Yep, once you’re above a certain level it’s all play and no worries. Just about everything you do is an “expense” to the company. This is why we need a greater level of socialism in this country, to curb such abuses.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but last time I checked, you couldn’t deduct contributions to political organizations, no matter how rich you were.
No, you finished stating it. You haven’t explained shit.
What, calling you deliberately obtuse? Shit, I could start a Pit thread on instances of that alone, and have more cites on you than I had on Bush in the OP here.
Now, OTOH, I’m dumb as a box of rocks to keep on talking with you. But we must both bear that cross. For now.
So, if they are all avoiding all their taxes, why was it so important to them to get their rates lowered back in 2001? And why did it considerably reduce Federal tax revenues?
You can spout all you want about this nonsense (and yes, I’ve read David Cay Johnston’s terribly-referenced book, or as much of it as I could stand before getting tired of yelling, Cite?? one more time)
I’ve been wondering that about you. Defining all income as capital growth simply renders the term ‘capital growth’ meaningless, along with the term ‘capital’ itself. Just like your use of ‘tyrannical’ rendered that word meaningless, too, since it applied to pretty much any government action not unanimously supported by the citizenry.
Words are useful only when they apply to one thing but not another. As soon as they apply to everything, they become meaningless.
I love the way you put words in my mouth, Lib. But what I said earlier applies. And as your cite points out, these things aren’t legal, and a subsequent Administration might actually try to enforce the tax laws. The Kerry campaign noted earlier this year that better enforcement of laws applying to the upper echelons might result in hundreds of billions more revenue, without a change in the tax laws.
Yes you could, I suppose. But you chose instead an avenue of petty sloth.
Yes, indeed you are.
It was important to everyone. I realize that, as a leftist, you believe that jobs and new industry come from heaven like manna. For you, entrepreneurship and capital investment are evil things because Marx has told you that they are oppressive.
Because it’s supposed to. If you steal less money, you have less money in your pockets. The idea is that you steal less and then spend less. But rightists have become indistinguishable from leftsists with respect to the economy. You both seek to expand the power and scope of government while micromanaging everyone else’s lives. You are compelled by the nature of your character to destroy, like pigs at a banquet, who tear down the table in order to get at the food.
I am not familiar with David Cay Johnston.
Red herring. Changing the subject won’t help your argument. Any time money is made, someone profits and overall capital is increased. Captial growth is an increase in the value of share holdings. If capital growth is taxed, then an investor derives less income. Likewise, if an investor’s income is taxed, he has less to offer for shares.
Which is exactly what you are doing with words like “idiot” when you apply them to everything Bush does from invading sovereign nations to mispronouncing a word. You have weakened your arguments against him by dwelling on piddly shit like your OP, not to mention the thread where you invited all and sundry to participate in bashing him for things that you believed did not merit even so much as a Pit thread. You are doing a disservice to Kerry by crying wolf so often that your bellyaching has come to signify nothing more than the fact that you’re obsessed. Seeing yet another Bush thread from you is like seeing yet another attack from SwiftVets. One already knows before one looks that the complaint is petty, mean spirited, and exaggerated. Moderate and reasonable leftists have become tired of it, and if you are not careful, your net effect will be to alienate undecided people who will become so suspicious of you that your condemnations will begin to constitute endorsements just as if a klansman attacked Obama.
That’s what happens when you speed read — you miss words like “often” and “may”. There is nothing illegal about pure trusts. If there were, a lot of politicians and powerful people would be in jail. It is only illegal to use these trusts as a means of escaping income tax. But if they make no income, then they are avoiding no income tax. It is the method by which wealthy people stuff their money under mattresses.
I think you’re way off-base with this; I think it’s a jab at the Kerrys and their wealth. Between them, George Soros, and Baffleck and co. in Hollywood, there’s a fairly substantial “have more” base on the Democratic side.
Because the law was originally written with industrial/farm equipment in mind and (IIRC) predates the release of monstrous SUVs that actually fit the category (I think the old Suburban was <6000 lbs, the new model is 7K lbs).
Somewhat of a hijack- I know that technically you could use the 6000+ lbs on a SUV, but has anyone actually taken advantage of the loophole?
Yeah, well, you’re really not worth the extra effort. Besides, we’re already in the Pit.
Nonsense. Neither Groucho, Chico, nor Harpo has spoken on the subject.
You were doing what looked like a close paraphrase of his book Perfectly Legal, so I assumed that was your source. My apologies.
You are mistaken in this. I have on occasion, even fairly recently, spoken approvingly of things Bush has said or done.
