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Originally posted by Shakka How so, lord master of the classroom? Or did you not learn analogies and metaphors in your 34th grade class?

Yes, but we also learned the difference between a piss poor analogy and an accurate analogy

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Originally posted by Fir3start3r I don't understand why people don't get this...

Because, as it bears no resemblance to reality, it is a piss poor analogy...

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Originally posted by The17sss No... what the heck? I'm suggesting that for the word "fair" to be taken literally, the same percentage of one's earnings regardless of overall wealth should be paid out in taxes for everyone.

I know what you meant, but you don't seem to be aware of the implications of what you mean. If you had a flat rate of income tax across the board, you either need to decimate the budget, or you need to tax those at the bottom considerably more to cover the shortfall left by those at the top (who, as you and others point out, pay a large portion of income tax). Baring in mind every time somebody proposes this and are faced with the question on how to cover the shortfall, they will say "cut back on government waste" which is completely meaningless and can never be taken as a proper answer. "Waste" implies it already is not intended to be spent, so the current government can't find ways to deal with it so how do people proposing cutting the budget considerably intend to deal with it?

So, I'll ask you again, if everybody were to pay the same rate of income tax, how would you cover the shortfall?

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All the regulation/de-regulation in the world won't help if you have bad management, and the fact is that the Democrats have been managing the housing situation. They enacted laws that mandated giving loans to people who didn't even have to provide an income source, for christ's sake. Read for yourself IN THEIR OWN WORDS below, from the people who are in charge of the Fannie/Freddie thing. It was nothing but a financial cookie jar for all of them, and they just lie and blame Bush and his policies when they are guilty as hell

The whole point of me commenting on this thread, which admittedly, has become lost in the ether somewhere, was to state that Obama is not a socialist and that socialism is not some kind of insult. The democrats adhere to the capitalist American ideology just as much as the republicans do, so of course they're guilty partners in all of this. That is completely irrelevant to anything I've been saying!

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Twist the numbers however you choose... there is a reason people from all over the world have been pouring into this country for a long time now. This is the place they all want to come because the opportunity is there for anyone who has the desire.

I didn't say Americans were living under oppression like they are in Zimbabwe, you've just made that up. I said large swathes of Americans are living in poverty which is true and something a country like yours should be ashamed of (and mine for that matter, because the UK also has large swathes of the population living in poverty so I reserve as much criticism for my own country as I do yours, the only difference is my country and countrymen seem to recognise that this is a problem and look for ways to resolve it).

As for refugee/asylum/illegal immigrant figures, well, America gets people from Latin America, Europe gets people from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. It's purely a geographical issue. In fact, refugees and asylum seekers tend to go to the very next country, rather than travel around the world looking for America! According to the UN, Britain actually hosts more refugees than America. As for asylum applications, America is the source of 9.3% of global asylum claims, the UK is 5.1%, but when you add France, Germany, Greece and Sweden the figure for European (EU) countries rises to over 25% (and that's not even taking into account asylum applications in the other 22 EU countries)

I'm pretty sure there is a myth in every country that they in particularly are being "swamped" by immigrants. The figures usually counter those myths (read any British news paper and they'll say we are the asylum capital of Europe, but the truth is, by sheer number, Germany has the most, and by population, Netherlands has the most)

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Originally posted by Fir3start3r Back up - how does the richer get rich at the poor peoples' expense again?

If you introduce a flat rate of income tax, those previously in the top bracket will pay less of a % meaning they take more money home than before. Those previously in the bottom bracket will have to pay more so they will take less home than before. The gap between rich and poor therefore increases

Let's bring this back a bit. Read this letter this morning and it gets at the meat of the matter. It's a fairly lengthy but compelling read, imho.


