If half your paycheck is going to taxes you must have a bunch of $$$, I personally make around 300k/year and I feel like I'm not paying that much taxes. I could be paying much more and still live pretty comfortable, it's pretty outrageous.
Economists calculate taxes using the “tax wedge”—i.e. what you pay in taxes versus what you cost your employer. According to: https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#WP4gh..., take home on $300,000 in California is $185,000. But including employer side payroll taxes but excluding benefits, you actually cost your employer $313,000. So your tax wedge is about 41%. Then add in the sales and property taxes you pay directly or indirectly, and you’re probably close to 45%. At $500,000, your tax wedge is 45% before sales and property taxes, so you’re probably over 50% all in.
If we are making international comparisons, I would add the cost of health insurance in california as a "tax". That's the only way to reasonably compare western countries.
I had a friend try to adopt a baby from china many years ago (1990s). He was rejected. The Chinese thought he didn't earn enough to safely raise a kid. They were using a means test designed for US applicants. My friend lobbied to explain all the things he gets in Canada for free, health care being the big ticket item. The Chinese authorities relented and he was allowed to adopt.
I don't follow how this could be possible. I'd think most people in the US either would be getting health insurance from the government (Medicare, Medicaid), from an "Obamacare" exchange and subsidized, or from an employer where they don't pay cash.
So where would the discrepancy in accounting between that and Canada come from? It seems unlikely that the Chinese government would assume that even Americans buy health insurance retail.
>> It seems unlikely that the Chinese government would assume that even Americans buy health insurance retail.
They aren't assuming anything. They know that healthcare in the US is hit-or-miss, that it is normally for people to move between having and not having healthcare throughout a lifetime.
>> The new report highlights that 5.5% of children under the age of 19 were uninsured, largely because of a decline in public coverage.
1 in 20 American kids are uninsured, not counting the undocumented who don't answer the census. That's ridiculous today but it was even worse in the 90s. That's why the Chinese didn't want to give kids to non-wealthy Americans. Uninsured children are almost unheard of in Canada. Only some illegal immigrant children, but even there they have systems in place.
"They aren't assuming anything. They know that healthcare in the US is hit-or-miss, that it is normally for people to move between having and not having healthcare throughout a lifetime."
That's a general complaint that has nothing to do with insurance being a cost you pay out of your take-home salary in the US.
Your anecdote seemed to be predicated on an accounting difference between the US and Canada, that the Chinese supposedly didn't know about. I'm saying that doesn't really exist. The sort of people who adopt would have a job with insurance, but the price of the insurance would not be included in their salary.
In my lifetime, I have been uninsured, insured by my employer, on an ACA (Obamacare) plan, etc. But never been in the situation where I was making a good salary and paying full price out of it for a health insurance policy, like people do with car insurance. Nor have I ever known anyone who did. Of course, somebody probably has, somehow, but it's not common, let alone a norm that some government would assume.
I never said my friend had a job. Part of the problem, in the US, is the link between employment and insurance. My friend earned reasonable money as a moderately-sucessful artist but did not have an employer. In the US that would mean paying out of pocket. In canada he didn't have to pay a dime.
Also the self-employed in the USA have to pay over the odds for rubbish schemes. Large employers can be assumed to employ mostly healthy people, but an individual is more likely to want health insurance if they already know they are a bad risk. This "moral hazard" means that selling health insurance to the self-employed is a money-losing proposition unless you screw them at every opportunity.
I’m no fan of health insurance as currently instantiated, but I don’t see it as screwing them at every opportunity if they are actuarially unprofitable otherwise.
Depends on framing. If you divide the population by an arbitrary standard with a very high health bias (employed, in big co), and adjust payments accordingly, then those on the wrong side of your arbitrary standard get shafted.
The second group may be unprofitable with lower payments, but the insurer doesn't even want the second group, the profits are from decreased expenditures on the first group.
Absent an individual mandate with actual teeth (or outright government providing of healthcare), do you have a solution that seems workable on a voluntary arms-length basis for all actors involved?
I’m not arguing those other conditions shouldn’t exist, but rather making the weaker, more limited argument considering “given the arrangement of the insurance market as it exists today, what should the price for that insurance offer be?” In other words, “What should a for-profit insurance company do, acting on their own and immediately?” because I think that’s pretty close to the question they’re facing when setting pricing for individual plans.
