A single‑speaker opinion piece arguing that the US tax code functions primarily as a set of incentives: wealthy individuals pay lower effective taxes because they follow government‑encouraged investment incentives rather than evade taxes. The speaker recommends changing incentives to foster innovation instead of raising taxes on the rich to increase revenue.
The rich don't dodge taxes they just know the rules better than everybody else. A CPA friend of mine says that the tax code is just thousands of pages of incentives. It's incentives that the government wants you to do and if you do what the government wants you to do then they will reward you with tax incentives. When billionaires pay fewer taxes than everyday Americans it's not because they're dodging it's because they're investing in the things that the government tells them to do. It's kind of ironic we pass these bills that incentivize the things that we want them to do and then we complain about billionaires not paying enough taxes. They just did what we told them to do. That is always going to be the case. So rather than thinking about how we tax the rich to create more revenue just think about what you incentivize instead and you will get way more innovation that way than taking from the rich and giving it to politicians to piss away.