http://www.eclecticwill.com/2008/10...e-well-driller/

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From: Cory Miller [email protected] Send this on to others… Joe the plumber woke some people up as they putt a face on the people who are going to be taxed more. Here’s a real example… Mr. Obama, Given the uproar about the simple question asked you by Joe the plumber, and the persecution that has been heaped on him because he dared to question you, I find myself motivated to say a few things to you myself. While Joe aspires to start a business someday, I already have started not one, but 4 businesses. But first, let me introduce myself. You can call me “Cory the well driller”. I am a 54-year-old high school graduate. I didn’t go to college like you, I was too ready to go “conquer the world” when I finished high school. 25 years ago at age 29, I started my own water well drilling business at a time when the economy here in East Texas was in a tailspin from the crash of the early 80’s oil boom. I didn’t get any help from the government, nor did I look for any. I borrowed what I could from my sister, my uncle, and even the pawnshop and managed to scrape together a homemade drill rig and a few tools to do my first job. My businesses did not start not a result of privilege. It is the result of my personal drive, personal ambition, self-discipline, self reliance, and a determination to treat my customers fairly. From the very start my business provided one other (than myself) East Texan a full time job. I couldn’t afford a backhoe the first few years (something every well drilling business had), so I and my helper had to dig the mud pits that are necessary for each and every job with hand shovels. I had to use my 10-year-old, ½-ton pickup truck for my water tank truck (normally a job for at least a 2 ton truck). A year and a half after I started the business, I scraped together a 20% down payment to get a modest bank loan and bought a (28 year) old, worn out, slightly bigger drilling rig to allow me to drill the deeper water wells in my area. I spent the next few years drilling wells with the rig while simultaneously rebuilding it between jobs. Through these years I never knew from one month to the next if I would have any work or be able to pay the bills. I got behind on my income taxes one year, and spent the next two years paying that back (with penalty and interest) while keeping up with ongoing taxes. I got behind on my water well supply bill 2 different years (way behind the second time… $80,000.00), and spent over a year paying it back (each time) while continuing to pay for ongoing supplies C.O.D. Of course, the personal stress endured through these experiences and years is hard to measure. I do have a stent in my heart now to memorialize it all. I spent the next 10 years developing the reputation for being the most competent and most honest water well driller in East Texas. 2 years along the way, I hired another full time employee for the drilling business so that we could provide full time water well pump service as well as the well drilling. Also, 3 years along the path, I bought a water well screen service machine from a friend, starting business # 2. 5 years later I made a business loan for $100,000.00 to build a new, higher production, computer controlled screen service machine. I had designed the machine myself, and it didn’t work out for 3 years so I had to make the loan payments without the benefit of any added income from the new machine. No government program was there to help me with the payments, or to help me sleep at night, as I lay awake wondering how I would solve my machine problems or pay my bills. Finally, after 3 years, I got the screen machine working properly, and that provided another full time job for an East Texan in the screen service business. 2 years after that, I made another business loan, this time for $250,000.00, to buy another used drilling rig and all the support equipment needed to run another, larger, drill rig. This provided another 2 full time jobs for East Texans. Again, I spent a couple of years not knowing if I had made a smart move, or a move that would bankrupt me. For the third time in 13 years, I had placed everything I owned on the line, risking everything, in order to build a business. A couple of years into this, I came up with a bright idea for a new kind of mud pump, a fundamentally necessary pump used on water well drill rigs. I spent my entire life savings to date (just $30,000.00), building a prototype of the pump and took it to the national water well convention to show it off. Customers immediately started coming out of the woodworks to buy the pumps, but there was a problem. I had depleted my assets making the prototype, and nobody would make me a business loan to start production of the new pumps. With several deposits for pump orders in hand, and nowhere to go, I finally started applying for as many credit card as I could find and took cash withdrawals on these cards to the tune of over $150,000.00 (including modest loans from my dear sister and brother), to get this 3rd business going. Yes, once again, I had everything hanging over the line in an effort to start another business. I had never manufactured anything, and I had to design and bring into production a complex hydraulic machine from an untested prototype to a reliable production model (in six months). How many nights I lay awake wondering if I had just made the paramount mistake of my life I cannot tell you, but there were plenty. I managed to get the pumps into production, which immediately created another 2 full time jobs in East Texas. Some of the models in the first year suffered from quality issues due to the poor workmanship of one of my key suppliers, so an employee and I (another East Texan employed) had to drive across the country to repair customers’ pumps, practically from coast to coast. I stood behind the product, and made payments to all the credit cards that had financed me (and my brother and sister). I spent the next 5 years improving and refining the product, building a reputation for the pump and the company, working to get the pump into drill rig manufacturers’ product lines, and paying back credit cards. During all this time I continued to manage a growing water well business that was now operating 3 drill rig crews, and 2 well service crews. Also, the screen service business continued to grow. No government programs were there to help me, Mr. Obama, but that’s ok, I didn’t expect any, nor did I want any. I was too busy fighting to make success happen to sit around waiting for the government to help me. Now, we have been manufacturing the mud pumps for 7 years, my combined businesses employ 32 full time employees, and distribute $5,000,000.00 annually through the local economy. Now, just 4 months ago I borrowed $1,254,000.00, purchasing computer controlled machining equipment to start my 4th business, a production machine shop. The machine shop will serve the mud pump company so that we can better manufacture our pumps that are being shipped worldwide. Of course, the