Ah, yes, the good old supply and demand theory of health: if you can‘t pay for your healthcare, you obviously have no need for it, because needs are only things you are willing and able to pay for.
It’s more like “if the cost to serve a broad population P is $X, I don’t think it’s screwing them to say ‘the price cannot be lower than $X’ because we are a health insurance company, not a charity.”
I think you’re arguing that perhaps health outcomes should not be funded by private for-profit insurance companies and I’d agree, but while it is, this outcome seems grounded in actuarially sound math.
Most employers in the US subsidize healthcare, but employees still pay. You usually pay X if you are single, a bit more if you are married, and ~2.5X if you are married with children. Each company has negotiated it slightly differently and it also depends on the specific plan and the state you are in.
but that is not all.
You also pay a co-pay ($15-$50) per visit to a doctor and a co-pay for many prescription drugs. In NYC, a pregnancy with my diamond healthplan cost ~$10k
You also pay a deductible (can be $0 to $5000 or more) where you cover the first $X of the annual payments.
Finally, depending on the state you are in (some allow it, some do not) you also pay balance billing. Basically, the hospital/doctor comes up with some surprise figure of how much you owe, they subtract what insurance paid, and you owe the rest. Usually it is nothing. In the case of more complicated things like surgery, it can be thousands.
I only heard of startups doing this. Outside of that you pay x % for healthcare per paycheck the employer covers some other amount. Healthcare might not be socialized but at least I can always find a new provider if I absolutely wanted one just pay out of my own pocket is the only downside. The subsidizing happens for bigger corps usually and negotations between healthcare providers vs insurance companies. The more clients you have the more effective the negotiations.
When Obamacare was going through I read in The Economist that about 1/3 of Americans had their health care paid for by Uncle Sam. The schemes were Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Administration, and health schemes for government employees.
Most companies don't pay for 100% of health care coverage - and even if they do, that might only be for you, and not for your dependents. The main leverage of private company health insurance is their negotiating power, but it can still be something in the ballpark of $10k/year/person I don't know exact numbers, but definitely Not Cheap.
Few countries even in Europe will let your effective income tax rate reach 50% but this may be an effect of tax system structure more than anything else. Eg in the U.K. the max marginal income tax rate is 45% but that doesn’t count payroll taxes (employer or employee), which are called “national insurance”, or student loan “repayments” (9% of income above a threshold, though not super relevant to people in the top band), or oddities of the tax system like a somewhat hidden 60% marginal rate or a discontinuity with the married couples allowance or withdrawal of certain otherwise-universal benefits for children.
It is similar in other European countries (at least as far as I can tell from a cursory search showing that sources can’t really agree on what the highest marginal rate is).
I would be interested in seeing a chart of gross to net income and effective tax rate in different countries but this is hard (eg do you count employer payroll taxes? Do you count removal of state’s benefits that might not be used anyway? How do you deal with countries that have more complicated systems with eg deductions or allowances based on personal situations?)
All that said, I think the post you’re replying to could just mean “approximately half,” ands I think 40% would fit that description.
According to an official simulator for France [1], more than 50% of what is paid by the employer goes to taxes and "cotisations" when you earn more than €32k/year (USD $35k) after all taxes.
That was 50 years ago. The top rate was 75% for income over £20k (something like £250k in todays money). Now how many people were in this category, or how they managed to avoid appearing to have that much income I don't know.
I think income tax was even higher during WW2, but that's pretty much a special case.
Also in the UK. When you take into account the council tax and national insurance (extra income tax by another name), the effective tax rate for is easily above 50% for most "high earners". And that is without considering fuel duty, VED, VAT etc.
No, you'd have to be earning an enormous amount to pay 50% tax in the UK. If you earn e.g. £150k, you get to keep £90k. Only £7000 of the money withheld is NI, so NI doesn't make that huge of a difference. Council tax isn't going to cost you £15,000 a year [1], so you're pretty clearly keeping more than 50%.
[1] If you're paying £15,000 a year in council tax, you must have some kind of gigantic property whose maintenance costs would dwarf that figure anyway.
Gah, you're right, I accidentally added an extra zero to my council tax!
