When you characterize taxation as the Govt “forcibly take it from us and spend it however they want” it’s hard to take you seriously; those are just the regurgitated talking points of the right. How high taxes should be, what form taxes should take, and what things are best done by the government vs the private sector are important questions and people have honest disagreements on them.
I just want to see an informed debate. Do you understand how important Land Grant Colleges and the County Extension Agent system were to making the United States have the most productive farms in the world? Do you know how effective the War on Poverty was or how Rural Electrification and the Tennesee Valley Authority led to economic development?
I personally am not a socialist, and think the free market is the first place to look for solutions and only if the market fails should the government step in. But there are times when the public sector is the best place to do something.
At the same time the right wing propaganda machine is mining the ignorance of folks like you to make sure that capital gains tax rates are lower than the tax rates on salarys they are working overtime to get no-bid government contracts for their cronies. Don’t you understand that they are laughing at you when they sit around the table at the country club?
I think it’s a good thing you edited, because that taking all the money from all the millionaires thing you had before the edit was so stupid I was gonna write a thousand words about it. 
So your response to the comment that the* taking the rich’s money to give to the poor* is a conservative meme is to state that saying that conservatives don’t want to give money to the poor is a liberal meme?
Gotcha. See, I was expecting the smart conservatives to jump out after my inflammatory posts… where are they hiding at?
This is what I don’t get. How is there not opportunity for everyone? Like I said upthread, the current CEO of McDonald’s started out flipping burgers. Barack Obama was not born privileged. Bill Cliton was not born privileged. Larry Ellison grew up practically penniless for god’s sake!
It’s not where we start. It’s that most people are average or below average. If anything, wealth breeds wealth because above average people have above average kids, and associate with other above average people. Have you ever heard that if we threw all the money up in the air tomorrow, the same people would end up with it within a few years? Pay attention and think about the behaviors and attitudes of the rich people you know vs. the behaviors and attitudes of broke people you know, and I think you’ll find it’s generally true. Not 100%, but generally.
This country was made to work on the principle that people are always going to act in their own self-interest. It’s not perfect but it’s what works, and the founding fathers knew that. Fuck with that principle too much and bad things happen. It’s not government’s job to “help a hard working entrepreneurial common man attain great wealth.”
How can you “even the playing field” without authoritarian government? Your argument is very warm and cozy but not very well thought out.
You even the playing field by making the very rich play by the same rules. Like I said, exempting capital gains from taxation is something that hurts the country (via lost tax revenue) and helps the already wealthy. No one is saying they shouldn’t be able to grow their wealth, but if you set up a system where the already wealthy have an advantage to leverage their wealth that others do not you distort the prospects of everyone else.
In any case, no one is asking to Robin Hood the fat cats.
There are any number of democracies that have laws that level the playing field to a greater or lesser extent. The scandinavian governments are perhaps the strongest example of this.
Your argument is not very well thought out.
Yeah, I knew someone would start yelling “CITE,” and because I read it years ago and don’t recall where, I decided to omit it. Still, I doubt that it’s far off the mark (though the ascention of Bill Gates might skew the time frame somewhat ). Still, it’s the vast and great middle-class that foots the bill for the bulk of government spending, and all this talk about the evils of the rich is just a smoke screen intended to mask the real intention, which is government redistribution of wealth.
Well, I really must not be a very smart conservative because I don’t know what the hell you’re trying to say in that second paragraph. But be that as it may, I don’t think it’s really necessary to try to my comments in a different light. What I said is pretty clear.
You misread my post. I was talking about America. How can you even the playing field [in America]? Our people are different. The scandinavian countries slid out of absolute monarchies. We overthrew one and set up our own system of government, and it’s deeply entrenched in our national culture.
A friend of mine sent me the following information the other day. It reads thus:
*At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in the year 1787, Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinborough) had this to say about “The Fall of The Athenian Republic” some 2,000 years prior:
“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.” *
Now, I don’t necessarily agree with all of this. For example, I wouldn’t say that the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury; but I’d say it eventually does. And sure enough, the more time that goes by, the more government programs and social spending we have.
