quote:

LIBERTY, n. One of Imagination's most precious possessions. The rising People, hot and out of breath, Roared around the palace: "Liberty or death!" "If death will do," the King said, "let me reign; You'll have, I'm sure, no reason to complain." Martha Braymance

Why is it everytime summat like this pops up its always looked upon from above. If I went to buy a car and I got it dead cheap cos I wasn't rich I'd be chuffed to bits!

Capitalist, maybe you are rich but your in the minority...

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Think about it. My hypothetical example is not so imaginative at all. Have you ever gone to the grocery store and watched the person in line ahead of you present food stamps as payment? In effect, his groceries are cheaper than yours because he earns less. You get to pay for your groceries and his – and you don't have any choice about it, not even about whether he buys groceries that are healthy for him and his family.

it really is terrible...the government auctually give money to poor people....

Poor poor Sammy Sosa. He really is taxed way too much to play baseball everyday, he earned every cent of the nearly $20 he earns per year and it's really beneficial to let him keep it. Warren Buffet really is hurting too, he has no money to invest back into his business.

I don't think the car analogy is good one to make, because I'm not sure who's advocating progrssive prices for automobiles. Us lefties are concerned with ensuring people have minimal access to food, shelter, healthcare and education. I still would like to know how it is more efficient to have more money in Sammy Sosa's bank account, not doing anything, than making sure working families at least get enough to live on. Just because someone makes a lot of money does not mean that they are reinvesting it into markets or using capital to promote growth of the economy. The rich tend to save more money, while people with little tend to spend it, hence reinvesting into companies.


Less taxes for everyone would be great, let's start by cutting the bloated defense budget, which we spend more on than any other country in the world. We can't even identify what happend to over $9 billion in Iraq and if we didn't have progressive taxation the overall cost for Iraq would be somewhere approaching $6,000 for a family of 4. Hmm,that would further help break apart the family structure, as kids spend even less time with their parents, eh? (see the gay marriage thread) Maybe make sure companies pay taxes rather than constantly finding every loophole possible if we're going to place an even greater burden on those with the least?

Since it's always great in every case to give more capital with those who earn the most, why don't we just have regressive taxation?

I'm all in favor of cutting taxes for everyone, but it's kind of difficult right now, when we owe massive debt and we continue to spend money on "promoting freedom" abroad, pork barrel spending or faith-based initiatives, going almost exclusively to Evangelical groups. Where is all that money going to come from if taxes were to be drastically cut for the upper class? It's very inaccurate to put the blame social programs and the poor for everything, since they're not the biggest expenditure we're "wasting" money on and there are benefits that come from investing in them.

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quote:

Think about it. My hypothetical example is not so imaginative at all. Have you ever gone to the grocery store and watched the person in line ahead of you present food stamps as payment? In effect, his groceries are cheaper than yours because he earns less. You get to pay for your groceries and his – and you don't have any choice about it, not even about whether he buys groceries that are healthy for him and his family.

Yes, let those bastards who don't have money to eat starve out and die on the streets so we rich people can buy ourself one more Mercedes!

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1+1=10

You really seem to have a vitriol toward the poor, dear Capitalizt. You really honestly think they're all just lazy fucks who'd love nothing but to live off of welfare? It just seems to be the reoccurring theme in the majority of your posts. But let's just take Linder's example of 23% in the most basic terms and see who really gets hit here. First a guy who earns 20K:

23% of 20K = $4600, giving that guy a total of $15,400, before payroll taxes and insurance (if he can even afford it). Now try and live off of 15.4K in today's world anywhere and see just how far you get.

Contrast that with a guy who earns 2 million. 23% of 2 million is $460,000. No chump change, to be sure, but that leaves him with $1.54 million left before payroll and insurance (and I'm pretty sure he can afford it). Now we must also take into account how many folks who make this much also have a great deal of $ lined up in the stock market, and make a pretty hefty amount on interest alone, let alone dividends (since we're no longer taxing that). Does the 23% cover this? I honestly don't know, but what I do know is I won't pity the man too much for his $1.54 million he's able to keep and somehow, some way able to "get by". Call me cruel, but I think he'll survive okay.

So it's pretty clear who gets hurt the most by such regressive tax schemes, and who's $ value clearly gets crunched the most. If you agree to such a scheme, my only question is - why do you hate the poor so much?

But let's be real here, in present-day terms with the gigantic debt that YOUR president created with his HUGE tax cuts that he wants to go on forever, someone has to generate the revenue lost by those tax cuts. By adding such a scheme in the mix, whom do you think will pay for that lost revenue?