My effective rate is actually 40%, not 50%. (although this doesn't include VED, fuel duty, insurance tax, alcohol tax, tobacco tax, flight taxes, VAT or any of the myriad of little taxes here and there)
You are confusing marginal and effective tax rate, a very common mistake. At $150k you pay only 29%+12% on each additional dollar, but your earlier dollars were taxed much less.
You probably also contribute 18% to your RRSP on that huge salary, which drops your effective tax rate to about 27.4%.
Also, you aren't paying 13% VAT on everything you buy - lots is exempt like food and your mortgage/rent. Even if you spend every dollar of your net income, VAT is probably closer to 8% of your total net income (which is 72.6% of your gross, so 5.8% of your gross going to VAT).
CPP and EI total $3754 in 2020, so that's another 2.5% total.
So that's a total of 35.8% tax on your gross salary. Also note it's much less if you have any common deductions, like children, dependents, education expenses, etc.
As an Ontarian it is frustrating how the marginal tax rate has risen over 50% over the last decade, but ignorant people think things are the same as in the US. Of course capital gains on primary residences is taxed at 0% so it isn't really surprising that real estate and its financialization is Ontario's main industry.
I'm actually with the OP - taxes as such don't offend me; I'm more concerned to get value out of them / their efficiency and purpose, rather than what they are in absolute terms. But wanted to point out that 50% is not unheard of and doesn't have to be in "millionaire" category of income.
The rapidity is similar in Ontario. I think that's why the public still thinks that the top rates are around the 2013 values and say we need to raise the top rates higher.
Well, if half your payments is going to taxes it might very mean you have a bunch of €€€ instead of $$$, that bunch being calculated relative to median income of your country - what I'm saying is that while I don't know what country you're from tax rates are also calculated differently in different countries, in Denmark where I live it isn't impossible for a software developer to hit the top tax rate.
That includes anything that’s pre-paycheck, which would include 401k and HSA in my case, but would exclude post-tax savings (I was imprecise in my original comment).
Again, this is a rough rule that’ll typically be personally conservative, not a precise calculation.
Ah yes, the obligate vacant comment about donating to the Federal Government when there's talk of taxes being too low on the wealthy. Get a new line.
The problems in this country, including the mess that is the tax system, cannot be solved by snarky comments like "donate your money if you think taxes are too low." They require a longitudinal and deep response.
The problems in this country also cannot be solved by empty rhetoric about “taxes being too low on the wealthy.” Taxes on the wealthy in the US aren’t dramatically lower than in Europe. The top tax bracket in Germany is 45%, versus 37% + state. So if you live in any of the 9 states with a top state bracket of 8% or higher, including New York and California, the top income tax bracket is actually lower in Germany. Capital gains taxes in Germany are also similar accounting for state capital gains taxes.
So how does Germany pay for its expansive welfare state? It has a 42% bracket that kicks in at 57,000 euro. In California, the marginal dollar income tax at that level is just 26% (federal plus state). It also has a 20% VAT. In both Germany and the US, the vast majority of income is earned by the bottom 99%. In the US, we don’t tax those people enough.
(Or we tax them what they want to be taxed. I can’t help but notice that while half the country wants European-style social services, nobody is proposing European-style taxes on people making under six figures, or a VAT. Even Sanders promised not to raise taxes on people making below $250,000. The math just doesn’t work. Americans—the bottom 99% that makes 80% of all income—have chosen to be taxed less than Europe in return for less social services than Europe.)
You're quoting nominal rates and not effective taxation. The very wealthy don't pay their "marginal dollar" in "income tax" at a 37% federal bracket (plus state), they pay it in capital gains tax at 20%. If they pay it at all, given that in fact much income at these levels is sheltered from tax entirely via international tricks.
There's plenty of analysis out there showing how the very wealthy in the US pay less effective tax than middle class families. That's not "empty rhetoric". It's a genuine problem and something we should be trying to solve.
Capital gains is 20% federal plus state (13% in California). Germany’s capital gains rate is 30.5%, lower than California and New York. Regardless, there is just not enough capital gains income for that to matter. For example, Biden’s plan to tax capital gains as ordinary income for taxpayers making over $1 million per year is expected to bring in less than $50 billion a year in revenues. Eliminating the capital gains preference entirely would raise only $130 billion annually.
