The Golden State’s poorest residents — those already enrolled in discounted rate programs — would pay small fixed charges.
and
Millionaires and billionaires would be slapped with the same fixed charges as middle-class families struggling to get by
Maybe I’m misreading, or maybe the article is poorly written, but it sounds like everyone would be paying fixed fees.
Setting a fee based on income sounds super error prone and vulnerable to gaming in the same way that the rich can avoid taxation. Imagine a CEO making $1 in salary with the rest in stocks, how would that be charged? Or imagine $1 in salary, but the rest in free housing, food, transportation, etc. What’s the overhead for properly monitoring all this? It must be huge to do a credible job. We’re already not doing it and repeating the same obvious error can only be assumed to be intentional.
Just remove base fees and charge people for their usage. Poor people already use much less electricity than rich people so they would save money under my proposal, while the people who use more would have to pay more.
The article says:
and
Maybe I’m misreading, or maybe the article is poorly written, but it sounds like everyone would be paying fixed fees.
Setting a fee based on income sounds super error prone and vulnerable to gaming in the same way that the rich can avoid taxation. Imagine a CEO making $1 in salary with the rest in stocks, how would that be charged? Or imagine $1 in salary, but the rest in free housing, food, transportation, etc. What’s the overhead for properly monitoring all this? It must be huge to do a credible job. We’re already not doing it and repeating the same obvious error can only be assumed to be intentional.
Just remove base fees and charge people for their usage. Poor people already use much less electricity than rich people so they would save money under my proposal, while the people who use more would have to pay more.
I agree that better enforcement of income tax payment by the wealthy is important.
Denying that it can be done is just defeatism
Not saying it can’t be done, just that it isn’t.
We should work toward proven solutions instead.
The Inflation Reduction Act actually included a lot of money to have the IRS catch wealthy tax cheats. It seems to be working.
Since state taxation is based on federal taxation, this should improve state revenue as well.