(Hint: it's not the upper class)

Yep, it is the middle class - and we're already seeing this occur with this Administration doing a splendid job ignoring the Alternative Minimum Tax that's slowly engulfing more and more of the middle class:

quote:

April 10, 2005 ECONOMIC VIEW A Tax Increase That Bush Didn't Mention By EDMUND L. ANDREWS WASHINGTON CYNICS have long predicted that the Bush administration, plagued by budget deficits, will eventually start raising taxes. But now it is becoming clear how it would do so: the alternative minimum tax. Baffling in its complexity and often bizarre in its impact, the alternative minimum tax is a giant undeclared tax increase that will ensnare tens of millions of moderate-income families in the next several years. It was created in 1969 to prevent the very rich from using tax deductions to avoid paying a fair share of taxes. But when the deadline for filing income tax returns arrives on Friday, the alternative minimum tax will require 2.9 million families to pay an average of about $6,000 more than what they would owe under traditional calculations That is just the start. If current law remains unchanged, the alternative minimum tax is expected to wring an extra $33.9 billion from 18 million households in 2006. In 2010, it will rake in an additional $100 billion, and by 2015 an extra $200 billion. Make no mistake: no one says they want that to happen. But it is one thing to rein in or eliminate the tax itself, and an entirely different matter to give up the money that it would generate. President Bush has promised to fix the alternative minimum tax as part a fundamental overhaul of the tax code, and he has ordered a bipartisan advisory panel to come up with recommendations by the end of July. But in giving the panel its marching orders, White House officials made it clear that they are counting on the extra money regardless of what happens to the alternative tax. Under the president's instructions, the panel's recommendations on addressing the alternative minimum tax are supposed to be "revenue neutral," neither raising nor lowering taxes, and to assume that his income-tax cuts will be made permanent rather than expire in 2010, as required under current law. Making those ordinary income-tax cuts permanent would reduce the amount of available revenue by about $1.8 trillion over 10 years. But White House officials told the panel that any change to reduce or eliminate the alternative minimum tax would have to be offset by higher taxes someplace else. "My understanding is that any reform in the A.M.T. that loses money would have to be made up with offsetting revenue," said Elizabeth Garrett, a panel member and a professor of law at the University of Southern California. Jeffrey F. Kupfer, executive director of the tax panel and a former Treasury official, confirmed that interpretation. "Our mandate is to be revenue-neutral, and we are interpreting that with respect to the president's policy baseline, which does not include a permanent fix to the A.M.T.," he said in an interview last week. Tax experts have long complained that the alternative minimum tax is a "stealth tax increase," one that Congress never intended and that is likely to catch millions of taxpayers by surprise. But a tax increase through tax reform could be even stealthier. If the alternative tax is reduced, the offsetting revenue increases are likely to be buried in so many other changes that most people would never know what hit them. Seen or unseen, the looming tax increases are almost as large as the president's tax cuts. Leonard E. Burman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, estimated that the government would have to raise ordinary income tax rates substantially in every bracket to offset the money lost in each bracket by the elimination of the alternative minimum tax. People in today's 28 percent bracket, for example, would have to pay a top rate of 35 percent. Those who now pay a top rate of 33 percent would pay 41.4 percent. "The A.M.T. is a huge tax increase built into current law," Mr. Burman said. "What the current law assumes is that over time we move to a tax that is much less progressive, that has atrocious marriage penalties and penalizes people with children who live in high-tax states." Taylor Griffin, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, said the administration's goal was to prevent a hidden tax increase by replacing the alternative tax with something that was easier to understand and more predictable. "What we are trying to do is prevent a stealth tax that sneaks up on you," he said. "If we don't do something, millions of Americans will be facing unanticipated tax increases." The alternative minimum tax is similar in some ways to a flat tax that blocks people from using most of the big deductions that reduce their taxable income under the normal rules. A married couple with a gross income of $100,000, for example, must first calculate its tax bill the traditional way, then again under the A.M.T. In the alternative calculation, the couple gets to exclude $58,000 from taxation, but it must also strip out all the personal exemptions and most itemized deductions. The prohibited deductions include those for state and local taxes, medical expenses, employee business expenses and interest on home-equity loans. The A.M.T. would then apply a flat tax of 26 percent (28 percent for couples who earn more than $175,000). The couple must pay whichever is higher, the tax calculated under the traditional method or the one under the A.M.T. The huge looming tax increase is caused by two things. The first is that the exclusion level for the alternative minimum tax is not adjusted for inflation, so the tax affects more people each year as nominal incomes go up. The second, paradoxically, stems from Mr. Bush's tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Those cuts reduced regular tax rates at all income levels but did not change the alternative minimum tax. At the same time, some of the cuts came in the form of expanded deductions - the child tax credit, child care tax credits and bigger exemptions for married couples - that are not allowed under the alternative formula. The effect of making Mr. Bush's ordinary income tax cuts permanent would be significant. Mr. Burman, at the Urban Institute, estimated that the alternative minimum tax would generate about $69.2 billion in extra tax revenue in 2015 if the president's income tax cuts expired on schedule. But if the White House persuaded Congress to make the cuts permanent, the alternative minimum tax would raise a staggering $200.8 billion in that one year. If the A.M.T. itself is pared back, how would that tax increase show up in practice? The possibilities are almost limitless, from higher tax rates for everybody to the abolition of popular tax deductions. Administration officials are almost certain to insist that any tax reform result in lower tax rates and fewer deductions. Many Republicans long for a flat tax or a national sales tax, but that would mean abolishing or reducing sacred cows like the tax deduction for mortgage interest. A potential trade-off, but a politically explosive one, would be to eliminate deductions for state and local taxes, which cost the Treasury about $40 billion a year and are a big reason that many people become subject to the alternative tax. But getting rid of those deductions would cause howls of protest in Democratic-leaning states like New York and California, which tend to have above-average tax burdens. Thus far, the issues have been so tangled and vexing that both the White House and Congress have simply opted to block increases in the alternative minimum tax with one-year and two-year patches. But that will become expensive. By about 2008, Mr. Burman estimates, the alternative minimum tax will generate so much money that it would be cheaper to abolish the regular income tax. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/b...ney/10view.html

