Goodspeed wrote:You do know that even flat tax rate systems are still percentual? Higher income means you pay more taxes either way. Going by your arguments, you are actually in favour of a regressive tax system.
Yes, I know. What's more important is that everyone is paying the same amount of income taxes from a proportional point of view. No, a regressive tax system would also be unfair, since it would operate with different rules for different income brackets.
But this should only apply to income taxes. I'm not talking about profit taxes, taxes on capital gains, taxes on dividends, on property and so on. Those could be and maybe should be taxed differently, by taking into consideration how they are produced and the economic contribution brought about by the economic activity which yields those gains. Because, for example, some rich people do not have any salary or income, they live exclusively on capital gains and dividends. Maybe this kind of income should be taxed at a higher rate, it's debatable.
Higher paid jobs often mean more value to the economy, yes, but not always. Teacher is one of the most taxing and valuable occupations, and in most places they don't get paid much, even high school teachers who are required to have university-level degrees.
This is a problem to be solved by the employer, imo. There's a whole debate on how to best assess teachers' performance (rating systems, students feedback, post-educational outcomes, etc). Overall, I think this shouldn't be an issue to be tackled by a taxation system. A private educational institution should be free to set performance standards for its own teachers and reward them based on what they consider to be within acceptable range. A public system usually cannot afford to sustain a level of wages for teachers that is competitive enough compared to that of a private system (especially in the Anglophone world, where private education is usually of better quality but also much more expensive compared to a public one). However, in Europe, where public education is still available for free, teachers' wage levels are one of the subjects that is likely to sensitise politics. Very often in Europe, when one category of workers grows frustrated with the level of pay, they tend to take it to the streets and protest against the government. Such as it happened in 2000 in Italy (
link), in 2018 in Poland and Ireland, in 2014 in Lithuania, in 2005 in Romania etc. Since teachers are an important and large category from a political point of view, these protests usually lead to a new round of pay rises.
On the other hand, while the teaching profession is important and can have a big impact on social outcomes, the services that teachers provide vary a lot in terms of quality. For some, teaching is basically a last-resort job for graduates who couldn't manage to find a job in a productive firm. Like, if they have a chemistry degree and couldn't secure a job in the industry, they could always apply to become a teacher and basically recite stuff they learned in university in front of a bored class.
So yeah, I agree, good quality teaching should be rewarded, but based on a rating system, not based on the assumption that the occupation in itself is so important it needs to be paid lavishly by default.
But what about the proportion? People with more valuable jobs are paid a certain amount more, sometimes a very high amount. In many cases this is disproportional, and progressive tax systems make up for this.
If the private employer can afford to do this, why should this concern the state? After all, if they pay them more, taxes that are owed to the state will also increase.
And I should note that I believe equal opportunity to be unrealistic. It's a nice ideal, and in some places we do okay, but in for example the US it's not even close to the reality because of the sorry state of education there. Public schools have been declining in quality and they were already shit to begin with. Education is often more about religion than anything else. And everywhere, not just in the US, the intelligence, work ethic and level of education of one's parents are a big influence in the early development and intellectual potential of a child. On top of that, in most places financial resources of one's parents decide the level of education one can realistically get.
Yeah, well, the USA's problem is cultural, it's a question of mentality, it's about how the whole country was built right from the start by settlers with a certain mentality. While they still kept some of the cultural luggage they brought from Europe, they were largely free from any constraints imposed by local and national politics. In Europe, the whole system is the result of centuries-old traditions that have been slowly and progressively tweaked. Power relations between different categories of professions and between them and the state have been negotiated over a long time and codified in ever-changing laws. This is missing in the USA. They started from scratch and kept only a modicum of traditions and cultural constraints, the most basic ones. Everything else was shaped by the "gold rush" mentality.