machine shop will also do work for outside companies as well. This has already produced 2 more full time jobs, and 2 more should develop out of it in the next few months. This should work out, but if it doesn’t it will be because you, and the other professional politicians like yourself, will have destroyed our country’s’ (and the world) economy with your meddling with mortgage loan programs through your liberal manipulation and intimidation of loaning institutions to make sure that unqualified borrowers could get mortgages. You see, at the very time when I couldn’t get a business loan to get my mud pumps into production, you were working with Acorn and the Community Reinvestment Act programs to make sure that unqualified borrowers could buy homes with no down payment, and even no credit or worse yet, bad credit. Even the infamous, liberal, Ninja loans (No Income, No Job or Assets). While these unqualified borrowers were enjoying unrealistically low interest rates, I was paying 22% to 24% interest on the credit cards that I had used to provide me the funds for the mud pump business that has created jobs for more East Texans. It’s funny, because after 25 years of turning almost every dime of extra money back into my businesses to grow them, it has been only in the last two years that I have finally made enough money to be able to put a little away for retirement, and now the value of that has dropped 40% because of the policies you and your ilk have perpetrated on our country. You see, Mr. Obama, I’m the guy you intend to raise taxes on. I’m the guy who has spent 25 years toiling and sweating, fretting and fighting, stressing and risking, to build a business and get ahead. I’m the guy who has been on the very edge of bankruptcy more than a dozen times over the last 25 years, and all the while creating more and more jobs for East Texans who didn’t want to take a risk, and wouldn’t demand from themselves what I have demanded from myself. I’m the guy you characterize as “the Americans who can afford it the most” that you believe should be taxed more to provide income redistribution “to spread the wealth” to those who have never toiled, sweated, fretted, fought, stressed, or risked anything. You want to characterize me as someone who has enjoyed a life of privilege and who needs to pay a higher percentage of my income than those who have bought into your entitlement culture. I resent you, Mr. Obama, as I resent all who want to use class warfare as a tool to advance their political career. What’s worse, each year more Americans buy into your liberal entitlement culture, and turn to the government for their hope of a better life instead of themselves. Liberals are succeeding through more than 40 years of collaborative effort between the predominant liberal media, and liberal indoctrination programs in the public school systems across our land. What is so terribly sad about this is this. America was made great by people who embraced the one-time American culture of self-reliance, self-motivation, self-determination, self-discipline, personal betterment, and hard work, risk taking. A culture built around the concept that success was in reach on every able bodied American who would strive for it. Each year that less Americans embrace that culture, we all descend together. We descend down the socialist path that has brought country after country ultimately to bitter and unremarkable states. If you and your liberal comrades in the media and school systems would spend half as much effort cultivating a culture of can-do across America as you do cultivating your entitlement culture, we could see Americans at large embracing the conviction that they can elevate themselves through personal betterment, personal achievement, and self reliance. You see, when people embrace such ideals, they act on them. When people act on such ideals, they succeed. All of America could find herself elevating instead of deteriorating. But that would eliminate the need for liberal politicians, wouldn’t it, Mr. Obama? The country would not need you if the country was convinced that problem solving was best left with individuals instead of the government. You and all your liberal comrades have got a vested interested in creating a dependent class in our country. It is the very business of liberals to create an ever-expanding dependence on government. What’s remarkable is that you, who have never produced a job in your life, are going to tax me to take more of my money and give it to people who wouldn’t need my money if they would get off their entitlement mentality asses and apply themselves at work, demand more from themselves, and quit looking to liberal politicians to raise their station in life. You see, I know because I’ve had them work for me before. Hundreds of them over these 25 years. People who simply will not show up to work on time. People who just will not work 5 days in a week, much less, 6 days. People always looking for a way to put less effort out. People who actually tell me that they would do more if I just would first pay them more. People who take off work to sit in government offices to apply to get free government handouts (gee, I wonder how things would have turned out for them if they had spent that time earning money and pleasing their employer?). You see, all of this comes from your entitlement mentality culture. Oh, I know you will say I am uncompassionate. Sorry, Mr. Obama, wrong again. You see, I’ve seen what the average percentage of your income has been given to charities over the years of 2000 to 2004 (ignoring the years you started running for office - can you pronounce “politically motivated”); you averaged of less than 1% annually. And your running mate, Joe Biden, averaged less than ¼% of his annual income in charitable contributions over the last 10 years. Like so many liberals, the two of you want to give to the needy, just as long as it is someone else’s money you are giving to them. I won’t say what I have given to charities over the last 25 years, but the percentage is several times more than you or Joe Biden (don’t you just hate goggle?). Tell me again how you feel my pain. In short, Mr. Obama, your political philosophies represent everything that is wrong with our country. You represent the culture of government dependence instead of self-reliance; Entitlement mentality instead of personal achievement; Penalization of the successful to reward the unmotivated; Political correctness instead of open mindedness and open debate. If you are successful, you may preside over the final transformation of America from being the greatest and most self-reliant culture on earth, to just another country of whiners and wimps, who sit around looking to the government to solve their problems. Like all of western Europe. All countries on the decline. All countries that, because of liberal socialistic mentalities, have a little less to offer mankind every year. God help us… Cory Miller just a ordinary, extraordinary American, the way a lot of Americans used to be. P.S. Yes, Mr. Obama, I am a real American… www.cmillerdrilling.com

