How has that worked out since the Bush tax cuts went into effect? It isn’t exactly hard to figure out that although corporations and the rich continue to do quite well for themselves, they are in fact NOT hiring and/or creating jobs. I mean, you know it is in the news and everything or maybe you missed that. Or am I being whooshed here?
cough Sarcasm cough
Good! Now, turn your head the other way and cough sarcastically twice.
cough My apologies. cough 
Time and time again, we hear someone say their tax rate is 30-whatever% and some smarmy Doper, oblivious to their point, comes along and reminds them that they’re only paying that on their top dollar and that marginal rates are different than overall rate.
And then the liberals here turn around and say stuff like this, as if the people in the top bracket aren’t also in the bottom bracket. News flash: You can’t tax the poor without equally taxing the rich. So long as the rich have to pass through the lower brackets first, they’ll always have to pay what the poor pay, and then some. You literally cannot tax the lower 50% without taxing the upper 50% as well.
So once again, a liberal that says “tax the rich” really means “tax only the rich,” and refuses to explain why people above the poverty line but below the ‘rich line’ should continue to not pay a single damned dime.
Non rich people pay a lot of taxes. You should look into that, it’ll make you less upset.
Yes, that’s right “tax the rich” does actually mean something different than “tax everybody”.
And to reiterate what Lobohan said, those folks pay taxes, and so do people below the poverty line.
John Mace:
(crosses Jeb’s name off list of suspects for the toilet paper all over my house)
This is not always true. Payroll tax is only paid on income up to ~$100k. Raising the payroll tax affects people making significantly above that figure by a disproportionately smaller amount than people making under it.
Well, then, if we lower the average wage of the American workers, so that fewer of them are above that threshold, our tax revenues will go way up and we won’t have to unfairly burden the job creators! Problem solved, and you’re welcome.
There was a time when unemployment numbers included who was laying off. That has ended, so you don’t know how many people each corporation is killing or offshoring.
If you had access to those figures, you would see large corporations are not job producers, but killers. It is small business that is our hope.
There is a development lurking that I fear. Not just loathe, and despise, but actively fear. And that is a Republican theme designed to turn the middle class against the poor, the active theme being those bums and their lucky-ducky benefits are what is dragging down the middle class. Suggesting to the middle class that they could remain middle class if they elect people who will stop giving away their money.
Seems to me that a lot more people in this recession are down-grading, class wise, than in previous recessions. A lot more people who are used to middle and upper middle life styles are being deprived of that, and are angry. Angry in an unfocused way, angry at somebody, but they don’t know who yet.
And that genuinely scares me.
Except of course that if you raise the lowest brackets by a significant margin, then this affects the poor quite a bit more than the rich. To the poor, that’s equivalent to taxing their entire income significantly more. To the rich, it’s just higher taxes on that first few thousand bucks, leaving the largest part of their wealth untouched since the rest is taxed at different rates.
Both groups might end up paying the same amount of money in absolute terms, but it doesn’t affect them the same in relative ones. If you make a million bucks a year, it really doesn’t matter whether you have to give 250 or 500 bucks out of the first thousand. If you live on a thousand bucks, however…
For ease of use let’s say that the first 50k you make is taxed at 20% and everything else is taxed at 30%.
If you make 50k a year and the bottom tax rate goes to 25%. Your tax bill goes from 10k to 12.5k, right?
If you make 100k a year, your taxes would go from 25k to 27.5k.
If you make 500k a year, your taxes would go from 145k to 147.5k.
The 50k worker is paying an additional 5% of his income to taxes.
The 100k worker is paying an additional 2.5% of his income to taxes.
The 500k worker is paying an additional 0.5% of his income to taxes.
So why do you think that tax increases to lower rates equally hurt the rich?
This is why we have a progressive tax system.
I never said it equally “hurts” the rich. But also reject the idea that it should. We’ve already got a progressive tax system. If you want to raise (or lower) taxes, you should start with the lower brackets first.
My beef isn’t that liberals want more money. It’s that they want it to all come from the same source- the rich. If the government needs to collect an additional $1,000, why take $1,000 from one man when you can take $200 from one man and only $800 from the first man? It’s that more fair than taking it all out of one guy?
Now you’re probably thinking of responding “because the first guy can afford it more.” But I fail to understand the liberal mindset that that makes it OK to take it. It’s almost as if the reasoning goes “He’s got it, ergo I can take it.”
I’m sure some others out there are thinking “But the rich benefit more from society than the poor!”, which is patently absurd, but even if it were true, that’s the whole reason we tax each and every (taxable) dollar a person makes instead of just billing everyone equally. Even if we’re exposed to the same tax rate, if you make twice as much as me, then you pay twice as much as me. So even though I can see how you can (wrongly) argue that the rich benefit more than the poor, they certainly don’t benefit more per dollar!
Third, the other taxes people pay (property, sales, SS) don’t factor into this because no one’s talking about raising those. We’re talking about the FIT here, so let’s stick to discussing what’s fair/unfair about the FIT.
Finally, you may be wondering how I came up with the 200/800 ratio as fair. Well, I just made it up out of thin air. But the way you’d determine what’s fair is by seeing what people can afford to pay, not by what they want to pay. And looking at the percentage of households that get out of FIT scot-free, anyone that claims the lower 50% can’t afford to pay more (i.e. anything at all) should be embarrassed.
Equally taxing the rich? Maybe in absolute dollars per person, but a 50% tax rate on someone making $20k is a 0.5% tax rate on someone making $2 million. You call that equal?
Plus. the lower brackets are a lot closer together, so raising the tax on a low bracket alone doesn’t generate nearly as much money, per person, as does raising the tax an equivalent amount on a higher bracket. And, as Jon Stewart pointed out, a tax that would nearly bankrupt the poor only generates the revenue that a small increase for the rich does. The amount said by the Republicans to not be enough to help.
You can’t get blood from a stone and you can’t get enough money to make even a tiny dent in the problem from the poor. Unless, of course, you want them all to starve to death to save on all those welfare costs.
I’d be more than happy to leave these out if you would stop saying that the folks who don’t pay into ONE of these taxes are getting off “scot free”, or that they don’t pay “anything at all”.
Frankly, if you want to break tax items up and cast aspersions based on payments into one item, we can discuss how little the super rich pay into social security. Maybe we should make SS “fair” and have everyone pay the exact same percentage of their income, for ALL their income, instead of having the poor pay on 100% of their income and the super rich on 1% of their income.
You got a kid who just got his $1 allowance, and a man who just got his $5,000 paycheck, and you need $5. In your book, you take $1 from the kid and $4 from the man, and call it fair, right?
No, the reasoning is that every member of society should feel equal pain. The very poor feel plenty of pain from sales taxes and from payroll taxes. The rich don’t. The very rich could stand a fairly big increase and feel practically no pain.
Then there is the needs of the economy. The consumption of the rich is probably independent of any small increase in taxes. The consumption of the poor is not. If you want to increase consumption to put more people to work so they get to pay taxes, don’t take money from those who can least afford it.
Just tell me what percent of income these bottom 50% have. You people keep giving the number of people, but not how much they make. That’s despicable.
No, of course that’s not fair! Why should the guy with the paycheck have to pay more than the kid? Take $2.50 from each.
Yep then off to the work house for the kid to make up the $1.50 he tried to ‘steal’ from society!