Should the U.S. Tax System Change?
Haja Sesay
Professor Campbell
Eng. 215- Research and Writing
March 1, 2013
Paying taxes is an important duty citizens need to do. For the country to be economically solvent, the government needs to collect taxes from citizens who are employed. The taxes that are collected pay for many things the country needs such as highway and bridge maintenance, jobs, Medicare, unemployment taxes, etc. If people want better communities, the government needs to spend money to fix roads, clean up the streets, and hire law enforcements officers to protect the people, and so on. Paying taxes serves a purpose in our society, but there is some controversy concerning the tax system. This research paper will discuss whether the government should increase taxes paid by people who make 400,000 dollars or more a year. The only way to figure out the answer is by looking at how the current tax system benefits the wealthiest Americans and burdens the rest.
One reason is that high income families do not pay enough in taxes for how much they make. Taxes as of late have been pushed on to the middle class to carry the load and they have barely been able to do that. Another reason is that the rich keep getting richer meaning when the recession hit the only ones that it seemed to be hit by it was the middle class. The third reason is that it could help the country as whole rather than just individuals. There is hope though through all of this and all that hope is President Obama.
The people who are paying taxes to date in the U.S. are upper, middle, and lower class families. The way it is supposed to work is the more money you make the more money you have to pay in taxes. The government started debating social spending around the end of World War Two and again on the eve of the Regan Administration. When the budget was settled, the Republican and Democrat agreed that taxes are an uninteresting mechanism to raise money (Dickson, 2011). Let us start at the definition of tax, which is money demanded by the government so they are able to use the contribution for services, property, etc. This is why we the people pay tax to the government. There is a battle between rising taxes and lower them. Eisenhower, Nixon, and ford each wanted to raise tax until John F. Kennedy outrageously committed the biggest tax reduction (Dickson,2011).
Every employed citizen is expected to pay his or her taxes, but unfortunately, that agreement is not hundred percent true. The upper class has more of an advantage with the tax system because they pay less than taxpaying middle and lower class people. Those who earn less are those who pay more. We can all agree the middle class is the heart of America because these citizens are keeping the economy going.
There is a saying that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Many may agree this is a true statement. How things are going in today’s society is not opinion but fact. An amazing fact about tax cuts is that is begun as a mistake in the inheritance tax. The first million would be exempt from federal from federal taxes unless their estate was worth more than 17 million. That was a rare case, so the super wealthy would have to pay taxes on their entire inheritance. There was a draft error to the final bill fail to include the exception for the super wealthy (Dickson,2011). The error was not corrected also the Republicans blocked a pro forma correction to the law. Without fixing the issue, this effectively secured 880-millon dollar tax cut for the rich. This were it all began from a simple mistake and the greed of the Republican Party not wanting to fix the problem. Republicans recommitted to giving the wealthiest Americans a tax break in 1997. After the tax breaks, the share tax has decreased by forty percent. Forty percent is a good size chunk of money the government is not collecting from the people. In addition, the GOP aids the wealthy and left
