Fur coats and poor women

Great Debates
21

Fair enough, evilbeth. That’s an excellent point that I had not thought of.

People seem to be getting the impression, though, that PETA is mangling these coats and making them practically unwearable, or at least unpresentable. I don’t think that’s the case, and in fact none of us has actually seen one of these coats or even a picture of one. Until we have, I think we should try to reserve some of our judgement about just what condition these coats are in.

Here are a couple of images from a PETA press release, and while they don’t show full, close-up views of any of the coats, there is no damage that is immediately visible It appears there might be a red stripe on the arm of some of the coats.

http://www.furisdead.com/images/givaway2big.jpg

http://www.furisdead.com/images/givaway3big.jpg

http://www.furisdead.com/images/givaway4big.jpg

I think the point also remains that, since PETA is an animal-related charity, and one with a lot of bad press, anything they do is going to look bad to most SDMBers. (Hell, look up the past threads.) They could have gone out and personally fed veggie burgers to hungry people at a shelter for the last six months, and someone would be sure to start a thread bitching about how they weren’t feeding them meat.

22

lol, right on,Phil. And I can justsee someone saying then, “Hey what IS this stuff? Wheres the bacon?”:wink:

23

Can’t they just put the no resale/recycled tag INSIDE the coat?

24

Oh the beauty of statistics… they can mean whatever we want them to. The top 1% of income earners pay 21% of our taxes? What percent of the income do they make? Without that bit of information you are saying nothing. If that 1% (in an extreme example) were making 50% of the income, then to insist that the last 99% who share the other half of the income between them pay the remaining 79% of the taxes sounds downright rediculous. (Also, what is income? Are we including stocks and investments, or just cash?)

As to your second point: yes, I think that a family of four can buy an awful lot with $719,000 a year. I consider myself in the solid middle class, and my family makes less than 1/8 of that amount and we have a home, 2 cars, and both my sister and I are going through college. In fact, that $719,000 could pay for both of our college tuitions for the full four years, buy our house without a mortgage and buy our cars, with plenty left over. It’s rather insulting that one might suggest that with that sort of income an average family would struggle. (and yes, even the top 10% of families are earning one heck of a lot of money).

25

Yes, that’s a common misperception.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say, “1%.” What you want to ask me is how much of the wealth they hold. And since my link is saved at work and not at home, I can’t answer you until I get there. Anyway, wealth is irrelevant to the question of tax burden, since personal income taxes are charged on, well, income.

If you don’t know when and how stock and investment income is taxed, and at what rates, why are you trying to participate in the argument? Does “income earners” mean something that’s difficult to comprehend?

You don’t think they get to keep the entire $719,000, do you?

Gee, do you suppose some of that might depend on where one lives (say, the Bay Area vs. Casper, Wyoming), what colleges the children attend, whether any have special needs, what their debt load is, etc.? Nah, of course not.

My wife and I made somewhere in the neighborhood of one-tenth that last year, and I can assure you we neither own a house nor 2 cars, nor even one new car.

You would be surprised how little $188,000 is for a family of four in some areas of the country.

26

Sorry to be so curt with you, Eonwe. Now that I’m at work, I can answer your objections a little more fully. For starters, though, it’s easy to battle against things we make up; for example, “It’s rather insulting that one might suggest that with that sort of income an average family would struggle.” I suggested no such thing. I said, simply, that they don’t all own mansions and yachts, which I think is demonstrably true. And even if they did, it isn’t up to dude to decide how other people get to spend money they earned.

Further to the point, saying, “One day everyone making over $1 million will get taxed more and all the poor will get a check” is little more than pointless class warfare. Get a check for what? Is being poor now some goal that we reward? Of course not. The fact is, the “rich” already pay a disproportionate amount of taxes. If those taxes are not being used in an efficient manner to alleviate poverty in this country, blame the people who disperse it: the government.

On to the numbers. The link I pulled my numbers from is here. The site itself may be biased in favor of lower taxes, but the numbers themselves are all from the Congressional Budget Office.

These figures spell it out pretty plainly. To answer another of your questions beforehand:

Pre-tax Family Income is the sum of wages, salaries, self-employment income, rents, taxable and nontaxable interest, dividends, realized capital gains, and all cash transfer payments. Income also includes the corporate income tax and the employer share of Social Security and federal unemployment insurance payroll taxes. For purposes of ranking by adjusted family income, income for each family is divided by the poverty threshold for a family of that size. Quintiles contain equal numbers of people. Families with zero or negative income are excluded from the lowest income category but are included in the total.


