Why the hell would I want **two **defective kids? (Wasn’t there a sketch on The State that involved winning orphans?)
A few years ago a boy crawled into the hopper of one of those claw-type arcade games at a store near my home.* At the time I wondered: If someone had dropped a quarter in and “won” the kid, would the adoption stand?
*Happens with some frequency, it seems.
Oh please. You don’t have to wait until your late 30’s or 40’s to have children if you focus on getting an education, getting a decent job and putting some money by during your 20’s. You know, instead of partying, buying an expensive car, running up credit card debt?
Besides, women wait to have their children until they are those ages and much older all the time, for reasons that are, at best, just as good. Do you have a problem with them making that choice, or is it only when the choice is made to wait until children can actually be afforded by the parents?
Ah. You feel that no black people inhabit the middle class? They are incapable of bettering themselves should they start out poor?
You are an idiot. Note how much we have paid and continue to pay in those taxes alone and you are complaining because I have the gall to want some of it back? If it makes you feel better, you can decide that my SSDI payments are been taken from the slush funds that pay for our wars. That better?
Again, for I don’t know how many times, I am not talking about those people who have been responsible and had a run of very bad luck. I am, here specifically, talking about people who have their children when they have to know they cannot afford them. And everyone should have the 20/20 hindsight that continuing to support people who have children they cannot afford rarely turns out well for them, their children and/or society as a whole.
As for people who have children and then expect the government to pay for them, stop paying. If this results in the children starving or running about naked, take them away. How long do you suppose it would be before people start to realize that if they want these children that they say they love so much, they are going to have to make sure they can support them before they have them?
I really don’t get this attitude from people that say they love, or at least like, children. I wouldn’t put a puppy of mine in those homes, but it is OK with you that they keep pooping out kids? Your idea that everyone has a “right” to have children means that you, the professed lover of children, is condemning thousands of children to grow up in squalor, abuse, poor or little education and all those other fun things I and those around me dealt with back then. Do you just not realize this?
No, it is not. What I have posted on that happened between 2007 and the present.
I was very clear that I wasn’t talking about “a raise”, I was talking about the effect of two incomes being claimed on one tax return.
The fact still remains, when I was working, we paid more in income tax than my gross annual salary. And now that I am not working, we have essentially the same take home even tho my husband’s salary is not significantly different than it was when I was working. (I have to be vague because I don’t remember the exact salary he had in 2007, tho I am pretty sure he made more then because he is now working his way back up after being laid off in early 2008).
Since our income dropped radically when I quit working, he has been able to keep more of his paycheck than when I was working because we don’t have to pay as much in tax. And it has ended up that it doesn’t matter if I work or not. Which works out that we have been paying so much tax that even if I could work, there is a serious disincentive to do so.
Which was the original subject.
It’s still true. Here are the tax brackets for 2009. Using the figures in the link, I calculated net pay in the following scenarios:
In the beginning of 2009, my salary is 171,000 and stays the same throughout the year.
I’m taxed 28% and my net pay at the end of the year is $123,120
or
In the beginning of 2009, my salary is 171,000 and it is raised to $180,000 about half way through the year. My gross pay is 175,500.
I’m taxed 33% and my net pay at the end of the year is $117,750.
A $9000 raise given half way through the year just cost me $5,370
Unless of course I was supposed to add everything after “plus” in the figures on this page. In that case, never mind. :o
Yes, “never mind” is correct. The new percentage only applies to the amount above the gross income that gets that percentage to apply in the first place (ie, only on the marginal amount). Stated another way, the new percentage is not applied beggining at the first dollaer, but only at the dollar that is $1 above the floor for the new percentage.
Curlcoat sounds like someone very familiar to me:
My sister grew up in a sole-parent household that financially bordered on the poverty line for many years. She moved out when she reached 18 and moved to the city, first to live with our grandmother and then in some shared houses. Despite not going to university, she managed to be trained and get some decent jobs that saw her look down her nose at our mother and the rest of the family for our lack of ‘class’.
My sister ended up marrying into some money, and has since never worked a single day, but still she holds those old prejudices against the poor and the marginalised even though she was once one of them herself. It was only the virtue of the year she was born and the relative boom economic times that ensued that saw her able to prosper…she certainly didn’t put any grand effort in herself that’s fer’ sure.
