Made me curious what the total tax rate would be in Mass. Apparently it has a flat 5% income tax, plus 4% millionaires tax, plus federal rate for income over about 578k is 37%, so altogether it’s 46% for income over a mil in Mass.

Definitely think it should be higher for such wildly high income. Also disappointed to see for being a relatively progressive state Mass has a flat rather than progressive income tax.

Per the article, it's an income tax on any income over a million dollars, so it's essentially an additional state income tax bracket. So, if an entity makes exactly 1 million this year then they won't pay any extra, but if they make 2 million, then they pay 4 percent on that additional 1 mill (40k), over whatever else they would owe before the additional tax.

Like all income tax, there are ways to avoid it or reduce your burden, but not every person/company goes to those lengths.

I personally think a wealth tax is fairer for society, but it's pretty hard to implement and of course has a ton of very wealthy opposition.

How did you do the custom font on your username? It looks awesome!!!!

It's not bleeding anyone. My father was an airline flag carrier captain in Europe. He made what he called "an obscene paycheck". When taxes came around, he would say: look at what they are taking from me, I must be making a ton!

Could one prong on this assault be to increase the IRS' operating budget, so that they're able to track down and stop more of these tax haven shenanigans?

Well you could simply start by plugging up a few questionable tax loopholes.

Whether or not the reason the IRS can't collect the tax revenue to be able to provide certain services is because of them not having enough money, I don't know.

But if you're issue is with certain laws on taxation, it would makes more sense to deal with those first.

EDIT: To mention something else that's important to all of this, there's something called the Laffer Curve. The simple explanation is that there's a happy medium between the percentage of income tax and the amount of tax revenue gained. Too much or too little income taxation and you end up with less tax revenue. You can see this in a few times during US history where the income tax wasn't as high, but the tax revenue was great. So to further determine where we should go with income tax you could look at the past few years of projected and actual tax revenue, as well as spending to service government debt among other government spending.

I'm not an economist nor an accountant, but this is likely what you'd have to do to figure out the balance between taxation and government spending in order to have money for certain social services. However, no one wants to do that and another big problem is the government doesn't like being told it needs to manage it's spending better.