I said global pollution, not local pollution. Acid rain, I know there are effects, but honestly haven’t looked into it much, Global warming has no crediable proof from what I have seen, and is highly political. Pollution issues are fairly localized, and in general in develped countries getting better while increasing productivity, As for arable land, we are loosing much to development, and farmers are in trouble, I admit both and don’t have answers except for cheap food is benificial to the lower classes and should be helped out. As for economically exploitable natural resources, you will have to go into which ones you are talking about for comments.
I disagree, with added productivity of cheap energy our eccomony has expanded far beyond any losses caused by any ‘subsidisy’. It is NOT a zero sum gain, It is possiable to have a win-win where all parties gain and the ‘pie’ expanded
I just checked in to see the latest on “bottom 50% of wage earners don’t pay taxes” and found a discussion on acid rain. Wow. That’s just about as far off topic as I think I’ve ever seen. I’ll check in later for the discussion about the morality of eating meat.
Well, science doesn’t operate on “proof,” which is concept within a deductive system like mathematics. Science operates by the accumulation of evidence. And, the accumulation of evidence has led major respected scientific organizations, such as the IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the councils of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union, the editors of the most respected multidisciplinary science magazines Science and Nature (citing work that has appeared in their journals), plus even Shell Oil and British Petroleum to come to the conclusion that the evidence is sufficient to state that anthropogenic climate change is real and that, while considerable uncertainty remains regarding the magnitude of the effects, the potential consequences are dire enough to take it very seriously and to justify action. I’ll repeat my link to a recent thread where you can find all sorts of links backing this up.
Whenever you subsidize or effectively subsidize something, you are by definition paying the externalized costs in some other way, either by spreading them around to others, damaging the environment, … It does not have to be zero-sum, I suppose, but if you are subsidizing inefficiency the chances are that the negative effects will outweigh the positive ones.
Well clearly, to make progress here, we will have to look into Johnston’s claim in more detail. I have his book and will see if I can track it down if I get the chance.
However, I don’t think it is so ludicrous to imagine that people earning $25 (not 2.5, by the way) million might pay less percentage of their AGI in federal tax than people earning $60,000…particularly now that the tax on capital gains and dividends has been reduced…And, once you factor in the payroll taxes. The potential does indeed exist for the tax code to be regressive over some part of the scale near the top. Whether it actually is in reality entails further investigation, but I don’t see how you are so confident that you can rule this out out-of-hand.
TaxGuy — Actually, going back to that article by Johnston, here is what he says:
Since this is IRS data, I presume it is likely based on AGI but I am not sure and don’t know whether his inclusion of S.S. and Medicare taxes included the employer-paid part of the contributions too (which I think most economists argue is effectively a tax paid by the employee). I don’t know where this IRS data is available. The Tax Foundation’s summary of IRS data doesn’t break down the very rich beyond the “top 1%” level.
I guess I was also a bit fast-andd-loose when I stated this in that previous post as an “effective federal tax rate,” since one could argue that you need to factor in other taxes such as corporate taxes and estate taxes. And, of course, it is not entirely clear how to assign these. I believe that CBO assigns the corporate taxes to the shareholders, although commentators, especially conservative ones, often like to argue that corporate taxes are passed on to consumers. The truth certainly lies somewhere in between these extremes. I am willing to believe more is borne by the shareholders than the consumers although that is just a WAG on my part.
And so, as jshore continues to argue that the payroll taxes are taxes, iamme99 finds a cite which not only ignores the amount paid as payroll taxes, it ignores the amounts spent on social security as expenditures altogether.
It seems we need to take this whole conversation back to the dictionary and agree on our terms first.
BTW, jshore, if you look closely at the quote from Mr. Johnston’s article you just posted, he seems to include payroll taxes, but ignore capital gains (and other non income) taxes altogether. I know that some of those taxes were lowered recently, but to zero?
Even at that, though, I bet he is including income earned through investments. Any takers?
The comparison of military and educational expenditures is sloppy at best, deliberately deceptive at worse. Educational spending is located at the state and local level, not the federal level. For examply, in CA something like 40% of the state budget is spent on education. What percent of the CA budget do you think is spent on national defense?
Au contraire. The Feds do contribute some tax dollars to education through various programs and subsidies which are sent to the states (such as Title 1). That’s all the article I posted was counting. As to your quip about National Defense, you know very well that it is the tax dollars paid to the government that provides for national defense (and that covers the supposed defense of all states). I believe the point the article was making was that we spend too much of our tax dollars on the military and serving our debt. What if we spent less on the military and had a balanced budget? We might then choose to spend that extra money on more socially useful items like education and health care. And bonus, the rest of the world might like us better if we didn’t have the means to undertake wars and nation building whenever we elected some misguided fool.
Whew! There for a minute, I thought that “earned” meant that the “tax credit” was earned. Funny thing about that, whenever I do my taxes, my income is not divided on how it is aquired, I am just asked for all sources of income. As I alluded to earlier, this program was entitled “The Earned Income Tax Credit” for the purpose of making palatable, legislation that is considered repugnant by the majority of the citizenry.
As “The Earned Income Tax Credit” is an example of Orwellian newspeak, an explaination if the EITC also relies on newspeak.
Giving the “working poor” a cut in their “payroll taxes” has a much more acceptable ring to it than admitting that the ruling elite is cutting their social security taxes as well as their income taxes.
Let’s see, the rules of FICA are that the employer matches the employee contributions to the Social Security “trust fund”. So, when the employee’s FICA is cut, does the employer also receive a cut in matching contributions? Why of course not. This is just another contortion and perversion of the written law that is required by the orthodoxy of liberalism.
