Why ?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html
The super rich often pay lower tax rates because they are able to classify their income differently.
The reasoning goes “we need to raise tax revenue, and we should do so in a way that is best for the economy.”
It is a purely reasoned, rational decision.
If Republicans were simply arguing that taxing the poor and middle class more and lowering taxes for the rich would help the economy, then at least that is something we could debate. The Republicans would lose the debate miserably because it is an incredibly stupid and historically ignorant position, but at least it is something one can respond to.
But they aren’t really doing that. Instead, Republicans speak only of pie-in-the-sky idealism about how morally wrong it would be for the ultra rich to pay taxes. No talk about what is best for the economy.
It is hard to respond to that with reason, because it is not a position they base on reason in the first place.
Screw fairness. It’s hard to define and “life’s not fair” as conservatives are wont to say. The reason we should tax wealthy people more is because that is who has the money. It’s not complicated. In order to address the deficit we’d have to raise taxes on the poor to a level such that they could not afford to live. All discretionary spending would go away and merchants would have no one to sell to. Not only that, there would likely be rioting in the streets. We’d need to raise taxes much less on the rich to have the same revenue as a large tax raise on the bottom 50%. The effect on spending would be much less, because the marginal propensity to spend is lower for wealthy people. It’s just pragmatism. It’s not like we have historically high tax rates right now, they are at a rate not seen in decades and much lower than they were during our boom years.
Republicans used to be practical business types, now they are wild eyed lunatics ignoring facts and reason.
The only thing SS and FIT have in common is that they’re both taxes. They’re unrelated otherwise. So it’s completely dishonest to say “I can’t pay the income tax because I already paid property tax” as if they were tied together somehow. If you want to debate school tax, then leave FIT out of it. If you want to debate FIT, then leave the other taxes out of it, too.
And as far as I can tell, we’re only talking about adjusting the income tax…nothing else.
I would, but that’s a different thread entirely. Personally I’d be fine with getting rid of the SS cap so long as you’re willing to pay the ultra-rich an ultra-luxurious pension when they retire. You get what you give. So if they’re to give more, they should get more. Anything else is a transfer payment for the layabouts.
Who said absolute dollars would be equal? The only thing I said about absolute dollar taxes is that the whole “the rich benefit more from society” argument is used up once you realize that you pay tax on each dollar you earn. So the guy that pays a quarter of his $20k and a guy that pays a quarter of his $20million have already ‘squared up’ with the whole “I got more out of society than you” business. You can’t use that argument twice.
Ah, yes. The well-known economist Jon Stewart. When he says “a tax that would nearly bankrupt the poor”, he’s bullshitting you. Even if we accept that the bottom 10% can’t spare another dime, are you honestly going to tell me that the 10%-50% group can’t?
Second, why do you continue with the “but the lower brackets are smaller!” argument? I already told you numerous times in other threads that you can draw the brackets however you like. If you need a penny per dollar from someone’s 1st-700th dollar, it doesn’t matter if that top dollar is in the 1st bracket or the 45th bracket. You just raise the rate 1% on all the brackets below $700. If you need to, you can even make $700 the top of a bracket in a completely different system of brackets.
I agree, which is why I’m OK with a progressive system. It’s a necessary evil. But my main point is that people making under $250k ARE NOT STONES. There’s plenty of blood in 'em.
Of course not. You take $.30…unless $1 is a really low amount in this universe, in which case, you let him and the other 10% like him off the hook and you tax the other 90% at roughly the same rate.
Bullshit. There’s no reason for everyone to feel the same amount of pain. Rich people are rich for a reason. They got that way through hard work and dedication. If you don’t want to be hurt by taxes, then make something of your life. If you did make something of your life, then you deserve to take it easy.
Second, you can find the national median income easily. It’s roughly $45,000 for a household of 1.39 taxpayers. The higher brackets are around 2 earners per household. What’s how much they make got to do with it? What’s despicable about it? Point is, if you’ve got $45,000, you can afford to give Uncle Sam $10,000 just in FIT alone. As it is, they pay zilch. “Blood from a stone”, my ass.
You’re acting like the economy is a zero-sum game. It doesn’t work like that.
Stupid decisions, such as increasing taxes on the poor and middle class while lowering them for the ultra rich, hurt the economy. That means there is a net loss.
There is not a fixed amount of “pain” that we need to allocate. Smart decisions will result in less total pain.
Right now there are historically low taxes on the mega rich, often lower rates than people in the middle class pay. Increasing taxes on the poor and middle class while lowering taxes for the mega rich has not helped and will not help the economy.
Go back and look at the tax rates during periods when the economy was doing well. You will notice that taxes on the ultra rich were higher, and coincidentally that the economy (including the rich because of the net gain) has done better under Democratic leadership.
