A nice goal. In this world the rich have access to the best lawyers, while the poor get Legal Aid if they are lucky. If they are really lucky they get lawyers who don’t fall asleep during their murder trials. So we don’t quite have that yet.
An important part of equality of opportunity is access to education. We are getting further from this as the cost of public colleges increases due to lack of support from the states. It is obviously easier to amass capital if you are in the caste of children of rich people. So you can borrow from your parents, as Mitt said. So we don’t have this either.
And here is the strawman. Adding a few percentage points to the tax rates of the highest bracket is not nearly the same as demanding equality of outcomes. In fact, this money can be used to fund the access to legal help and education that would provide true equality in the two cases you mention. The the right is so dead set against this shows they really don’t care about any kind of equality.
As for “enemies” - people don’t hate the rich who they feel earned it. Bill Gates is a popular hero. So was Steve Jobs. Not so well liked are bankers who nearly destroyed the financial system and still got big bonuses, CEOs who lay off tons of people to save money but get big raises, and guys like the CEO of our gas company who presided over a dysfunctional system which led to a neighborhood blowing up, spend money meant for pipeline upgrades to improve the bottom, and got fired with an over $30 million parting gift.
I definitely agree with you about the tax breaks. The socioeconomic class called “the rich” get a hell of a lot more tax breaks than the rest of us, and shown by their relatively low tax rate.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a lot happier working and paying taxes to support those without (and having plenty left over for me) than I would be collecting that check which sure as hell isn’t big enough to have much fun on. If I were rich I’d suspect I’d never really notice the tax bite we have now, unless my name was Scrooge McDuck.
As for affirmative action, that was designed to make up for 100 years of minorities getting excluded from jobs and advancement. Real affirmative action is reaching out to those you excluded before, either directly or subtly. When I went to MIT there were about 16% women. Now there is over 50%. Did women get smarter all of a sudden? I think not, they went out and tried to recruit. (And judging from the resumes I get the average student today is a lot smarter than we were.) Affirmative action, done right, increases your candidate pool and gives you better people.
Thing is, every dollar that remains in the pocket of a rich person (or a poor person, but more remain in the pocket of a rich person) remains there with the threat of force, too. When we use state force to make property ownership static instead of its natural state of flowing to the most bloodthirsty person, we’re doing something unnatural (but wise). When we use that same state force to redistribute property, what we’re doing is no more unnatural than when we use it to protect property ownership. In both cases, the state’s force is violating the natural dynamic of wealth.
It depends what you mean by “class”. We certainly do have different socioeconomic strata in this country. That is not the same as a fixed “class” society. Derek Jeter is in the top 1% of wealthy individuals. He was not, however, born into the New York Yankees.
What is “wrong” with “class warfare” is that it presumes that people are stuck in whatever lot in life they are born into. The perception is that wealth isn’t “earned”. It’s just inhereted or arbitrarily bestowed upon a chosen few.
Those who don’t have wealth, instead of trying to better themselves through education, innovation and entrepreneurship, feel justified in seeking out ways to rob, swindle or legislate wealth from those who have it
And those who have wealth spend an increasing amount on security and detaching themselves from the rest of society.
Just thought I’d repeat my questions to Sam Stone, in case he feels like being more responsive than any other Stone.
My response to his points is that we will someday have to see how much he believes, or other right-wingers believe (since both **Sam **and I and all may have departed this earth), in democracy.
I say this because when we discuss tax policy, and redistribution of wealth, and even confiscation of wealth, as he would have it, we are merely discussing details. Tax is inherently redistributative, and if the masses ever acquire self-awareness, we could see a day when Americans freely vote to have tax rates that will make the Sam Stones of this world beg tearfully for another leader like Barack Obama. Nowhere in the Constiitution is it written that the top tax rate should be 35% for the wealthy, or 40% for the middle-class, or anything of the kind–my question is how loyal the Sam Stones of the future will be to the U.S. when that day comes. I suspect (and I know that Sam is a Canadian citizen) that his patriotism ends on the day that he learns he has been outvoted.
This is a really important point I think. We protect property rights in the US, that benefits the wealthy WAAAY more disproportionately than it does the poor, because the wealthy have so much more to lose.
Taxation isn’t redistributive. It is a collection procedure. There is nothing redistributive about taking money from your citizens. The redistribution part is when the government starts giving it back out to certain groups, which they are not authorized to do.
Someone way back when (who I don’t feel like looking up) said “a democracy can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.” This is why democracy was not chosen by our founders.
That would not surprise me. Wealth is strongly tied to employment which is strongly tied to education. And higher education has become extremely expensive in this country. Needing to come up with over $100,000 to get a chance at a $70,000 a year job is a very real class barrier.
But there is the second you spend that money on anything. Roads, army, firefighters or corn subsidies, it doesn’t really matter : public spending always benefits one chunk of the population more than one other.
So, unless you’re arguing that your founders envisioned a blessedly simple tax system where money would be dutifully collected from citizens then promptly dumped down the Marianas Trench* ; then your axioms are pretty much self-defeating.
which, incidentally, would still be redistributive in that it would prop up the currently ailing ferrying-large-amounts-of-currency-by-ship industry.
And it also means that democracy works best under a dictatorship where the poor don’t get to oppress the rich with their demands. Must be true - look at the high turn out in the Communist countries, and how damn popular their leaders were!
Though what I said also implies that democracy was safe before they invented TV.
High per capita GDP probably makes the guy working two jobs and hoping he doesn’t get sick because he has no health insurance feel great.
Denmark is not far behind us - but when I was in Copenhagen earlier this summer I saw no pan handlers, no poverty, no dirt, and no one worrying about doctor bills. My daughters’ German boyfriend, who is not exactly rich, finished university and a Masters program in business with no college debt. I think the distribution of this wealth has something to do with quality of life. You think the average person in Qatar has it better than us?
If not from the government, then from your neighbours who pay their taxes and will resent you if you don’t pay yours. Being social animals and living in communities brings certain shared responsibilities.
And to put it as melodramatically as you did, every dollar extracted from you by private enterprise is done under the threat of force, too. Try shopping for groceries or filling your gas tank without paying for it.
The average American person has higher income and consumes 33% more than the average Danish person. Overall, Americans have a higher standard of living.
