Ronald Reagan understood “It’s nap time now, Mr. President”, and that’s about it. :rolleyes: Nice dude, though.
Since you seem incapable of writing other than run-on sentences, I’ll have to break it up. Cite for this claim?
When did this “debate” become about the 2001 tax cuts? Talk about a strawman.
This is my biggest complaint. Neither Ravenman nor you have proved otherwise. As has already been stated, it’s only common sense, and has been true in economies across the globe, over the years. You’re the one making the extraordinary claim, you need to back it up.
Common sense: the sum total of one’s prejudices.
You may believe that it is common sense, but all your “citations” have been no more than personal opinions (of others) flawed by fallacy. Aside from the rare loon, people do not quit trying to earn money just because they are paying taxes. It did not happen when we had a 91% marginal rate (that no one ever actually paid) and it has not happened at any other time.
Please provide a list of “the successful” who have quit trying to earn more, particularly because they were going to be taxed on it.
You wandered off to talk about Kenndy and Reagan–who were describing selected, short term tax cuts, not eliminating progressive taxation–and I completed the picture. Don’t like hijacks? Don’t introduce them.
“Personal opinions” of tax economists, you mean. You have contrary cites? Post 'em. Your say so is not good enough.
If the taxes are too high, they do. They reduce work, go into the black market, or even leave the country.
Which of those have you done?
None. The marginal tax rate isn’t 90%, though.
Then it’s hardly common sense, is it? If the prospect of paying more in taxes does not stop you from trying to make more money, why should it anyone else?
I was under the impression that you believe any income tax is too high.
I think it’s important to understand that economists disagree about a whole lot of stuff. I doubt that **Ravenman ** wants it conveyed that he did anything other than express a contrary opinion. The only school of economics that is based on a deductive system of logic is the Austrian school. All the rest just pretty much throw darts to see what sticks. Also, I think that what Carol was intending to convey wasn’t what you inferred. I have no idea what you would trust as a decent source, so I’m going to try the Washington Post, which I don’t think anyone would call “right” leaning. Part of the problem with extreme marginal tax rates is that not all money or wealth is currency, but currency is what you must pay as tax.
Sorry, Red. But I’m not the one who said what you attempted to quote.
So this disincentive thing, way that works? So this guy is a born striver, gets out there with full entreprenuerial vigor, makes a shit load. And he looks up one day and says “WTF! I create an obscene amount of money, and all that sticks to me is enough to make me filthy rich! What a rip! I quit!”
You know, you’d think that would be a pretty common story, if this whole “disincentive” thingy were an active effect. But they don’t, do they? Guy gets ten million, only thing he wants is eleven.
No, what he does is hire a guy to interpret the tax law in as favorable a light as he can get away with. (Often, this experience awakens a dormant civic passion, one seeks to support those legislators who most understand the need for a healthy business climate, and the political party that best appreciates the sublime dignity of wealth…)
I understand these people do quite well, I certainly wouldn’t know, I’ll sooner need a coroner than a tax attorney. But so I’ve heard, that there are several such people. No, really. I swear I’m not making this up.
So, for the disincentive thingy to work, people would have to stop working so hard for more money because they can’t keep enough of it, but what *really * happens is that they try to make even more money *and * keep more of it.
Again, not all money is currency. In fact, most money is not currency. When you say Bill Gates is worth X billion dollars, most of it is fiat assets (like stocks, bonds, and other non-guaranteed pieces of paper). If you tax him at a high enough rate, he will at some point be unable to raise the cash to pay. (And the more assets he sells, the higher they may cost to recoup.) Check out the Washington Post article for what France’s marginal rates did to mere millionaires.
Now that is an incentive for Democrats.
Well, it should be noted that I did noyt dismiss any source–except as I found its argument to be flawed.
Second, I note that in the linked WP article, the gentleman was not forced out of the labor force by high taxes: he had already retired on his income and was now being taxed on assets he possessed. The claim Carol Stream expressed was “"Taxing the successful, at some point, becomes a disincentive for them to earn more.” Had M. Payre continued to earn, his story would not have taken the same turn. I suppose that Carol Stream can take cover behind the “at some point,” because an effective tax rate of 72% (as claimed in France) probably is a genuine disincentive. I have now twice noted that extremely high taxes are unfair (although we could could have a separate discussion of what constitutes “extremely high”), and in my first response to her claim, I explicitly noted that we have never had such high rates in the U.S. (To which she responded with her silly “91%” rate issue–which no person in the U.S. has ever paid.
I have not claimed that there is no tax that will drive a person to stop trying to earn more; I simply noted that such a tax has not been imposed in the U.S.–a point that she has attempted to rebut with vague appeals to “common sense,” links to flawed arguments relying on information outside the U.S., and not one example of it occurring here.
Wasn’t the reference to the 90% tax driving people to the black market & overseas, a reference to people in African countries?
Just how big is the black market in the US, anyway?
But I thought that was what was being discussed: marginal tax rates — that is, tax rates at the extremes, which would include taxes on wealth possessed, and which, as you concede, drives people either to leave or stop producing more wealth. It has been my experience that the great disconnect between free-marketers (real free-market, not that caricature crap with robber barons and crooked Senators) and Keynesians involves a difference in what it means to produce wealth, or “make money”. Money is like love in the sense that the more there is the more there is to go around. Say you’re married. You love your wife. You have a kid. Now there’s even more love. Your love for your wife did not diminish with the introduction of the love for your child. With money, same same. It is the wealthy who produce wealth that is available to all. Now, government can interfere in that process and direct it wherever it will, but ideally it will be available to people who earn it peacefully and honestly. So, when you burden the wealthy to the extent that they leave or stop producing, you are hurting the overall flow of wealth to people who otherwise might have benefited from it; i.e., there’s no investment in that new factory that would have produced all those jobs that would have produced all the income for people to spread around when they buy their groceries, cars, homes, knick-knacks, or what-have-you. You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip, and if you knock down all the people at the margins, you reduce the amount of money available to your economy as a whole.
Wasn’t the income tax on the top bracket in the 1950s close to 90%? I seem to remember something like that in an article comparing taxes and the economy between the Reagan administration (when it was the lowest) to the Eisenhower administration (when it was the highest).
Thanx. I actually took your advice and remembered I had some Tylenol PM. Went out like a log for ten hours. Feel great now…and hopefully more coherent as well. 
Apologies, Lib, for false attribution. OTOH, my main point remains, which is simply that you often conflate the European system with some sort of pseudo-communism or that that is the way we’re trending. It’s not. Honest.
askeptic, more like RedDawn. 
Accepted. No worries.
Most European systems are Fabianist; that is, government controls the means of production (as opposed to socialism, in which government owns the means of production).
I’ve always thought of Fabianism as a school of socialism, whereas what you’re describing (and is that what accounts for why things in general are going so much better in Europe than here?) is actually called dirigisme.
I just saw this news story today about a certain billionaire who feels he pays too little in taxes. He has challenged other members of the Forbes 400 to demonstrate that they pay more in taxes than their secretaries, with a $1 million stake going to charity. Nobody seems to want to take him up on his bet.
It is slightly off the point of what we’ve been talking about, but I think quite illuminating nonetheless.