You are welcome to your opinion of what is piddly shit. I thought it was rather significant. If the President of the United States has the attitude that if rich people weasel out of taxes, it’s really no big deal, and just means you shouldn’t bother trying to tax them at all, I think people should know that.
If you don’t think so, it seems to actually undercut everything you’ve been saying in this thread, since you’re much more alarmist than I am about the ability of rich people to avoid taxes.
Many people had complained about the number of Bush-bashing threads; I’m sorry my attempt at consolidation upset you.
FWIW, my point was that Bush had effectively moved the goalposts: in a year of Abu Ghraib and outing al-Qaeda moles, stuff that would under more normal circumstances rate its own Pit thread just doesn’t quite make the cut anymore, but it might still deserve mention here.
Oh, good, a substantive allegation. How often have I cried ‘wolf’ lately? Manny made some criticisms awhile back, I took them to heart, and so please point out the times since then that I’ve cried ‘wolf’. Link, and explain, please.
I’m sure you can back that up too. Go for it.
Since this comes from Mr. Careful himself, I think I’ll just consider the source.
Which was my point. You might want to be more careful in the future, or people might not bother reading you.
You may not be aware of this, Lib, but the tax on zero dollars of income is zero, regardless of its location - be it in a pure trust, or in a literal mattress.
Well, I ain’t too old to learn. Seeya.
[RTF Snipped]
No…you’re missing the point.
If you raise taxes on the rich, they’ll dodge them and someone else will have to pick up the slack.
Therefore, raising taxes for the rich is actually raising taxes for everyone BUT the rich.
Ergo (since I already said “therefore”), lowering taxes for the rich means lowering taxes for everyone.
It’s the exact opposite of ‘trickle-down economics’. Kind of ‘double-anti-trickle-up taxes’.
Duh.
-Joe, is not Joe, unless it’s convenient for him to be Joe, but it probably isn’t, so he’s not. Or something.
It seems to me that questions about how much tax the rich are actually able to avoid paying are beside the point of the OP. Please tell me if I’m reading it wrong, but I think the OP wants to hold Bush’s transparently illogical statements up to ridicule. And if he doesn’t, I do.
First of all, as has been mentioned, if the rich are so good at avoiding taxes, why did he need to give them a tax cut in the first place? The answer is that, for all the loopholes that exist, they do pay most of the tax that gets paid in this country. Whether they should pay more, or less, or not at all, or whatever… that’s another debate entirely.
Second of all, is he actually saying that rolling back the tax cuts will decrease revenue? That’s what it sounds like! The *(il)*logic seems to be thus:[ol]
[li]John Kerry wants to raise taxes on the rich[/li][li]Rich people are good at finding ways to pay less in taxes[/li][li]John Kerry’s tax hike for the rich will cause them to increase the amount of taxes they might be able to avoid paying[/li][li]John Kerry’s tax hike for the rich will cause the rich to pay less in taxes[/li][li]John Kerry will cause the middle class to pay more in taxes to make up for the lost revenue that resulted from his raising taxes on the rich[/li][/ol]
Now, you could say “Well, there’s a more abstract cost to raising taxes on the rich, in the form of less job creation, less reinvestment in the economy, etc. The middle and lower classes could end up paying for that in ways John Kerry doesn’t expect.” Maybe, maybe not. But as RTFirefly pointed out, that’s not what the President said!!!
What the screaming fuck? Taxing the rich makes working people pay more taxes?
How exactly would that work? Rich guy calls his accountant, “Hello, Sid? Yeah, I need you to find me a way to pay less taxes than last year. Yes, I know John Kerry has raised taxes on people in my income bracket, but you know us rich people. We only pay the taxes we feel like paying. And this year, I feel like paying even less. That’ll teach Kerry to raise my taxes! BUWAHAHAHAHA!”
Two years into John Kerry’s term, every American earning less than $200,000/yr. gets a letter in the mail:
Amen.
There are, and always have been, “limousine liberals”; but if you’re making a claim about relative representation of “have mores” in the two parties, you need to back it up somehow. (Polls, campaign contributions, whatever.)
Parts of the law were written before the 1990s; parts of it were revised as recently as last year. The big change in 2003 was raising the ceiling from $25K to $100K on how much of the purchase price could be deducted immediately as an investment in equipment. (The rest could already be depreciated over 5 years.)
Here’s a list of vehicles that qualify. Suffice it to say that those potentially eligible to use this break are being made aware of it.
This strikes me as an incredibly populist position and yet I don’t hear a lot of people suggesting it? When it is brought up, where does the opposition to it come from? I’m thinking conservatives would generally hate it on understandable grounds of self-interest but what do liberals have to say about it? Aside from cynical accusations that the liberal elite are pigs at the trough as much as conservatives, what are their stated reasons for opposing this kind of reform?
