Dear next president,

There is essentially a “Private tax system” for the wealthiest Americans that lets them lower their tax bill by billions, while working families play by the rules and pay their fair share.

Next president, you need to help restore basic fairness to our tax code. You as the next president should implement a “fair share surcharge” on multi-millionaires and billionaires and fight for measures like the Buffett Rule to ensure the wealthiest Americans do not pay a lower tax rate than hardworking middle-class families. You should close loopholes that create a private tax system for the most fortunate, and you need to ensure multi-million-dollar estates are paying their fair share of taxes. For too many years, middle-class families have been squeezed by rising costs for everything from child care to health care to affording college. Hopefully the next president will offer relief from these rising costs, including tax relief for Americans facing excessive out-of-pocket health care costs and for those caring for an ill or elderly family member. Corporate America will be looking for answers to simplify and standardize the way taxes are computed. One way to do this is to replace the current progressive tax scale with a flat 20% tax rate for individuals who make more than $200,000 a year, and lower the 39.1% corporate tax rate to 12.5%, while simultaneously closing loopholes that make the system so unfair.

The wealthy pay closer to 22% for various reasons: many have a predominance of investment income, which is taxed at 20%; some may enjoy tax breaks from mortgage interest payments; some may donate to charities or have rental income that’s excluded,and most are able to deduct state and local taxes from their federal taxable income. The list goes on. Even those with $200,000 to $500,000 in annual income enjoy an effective tax rate of only 23%. There are too many loopholes in our tax system,which leads to so much unfairness too our hard working middle class citizens.  As a hard working person who pays taxes, I do not like it. I don’t like the fact that I work hard while the wealthy people don’t have to work as hard as I do, and they do not have to pay as much for taxes as we do. My parents work really hard to keep clothes on their kids back and keep food in their stomachs and they fight with such high bills and still have to pay so much for taxes. It is just not fair this needs to stop all the loopholes need to get shut down and we need to make our tax system fair.

Thank you,

Joseph

Work cite.

Clinton, Hillary. “A Fair Tax System”.https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issue

http://fortune.com/2015/01/12/how-to-make-americas-tax-system-fair-for-all/

http://www.debate.org/opinions/is-the-u-s-taxation-system-fair

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2011/08/22/why-rich-should-pay-higher-taxes