There is a huge difference between cutting top marginal tax rates from 90% to 70% and then to 50% on the one hand and cutting top marginal tax rates from 39.6% to 36% and cutting capital gains and dividend rates to 15% on the other hand. You are no longer stimulating the economy so much as just giving away tax revenue to the rich to be borrowed back from the same people in the form of treasuries.
Maybe I’m just not ignorant or stupid enough to allow you to steer the discussion away from the subject at hand? Quick remider, thread topic: Half the country doesn’t pay taxes. This was clarified early on by another poster to refer only to income tax.
Carry on. :rolleyes:
I apparently needed to put ‘my fair share’ in scare quotes. I agree with taxing the rich more than the poor. I believe that the standard of living should be increased for the poor and that this should happen on the backs of those more fortunate.
(Just trying to escape being lumped with the stupid.)
Oh, I’ll still support social programs to get him back on his feet in troubled times. I’ll just chuckle while I’m doing it, in his case, since I’m aware that his bad luck wouldn’t make him a bad or lazy person (the fact that he’s a trollish jerk makes him a bad person, but that shouldn’t be grounds for removing his unemployment :D)
As for the “basic living” above, let’s work on a definition. When I see the term, I think “low end house/apartment by US standards”, “car with more than 75k miles on it, or no car”, little or no independent retirement savings, little or no rainy day fund, little or no money for nonessential luxuries like, say, fresh produce or eating the occasional delivery pizza. (when I say “little or no”, I mean around $100/mo or less)
Certainly it’s not a bad life by global standards. It’s a little hard to reconcile as “fair” when compared to the lives of the rich or even the middle class (of which I’ve been all my life). I’m not saying the rich are evil or bad or whatever, mind you–I’m hoping to quadruple my average income before I retire and I have probably a 75%+ chance of that as long as the Internet doesn’t arbitrarily disappear. What I am saying is that it’s hard to reconcile, from the position of “skilled middle manager/project manager” (let alone from the position of “line grunt”), the salaries that SOME CEO/upper manager types make relative to the amount of perceived value they create for their companies.
That “other poster” A) has no special standing, and B) conflated “running the rest of country” with “income tax”, which is ridiculously, totally wrong.
Of course, the odds of you coming up with a relevant, non-weaselly response to this (or, based on your track record, any) thread is approximately the same as the odds that my leg will spontaneously detach and join the circus.
I’m sure if we get enough to go along with that idea unreservedly we’ll be able to get that 125 milion number up over the 200 mark in no time. :rolleyes:
1 in 7 Americans live below the poverty line
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/16/AR2010091602698.html
about 40% of the population is close enough to poverty that they will fall below the poverty level in any given ten year span.
It’s possible that that is where the number should be. Even here in Canada, the minimum wage is not enough to live on. Hell, in most cities it is not enough to even rent an apartment let alone eat.
Do I wish that these people could make enough so that they could pay for all their needs (not wants) and still pay more into the tax base? You bet. Is it going to happen anytime soon? Nope.
Sorry but hard work doesn’t do it either. People who make millions are not working at least 10x as hard as I am. There is luck, who you know and who your family is. If they want the priviledge of living in a civilized nation, then they are just going to have to share with those less fortunate. Since we know damn well they aren’t going to do that on their own, we tax them at a higher rate.
You will note that I am upper middle class and I do not begrudge my tax rate being much higher than people making minimum wage (who typically pay nothing in income tax). In fact, I support variable taxation for everything (which means I think sales tax should be replaced by higher income taxes, not a popular view).
Methinks you should try living on what they have to make due with for a month and see what the real deal is.
So where does income redistribution stop? 1 in 10? 1 in 20? What’s the magic number where liberals stop believing the rich should give up more of their income to support the poor?
There will be no more rich backs left to ride before you reach your goal. It is the classic carrot and stick idiom you have been chasing forever.
1 in 7 is 14%, meaning about 46million are blow the poverty line, not 125million.
Next, what are you defining as the “poverty line?” $12,000 a year; $16,000: $21,000?
How is that 46million distributed? Are they clustered near the line, spread out evening from zero -> line, or clumped in abject despair living in squalor?
Like I said, if you feel the need to tug at my heart stings, at least have the decency to do it honestly. 1 in 7 is a long way off from 125million.
The article you linked to is basing that off the $22,000 for a family of 4. How does that compare to a family of 4 in the rest of the world? Industrialized or otherwise.
I can’t find that last statement in the article you linked to. Again it includes loose and ambiguous terms like, “close enough” to suggest you’re again trying to use emotion to manipulate facts.