Perhaps the Scandinavian democracies you mention are just a little further down that road to eventual bondage than we are.
No, I didn’t misread, you are just qualifying and changing tack because you are wrong. Your post is just desperate distraction, handwaving and special pleading. You can level the playing field without authoritarian government. Even the US evens the playing field to some degree. You have welfare, and you have progressive taxation. Yet you do not have authoritarian government.
You don’t even come close to developing anything resembling an argument in support of your earlier proposition by spouting historical non sequiturs.
The fact that certain exceptional people do well in a capitalist society doesn’t necessarily prove much of anything. Most people are not all that exceptional, to state the blazingly obvious. By our distribution we declare what we really value, behind the platitudes we mouth in our churches. We admire the salesman, the sharpie, the hustler, the poor dumb shmuck who hauls away their garbage, not so much.
How does one “earn”? What does it entail? Anyway you get a buck into your hand is kosher? If you are smarter than the guy next to you, you deserve more, your kids deserve better clothes, better health, better lives? Why not because you’re taller than him, or have more freckles? How does one “earn” ten million dollars? A policeman or a fireman might make 50K, what does one contribute to earn 200 times more? Are the mysteries of spreadsheets and salesmanship so wondrous, so beneficent?
There is a whole lot of injustice hidden in that innocent word, “earn”.
It’s not information, it’s an opinion unsupported by convincing evidence. And the tentative conclusion you draw is just speculation.
By the way, SA,
Is this accurate? According to Cecil the top 7% pay over 51 percent of all income tax. I appreciate that this is not necessarily representative of the total tax take, but I wonder if the “great middle class” pays so much non-income tax as to make your comment correct. I have an open mind, but I do wonder if you are right.
Lets look at a a couple of examples. Microsoft was able to exist because the government forced IBM to unbundle it’s hardware and software. At one time you could not but IBM mainframe software without also buying the hardware. IBM had such a dominant market share that the govt stepped in. That allowed companies like Amdahl to sell their IBM compatible mainframes. Down the road when IBM developed the PC you were also able to buy the SW separate from the HW. This allowed Compaq to sell IBM clones. Gates also made the wise decision to get the rights to sell PC software and the rest is history. So here is a case of the government stepping in to create a level playing field and allowing several of the world’s largest corporations to get their start and hundreds of thousands of people to get rich.
Then we can look at the internet. It started as a government sponsored project to create a robust communications system that would survive a nuclear attack. As a result we now have companies like Google, Yahoo, and Amazon.
Vast stretches of the west were made accessible when the interstate highway system was created. The examples go on and on. The key is to have a balance. The centrally planned economies of the USSR and China were a disaster, but we benefit when we make wise interventions into the free market.
I personally think that providing a basic safety net of health care and education is a wise investment. I don’t think we want the next Edison, Ford, or Gates to miss the opportunity to succeed because they grew up in a poorly funded school district.
So I didn’t cry a river when I had to pay more in capital gains taxes a few years ago than my father made in his entire life. People like Warren Buffet, however, are embarassed when their secrataries pay higher aggregate tax rates than they do.
I suppose you noticed that that top 7% includes households making $75,000 dollars a year, and that only 3% make over $100,000 a year?
I started to mention in the post that Lobohan mentioned how the definition of ‘rich’ gets skewed downward more and more as politicians get greedier and greedier and have more and more success playing the ‘tax the rich’ card.
You may disagree - and of course we can have a whole new discussion over what truly qualifies as rich - but IMO $75,000 a year ain’t it. I wouldn’t even call that upper-middle middle class. YMMV.
I can remember when I was but a lad, studying for admission to the penitentiary and a fervent admirer of Goldwater and St. Ayn. (I’m fully recovered now, thank you…)
I remember reading how Sweden and that ilk was on the edge of collapse, just about to come tumbling down due to their unworkable and impractical socialism, because As Everybody Knows, that sort of thing simply cannot work, it *must *collapse, and would. Any day now. That was about 40 odd years ago. (Some odder than others, but I digress…)
And oftimes I’d feel vaguely homesick, and read conservative outlets and read the same thing again, that they were just about to collapse, for sure this time, any day now. And another twenty years or so went by… And then another.