How very convenient of you to salami slice the tax debate like this.
Who pays what kind of tax isn’t important. What’s important is the final tax burden. This is why liberals combine them (and why Reagan’s ‘lowered taxes for everyone’ talking point is bullshit but that’s another story) and trying to isolate them into categories and going ‘we’re only talking about such and such tax’ isn’t helpful.
Even if the economy WAS a zero-sum game, from a strictly utilitarian point of view it’s better to cause one person a small amount of pain than hundreds of people a small amount of pain. If nothing else you’ll have to inflict hardship on millions more people than if you went after the other. The choice is pretty clear here.
That’s illogical. For one thing, not everyone can be rich - there’s a limited number of opportunities. If, everyone, tomorrow, got up and performed to the very best of their ability, even assuming that their starting situations are equal enough to provide theoretically equal results, you’re still going to need people doing those jobs which don’t pay a lot of money. It’s not a zero-sum game, but it is a situation (especially in the current economy) in which one person’s success may well mean that another few don’t succeed. Perfect performance isn’t a guarantee of success - if there’s a job open as CEO of some well-paying company, and 65 qualified, hard working, dedicated people apply, those deciding who gets the job aren’t going to go “Well, these guys are all awesome. Let’s just hire 65 CEOs, on that same high salary”. You generally aren’t going to find a company with 2 guys in entry level positions and then 100 high level managers. Hard work and dedication isn’t the sole purview of the rich, and with that in mind, they aren’t the only ones who deserve to “take it easy”.
Not to mention that most people don’t start off rich (those who do inherit it, so haven’t worked for it either). The best paid people in the world today were, at some point, in some shitty job (or at least, some shittier job). Rich people were once poor people. Logically speaking, given that the hard work and dedication is what leads up to an excellent job and salary, if we want to give those who work hard and show dedication a break, we have to do it before they get rich - in other words, if those who have earned riches deserve a break, then we need to give that break to the non-rich. Seems counter-intuitive, I realise, but it’s only logical.
And if nothing else, surely the reward for being rich is… being rich? If that isn’t enough - if rich people who’ve worked for it deserve more than what they’ve earned - then logically, the economy is entirely broken, since no person can earn what they deserve to.
It’s hard to argue rationally with people who believe this crap. The thought that in America income inequality is purely a result of work ethic is ridiculous.
Being poor is not a moral failing it’s an unfortunate condition most poor find themselves in because of who they were born to, poor parents who did not have the money to educate their children how to escape poverty. Most wealthy people are not wealthy because of their own labors, they were born to wealthy parents who taught them how to maintain and grow that wealth.
If you want to argue the poor and wealthy should all be treated equally then lets make sure everyone is born and raised in equal position. Make the Estate tax 100 percent so each person must compete economically for every dime the have rather then inheriting it from the labor of their parents. We can use that money to ensure everyone age 1-22 gets the same opportunities to start out with.
No matter how exquisitely just the rat race, it will remain a rat race. And so long as the joy of rat’s desiring is to have perks and privileges the other rat does not have, then injustice isn’t simply an unintended consequence, injustice is the whole point. A rat strives to achieve a level of inequality, exploiting characteristics that may be alternatively described as hard working and ambitious or hyper-active and greedy.
However much one can applaud any effort to make the rat race more fair, as more justice is better than less, still, it is what it is. And we are what we let it make us.
Middle and lower income Americans ‘benefited the most’ from Bush-era tax cuts because we’re the ones that needed it the most. I was thankful to Obama for my few thousand bucks in the mail that I got last year by virtue of being single with a child - not because I’d actually overpaid that much or anything. 
I think this Tea Party/Republican ‘let’s tax the poor, too’ is another kind of class warfare: the kind where the non-lower class is somehow un-American for failing to realize their American dream/needed social services/whatever. Not sure if this is also code for the degradation of race relations in America, but it may be worth noting that ‘welfare reform’ advocates used stereotypes of colored women on food stamps. I can see a lot of the same thing in conservative commentary lately: the 47 per cent are now “moochers”.
That being said, I’ve been exempt from taxes for most of my adult/working life. The **only **governmental assistance I’ve ever received is grants for school. I’m OK with paying taxes, but being put in the same tax rate as a single person without children would kill us. (Hell, that would force me to go to the welfare office to apply for food stamps!)
There’s really nothing wrong with taxing low-income people; it’s taxing excessively that is the issue (which a flat-rate tax creates).
But really. You can’t keep raising taxes on the rich to fund the government.
I didn’t bring up that argument, because it is unnecessary. I’m perfectly happy to say that everyone benefits from society equally. I do hope no one tries to say that the poor get more from society than the rich, though.