The article was about how poor people got poorer during the recession, is that a surprise to anyone? They also got richer during the bubble.
I don’t have the time or energy to get a bunch of cites together for a “discussion” in the pit.
The point is (if you can stop the Bricker-like nitpicking and asking for definitions of “more” or “less” or “basic” for one second)
The bottom earning portion of the public have been getting less of the “pie” in recent years. The top earners have been getting a bigger proportion. This is why taxes must logically come from the higher earners. The lower earners have less money now.
Forget about social programs, redistribution and the other bullshit rhetoric. Tax money must come from whoever HAS the money.
If the trend in wealth inequity continues at the same rate for another 50 years, the situation will be even more obvious.
Very feudal, aren’t we. Tax and tithe the poor to the point they can’t feed themselves, use the tax dollars to drive an economy that makes the wealth wealthier, and then blame the laziness of the peasant class for their own situation. Sometimes it seems like we just revisit the past.
HA, at first I thought you were mocking him/her.
“Half the country (U.S.) doesn’t pay [income] taxes”
We aren’t tithing or taxing the poor. The only thing I can see that’s changed is that we can’t be bothered to pay them for their labour. Unskilled jobs just aren’t going to pay what they used to. It doesn’t matter how much you tax the rich, it still won’t get people to value the janitor more than the CEO.
I had to re-read that twice for it to sink in. It’s like I’ve been trying to explain to my oldest teenage daughter: All that money for more makeup, clothes, night’s out etc. is going to have to start coming from someone who has the money. I can afford to let you go out to the movies with your friends a couple-few times a month, but not every damn Friday and Saturday night.
Time for a part-time job, maybe? 
It’s odd how the budget requirements tend to self-modify after you turn off the money spigot. 
I’m mocking both ends actually. There is a middle in tax debate.
Have you heard? There is a recession going on. There aren’t enough jobs for the people who want to have one, let alone part time jobs for people who need extra cash.
That is why he is harping on marginal utility.
A progressive tax system is predicated on the notion of marginal utility. The notion of progressivity in teh tax system is something that just about everyone from Kucinich to Ron Paul understand as a necessary component of any equitable tax system.
Your point might be that it has gotten so progressive that half the population doesn’t pay any income tax. Well, there are a couple of reasons for that. The primary reason is that the Earned Income tax Credit took a lot of people from paying very very small amounts of tax and receiving government aid to paying no tax and getting a cashable tax credit. Earned income tax credit - Wikipedia
The EITC is largely a Republican tax device. Reward people for earning income by supplementing their income with cashable tax credits, this was supposed to reverse some of the incentives of welfare programs.
Also every time we have cut taxes on the rich, we have also cut taxes on the very poor. We had a zero tax bracket for a while and we still have an effective zero tax bracket for those making under the standard deduction on income taxes.
So I don’t really see what point is being made when someone pionts out taht half of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes, which account for 40% of federal revenues.
Now there’s philosophy I can understand.
I concur. Progressive economics is not handouts to the poor. Let’s create those jobs by taxing the rich and hiring the unemployed to rebuild our infrastructure.
Now You’re changing the argument, but I’ll roll with it.
How much of the federal income tax dollar do you think goes to income redistribution?
I don’t want redistribute away poverty as I want to try to provide everyone with the ongoing opportunity to avoid poverty (this is primarily not a tax issue).
I don’t really mind income inequality as long as we can maintain a vibrant middle class.
We are nowhere near eradicating wealth in this country. Nothing that anyone is proposing would do so. Increasing taxes to what we had under Clinton isn’t going to impoverish us, it didn’t then, it won’t now.
The poor beset upon rich are suffering under the weight of the lowest taxes since the Great Depression (minus a few years during the Bush Sr. administration).
The point you seem to miss is that horse left the barn around the mid 60s. No tax policy either ultra conservative or ultra liberal will fix the socio-economic problems we are now faced with. Other countries have benefited from increased standards of living, siphoning off resources, jobs and talent from the US. We want to continue living like the country did in the 50s and 60s, when we were economically vibrant and dominant.
So people spend, not save, attempting to maintain an increasingly impossible lifestyle. Government at all levels do the same. Our schools get swimming pools, fabulous athletic facilities, etc. when what they need to do is provide a meaningful education with that money.
Until we control our spending habits, become far more frugal at all levels and learn to accept less, things will only get worse. What the few rich do with their wealth is utterly irrelevant in the larger scheme of things.