And there they are. Still tottering on the brink of collapse, and all they have to show for it is some of the happiest and most healthy citizens of the Western world. Sure is a good thing we’re so much smarter, huh, Starvin’? Hell, they probably don’t even know they are doomed to collapse. Any day now.
Nice try, luci, but nowhere in my comments did I even hint that Scandinavian collapse was nigh.
I would think that to a person with your vaunted intelligence, it would be fairly obvious that Professor Tyler’s prognosis would take some considerable time to evolve. And I’m also certain that at certain points in that progression, the health and happiness of the citizenry happily engaged in voting themselves goodies is just peachy.
The problem is, it won’t stay that way.
Common sense and human nature dictates that there will never come a time when the citizenry will rise up and say, “Okay, that’s enough…no more goodies from the public trough…let’s just keep everything at this level from now on lest we face fiscal ruin,” and the politicos will happily follow suit, confident in their ability to draw votes anyway despite the inability to promise more goodies to be paid for with someone else’s money.
Oh, btw, I’ve got this great bridge you might be interested in…maybe some government program exists that will buy it for ya. 
Seriously, we should be so fucking lucky to live as well as the Swedes do. The weather there is absolute shite, and they still have immigrants knocking down their doors to live there.
On a more serious note, those who talk about how shitty everything is in Scandinavia don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. From a personal perspective everyone in the countries there is pretty damn happy about the fact that there’s no bums on the streets and that nobody is fucking poor and starving. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is that those who think that they have some kind of crippled economy are also fools. Denmark (where I lived) has some very sensible economic policies. The relationship between labor government and capital is pretty amazing, and we could learn a lot from it, if only we were fucking smart enough. There is virtually no job protection in Denmark, yet there is a lot of government support after one has lost their job. It’s a mixture of liberal labor policies and liberal attitude towards business (fiscal liberal) and a generous welfare state.
If you’re going to attack the Scandinavian way of life, it should be that it is infeasible for a country as large as ours, rather than it being inherently wrong. Scandinavia is always going to be doing well because their values make them protect one another.
Wow, you gave a nice list of things I support. I said that I want government out of our lives as much as possible, and I mean that, which includes things like gay marriage, abortion rights and drug laws. You might want to try arguing against what I’m actually saying, rather than railing against what you’ve been told is the imagined stereotype of a “Republican”.
Nah, forget it, that would require nuance in your thinking and you’ve proved by your posts that that’s beyond you. Just point you at what you’ve been told to hate and let you go. Anyone who doesn’t echo the party line “Government good, individualism bad” is a gay hating, knowledge rejecting, misogynist, authoritative, warmongering bastard. It’s easier that way, you don’t have to think, just react. We’ve always been at war with Oceania.
sadly That’s the inevitable result of what you advocate. And it’s sad, hell, it’s a brutal crime, that you can’t see that. You’re blinded by the fantasy promise of a collectivist society. You seem smart enough, why can’t you see the obvious?
So percentage wise, what is the great middle class? You haven’t left yourself much room to play with.
It’s necessary for you to make this speculation, otherwise your position would fail. Shame you have no evidence. Invoking “common sense” is a refuge of the desperate. The fact is, there are any number of democracies that have swayed between greater and lesser amounts of pork for the populace. There is no evidence of an inevitable slide to collapse.
Awww, poor Ozombie (change…Chaaaange…CHANGECHANGECHANGE)…
I can’t stand McCain, and may be a poor to possibly mediocre prez, but better that than the chaos Ozombie has in store for us. I’ll take the lesser of two evils thanks.
Obama has no concrete tangible solutions, all he, and his young dewy followers keep spouting is “change, change, change”. Oh yeah, and “hope for the future” and a whole paddock full of horsepucky platitudes.
Sheesh, I’d have taken Hillary over both, Kerry even…