As to the “very wealthy”—Tim Cook’s tax rate on his $135 million bonus a few years ago was 52%. The people you’re talking about aren’t even ordinary wealthy people: CEOs, movie stars, and the like. What you’re talking about the Warren Buffets of the world that make money through investments. But there’s just not very many of those people. The IMF estimates the global cost of individual tax avoidance at $200 billion per year: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/09/tackling-.... Say half that is attributable to the US. That’s about the same as the cost of the deductions for mortgage interest and local property taxes.
Federal, state, and local governments tax more than $5 trillion annually. One party is proposing new spending amounting to several trillion more annually. In the face of those numbers, talking about $50 billion or $100 billion issues with respect to the taxation of the very wealthy is indeed empty rhetoric. You hear a lot of talk about billionaires this and billionaires that. The total income of all billionaires in the US is $130 billion, or about 1% of all income. It just doesn’t matter very much what the tax rate is on people who comprise only 1% of the tax base. Spending 90% of your time talking about tax issues that could fund at most 10% of your proposed new spending is empty rhetoric. Meanwhile, German levels of taxation on the middle class, and a German-style VAT would raise trillions annually. Guess why nobody talks about that.
Capital gains is 20% federal plus state (13% in California)
But long term capital gains are not indexed to inflation, so the effective rate is higher for long-held appreciated assets... like real estate. This is part of why turnover of real estate is suppressed in high appreciation areas, even outside of CA.
> Tim Cook’s tax rate on his $135 million bonus a few years ago was 52%
This is the kind of selective data that makes this subject so infurating to argue about. I'm sure this fact is true. But what you're trying to imply is that Tim Cook's overall tax payments were very high, and that's not remotely true at all! A bonus is one of the few bits of income he has, in fact, that is taxed as routine "income" that the rest of us pay. Almost everything the guy makes is in long term assets, and those are absolutely not taxed at 52%.
Tim Cook shouldn't pay a lower tax rate than I do. And while I don't have numbers for Cook specifically, I'm pretty sure he does. Everyone in that world pays less tax than I do. And they shouldn't.
There’s nothing selective about my data. I gave the top line numbers—Biden’s proposal to eliminate the preferential capital gains rate on people with more than $1 million a year in income would raise only $50 billion annually. Cook’s bonus is just an illustration of why that number is so low—even very wealthy people make most of their money through ordinary income. Capital gains amounts to just 5% of all income.
Most economists agree that capital gains should be taxed lower than ordinary income, which is why most developed countries including social democracies have preferential capital gains rates.
And again, why do you care about the taxation of the super wealthy so much? Even if we taxed capital gains at the level of Denmark (9 points more than California) would raise less than $70 billion a year. Even Warren’s completely bonkers wealth tax (which would have had a top rate four times higher than Sweden did before it got rid of the wealth tax) would have raised only 10% of what Warren was proposing in new spending. Why spend so much time talking about a potential source of revenue that would do so little to actually increase the government’s ability to provide social services—even if we taxed the wealthy far in excess of European countries?
It’s as massive effort in deception. People don’t want to put their money where their mouths are. They want Medicare for All—but only if someone else pays for it. If proponents of these social were forthright in asserting that wealth taxes or whatever would only pay for 10%, and European-style taxes on the middle class would be required to pick up the rest of the tab, support for these proposals would evaporate: https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/millennials-soc...
> When tax rates are not explicit, millennials say they’d prefer larger government offering more services (54 percent) to smaller government offering fewer services (43 percent). However when larger government offering more services is described as requiring high taxes, support flips and 57 percent of millennials opt for smaller government with fewer services and low taxes, while 41 percent prefer large government.
For what it’s worth, I’m pro paying higher taxes. I’d be happy to pay what people in Germany pay at my tax bracket. But only if middle class taxes also go up. Otherwise, there is no point—we won’t be able to tackle the big ticket items like universal healthcare without the trillions in revenue we could raise through a 10% VAT, a 10% payroll tax, etc.
> And again, why do you care about the taxation of the super wealthy so much?
This is always the retreat: "OK, taxation is unfair, but you can't prove there's a problem so it doesn't really matter, does it?"
I say: taxation is unfair, and we should make it fair instead of constantly trying to justify the fact that the very wealthy (who are, relative to US society, wealthier than they have ever been and getting steadily wealthier) are paying less tax than you or I do. Let's start there.
To wit: why are you so invested in the regressiveness of current taxation policies? Shouldn't you at least accept that we should make it fair?