Share of Total Federal Taxes

Quintile    %wealth     %taxes    avg. income   #families

Highest       54          65       $132,000       23.6m
Fourth        21          19       $ 53,000       22.6m
Middle        14          11       $ 35,400       22.5m
Second        9            5       $ 21,200       23.3m
Lowest        3            1       $  8,400       22.7m

Top 1%        15          21       $719,000        1.2m
Top 5%        28          37       $276,000        5.9m
Top 10%       39          49       $188,000       11.9m

So we see that the top quintile, holding just over half of the wealth (and making an average of a whopping $132K), pays far more than half of the taxes. That means that the 80% of the country holding 46% of the wealth pays only one-third of the taxes.

The top 1% – 1.2 million families – pays 21% of the taxes. Look at that again: 1.2 million familes in a nation of 300 million people pay 21% of the taxes. They make an average of $719,000. So the people earning more than $1 million a year comprise fewer than 1.2 million familes, and dude thinks maybe they should pay some more taxes so the poor can “all get a check.” (And who are “the poor”? The lowest 2 quintiles–47 million families??)

In any other social situation, we would (rightfully) declare that discriminatory treatment of the most insidious kind. But because we have to frame all tax debates in these ridiculous class warfare terms, people like dude develop a simple, ineffective “soak the rich” mentality that does nothing to help alleviate poverty or address its causes.

27

Is it just me, or dis this thread mutate from PETA/fur to taxes?

~~Baloo

28

Ugh. Phil, you’re one of the best around with figures and such, so I’m sure you’ll want to reread the question and reformulate your answer.

Great stats on the wealth, though. I had had it in my head that the wealth was more concentrated than that.

29

Wasn’t trying to argue for or against welfare or anything like that. Nor was it to try to say that your numbers were wrong or incorrect. My point was that without a little more information those statistics don’t convince me of anything, and I think that any discriminating eye should ask some questions of the facts with which it is presented.

Perhaps I am wrong on this, but isn’t that what our government does? Take an amount of everyone’s income (determined by legislation) and then distribute it however it wants (also determined by legislation)?

So then why do I care what the %of wealth held by people is (as illustrated by your table)?

Hm… I think that I read these message boards and occasionally participate in them because I would like to increase my knowledge about certain things and to develop my own opinions. “What sort of income are you talking about?” may seem like an obvious ignorant question to you, but hey, now next time I won’t have to ask. The process of learning at work, what a beautiful thing!

30

manhattan: Look over there! A big distracting thingy!

Eonwe: My apologies, I was quite cranky yesterday. And you and manny are right, I screwed up all on my own on the income/wealth thing. As far as the “other people deciding how to spend our money” question, I think there’s a serious qualitative difference. Yes, the Congress determines the level of taxation and the budget (although I’ve never seen referenda on either of those things at the Federal level, and never will). What people like dude posit is additional confiscatory taxes because other people have things he doesn’t.

31

I pay taxes, many of which I never reap direct benefits from (I know that this is not really a true statement as it would be impossible to track my specific dollars through the system). How is that different from “confiscatory” taxation? Although I don’t ever recover my tax money in any sort of financial way, I do have an interstate highway system, a mail delivery system, a protective military, a judicial system by which people can be held accountable for crimes, and so on. I could never be able to afford to pay for “my share” of all of these things (if I could even determine what that share is), so is the government “confiscating” my money to help pay for other people’s roads, mail delivery, etc.?

I say NO! In fact, I would argue that other people having these things improves my standard of living a great deal. It is in my best interest for people in California to have highways just as much as it is for people in my home state. Another very important thing our government provides is welfare (at least according to me). Neither I nor anybody in my family is on welfare, yet we all pay taxes to support it. What gives???

I am quite satisfied with this situation because a) welfare increases to some degree the standard of living of the people around me, thus enhancing my life, and b) because I know that if I ever fell into dire straits (money for nothin’ and the chicks for free) that there would be a system to help me out.

Granted, whether or not welfare is all it’s cracked up to be is debatable, but I think here we seem to be trying to figure out if the concept of government mandated assistance for those with less is “fair”, not if the current system is effective (although I suppose you could say that forcing someone to pay into an ineffective system is not fair).

No problem! If I can survive big government spending I certainly can survive a little harsh criticism.:slight_smile:

32

Eonwe, I don’t disagree with what you said (well, some of it I do, but on a philosophical level beyond the scope of the discussion at hand). I’m dealing specifically with dude’s words as written. “One day, all the people with 1,000,000 will pay more taxes and we will give the poor a check. Oh, wait, they really need those big houses and yachts.”

This is just class warfare: Let’s punish the rich for being rich and reward the poor for being poor. It falls outside the argument of whether we all derive benefits from paying taxes (which we do, but not the postal service, BTW–that one is supported solely through the sale of stamps and other delivery products) or whether a certain level of social benefits carries benefits for everyone (which it does).

If dude meant something else by his words, he’s free to say so, but he’s been conspicuously absent from the thread. I don’t think statements like his add anything to the debate over how much taxation is optimum or what the government should do with the money it receives. And I still think that those who hold 15% of the wealth paying 21% of the taxes is a little unfair.