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Originally posted by George Smiley I know what you meant, but you don't seem to be aware of the implications of what you mean. If you had a flat rate of income tax across the board, you either need to decimate the budget, or you need to tax those at the bottom considerably more to cover the shortfall left by those at the top

That is actually not true. There have been studies of flat tax proposals (the fair tax, etc) with a fixed rate if around 26% with a poverty-level exemption of $10-12k (the tax kicks in on anything earned beyond that). The studies have shown that such a proposal would be REVENUE NEUTRAL. Despite the low rate, it would bring in the same amount of revenue as our current convoluted tax system because it closes thousands of loopholes and deductions..and it simplifies things tremendously.

A system like this is both flat AND "progressive" if you do the math. Despite the flat rate, the effective percentage paid is under 10% for those making under $25k, because they are only paying taxes on half their income. Someone making $30k will pay closer to 15%. $40k = 18%, $50k = 20%. It gets closer and closer to 26% as your income goes up. It's flat...but when you factor in a poverty-level exemption, it also becomes progressive.

Question George: Would you have a problem with this system if it were proven to bring in the same amount of revenue as the current 5-bracket system? If there were no loss to the government and the middle class burden would be a little less that it is today, would you still oppose it because that socialist in you thinks rich people need to be punished a bit more?..that they need to work a little longer than 3 months a year for the federal government?

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Originally posted by Capitalizt Question George: Would you have a problem with this system if it were proven to bring in the same amount of revenue as the current 5-bracket system? If there were no loss to the government and the middle class burden would be a little less that it is today, would you still oppose it because that socialist in you thinks rich people need to be punished a bit more?..that they need to work a little longer than 3 months a year for the federal government?

There is no way it can bring in the same amount of revenues as a progressive tax rate as the whole point of the flat rate is so those at the top pay less. That shortfall has to be made up and that can only come from those from lower tax brackets, hence they pay more to subsidise the rich. I understand the "progressive and flat" concept, but those towards the bottom must pay more if the rich are to pay less...

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Originally posted by George Smiley There is no way it can bring in the same amount of revenues as a progressive tax rate as the whole point of the flat rate is so those at the top pay less. That shortfall has to be made up and that can only come from those from lower tax brackets, hence they pay more to subsidise the rich. I understand the "progressive and flat" concept, but those towards the bottom must pay more if the rich are to pay less...

Which is the inherent problem with the flat tax - it raises tax rates on the poor in order to stay revenue neutral.

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Originally posted by Shakka Let's bring this back a bit. Read this letter this morning and it gets at the meat of the matter. It's a fairly lengthy but compelling read, imho. http://www.eclecticwill.com/2008/10...e-well-driller/

See! This is the one example I was talking about earlier! I knew the rich corporate elite had this one example that they would reel out every time there was a threat to their profits! This is story that tricks people in America into thinking that everybody will become a rich business owner one day - the American Dream!

But wait...this "American Dream" is dependant on 32 people not achieving the American Dream, isn't it?

And that's only for a SMALL business! Just think about how many people are required not to achieve the American Dream for the big corporations to exist?

Not good odds are they?

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Originally posted by George Smiley There is no way it can bring in the same amount of revenues as a progressive tax rate as the whole point of the flat rate is so those at the top pay less. That shortfall has to be made up and that can only come from those from lower tax brackets, hence they pay more to subsidise the rich. I understand the "progressive and flat" concept, but those towards the bottom must pay more if the rich are to pay less...

yeah - that's a pretty obvious point george makes. if people who are currently in the 35% bracket with an effective rate over 26% would have their rates reduced to 26%, and the total taxes remain static, then people in lower brackets necessarily make up the difference.

This is the best piece on this topic I've yet read. Hendrik Hertzberg hits the nail on the head once again:

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Like, Socialism by Hendrik Hertzberg November 3, 2008 Sometimes, when a political campaign has run out of ideas and senses that the prize is slipping through its fingers, it rolls up a sleeve and plunges an arm, shoulder deep, right down to the bottom of the barrel. The problem for John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Republican Party is that the bottom was scraped clean long before it dropped out. Back when the polls were nip and tuck and the leaves had not yet begun to turn, Barack Obama had already been accused of betraying the troops, wanting to teach kindergartners all about sex, favoring infanticide, and being a friend of terrorists and terrorism. What was left? The anticlimactic answer came as the long Presidential march of 2008 staggered toward its final week: Senator Obama is a socialist. “This campaign in the next couple of weeks is about one thing,” Todd Akin, a Republican congressman from Missouri, told a McCain rally outside St. Louis. “It’s a referendum on socialism.” “With all due respect,” Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said, “the man is a socialist.” At an airport rally in Roswell, New Mexico, a well-known landing spot for space aliens, Governor Palin warned against Obama’s tax proposals. “Friends,” she said, “now is no time to experiment with socialism.” And McCain, discussing those proposals, agreed that they sounded “a lot like socialism.” There hasn’t been so much talk of socialism in an American election since 1920, when Eugene Victor Debs, candidate of the Socialist Party, made his fifth run for President from a cell in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for opposing the First World War. (Debs got a million votes and was freed the following year by the new Republican President, Warren G. Harding, who immediately invited him to the White House for a friendly visit.) As a buzzword, “socialism” had mostly good connotations in most of the world for most of the twentieth century. That’s why the Nazis called themselves national socialists. That’s why the Bolsheviks called their regime the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, obliging the socialist and social democratic parties of Europe (and America, for what it was worth) to make rescuing the “good name” of socialism one of their central missions. Socialists—one thinks of men like George Orwell, Willy Brandt, and Aneurin Bevan—were among Communism’s most passionate and effective enemies. The United States is a special case. There is a whole shelf of books on the question of why socialism never became a real mass movement here. For decades, the word served mainly as a cudgel with which conservative Republicans beat liberal Democrats about the head. When Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan accused John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson of socialism for advocating guaranteed health care for the aged and the poor, the implication was that Medicare and Medicaid would presage a Soviet America. Now that Communism has been defunct for nearly twenty years, though, the cry of socialism no longer packs its old punch. “At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives,” McCain said the other day—thereby suggesting that the dystopia he abhors is not some North Korean-style totalitarian ant heap but, rather, the gentle social democracies across the Atlantic, where, in return for higher taxes and without any diminution of civil liberty, people buy themselves excellent public education, anxiety-free health care, and decent public transportation. The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent. The latter is what it would be under Obama’s proposal, what it was under President Clinton, and, for that matter, what it will be after 2010 if President Bush’s tax cuts expire on schedule. Obama would use some of the added revenue to give a break to pretty much everybody who nets less than a quarter of a million dollars a year. The total tax burden on the private economy would be somewhat lighter than it is now—a bit of elementary Keynesianism that renders doubly untrue the Republican claim that Obama “will raise your taxes.” On October 12th, in conversation with a voter forever to be known as Joe the Plumber, Obama gave one of his fullest summaries of his tax plan. After explaining how Joe could benefit from it, whether or not he achieves his dream of owning his own plumbing business, Obama added casually, “I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” McCain and Palin have been quoting this remark ever since, offering it as prima-facie evidence of Obama’s unsuitability for office. Of course, all taxes are redistributive, in that they redistribute private resources for public purposes. But the federal income tax is (downwardly) redistributive as a matter of principle: however slightly, it softens the inequalities that are inevitable in a market economy, and it reflects the belief that the wealthy have a proportionately greater stake in the material aspects of the social order and, therefore, should give that order proportionately more material support. McCain himself probably shares this belief, and there was a time when he was willing to say so. During the 2000 campaign, on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” a young woman asked him why her father, a doctor, should be “penalized” by being “in a huge tax bracket.” McCain replied that “wealthy people can afford more” and that “the very wealthy, because they can afford tax lawyers and all kinds of loopholes, really don’t pay nearly as much as you think they do.” The exchange continued: YOUNG WOMAN: Are we getting closer and closer to, like, socialism and stuff?. . . MCCAIN: Here’s what I really believe: That when you reach a certain level of comfort, there’s nothing wrong with paying somewhat more. For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comme..._talk_hertzberg

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