Yeah, notwithstanding the fact that the “revenues derived from the labor of others” is not only used to pay the wages of the others, but their unemployment insurance, workman’s compensation insurance, medicare and social security as well.
As far as the business owner is concerned, if there is any left over, tax the Hell out of it, ‘cause it’s derived from the labor of others. Nuthin’ like some good ol’ class warfare to bolster the Democratic voter base.
That’s not what I meant, but maybe I was unclear. In the US, education is a responsibility of state and local governments. The Feds are not supposed to play a significant role. I would aruge that the Feds should spend $0 on education.
Now, if you want to add up all the local, state, and federal monies spent on education, plus all the private money spent and compare that to the Defence budget, that might be a good indicator of the value of each to our society. Quoting federal spending on education and the military is pretty much meaningless.
Razorsharp *Funny thing about that, whenever I do my taxes, my income is not divided on how it is aquired, I am just asked for all sources of income. *
However, if you were applying for the Earned Income Tax Credit, you would have to distinguish between your earned income and the rest of your AGI. (Both earned income and AGI would have to be less than $11,260 (for a childless applicant), and your investment income component would have to be under $2600.)
As I alluded to earlier, this program was entitled “The Earned Income Tax Credit” for the purpose of making palatable, legislation that is considered repugnant by the majority of the citizenry.
I don’t see why you think that most citizens would find it “repugnant” to give tax credits to working folks with less than a certain minimum annual income. Public opinion surveys (pdf) do not seem to bear out your opinion:
Seems to me that most people like it because it gives low-income people an incentive to work even if they don’t earn enough to live on. The taxpaying public is generally in favor of giving some assistance and/or income support to poor people who work, as well as providing more poor people with incentives to work.
As “The Earned Income Tax Credit” is an example of Orwellian newspeak […]
Compared to, say, the conservative PR maneuver of trying to rename the “estate tax” or “inheritance tax” as the “death tax” (which is fundamentally absurd, because dead people don’t pay taxes and therefore are not taxed on their deaths), it seems to me like a pretty mild example.
No, there is no evidence he ignores capital gains taxes…That is in fact part of your federal income tax. Capital gains are income, even if they are income that is sometimes treated differently for tax purposes than other income (e.g., now taxed at a lower rate; doesn’t qualify as “earned income” for the EITC; …). As I noted in my last post though, it does appear from the full quote that Johnston considered only at federal taxes directly paid by people on their incomes (income tax, payroll taxes) and not those like the corporate taxes that are indirectly paid and there is ambiguity in assigning.
Because the whole issue of the EITC is deceptive. Despite your cite, I would venture to say that most people don’t realize that many beneficiaries of the EITC are getting money back that they never paid, and that is being camouflaged under the guise of a “tax credit”.
As for cutting “payroll taxes”, if one is still eligible for Social Security benefits, despite not having paid “payroll taxes”, then one is receiving benefits from a “trust fund” that they never paid into. In other words, getting money back that they never paid.
What is equally repugnant is the effort that the ruling elite puts into deceiving the citizenry.
I wonder how that survey would have panned out if the participants were asked, “Would you favor giving members of the “working poor” a tax refund that was more than the amount of income tax that they paid?”
(1) Social security was never meant purely as private retirement accounts…i.e., it is understood that some people would get out more than they put in and vice versa. In particular, those who got benefits in the early years clearly got more out than they put in. It has also generally been believe that social security was progressive with poor getting more out than they put in, although some conservative/libertarian groups like Cato and NCPA have recently argued that S.S. is in fact regressive (in trying to make the case for abolishing it in favor of private accounts). See [url=http://www.ncpa.org/pi/congress/pd051100e.html]here[/rl] for one example. The issue turns out to be fairly complicated because it depends on the rate at which you discount money over time and such.
(2) You also have to recognize that the government has been borrowing from the surplus in the social security trust fund to pay for government spending, so in fact, spending for other things is being paid for by money collected through the payroll taxes. Now, one might argue that this is just a temporary thing and the money will be paid back…And, I hope that this is true. But, with the fiscal train wreck that Bush has created, it is not so clear. And, in fact, you have conservatives (even “respectable” ones like Alan Greenspan) now making noises about how we will have to do something to save social security from a crisis that will come about in 2017 or there-abouts once the system is no longer running a surplus. However, the only way in which one can believe that this date is the crisis point is if you accept the idea that the government won’t repay what it has borrowed from the S.S. trust fund. In fact, if the government repays what it borrowed, then the “crisis” in social security doesn’t happen until about 2043…And, that date is so far off right now that the estimates of future economic growth that go into it make it highly subject to revision (and those estimates are apparently quite conservative).
As the history I linked to (by a conservative commentator) makes clear, talking about all this as part of the “orthodoxy of liberalism” seems to put Milton Friedman, Andrew Mellon, and Gerald Ford into the camp of liberals. As the link noted: "The EITC has a sterling Republican heritage. "
Also, I believe most economists don’t think there is much of a distinction between the part of the tax paid by the employee and the part paid by the employer, since the distinction between having the employer pay half and having the employee pay all but with the employer now including the money he would have paid in the employee’s paycheck is pretty much nil. (I guess the one difference is that if paid to the employee, it would be additional income subject to income tax…so those rates would have to be adjusted too to nil-out the difference.)
Why do you keep saying things like this. Do you really not see the changeover from surplus to deficit SS as a potential crisis? Even if we do not renig on the SS debt, we will still have a sharp decrease in the purchase of government bonds from that source. That is, a sharp decrease in monies collected for other expenditures. At that point (2017, not 2043) we will have to cut spending or raise taxes, or both. Given that SS spending will be an enormous portion of government spending by then, cutting spending will be very difficult without cutting SS benifits.
It will be a crisis of huge proportions for both sides of the isle, so to speak.