I’d be several thousand dollars worse off each year (assuming unchanged tax rates) but I do well enough and I’d be more than willing to sacrifice a little for fairness for all. I might even come out even depending on what the rates were dropped to.
cuauhtomec - exactly. Thanks for bringing this thread back to its intended subject!
No problem, RTFirefly.
Why, oh why did my parents saddle me with the hard-to-spell name of cuauhtemoc?
Meet Karl Wizinsky:
I know his son, who sings in a local art-punk band, and thinks the whole thing is pretty crass.
“Hi everybody! My Dad’s a great big jackass!”
I forgot to add that here in Cincinnati, the local Hummer dealers advertise the writeoff in their commercials on the local Neandertalk station.
First time I heard one, I called the dealership and let them know that they were welcome to give me a free hummer of a different kind.
Then why did you bring it up? You made the otherwise irrelevant assertion that you had the ability to start a thread. If it isn’t worth the effort, why is it worth the mention? Is your intention nothing more than to incite, provoke, and tease just to see how I will respond?
As you know, I meant Karl Marx. He was the enemy of liberalism. Ludwig Von Mises wrote, “The program of liberalism, therefore, if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production… All the other demands of liberalism result from his fundamental demand”. Marx, on the other hand wrote, “In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
I accept your apology. Please attempt to keep your wits about you in future.
I think you misspelled “sarcastically”.
But that is a misrepresentation of his position. You’re affirmating the consequent, which is a logical fallacy. His position is that because the wealthy can successfully dodge taxes legally, the rest of us have to pay because the government still continues to spend money.
I doubt seriously that you’re paying any attention at all to what I’m saying. I’m not calling you out for a debate; you have no position from which TO debate. I’m exposing your nonsense for the sake of the general record.
Everybody knows you made no such attempt. If you had made any actual attempt at consolidation, this OP would be in that thread, as would others you have written.
The al-Qaeda mole (singular) was outed by the New York Times. And it isn’t Bush who is moving any goalposts. His tyranny has been steadfast and predictable. The goalposts are being moved by you.
This very thread. Bush has made a point that is common knowledge, and you have wasted bandwidth in order to stir up a tempest in a teapot.
Perhaps if you would read as many Pit threads as you generate, you would notice. Here is one recently started by Leaper, Okay, even I’m getting somewhat tired of all the repetitious anti-Bush threads….
I’m sure you will. Logical fallacies are your specialty.
Then your expository skills need serious work. The point you actually made was “And as your cite points out, these things aren’t legal, and a subsequent Administration might actually try to enforce the tax laws.” Pure trusts, in fact are legal.
That’s the whole point that Bush is making, you dufus. You are, in effect, pitting yourself.
It has nothing to do with your age, and everything to do with a conscious decision you’ve made to cover your eyes and ears.
I had assumed that this was one of those things that everybody talked about but nobody actually followed through on. One day I hope to see one of these tools filling up their Hummer while wearing nothing but a barrel with suspenders due to current gas prices.
I was sorta right about the reason ("Tax experts say the light-truck tax loophole was originally targeted for farmers, so their working pickup trucks would not be treated, for tax purposes, like luxury cars. ") but wrong about most everything else.
No, I can’t. I was just pointing that out to rebut the “After all, his ‘base’ is the haves and have-mores” from the OP. There’s a hell of a lot of people in the “red states” who are poor and voted for Bush. Especially in the South.
Well, yeah, Bush has plenty of support among evangelical Christians (and those who grew up and remain in the culture, even if they aren’t ECs themselves), regardless of economic level.
But you can’t rebut the statement about Bush’s base being the haves and have-mores; Bush actually said that.
Speaking of things he’s said, he went with the meme one more time yesterday:
And, just as a variation on a theme:
And if the rich are able to weasel out of paying taxes, guess who’s lent a big helping hand?
It always helps if you have the power to make your prophecies self-fulfilling.
But Ms. Butts, the lawyer who wrote the aritcle, admits that “the more recent corporate tax shortfalls may reflect a weaker economy at the beginning of 21st century”. Moreover, she seems to have at least as big a beef with Clinton as she has with Bush:
If she’s right, 6 out of 10 US corporations paid no tax during Clinton’s second term. Could you link us to the Pit thread where you ranted about that?
Not as much as they used to, thanks to Bush’s tax cuts, but they undoubtedly pay taxes:
That’s the part that’s germane to this discussion. I’ll quote some more stuff, simply because it’s interestiong: