It appears you skimmed my “bizarre” comment about your “lost opportunity” re: the $800 billion:
I think you’re smart enough to connect the dots by yourself if I ask whose complaint is bizarre here? 
Sam, I asked my simple question because it is under the current tax system, of course, that Bill Gates was able to set up and administer the Gates Foundation–if only it were different, you imply, we might be able to have a Gates Foundation!
Lets get to the real issue.
Is anyone seriously going to argue that the tax code should treat billionaires equally to someone whose net worth is 30K? That tax exemptions that are not available after a certain amount of income are inherently wrong? That the fact half of americans don’t make enough income to even pay income tax is wrong, in a just world they would pay some?
These are the things thrown out to show the rich are oppressed by class warfare.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. You and XT have both said similar things. If you really want to dilute the idea of “warfare” to this extent, then you win the debate by definition. By your definition, then sure: when I say that the rich can afford to pay greater taxes because they’re rich, then I’m engaging in warfare. It’s a bit like Pearl Harbor, actually.
Dude…calm down. It’s not worth getting this excited over, and certainly not worth you getting a mod breathing down your neck over. Take a deep breath, ok?
Now, it’s not MY term, so I’m not the one who wants to strengthen OR ’ dilute the idea of “warfare”’. Neither Sam nor I invented it, nor did we coin the phrase here on the 'dope…nor, is it just arch ‘conservatives’ like Sam and I who use the thing here. I, personally, don’t generally use the freaking term ‘class warfare’…nor ‘war on drugs’ or ‘war on poverty’ or any of the other various ‘war on’ catch phrases. Again, your main problem, or at least the only thing you are addressing, is your personal animus against the phrase, which is more a semantics argument. It’s a silly argument in terms of THIS discussion and OP, since we are all familiar with the concept and the OP is not asking if the term should or shouldn’t be used, or if it detracts from the meaning of ‘warfare’…or anything else along those lines.
It’s a rare treat to see a post get almost every single sentence wrong. I don’t normally do the sentence-by-sentence rebuttal, but again, rare treat time.
Plenty calm, but thanks for checking.
Didn’t say anything remotely warnable; swearing is allowed 'round here. If you disagree, though, feel free to report me.
Since I never said any of this, it’s pretty irrelevant. I referred, not to your term, but to your definition. You seem to think it has some meaning that allows for its use in a hyperdiluted form.
And this is the last wrong point in the post. I have no animus against the phrase. It’s a perfectly cromulent phrase to describe situations like the Bolshevik rebellion. It can be stretched to apply to situations in which one class is denying another class the basic necessities of life; I won’t use it then, but I understand such a use.
My animus is against the Orwellian tactic of saying that, when people point out that the rich can afford to pay greater taxes without suffering serious deprivation, it’s warfare. (Rather than calling it Orwellian, I should call it Luntzian, of course). It’s every bit as objectionable as when Ms. Akin refers to her husband’s treatment by the Republican establishment as rape, and for the same reason.
Now, I hope you’re calm, because I’d hate for you to have an aneurysm just from reading such cogent rebuttals of your points; I know it must be difficult! (Of course, if you’d like to stop the game of fake concern for one another’s emotional status, I’m jiggy with that, too.)
Yes, I can clearly see that. 
Wasn’t making a backhanded attempt at junior modding, nor did I mean that you had said anything (yet) that the mods would take exception too. You seemed to be overwrought, though clearly you are calm like bull now.
Ah…clearly we have a different idea of what this means then:
Obviously I’m wrong, and what this actually says is something quite distinctly different than the meaning that can be derived by a simple reading of the sentence. Possibly it’s not actually written in English, but in some other language that changes it’s meaning and context. But now I see, since I was wrong in almost every single sentence.
Yes, and you haven’t expressed, several times in this thread so far if memory serves, your animus to the phrase regarding the fact that it’s hyperbole and distorts the definition of ‘warfare’, etc etc, blah blah blah. Yes, yes…you are right and I am, um, less right. You’re the best. I’m the worst. You’re very good-looking. I’m not attractive.
Strawman again. sigh
Yes, clearly you are a rock of calmness, er, ness. Calm like bull, collected like paycheck, cool like ice cube. Thanks for your cogent rebuttal of my totally wrong points, you handsome devil you. Hope you have a good weekend and no one carts you off to the morgue, you are so calm they might think you are dead or something! 
(BTW, just for the record, it wasn’t ‘fake concern’…I DID think you were one of the better posters on this board, and that the subject had unhinged you and you were straying close to the line and might want to back off. Obviously I was wrong about all of that, and you were in no danger of a mod smacking further down the road)
Glad to set you straight on that point.
As for the rest: I can’t believe it’s this complicated, but apparently it is.
I do not object to the term when used appropriately. Some appropriate uses:
Every one of these uses involves denying something basic to people based on their class.
Here are some uses that are not appropriate:
Those uses are stupid and hyperbolic. They don’t involve denying something basic to people based on their class.
It’s absolutely appropriate to acknowledge economic classes in a society. It’s absolutely appropriate to talk about whether members of a certain class are being unfairly favored by current legal systems. It’s absolutely appropriate to talk about remedies to such unfairness. Calling such a conversation “class warfare” is an Orwellian twisting of the term designed to shut down conversation.
Oh for Pete’s sake. I didn’t say the Gates foundation wouldn’t exist - I said that it would have less money to do the work it’s doing if some of it had been taxed away. Do you seriously dispute that?
What I also said, and what you seem to be challenging, is that when capital gains rates go up, it punishes risky investment. And if an investment doesn’t happen because the tax rates on the profit of that investment made it a non-starter, we’ll never know about it, so it can’t be used as a counter-example to what government is doing with the money that was taxed.
Venture capital is a good example of this. Venture capitalists are generally people who made a lot of money in an industry, then leverage their expertise and business skills to invest in other startups. This is a high-risk, high reward business. Most startups fail. But the ones that succeed often do very well, and it’s the few successes that generate the profit for the venture capitalist. I showed you how the math works in a previous message. When an investment is likely to have a 90% chance of failure and a 10% chance of success, you have to make a LOT of profit on the success to justify the risk. Taxing away half the profit doesn’t make the investment half as profitable - it makes it dramatically less profitable.
That’s why ‘supply side’ economists focus so much on capital gains taxes, and that’s also why the capital gains tax is (and should be) lower than the tax on employment income. Employment income is guaranteed, but capital gains involve risk. Capital gains also take more time to be realized, which means you need to make more profit on them to generate a reasonable return on capital when measured on an annual basis against other, safer investments.
In a country with high tax rates, what you will get is less entrepreneurial enterprise, fewer startups, less risk-taking, and most money being shunted into big corporations and government bonds and such. But it’s the risk taking that causes the big paradigm-shifting changes that create big gains in wealth. It takes those big piles of cash and an investment environment that rewards risk to create the next Apple or SpaceX.
There’s a reason why most of these big paradigm-shifting changes have come out of the United States, and it’s not because the people are smarter or because of government ‘investment’. It’s because until recently the U.S. has been the most friendly place on earth for risk-takers and entrepreneurs, and that’s mostly due to a tax system that doesn’t punish people for making huge profits on risky ventures.
I expect that in the future, if the Democrats manage to increase taxes on capital gains and high incomes, the innovation sector will slowly shift to places like Canada, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and other countries that have surpassed the United States in economic freedom. The U.S. will become more like France - big government, high taxes, and a large crony capitalist corporate sector that still makes plenty of money for itself by embedding itself in the intersection between government and the market. Growth will be modest, structural unemployment will be 7-8%, and the standard of living will grow slower than the more free countries until the U.S. is just another dull, drab bureaucratic state.
- Robert Heinlein
That’s certainly a use of the phrase, and maybe even the most accurate one. But the fact remains that BOTH sides of the political debate have been using the phrase ‘class warfare’ to describe a host of actions that are far less severe than hanging the Kulaks from trees on their farms. Democrats use the phrase ‘class warfare’ to describe tax cuts for the wealthy or cuts in aid, or even cuts to middle class programs. And Republicans use it to describe the Democrats’ characterization of the rich as greedy plutocrats who don’t care about anything but their summer vacation homes and luxuries.
As XT said, the term is in commonly used in this mundane way, and it’s in that way that I’m using it.
You still don’t get it. Let me give you an example:
Not class warfare: "The rich should be taxed more because what really matters is the marginal utility of money, and $1 has a lot more marginal utility to a poor person than to a wealthy person.:
Not class warfare: “The Rich should pay a higher percentage of their income in tax because we believe that a government of size X is the best size for our country, and we can’t possibly pay for it all with a flat tax.”
Class Warfare: “The rich should be taxed more because if we let them keep their money they’re just going to blow it on luxuries and vacation homes.”
Class Warfare: “The rich should be taxed more because greed is bad, and rich people are greedy.”
Class Warfare: “The rich should be taxed more because their money is the ‘social surplus’ STOLEN from the average person.”
Get the difference? Class warfare is about demonizing a group of people based on their class, or trivializing their needs and concerns because their class does not warrant consideration. You can make a liberal argument for progressive taxation without resorting to class warfare, or you can choose to carry around giant puppets of greedy tycoons smoking big cigars made from the skins of the poor which emit smoke shaped like dollar signs. It’s the tactic that earns the ‘class warfare’ label - not the policy.
There’s a tremendous difference between demonizing someone and considering their desires to be of lower priority than they consider their own desires to be (what you call “trivializing them.”) It makes no sense to include them both in the same category. By doing so, you’re essentially saying that not taking someone seriously constitutes an act of war. (And FTR, I mentioned previously that it’s irritating when liberals call flat tax proposals et al class warfare, too–I think the hyperbole is obnoxious on both sides).
For myself, I never said rich people would blow their money on luxuries, mainly because I don’t think that spending money on luxuries is a bad thing to do. What I said was that additional taxes wouldn’t deprive them of basic necessities, and so it’s a much better approach than approaches that DO withhold basic necessities from people.
You chose to interpret my use of “vacation home” as a stand-in for legitimate luxury purchases to mean I was deriding rich people. That was an error on your part.
No, it was your assumption that taxing rich people more would simply result in them cutting back on luxuries, and totally dismissing reasonable, substantiated arguments that the effect of raising taxes, and particularly capital gains taxes on the rich would have much more profound effects on economic growth.
You don’t want to have that argument, so you responded to a detailed post with, “yes, yes, job builders capital investment blah blah blah puke it’s spent on luxuries.”
Forgive me if I find that a little dismissive and hostile.
The problem with your analysis is that it denigrates rich people.
Folks with lots of money tend to spend it on two different things:
- A higher standard of living;
- Investments.
If they have less money, they have to cut back on one of those two things. My belief is that they know they need to keep investing if they want to maintain their wealth, so they’ll continue investing, and cut back on some luxuries–just like if I were taxed at a higher rate, I might for example give up Internet, but I wouldn’t give up my budget for work clothes.
You propose that rich people would give up investing–that they’d kill their golden goose before they’d give up their higher standard of living. You don’t actually offer any evidence for this position, but only one of those tortured and counterintuitive arguments that righties are so fond of making in order to pretend that what’s obviously not true is true.
So pardon me if I don’t engage with your tortured analysis, beyond calling it tortured. If you consider that dismissive, well, you’re bound to get something right sooner or later :).
Yes. This also answers Sam’s reply to my previous post about Bill Gates. If Gates has a $100 Billion and he’s devoted 50 Billion to set up his foundation (both figures are straight outta my ass), then if he’s taxed an extra billion, Sam presumes he only has 49 Billion to devote his foundation. But my point was that his foundation is more important to him than his personal standard of living and since he seems to be an intelligent, charitable man, he would scrape by on 49 billion for himself, and continue funding his foundation as he deems proper. Sam can’t wrap his mind around that concept. If Sam’s taxes go up, charity must suffer–that’s only fair and right and proper and the way the Good Lord intended.
Did you even read my post? I didn’t say they give up investing - I said they shift their investments from high-risk/high reward investments to safer investments. I went on at some length about it. So stop attacking straw men.
As for Bill Gates cutting a billion dollars out of his luxuries… Just how much money do you think Gates spends per year on those luxuries? When you’re talking about the very rich, increasing their taxes necessarily comes out of investments, because that’s where the vast majority of their money goes. I’d be surprised if Bill Gates spends more than a few million per year on ‘luxuries’. Warren Buffet lives in his small childhood home and drives a modest car.
You seem to think the average rich person behaves like the average Hollywood celebrity. But they don’t. Most people get rich because they are responsible with their money. My grandparents had a net worth of about a million dollars, and they drove a 15 year old car and lived in a 1200 sq foot bungalow my grandfather built in the 1970’s. I have an uncle who had one of the biggest chicken farms in the province, and retired with millions of dollars. His house was no bigger than what you’d find in a middle-class neighborhood, and the nicest vehicle he ever owned was a new Buick that he was inordinately proud of.
Check out this article about The cars in the wealthiest zip codes in America. You’d think they’d be Bentleys and Porsches and Jaguars, wouldn’t you?
Ross California, the 10th wealthiest zip code in America, has a population that averages $497,000 per year in income. The most popular car in that zip code is a Toyota Prius, and the most expensive car in the top five is a Mercedes GL class, worth $63,000.
Manhattan has an average income of over $5 million dollars. These are the top five cars in that zip code:
- Mercedes E-Class
- BMW X-5
- Honda Accord
- BMW 328
- Honda CR-V
That’s the kind of mix you’ll find in any upper middle class neighborhood in America, and you’ll find a lot of those vehicles in the mid-range of the middle class, too.
So maybe your stereotype of rich people as those who can just take a billion dollars per year out of ‘luxuries’ is a little off?
Perhaps if you want to soak it to the ostentatious rich you should be focusing your economic populism on Hollywood lefties and sports stars and hit musicians.
I certainly can’t deny that. You said, for example,
What that really is, is a weaselly way of turning your complete lack of evidence for your claim into an attempt at a strength. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature, you suggest, that you haven’t mustered any evidence for your calculations.
Thus the dismissiveness.
Actually, no. I’d think they’d be new. Of course, you couldn’t possibly have known what I thought, since it’s not like I said in an earlier post that I thought wealthy folks might spend their money on new cars.
Oh, wait–that’s exactly what I said. Huh.
You also said they’d spend enough that any tax increases could come out of ‘luxuries’. You mentioned a billion dollars for Bill Gates, that he would take out of ‘luxuries’. A reasonable question to ask is, “Just how much money do you think the rich spend on luxuries as a percentage of their income?”
Who are you talking to? Me or prr or someone else? I never mentioned Bill Gates.
It appears we’re having trouble defining “class warfare.”
France’s Reign of Terror, in which people were sent to the guillotine because they were of the aristocratic class, was “class warfare.”
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin writing “The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation” was “class warfare.”
If one wants to relax the definition slightly, denigrating 47% of Americans because the 13% tax rate they pay consists of payroll taxes, while the 13% job creators pay consists of income taxes is “class warfare.”
To give three examples in one, here’s a quote describing poor-vs-rich “warfare” in parody form, making it rich-vs-poor “warfare” instead. Except that the parody may be “over the top”, reverting it back to poor-vs-rich “warfare.”
What is NOT class warfare is to ask why billionaires pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries. Suppose a secretary pays 20% (including payroll taxes) on $75,000 and takes home $60,000. Is it really “warfare” to ask that the vulture capitalist who earns $75 million pay 20% and take home only $60 million? I’d rather take home $60 million than be guillotined; YMMV. If the gibberish here about class warfare continues, I’m afraid I’ll start a thread asking SDMB math experts to confirm whether $60 million is larger or smaller than $60,000.
Yes, $70 million is more than $60 million; replacing the former number with the latter will have “consequences” regardless of how it’s spent. Even paying for hookers and blow Creates Jobs™. And if (heaven forbid!) the tax burden were shifted so that poor families could give their children nutritious breakfasts with money the rich would otherwise spend on Job Creation or Destruction, that might be “meaningful” for those children even if they don’t grow up to be Job Creators™ themselves.
Finally, what is definitely “class warfare” is the peculiar insistence by right-wingers that centrists want to tax the rich because they’re Evil. In future I ask that this claim not be made without a link to a Doper posting that Rich are Evil. I think the only search hits that will appear will come from right-wingers pretending that others make the claim. (Obviously we must except specific persons. One might claim the Koch Brothers are malicious without impugning all rich people.)
Sam Stone seems uncertain why centrists want to tax the rich. Is it because they’re Evil? Are we jealous of their hookers and blow? Is it that we don’t approve of tithing the Mormon Church?
The reason is much more mundane, I’m afraid, and is the same reason Willie Sutton gave for robbing banks! 
It’s because that’s where the money is.
To the right-winger who will show up soon, twist these words, and use them to demonstrate that septimus is waging class warfare: Please take a deep breath and apply common sense instead.
When the Mormon Temple needs a new roof, do they ask Milton Ramner for help, or Alice Q. Crackhead? When help is needed for earthquake damage in Bangladesh, is Uruguay expected to contribute as much aid as the U.S.A.? Google by yourself if you need a cite, start with “easier camel eye needle” if you wish.