Glad you brought up Ashcroft. Let’s see… I believe that he lost his senatorial election to A DEAD MAN!!!
They talked about that because Bush cut taxes, but wasn’t cutting spending (he was actually increasing it) and the result would be a deficit. Part of the way the Federal government pays for deficits is pillaging the Soc Sec fund.
[quote]
Now that the tax-cut has become inevitable, liberal Democrats are demanding that “America’s hardest working families” (that don’t pay income taxes) get a “tax-cut” from their “payroll taxes”, which is their Social Security taxes.
Because the trust won’t be effected. The fund will be credited with the cash taken from payroll checks, as is the case now. However, those funds taken from payroll checks will then be reimbursed to the working poor from the general fund, which is collected from income taxes.
Actually, they are much higher for the poor than they are for the rich, because the rich only pay (what is it?), say 8% on the first $85,000, while the poor pay 8% on everything they make. So a poor person making $20,000 a year pays $1,600 – 8%, while a person making $200,000 a year only pays around $6,800, or 3.4%. That is, by definition, a regressive tax structure, that leans harder on the poor than on the wealthy. Such tax systems make life harder on those least capable of sustaining the cost, and are thus immoral.
Even if the rate were flap with no cap, it would still be harder on the working poor, who can less adroitly suffer the loss of 8% of their income, than the wealthy.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Razorsharp *
You know, it’s really getting boring, having to address your nit-piking. But, I’m going to do it one more time.
Thanks.
Hey, I’m waiting for token mention from you that the poor pay taxes other than on income, but it semes to keep escaping you.
This is the part that keeps escaping me. Even if you could adequately prove your case that the Senate did something bad (and you haven’t), how exactly does that justify repealing the 17th, and why do you think restoring the Senate to its pre-17th electoral process is going to improve things?
I wondered how long it would be before the your alleged commitment to fair taxation turned into the rather predictable round of single-mother-and-ethnic-bashing.
That aside, i don’t even know what argument you’re making here. It serves your ranting about the welfare state, but fails completely to make a logical argument for repealing the 17th amendment.
If this “depraved urban underclass” that you’re so worried about is indeed dominating state-wide elections, then surely they must be electing similarly depraved welfare proponents to the state house. And, consequently, if the state house is dominated by depraved welfare proponents, then surely these members would send one of their own evil number to serve in the United States Senate?
As BobLibDem asked:
Exactly! Especially since those state politicians have also been elected by the same people who currently elect the US Senators.
A complete non-sequitur by the OP. The 94-2 vote–no matter what the issue–is totally irrelevant to whether or not a repeal of the 17th amendment would curtail the buying of Senate seats. Can you demonstrate that the state legislators in whom you have such touching, wide-eyed confidence would be any less susceptible to financial incentives than any other politician? As Captain Amazing pointed out:
Also, when one poster pointed out that these “mid-western states” you complain about are not exactly sources of rabidly socialist Senators, all you could come up with is
Again, nice way to avoid the issue. But at least you concede that Ashcroft was defeated by a more competent opponent.
Your constant references to people being “apologists for socialism,” and your personal insults in a forum not designed for such things, are unlikely to induce people to pay attention to what you have to say. This is SDMB, not HUAC.
Given that quotation marks are often used to indicate irony, they are particularly apposite in this sentence.
Razorsharp, I don’t get what you see wrong with this. So people are receiving rebates for a tax other than income tax. So what? Is income tax special? Is it the only tax for which rebates are acceptable? Personally, I don’t think that any tax should have rebates. If the government wants to lower taxes, it should just lower taxes, instead of taking a bunch of money and then giving some of it back.
Funny thing is that the pre-17th Amendment system that Razor so loves is the system under which the 17th Amendment was approved by the Senate.
No, but the Social Security tax is special.
Giving people a tax-refund on taxes that they didn’t pay is not only a bad thing, it’s inherently dishonest.
Giving the “refund” to those who don’t deserve it is designed to gain votes.
Hiding the “welfare giveaway” under the guise of a “tax-credit” is designed to keep from loosing votes from the part of their constituency that does not want any further giveaways.
Razorsharp, you still avoid answering the challenge several of us have made, as to the basis on which you believe that a legislatively-elected Senate would be any less prone to these kinds of shenanigans, given that the same people will elect the state legislatures in the first place.
Posted by Razorsharp:
You’re assuming that Razorsharp is motivated by a genuine desire to discuss this issue rationally.
Bad assumption.
Posted by Razorsharp:
I think you will find, Razorsharp, that persons who qualify for welfare or tax credits are not an important voting bloc. The Pew Research Center for People and the Press has developed a typology (http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=98) which divides the American public into ten groupings by their political views and behavior. Of these, three groups – Disaffecteds, Partisan Poor, and Bystanders – include significant numbers of people who might draw welfare at one time or another; and only one of these groups, the Partisan Poor (9% of general population, 11% of registered voters) are politically concerned enough to vote in most elections. The Disaffecteds, as the name implies, are disillusioned with government and the political process and rarely bother to vote. And the Bystanders – well, a lot of them are ineligible to vote, because they are non-citizens or have criminal records.