I’d suggest you watch the clip. What he was addressing was the dual claims made by many conservatives - that a tax cut for the rich would be a measly amount, not big enough to fix the problem, and that the poor should be taxed more. He was noting that the measly amount was equivalent to half the income of the poor. In other words, taxing the poor more does nothing to address the deficit, and can only be explained as hatred to those conservatives see as their inferiors.
I need to research why we have the brackets we do, but I suspect they match the marginal utility curve, and are thus not random.
I’m perfectly fine with increasing taxes for those making over $100K, say. I’m perfectly okay with doing away with the entire Bush tax cut. Not politically feasible, but relatively speaking economically sound.
Why take anything from those low on the totem poll except to hurt them?
Right. The guy born into a disfunctional family with a low IQ and sent to crappy schools is a much worse person than the man born to wealth. You’d have to raise taxes a lot higher than anyone is advocating to get anywhere near equal pain.
Oh, I see. The message we’re supposed to take away from the “horrors, 50% of the people pay no taxes” rant is that it should be 45% instead? Yeah, right.
When I say pain, it is short hand for the effect of a slightly lower net income at tax time. But you are quite correct - in the (not very) long run higher taxes used to stimulate the economy will increase the value of stocks and of companies, and wind up making the rich far more than they pay. I think I paid a little bit more under the Clinton increase - the money I made during the bubble (and I could have made a lot more) was a hell of a lot bigger.
What’s dishonest is implying people pay “no taxes” when it is you who have personally chosen to limit the discussion to one form of tax.
I’m not sure where you got that idea from… The OP’s link has to do with SS payments. Odd how these discussions shift isn’t it?
Just curious, after they pay the Feds 10 grand, how much do they have left over to pay State and Local taxes? Wait… Those don’t count, not until we start a discussion on those taxes, at which time I’m sure the will be deemed good for another 10 for State and 10 for Local.
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Senator Lieberman killed the public option, not Obama.
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Extending the payroll tax cut for another year or two would be a good way of pumping dollars into an economy in sore need of additional demand for goods and services. It is a debt-efficient form of stimulus.
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I sympathize with your sentiments though frankly Obama made soothing conciliatory remarks both during the campaign and in his interactions with Republicans as an Illinois state Representative.
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It would have been best if the Republicans put country first and agreed to pass a jobs program that had backing by mainstream economists. But even given record obstructionism, there are many things that Obama could have done for the economy but did not.
President Obama also effectively killed a single-payer or national heathcare before even took office, so yeah. The point about Obama being a fabled ‘progressive’ still stands.
The only crap here is the liberal idea that someone is born with a destiny to be rich or poor and there’s nothing they can do about it. If they drop out of high school, it’s not their fault. If they got a liberal arts degree instead of engineering or a medical degree, there’s nothing they could have done differently. If they have kids at 22 instead of pouring themselves into a start-up, well, that’s just the way life goes.
The left’s tendency to look at the pauper and say “He had no choice! There’s nothing he could’ve done differently!” is appalling.
It’s not “hatred”, it’s the conviction that people should live with the choices they made and reap what they sow. It’s the conviction that their fiscal inferiors should keep their hands to themselves.
Come on down to $40k and you’ve got a deal. Well, actually, I’m fine with the rates where they are/were…it’s the writeoffs (loopholes, if you want) that kill me. It shouldn’t be possible to write off and entire median income. We’ve got WAAAY too many deductions and people aren’t paying the tax they fairly owe.
Oh, I see. So when you take from the top, it’s to fund society for things like roads, schools, and hospitals, but when it’s from the bottom, it’s a pouty-lipped “Why do you want to hurt me?”
You’re cherry-picking two extremes. Why can’t you just take a suburban kid that becomes a doctor and a suburban kid that becomes a trucker, and compare those?
Where’d you get the 45% number? I said 10%. 10% shouldn’t pay, 90% should. That sounds fair to me.
I do admire Paris Hilton’s work ethic, though.
Why stop there? Why not ask how much it is for bread, gasoline, and movie tickets? Why weigh in all the things called “taxes” but not the rest of life’s expenses?
Honestly, Cheesesteak, I’d see your point if taxes went to the same place for the same things. But they don’t. State taxes go to the state for state things and federal taxes go to the feds for federal things. They have isolated treasuries and isolated expenses. Therefore paying one isn’t an excuse to get out of paying the other any more than"But I just bought a new car" waives your obligation to the water bill.
This is true for high earners who get most of their income in the normal way and pay payroll taxes. This is not true for the high earners who can classify their income in other ways, inc., capital gains, as in the link that Carmody earlier provided.