Alas, like Curlcoat, she doesn’t recognise that it is mostly circumstance and NOT personal ‘choices’ that makes the difference between those of us who thrive and those who end up on the social scrapheap. We don’t all start off on a level playing field, and even those who begin privileged sometimes fall upon hard times.
Chance is a fickle auld bitch, and none of us know when she’s going to point her rheumatoid finger at US in the future, despite our best preparations and intentions. It’s good to keep in mind that while our success is wonderful and grand, there but for the grace of Og etc. Life could have been very different, and we who live well have been fucking lucky, not just smart.
Curlcoat, think back to your roots and really appreciate where you came from. It’s all well and good to look towards the future, but in your case, it sounds like you need to reconnect with the past that gave you your smarts and your survival instinct: the more recent past that has given you money is so not important at all in the big scheme of things.
And just imagine where you might be if your past had not taken the beneficial turn it has???
Right, the “you could have been rendered crippled or mentally handicapped by a random meteor strike so you can’t complain about any program that forces you to give money to poor people” school of how to run a society. I find that argument lacking.
Sure there’s luck or chance involved in Bill Gates being so wealthy, but that doesn’t discount his talent and hard work or justify wealth redistribution for its own sake. If anything it justifies handouts only to those who can prove up that their poverty is predpminantly due to chance and not their own lack of effort, which is esentially impossible.
It is not simply that a heavily taxed increase necessarily results in an overall decrease. It is more that changes in taxation, like many economic factors, affect behavior at the margins.
Suppose I am making $75K a year. I am offered another position that involves relocation, but would make me more productive. In order to make relocation worthwhile to me, I need a $20K raise. If taxes on my raise exceed $5,000, I will not make the move, and the economy loses out on my increased productivity. If they are less than that figure, I will, and it does not. Therefore, if my productivity exceeds $5,000, everybody is better off if taxes on my raise are kept under that amount.
Regards,
Shodan
You’re insisting that people have the money set by to cover the cost of raising a child–which these days is well over six figures. I went to college, I have a well-paying job, I don’t own any car (let alone an expensive one), and I have zero credit card debt. I also had a pulmonary embolism out of nowhere about a month ago that is probably going to wipe out a good chunk of the several thousand dollars I have in savings. I’d like to know how you think I could save a **few hundred thousand **dollars by the time I’m 35.
We have different definitions of when a child can be afforded. You want people to be insanely rich.
There are more poor African-Americans that poor European-Americans because of a history of slavery and discrimination. Most Americans of European background got a leg up because of their ancestry that those with African ancestry did not. What you want to do is scramble up the ladder, and then kick it out from underneath you and complain about how lazy all the people still stuck on the ground are.
I don’t care that you want some of it back. I care that you are **specifically **bitching about **payroll **taxes when payroll taxes are currently supporting your disgusting waste of flesh. If you had chosen instead to discuss your **income **taxes, then you would be less hypocritical, you dumb whore. You’ve already admitted that you have no education nor desire to improve your knowledge–why even try to discuss anything when you clearly don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about?
Which, in your mind, is some crazy-huge percentage of the population. All those scary Black women popping out crack babies in poverty who are gonna pop out even more so they can steal more of your precious money! OooOooOOOOooOhh, scary! You refuse to cite **any **evidence that your insane worldview at all reflects reality, while you simultaneously **reject **all the evidence that people have presented that proves that **you **are just plain fucking wrong.
Go marinate in your ignorance somewhere else. You disgust me.
Similar situation here, mostly: 3 college degrees, a used car, no debt ever. But also unable to get full time work in my profession despite 20+ years of extensive experience and qualifications (yes, I know it’s a dead end now and am trying to transition into other work); working multiple part time jobs to keep it together; paying out of pocket for insurance; got hit with a few thousand dollars in copayments earlier this year for a surgery that had to be done. And I’m over 40.
I pay everything on time, but with everything going up (including medical premiums as soon as I hit age 44) and my hourly wages being pretty stagnant (they don’t rise unless they’re negotiated successfully, and since CA is cash-strapped I don’t see much chance of a rise), there’s not a lot left to save at the end of the month.
A raise can increase your tax payment by more than the amount of the raise if the raise makes you subject to the AMT. This probably isn’t a concern for the large majority of people, but if you make around $175,000 a raise might end up hurting you.
