That is one of the stupidest statements about taxation that was ever uttered.
Reagan raised taxes 11 times. After he cut taxes, he saw that the responsible thing to do was to raise them again. Which is why Saint Ronnie would be cast out of the Republican Party nowadays. Who wants a (relatively) fiscally-responsible leader?
No it was imposed on them by want of food and shelter.
And yet some laborers get higher pay than others. Why is that? Guys who fly planes earn more per hour than guys who drive trucks, who earn more per hour than guys who unload trucks; why does each group settle for a different minimum amount of pay, and why do employers agree to pay them differently? Why do auto mechanics earn more per hour than fry cooks? Why do paramedics earn more than cashiers? It’s almost as if – wait, could it really be that simple?
Because for one reason or another a skill set is rare enough that the workers have a little bargaining power, or expensive enough to acquire that if the companies don’t offer more than a certain minimum amount no one will acquire them in the first place because the debt will be too high. Or of course the workers in question are unionized.
Thats what he offered. Left leaning rich folks who say they are willing to pay higher tax rates.
It depends on what you think of as wealthy. Capital gains are taxed at 15%. For the average schmo making $50,000, capital gains represents less than 1% of income. For someone making $500,000 (still not “wealthy”), capital gains represent perhaps 10% of income. When you get to $5,000,000, then about half of your income is capital gains. So the guy with $5,000,000 of income pays lower taxes than the guy that only makes $500,000.
Once again it depends on who you consider rich.
The tax foundation is another Koch brother’s “think tank”
The lowest quintile has a mean income of $11,552 and the highest has a mean income of $170,844. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=330
Your statistic is government services received compared to taxes paid. In this sense, yes, the poor get more out of the system than they put in and the rich get out less than they put in. But we have not yet figured out how to provide the rich more military protection than the poor (we’ve kinda sorta figured out how to do it with police and teachers but the poor still get more in police protection and education than they pay in taxes). Sure the poor also receive stuff like food stamps and medicaid but how much of government spending do you think is food stamps and welfare? If you go by the examples in the paper, half of government spending is food stamps and welfare. Still the fact remains that the poor receive a lot more from government than they put in. If only there were some way to discourage people from being poor (as in making $1000/month poor)… if only.
Personally I think the top marginal income tax rate rate should slowly move towards 50%. It was good enough fro Reagan for the first 6 years of his presidency, its good enough for me. We could start out by raising it to 39.6 (it was good enough for Clinton, its good enough for me).
But I don’t know how valuable the steel-producing labor is. I know how valuable a heart surgeon’s labor is, because I know how much it costs to replace that guy. I know how valuable a burger-flipper’s labor is, because I know how little it costs to replace that guy. How hard is it to get some guy off the street from “zero” to “doing a steelworker’s job”, and for how little pay would an untrained guy of can’t-see-any-real-difference ability be willing to do it?
Well, to the precise extent that we’re talking about folks who can’t offer labor more valuable than any other guy off the street, then just how much should we pay the folks in question? Just how valuable is their work if it truly is that indifferently unimpressive?
The question of the distribution of the fruits of production between labor and capital has been around for a while.
Umm the vote was for sales tax. Presumably EVERYONE pays sales tax.
As for the federal income taxes, yes, we let everyone decide unless we want to make wealth and income a qualification for voting.
Waste fraud and corruption has historically been much worse at state and local levels than at federal levels.
And how much of our federal budget do you consider redistribution?
Social security? Medicare?
Then its not a tax, its a donation.
Even Ron Paul believes in a progressive tax system. He has problems with how the money is spent not how the money is collected. Spend less and we will naturally collect less (of course we would have to cut our overall spending in about half before we could lower taxes).
We’re obviously coming at this from different perspectives. I don’t frankly know how much steelworker labor is worth either. However, I look at it in this way: Say a steel company sees a billion in revenues a year. The company is 10% management, 90% labor. If management reaps 90% of the gains and labor 10%, obviously (to me) things are out of balance. Labor is being under-valued, as these decisions have been concentrated in the hands of a few self-interested parties. A system more like Germany’s is in order in such a case. No matter how much you want to talk about interchangeable worthless workers, it is quite simply never that simple.
Again our differences seem to come down to how things are framed. Management folks who reap 90% of the gains could far far more easily be interchanged for profit than $10/hour laborers. Der Trihs has a point where this example is concerned- ‘labor discipline’ ensures that there are desperate people willing to work for anything, regardless of how much value they actually produce. Do you see what I’m getting at? In one view pay is tied to value produced. In another view it is tied to a race to the bottom, enabled by divide-and-conquer union busting strategies among other things. Management pay somehow seem tied to neither view. Congrats to those guys for figuring out how to siphon all the profits into their own pockets without actually contributing much of anything, though my complaint remains with the injustice of that fact.
Hmpf. I’ll have to think about it some more though. It’s true that in my own situation I prospered by figuring out how to be worth more than the other guys. I don’t like the dog-eat-dog aspect of the world one bit, and I believe market forces are manipulated to accentuate that aspect. Nonetheless, that being the reality I felt I had no choice but to eat the other dogs.
2 days ago Rachel Maddow put up a quote from the founder of the Tea Party in favor of limiting the vote to property owners.
Um, SS and Medicare aren’t exactly welfare you know. People pay taxes into those programs their entire lives to get those benefits. The label ‘entitlement program’ is disingenuous in these cases.
BOLDING MINE
I generally agree that capitalism is a great thing. A decade of capitalism has done for India what 50 years of Mother Theresa was not able to do. Significantly reduce poverty.
However the notion that he rich generally “deserve” their wealth is belied by the fact that less than 1/3 of the Forbes 400 are self made millionaires. The majority of them inherited their wealth of businesses. 1/3 is not bad by historic standards, but I think we can do better.
Oh, I’m pretty much willing to put the “evil bastid” label on Mitch Kantor. He knows what the stakes are, he clearly does not care what happens to the rest of us so long as he makes political hay. He’s probably one of those functional sociopaths you hear so much about.
I’ll give it a try. Here’s one possibility:
The huge increase in profits of many companies, which its workers were absolutely essential in generating, is disproportionately being distributed to the executives of the companies, leaving the workers, without whom no profits would be possible, largely in the lurch. Workers have declining adjusted-for-inflation wages and cuts to benefits and pensions, while executives get more of the pie than ever.
If that were true – if they’re not only interchangeable, but far more easily interchangeable than the $10/hour folks – then why isn’t that happening? If I were the one greedily reaping the profits from such a company, then why wouldn’t I insist on treating my white-collar managers the way I treat my blue-collar laborers?
I’m not content with that; the alleged injustice hinges on whether those guys are as replaceable as you claim, but you can’t explain why they aren’t treated as if they’re that replaceable. Isn’t the simplest explanation that it ain’t that simple, and they ain’t that replaceable?
And that’s why some folks in commission-based fields consistently do better than others. I’m not sure what the explanation for that would be, either – if it’s not, y’know, the simplest one.
While I agree with much of what you say, the above isn’t at all true. One’s income says nothing about where that income came from - I know people making $50k purely by cap. gains (if you live in Arizona or Florida, you probably know a few like that as well) and there are people making $20 million who earn it all as income (for example, movie stars).