So the number of poor Americans who might try to “vote themselves money from the public treasure” is not electorally significant. (The number of extremely rich Americans who want money from the public treasure is even less electorally significant but, nevertheless, they are much better positioned to get their way, and do.) Except for those legislators who represent certain inner-city districts, most politicians could safely disregard the poor if they chose – but they cannot disregard the far larger numbers of active and financially solvent voters who quite rightly regard the presence of desperate and unrelieved poverty in their midst as a serious problem.
I don’t understand what Alexander Tyler was talking about, anyway. There are plenty of historical examples of democracies degenerating into dictatorships, but there are no examples of a democracy that degenerated into dictatorship because the people’s tendency to “vote themselves from the public treasure” resulted in “loose fiscal policy.” The inflationary fiscal policy of Weimar Germany did destabilize the society and pave the way for Hitler’s rise to power, but we must remember that (1) the inflation was brought under control long before Hitler came to power, and (2) the inflation did not result from welfare-state spending but from the government’s desperate attempts to pay war reparations to the Allies.
Not to mention that Weimar was a baby democracy compared to the US-prior to 1918, they had been the German Empire, and before that, a bunch of little kingdoms and duchies.
One of Razorsharp’s arguments here seems to rely on the (unproved) assertion that state legislators are somehow more reliable and less corruptible than their federal counterparts.
I’m doing research at the moment on the teaching of economics in American high schools since World War Two, and i just came across a rather amusing piece of evidence that demonstrates how inaccurate this assumption might be.
In North Carolina during the mid-1970s, there was a push in the state legislature to require the teaching of “free enterprise” in NC public schools. The idea of such legislation was to educate students on the problems associated with socialist and communist systems, and to promote the ideal of the free market as the best way for an economy to run. A considerable part of the free enterprise ideology that these legislators wanted the students to grasp was that government should not interfere excessively in the workings of the free market.
Now, i’m sure someone like Razorsharp would applaud such a bill. And so did most of the NC legislators. But some were worried that such a principled stand might not be popular among NC voters. According to one NC paper, one Representative (a Democrat, as it happens) proposed an amendment that
Yeah, these guys are so much more principled and consistent than their counterparts in Congress. :rolleyes:
I realize that this is only one piece of evidence, but my reading in the history of other state legislatures has uncovered many other examples.
Quite simply, they’re not.
The longest-lived governments currently on the planet are democratic republics - which is a different beast entirely.
Are we ever going to rid ourselves of this ridiculous fauz-semantics of opposing Republic to Democracy. There is no inherent tension between the two concepts at all.
“Single-mother” encompasses many different scenerios and paints with a fairly broad stroke. Let’s narrow it down a bit.
What has become detrimental to society is the welfare brood-mare, whose spawn has shown a criminal tendency to prey on the lawabiding citizenry, who are forced to subsidize this criminal class with their tax-dollars. And now, the Senate has voted to give them an extra $400 per “spawn”. (And you can bet that it will be spent responsibly, too.)
Oh, and they come in all ethnicities.
There absolutely is. They’re two seperate entities.
The biggest difference is that democracy has absolutely no inherent respect for inalienable rights. If 50%+1 of society decided that genocide against the other half was the appropriate course of action, that’s perfectly valid in a democracy.
Your willingness to cherry-pick particular phrases and use them as a springboard for even more ranting, while ignoring all the logical and reasonable questions and arguments made against your posts, demonstrates the lack of sincerity with which you started this thread.
The title of this thread is “Another reason to repeal the 17th Amendment,” yet of your 15 posts here so far, barely three or four have actually addressed this topic or the arguments that people have made against it. If you simply wanted to start a welfare-bashing thread, why didn’t you just do that? You probably would have got quite a bit of support from some members of this board.
But when you open a thread in Great Debates, those people who contribute to it have a not-unreasonable expectation that you’ve actually spent more than three seconds thinking about the issue at hand, and that you’re willing (and perhaps even able) to make a logical and reasoned defence of your position. And if you open a thread about a Constitutional issue, be aware that people might expect you to at least have read the document and have some idea of the historical implications of the points you are making.
The really pathetic thing about this thread is that there could actually be an interesting debate over the issue if you had the commitment and the understanding to try and put your case logically. I can envision some rather persuasive arguments that might be mustered in favour of repealing the 17th, and even if i didn’t agree with them i would be willing to debate them in a friendly manner.
But your continued harping on welfare issues, and your refusal to believe that this particular 94-2 vote in the Senate is not, in and of itself, a good enough reason to repeal the amendment, make it appear as if you never really wanted to debate the constitutional issue in the first place. I would have left this thread long ago, except that people like you tend to misinterpret exasperation and dismissal for surrender. When people stop debating, finding no reasonable arguments to debate against, the ignoramus usually thinks he has won and feels even more secure in his ignorance. Well, this Board’s about fighting ignorance, about weaning people off their stubborn refusal to be rational and coherent. So i’m staying, for your own good. 