Did you also grow up in that poverty line home?
How does that work? She got lucky because she happened to be born in a time when people can get jobs (when can they not?) and you weren’t?
Only the last part of that approaches correct. I spent 20-30+ years on that social scrapheap (depending on what income level you consider to be “scrapheap” - back in my day, we called them “poor people”) and I actually saw people, many many people, who couldn’t be arsed to better themselves. Who couldn’t wait to have children, buy a car, go on vacation or anything else until they could actually afford to do so. Yes, circumstance plays a part, more or less depending on each individual, but it is definitely not the only factor.
It was apparently more possible to have children and buy a home you couldn’t afford in my parents’ day, or maybe they just got lucky because they were able to make it to lower middle class by the time I was 12 or so. Maybe my grandparents helped more than I realized they did, no idea. What I do notice is that it doesn’t seem to be near as easy to do that these days, and so people need to quit spending money they don’t have.
Um, why would I appreciate living like that for so long? I am supposed to appreciate two adults who had me by accident and then my brother the next year on purpose because that was “the plan”, even tho it meant we had to live in a rat infested apartment? The resentment that my father felt towards me was all kinds of fun. Then when we “moved up” and we got to go to a very under funded poor school? Or am I supposed to appreciate my abusive father, or both of their attitudes that women should marry young, have children and do nothing else at all with their lives? Funny how that didn’t apply to my mother when she got her Masters at 45… None of which speaks to how I ended up on my own at 18 with no money and no support.
You think it’s more important to live like a feral animal than security?
Most likely living with the man I turned down to marry my husband..
Since my husband has lived in the same house since the early 80’s, and I’ve been here since 1992, relocation had no effect.
Please quote where you have seen me say that one has to have all of the money saved up to raise a child before they have one.
Please quote where I said that you needed to do that.
No, I merely want them to have money saved and no serious debt. Particularly credit card debt. You know, act in a responsible manner? Is this an idea you cannot understand?
However, there are also more poor blacks than there are poor asians, jewish people or any other minority except, I believe, Mexicans/Cubans/whereever they came from. Why do you suppose that is?
Well, that’s totally not true. The “ladder” that I used to get out of poverty was determination, hard work and responsibility, and I suppose the “good luck” to have not ended up with cancer or something. When have I said that those that are currently poor should be denied good luck, determination, hard work and a sense of responsibility?
Oh, OK! Lets pretend that the government hasn’t taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from me, back when I couldn’t really afford it and just focus on the income taxes that we are paying in the here and now! By the end of the year, provided my husband doesn’t get a raise or a bonus, we will have paid over $10,500 in federal income tax and over $5000 in state income tax. Every year except last year, when we were both unemployed, we have ended up paying out a couple of thousand more to the fed and a few hundred to the state. Don’t know what difference that makes to you but there it is.
Please provide a quote where I said that.
That’s nice. You set me up as this horrible person by pretending I’ve said a bunch of things I haven’t, and then you tell me to go away. How mature and intelligent.
So, for the record… if everyone who was poor just tried hard enough, they’d ALL be able to climb out of poverty… and poverty would cease to exist?
Probably not. There is the factor of luck, as well as being born with at least decent intelligence and a functioning body. Also, I imagine that as more people made more money, the definition of “poverty” would keep shifting up. People seem to have a need to classify things.
I think the point was that they wanted you to acknowledge that you had a lot of luck to get to where you are today. If you had been seriously ill or discovered some congenital health condition when you were still living in poverty, you’d have been completely fucked through no fault of your own.
You said it in this thread, that it only takes something like $30k or $60k or some ridiculously small figure to raise a child. You’ve shat out posts for so many pages now, it would take a year to dig it up again.
Because poverty and discrimination breed more poverty? Duh? We never imported thousands upon thousands of Jews, Chinese, Koreans, etc. as chattel slaves, you ignorant whore. If your education was as shitty as you say it was, and you’re too disabled to work, at least go back and take some fucking GED classes.
It’s been implied in your entire argument–you say you acknowledge that accidents can happen and that poverty isn’t always the fault of poor people, but then you insist that social programs to support health and provide for other basic needs just go to the lazy.
Slime doesn’t deserve politeness. It deserves to get its disgusting, lazy, willfully ignorant self the hell out of my sight.