If it was fair, maybe you'd have an easier time convincing the hippies not to try to pay for your health care or whatever.
Most economists agree that taxing capital income lower is more efficient, and our capital gains rates are in line with those of Germany, Sweden, etc., so that all seems fine to me. I don’t want to be to the left of France or Italy on tax policy. That seems insane to me.
Beyond that, taxes are just a means to an end. I accept that taxes are necessary for providing social services. So I find it extremely disingenuous to focus so much on a potential source of tax revenue that won’t cover 90% of what we need to provide universal healthcare, etc. I find it disingenuous when people like Warren talk about Medicare for All (which by her own math will cost $30 trillion over 10 years) and then spend the rest of the speech talking about wealth taxes (which by her own math would raise only $3-4 trillion over that same period), and then also promise not to raise taxes in the middle class. It’s rank manipulation: you’re trying to make voters believe we can pay for these services through higher taxes on the rich, and burying in the fine print the fact that the middle class will have to pay 90% of the bill. (This manipulation also undermines the prospect of us ever getting universal healthcare, because no real plan can achieve that without the massive middle class tax increases you’ve convinced voters are unnecessary.)
The motivation seems to be more focused on taking money away from certain people (because “the billionaires shouldn’t exist” or some such tripe), than raising the money we need to pay for social services people supposedly want, and figuring out how to do that with minimal distortion to the economy. I think that’s a toxic brand of politics. It’s also a departure from what other developed countries are doing. Economists agree that the most efficient sort of tax is consumption taxes, which is why every OECD country relies heavily on VAT. (If our taxation profile was the same as Spain’s, payroll and consumption taxes would go up $2 trillion per year, while income taxes—paid mainly by the rich—would actually go down $1 trillion per year.) So this rhetoric seems both spiteful and empirically unwise.
You keep misdirecting. Sure, our nominal capital gains policies are roughly in line with the rest of the world. But our overall tax fairness is not. So something doesn't match up, and the answer is the way our tax regime is enforced and regulated. Let's make that match Europe. Would you agree there?
> The motivation seems to be more focused on taking money away from certain people
I straight up told you what my motivation was, and it wasn't that.
I like your posts on this topic. Talk to wealthy EU citizens about their tax rates. They hate them. And bringing that model,here won't fund the social plans we are told we need.
Why? There just too few people in that echelon for higher taxes to make a dent.
So one might think these pushers of more social aid might realize, "ok we have to raise taxes on the middle class to get the funds we need... and introduce a national sales tax (VAT) that everyone, even the poor, must pay."
Do they say that? Do they come to that conclusion?
No, they imstead promulgate ideas such as wealth ceilings: anything you earn over 100 million is taxed 100%. There can be no billionaires.
I think you're strawmanning. No one in this thread is talking about "social aid" programs or budgets for them, the subject at hand is tax fairness. At least you'll agree that the US tax regime, as it's implemented right now, is unfairly regressive, right? And that should be fixed, at least as far as it goes? Bezos currently pays less tax than I do, and he should at least pay that much, right?
> No, they imstead promulgate ideas such as wealth ceilings: anything you earn over 100 million is taxed 100%. There can be no billionaires.
I'm sorry... who is saying this? This isn't a serious policy promoted by anyone that I'm aware of.
The history section is particularly interesting especially the recent history. I hear this talk all the time on social media.
> Bezos currently pays less tax than I do, and he should at least pay that much, right?
I don’t know your earnings, but let’s assume it’s under $1M annually. I do not believe you pay more in gross taxes than Jeff Bezos. If you paid more, you would likely have $0.00 remaining. What is your source for how much tax he pays? It is likely in the millions.
I don't know why you say hundreds of billions of dollars isn't worth taking about, compared to trillions. $150B is 15% of $1T, a sizable chunk. And the total income of US billionaires being just $130B doesn't quite capture the complete picture, when their combined wealth is in the trillions, and their assets keep growing.
>> when their combined wealth is in the trillions, and their assets keep growing.
Because capital gains, ironically, do not apply to gains in capital assets. They have to "realize" the gains as "income", usually by selling the asset. So a millionaire (stockholder) can become a billionaire without ever paying a cent in capital gains tax. Only when they sell the stock is it subject to taxation.
This allows them to pay tax selectively. Even if they want a chunk of money all at once, they can take a loan against their capital assets. There is no income realized when taking a loan. They then selectively sell stock to pay down the loan, preferably in years when they are taking a loss in some other area, nullifying the taxable gain on the asset sale. Such tricks are why, for billionaires, paying capital gains tax is basically voluntary.
You can grow your wealth without virtually no taxable income. It's real wealth - you can buy houses and yachts with it - but you don't need to pay tax unless you choose to.
In reality most money at this level is made by speculation, and speculation is spectacularly under-taxed.
For example Forex trading in the City of London moves $6.6 trillion of money around, every single day. A Tobin Tax of 0.1% on that would raise $2.5tn a year - which would almost instantly wipe out the UK's entire national debt.
Of course you'd lose some transaction volume - you might earn "only" $500bn - but the principle remains. A lot of economic activity isn't taxed at all, mostly to the benefit of the rich. This has huge effects on the quality of life of most of the population.
There's a principle you won't find in econ books, which is that in an industrial economy basic maintenance spending isn't optional.
If you don't pay for good education, you pay for it in lost economic activity. Likewise for infrastructure. And health care.
The idea that these are somehow nice extras that the population shouldn't expect because they're "too expensive" is so wrong it's borderline insane.
Everyone pays anyway. You may as well organise this properly so the work gets done and prosperity increases, because the alternative is instability, loss of opportunity, and ultimately a real risk of complete social and economic collapse.
> For example Forex trading in the City of London moves $6.6 trillion of money around, every single day. A Tobin Tax of 0.1% on that would raise $2.5tn a year - which would almost instantly wipe out the UK's entire national debt.
Traders can just move money to other trading system, e.g. futures, or they can just stop trading and instantly gain $2.5T a year in saved taxes, which is equivalent of UK's entire national debt!
If you want to capture these $2.5T, you need to close borders and tax these traders physically, one by one, like Soviet Union, China, North Korea, etc.
"Net value taxation" may be the future. How much were you worth last year? How much are you worth today? Net = income. We would need exceptions for things like houses, but such an approach would capture all capital gains in real time.
Why do you care how much paper money someone has? As you recognize, they can’t do anything with that—buy houses, yachts, lobbyists, etc.—without realizing the gains. So why does it matter what they are worth in paper?
>> Taxes on the wealthy in the US aren’t dramatically lower than in Europe.
Apples and oranges comparison. The US government is fundamentally different concept of national government. Between healthcare and the military, US per-citizen spending it far beyond, as European examples, Germany (more than double). In short, the US has to tax more because its government is so much bigger. Add to that the greater wealth disparities in the US, taxes on US rich need to be higher if the US ever wants to climb into the black.
Germany: 399 billion / 83 million people = ~$5,000/person/year
US: 3.8 Trillion / 328 million people = ~$12,000/person/year
> In short, the US has to tax more because its government is so much bigger.
It seems reasonable to point out that there’s another direction we could go to solve that imbalance. (Could be across the board or in certain categories.)
>Germany: 399 billion / 83 million people = ~$5,000/person/year
>US: 3.8 Trillion / 328 million people = ~$12,000/person/year
Apples and oranges comparison. The US subsidies most EU militaries. NATO spending is a great example. US is the only member who actually fulfills their obligations.
It doesn't matter what the money is being spent on. For purposes of budget and tax, all that matters is that the money is being spent. The US chooses to spend more, to have a big government. Other countries choose to spend less and have smaller governments. They both have to get the money somewhere.
There's an assumption there that more money to government = make things better but there are plenty of examples where the government makes things worse.
Some people believe that giving less = actually make things better because it will limit the bad things a government can do.
More money or less money isn't the issue. I would have no problem with way paying much more to the government if it's for services that are beneficial, and I think we're paying too much for services that are not.
When it comes to healthcare, the vast weight of the evidence supports strong government intervention in healthcare. When examples of profit driven healthcare exist, the vast weight of the evidence would lead you to conclude that it is less efficient and more expensive, delivering worse outcomes for higher cost.
Only government legislation is working. It is people pushing for it, but they still mostly have the same mentality of "I will only do X when everyone does X".
I'd be happy if everyone gave more, I don't believe in donation. I believe the government should be funded to work for the public. Refusing to fund the government is why we're in this.
