What you “believe” is between you and your conscience. What really matters is what the facts are, and the facts do not come anywhere close to establishing the truth of your belief.
That is an interesting read, but is not conclusive on the matter.
On the flip side of that, it does nothing to explain why their current opinions on tax code should be taken credibly. After all, if my Dad had set me up with money that meant I never had to work again, I could certainly afford to take a different position on income currently being earned, couldn’t I?
So, for this argument’s sake, I’ll back off my Kennedy statements other than the fact that a man living off of what Daddy left him does not make that man qualified to tell me how much of the money I am earning today should be mine.
Let me tell you this. I promise to you, right now, that when my family has the net worth that Teddy Kennedy (and his family) currently has, I promise to lend vocal support to the same policies. How’s that?
How 'bout I don’t give a damn what your net worth or your politics are? All I care about is that you don’t waste the Board’s time with false assertions of fact.
Ok, so a portion of the Kennedy family fortune was earned through bootlegging, something that the cite given does not even begin to unprove, and even admits may have very well happened. Oh well. I have already taken those Kennedy claims back. I would delete the post, but I can’t, so your argument about it is pointless.
So in other words:
You assert that X is true.
Cecil does not definitively prove that X is untrue (he just points out that the evidence for X is crap).
Then you claim that X may have happened.
Oh yes, I can see you’re going to get along just swimmingly around here.
The same could be applied to G.W. Bush. If you look at his tax statements (from 2000 at least), you can see that any little bit of money he earned from being governor paled in comparison to his income from investments, etc. The difference, of course, is that Bush’s positions on the tax code are to change it in ways that turn out to benefit him quite handsomely whereas Kennedy’s position is not to change it in ways that would benefit him quite handsomely. Do you see the difference here?
P.S.- Lest I be misunderstood, I am not claiming that Bush’s policies are a crass attempt to make himself richer. Rather I think that he honestly believes that it is people like him and his wealthy buddies who are the engines of growth in our economy. Never underestimate a person’s ability to rationalize (and truly believe) that things that are in his own best interests are also in the best interests of everyone as a whole.
Jshore:
Who do you think are the engines of growth for the economy? I would say it’s those people who start up, invest in, and/or grow companies. The average worker (like most of us) is frankly just along for the ride. Sure, consumers are necessary for business to sell products, but there has to be products to sell. Otherwise, we’d be in Bangladesh, as per Buffet’s comment.
I actually don’t think there is anything to be gained, though, by class warfare type of rhetoric. It’s a simple fact that the wealthy pay the lions share of taxes in this country. Even your own cite shows that (and I would contest their numbers). You can argue whether they should pay more or less, but to say they don’t pay more than everyone else is just wrong. I think we can agree on at least that much.
Well, I don’t think we can really isolate one engine. I think our economy is way too interactive. And, everyone likes to think they are the important cog without which nothing would get done. So, our (overpaid in my opinion) CEO thinks he is the most important one since he is running the company. We researchers think we are the most important ones since we are the ones who are actually figuring out the science that makes the products work. And, the guy on the manufacturing line would argue he is in fact the one really making the stuff.
At any rate, one thing that I think can be said at the moment is that our economy isn’t suffering from a lack of capital to invest. The reason companies aren’t investing is that they are skeptical about the demand for their products and services (and, indeed, especially in the high-tech industry, they way over-invested and painted ridiculously optimistic demand scenarios). This is why it seems particularly useless at the moment to be giving tax breaks to the “investor class” rather than those who will actually go out and spend any additional money they get.
Well, if the Republicans stop engaging in class warfare on behalf of the rich, then the Democrats could stop engaging in “class warfare rhetoric.” The idea that we should not engage in “class warfare rhetoric” seems to be just a way of trying to short-circuit debate on how our society should be structured, who should pay and get what, and in particular to ignore the issue that most of the GDP growth in our society over the last quarter century has benefitted only a select few.
Well, yes, that is because they have the lion’s share of the money.
Well, now you sound like Bush. When Gore essentially quoted numbers from the CTJ and their taxation model, Bush called it “fuzzy math”. But, the fact is that they run a highly-regarded taxation model and, as Paul Krugman noted, what Bush would do when pressed on what the numbers in dispute really were was just to answer a different question. [E.g., rather than talking about the share of the tax break that went to the top 1%, he would point out that his tax cuts actually cut the federal income taxes of the poor by a larger percentage than they cut those of the rich. This is true, of course, because the poor pay almost all their taxes through forms of taxation other than the federal income tax. If one used to pay $5 a year in federal income tax and a few thousand dollars in other taxes and that $5 is cut to 0, your federal income tax has been reduced by 100% but your tax burden has hardly changed.]
I never claimed they didn’t.
I’ll look back at what I said, but half of it was tongue-in-cheek that the opinions of a Kennedy really matter at all, and the other was based on what has been alleged for years about Joe.
We are just as likely to find out whether Joe really built up some of his financial base with illegal activities like bootlegging during the Prohibition as we are to hear Teddy Kennedy actually explain why he did not help Mary Jo Kopechne out of that car. Fact is, we won’t find out the real truth will we? I admit I am just as much wrong as I am possibly right. I backed off of it for the convenience of everyone, while stating that not one of us here could prove it either way. That is the truth.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by jshore *
**Well, if the Republicans stop engaging in class warfare on behalf of the rich, then the Democrats could stop engaging in “class warfare rhetoric.” The idea that we should not engage in “class warfare rhetoric” seems to be just a way of trying to short-circuit debate on how our society should be structured, who should pay and get what, and in particular to ignore the issue that most of the GDP growth in our society over the last quarter century has benefitted only a select few.[\b][\quote]
Beautifully put. I generally just say, “Conservatives cry “class warfare” when they see that the poor and the middle class are trying to get up off the barrel and get their pants up from around their ankles.” But your explanation is clearer.