Key words: "Revenue neutral changes"

That means even Bush is realizing that we need to generate revenue somehow. So he ignores this particular tax hike that's a growing burden to the middle class, yet praises regressive taxation such as a flat tax while at the same time, continues to give huge tax cuts and tax breaks to the most affluent people in the country.

Very nice. Really deserves a fucking round of applause doesn't it? I mean, who wouldn't want to continue giving more money to the fucking affluent while having to pay more and more federal AND state AND local taxes as a consequence of "revenue neutral changes"?

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Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

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I still would like to know how it is more efficient to have more money in Sammy Sosa's bank account, not doing anything, than making sure working families at least get enough to live on.

Wow man, I thought you knew at least a little something about economics before I saw this. The money sitting in Sosa's bank account ENSURES that many people put food on their table. Sosa cash "sitting there" has likely provided loans for hundreds of people starting small businesses and creating jobs...as well as families buying their first homes. The money he has earned and saved is doing FAR more good for society than any bleeding heart bureaucrat could ever hope to accomplish with it.

And to the rest of you folks...Let's be clear, I don't hate the poor. I make $9.24 an hour, but I do believe a progressive/socialist tax system does far more damage to our economy than any amount of social programs can cancel out.

Dependancy should not be rewarded/encouraged by generous benefits, and success should not be considered a SIN, especially in the "land of the free".

Maybe that's asking too much.

Last edited by Capitalizt on Apr-11-2005 at 19:38

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Originally posted by Capitalizt Wow man, I thought you knew at least a little something about economics before I saw this. The money sitting in Sosa's bank account ENSURES that many people put food on their table. It provides capital for entrepreneurs to start small businesses and for people to buy homes. And to the rest of you folks...Let's be clear, I don't hate the poor. I make $9.24 an hour myself, but I do believe a progressive/socialist tax system does far more damage to our economy than any amount of left wing social programs can cancel out. I think we need a low flat rate tax on everyone. Success should NOT be considered a sin, and dependancy should not be rewarded/encouraged by generous benefits. Maybe that's asking too much in the "land of the free".

I can see where you are coming from but my problem with that is that you approach this subject from a purely economical point of view. Try thinking of what the effects on society will be if your views become policy. Basically, the rich will get more money and the poor will get less money right? That is gonna have massive implications for crime, poverty etc. It also means that there will be less tax money being collected (the extra poor tax will be nowhere near as much as tax collected from the rich) so what are you gonna cut back on?

Isn't that headline a registered trademark of communism?

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Retro ...

Where will we cut? Let's start with ending ALL federal subsidies to corporations, farmers, big unions, and every other special interest group in the country. That will knock about 10% off our $2.5 trillion budget right there.

And I have no problem with an emergency safety net for the truly needy...those disabled or unable to work for legitimate reasons, but I do think would be better administered on the local level by states, not the federal government where it is clearly unconstitutional.

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Originally posted by Capitalizt Wow man, I thought you knew at least a little something about economics before I saw this. The money sitting in Sosa's bank account ENSURES that many people put food on their table. It provides capital for entrepreneurs to start small businesses and for people to buy homes.

Again

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I still would like to know how it is more efficient to have more money in Sammy Sosa's bank account, not doing anything, than making sure working families at least get enough to live on.

No doubt, great for banks to make loans, maybe I should not have said "anything", but how is that better than having people at the lower end not being able to afford those loans to buy houses or even the basic necessities of life? Remember when good ol' W wanted people to go out and spend money to support freedom and the economy? The poor and middle class are more likely to spend the money that they have into small businesses rather than save, which might not be so bad if those business loans are to be paid back. But, yeah it's better for SOCIETY to have members of that society, including children and many WORKING parents not having enough money to live on while others have more than they would ever need to live off or open a business if they wanted to.

Also, I'm really surprised that you now bring small business into this. You do realize that most small business owners are not in the highest income tax brackets? But then again I know nothing about economics, right? Well I might as well just give my paycheck over to the richest person I can find, since that's the best way to do everything.

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Thurs May 15: Influence @ Tini Martini w/ Kris B. vs. Nosmo, Rikler & Mike Palmeri
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