Wow, it’s like walking down Tangent Street talking to you people.
No one is suggesting allowing anyone to starve to death. It isn’t even related to the topic. I’m talking about equal tax rates for everyone. Whatever we decide for the government to provide us must be paid for by all of us at the same rate.
To tax everyone at X% is fair. To tax everyone at X%, and then add 70% tax on income over Z dollars is unfair. We are not even talking about letting people starve or even the spending side. Class warfare is about the taking side.
So, if your position is that you and yours are the compassionate ones at the table, I’m sure you are all for taxing yourselves at the same rate as everyone else. No, we don’t find that at all. You are part of that group called progressives. See how much we care? We are so eager to spend someone else’s money to prove it. We are going to keep ours of course, though we really care a whole bunch about these starving people in America. People are dying from starvation because other people resist letting us rob and pillage them. See, they are just greedy. I can’t understand why they wouldn’t want to work for only 10% of what they earn…even though I’m not willing to do that either.
Does that stretch your definition of compassionate? To be willing to steal to accomplish your high morals, yet not willing to put in the same percentage as others…Or is this a shenanigan?
It’s simply not possible to run a government with a flat tax rate that doesn’t take a huge amount from the poor. You can’t find a perfect rate.
And hey, if you really want to be fair, shouldn’t it be a flat tax amount, i.e. everyone pays $500? That would really be “fair.” And regressive, and impossible.
So “class warfare” is just another word for “progressive tax structure” (as opposed to regressive, for clarity, since you use the word in a different sense above). Anything except a flat tax is class warfare.
Wow, you really are stretching the definition. I thought flat taxers were as rare – and as misguided – as flat earthers.
If you’re going to bring up an issue–compassion–that nobody else has brought up, just so you can recycle a poorly-thought-out Penn-and-Teller talking point, you kind of lose the moral high ground on the tangent issue. Just sayin’.
Since that’s a tangent, I’ll not address the issue of compassion (even though it operates according to a poor understanding of compassion). Instead I’ll point out that government redistribution makes sense even without needing to bring compassion into the picture. The market becomes freer and more vibrant as citizens in a culture are able to meet their basic needs without resorting to theft or other violent means.
You keep using the word “steal” as if to suggest it has some meaning outside of the law. It doesn’t. One chimpanzee can’t steal from another. The state of nature is that physical goods are dynamic in how they move around a society. That cow you own, you only own because I’m too frightened to take it from you; the moment I get hungrier or greedier than I am frightened, there’s a decent chance it becomes my cow.
The government comes in and says, “Mmmmbeeer currently owns that cow? Okay, let’s keep it that way. Anyone comes and tries to take it from him, we’ll call that ‘theft,’ and we’ll use our overwhelming force to punish that person. Y’all hear that? Cuz by telling you that, we’re using our overwhelming force to deter you from taking that cow.”
Calling taxes “theft” makes no more sense than calling imprisonment “kidnapping.”
You think taking 10% from someone who needs every penny to eat and pay the rent is the same as taking 10% from a billionaire whose good and housing costs are trivial in relation to his income? Equal tax rates are not necessarily fair.
As for letting people starve, if you put a cap on revenue, and you need more than that to keep people from starving, you are indeed letting people starve. We’re hearing plenty of “we can’t afford food stamps, or extending unemployment, or teachers or cops and firefighters because paying for it would involve raising taxes.”
Sneaky. You go from the rates in the 30s which was up for discussion to 70% above to 90% here. Typical right wing distortion.
Not being a greedy schmuck, I’m willing to pay more than others, because I am lucky enough to make a lot more money than I need to live. I sure as hell should pay a higher tax rate than my daughter and her husband who are just starting out. I think Mitt can afford to pay a lot more than I do without noticing it. It should be obvious that the incremental value of the next dollar of income is a lot less for Mitt (you remember his comment about the lecture fees) than for some guy working two jobs to support his kids.
You alleged that one can avoid paying taxes very simply by not using currency or any government services. This is not the case. You are obligated to pay taxes on barters. This is not subject to dispute - it is the law.
If only you had looked at what my claim was, you might have saved yourself some embarrassment. Here was my claim:
Is it your claim that the guy in question used no tax-dollar-supported services at all, or do you think that I was claiming people have never been audited for barter? If you think the latter, you’re not following the thread very well.
The overarching point is that folks need to pay taxes because they benefit from government services, including currency. You showed someone who, in one specific instance, didn’t use currency. That guy doesn’t even come close to disproving my claim.
Edit: it occurs to me that you might be showing Conservative Amnesia Syndrome, the same sort that leads to people forgetting W’s presidency, and may think that the thread can only be traced back to post 118. If that’s the case, I’ll remind you that history matters, and that post 118 ought to be read in the context of the larger thread, and was intended to be read in such a manner.
And I am clear on what the law is. There’s a reason for having the terms “de jure” and “de facto.”
This whole argument is ridiculous. Saying that taxes are optional because you can go crawl in a hole somewhere and avoid the government is silly. The point is that if you want to actually engage in civil society, you are forced to pay tax. And that’s not a bad thing. Everyone should pay their share for the public services they consume.
This is a far cry from saying that, since you’re a citizen, the government has the right to determine a ‘fair and equitable’ balance of income, and take your money away to give to someone else.
If you can’t see the difference between being taxed to pay for your share of the commons and other public goods, and being taxed simply because someone has decided that you’ve reached the point where you’ve just made enough money, and therefore your additional marginal income or a high percentage of it belongs to the state, then I don’t know what to say. It goes to the heart of what it means to be a citizen in a free country.
As for what class warfare is… come on. We all know what it is. It’s when you attack people based on their class for political gain. The Republicans did it when they attacked ‘welfare queens’. Liberals do it when they treat ‘the rich’ as being Gordon Gekko type heartless monsters. The Democrats are currently doing it to Romney, by attacking him for his tax returns, making specious claims about Bain Capital, etc.
It has nothing to do with tax rates - it has to do for the justification for those tax rates. If you justify higher rates on the rich by pigeonholing them as evil greedy fatcats making their living on the backs of the poor, then you’re engaging in class warfare. If you think that money left in the hands of the rich will be blown on fancy cigars and private jets, and that government bureaucrats could make better use of it, then you’re engaging in class warfare.
Likewise, if you justify raising taxes on the poor or cutting their services by depicting them as a bunch of lazy layabouts on drugs, then you’re engaging in class warfare as well. But in my experience, ‘class warfare’ is usually a tool employed by the left to demonize the wealthy to build political support for taking away more of their property.
If I don’t buy gas, my freedom to travel for both work and pleasure gets severely limited, so you can’t say nothing bad happens. But you’re missing the point I was making. Complaining that taxes are paid under threat of force implies that you ought to have the option of not paying for the benefits you get from living in the community. If you think that, then why shouldn’t we have the option of not paying for our food and gasoline? Roads and bridges and police forces cost money, just like oil refining and growing food.
:dubious: How do you determine what somebody’s “share” of commons and public goods is?
Clearly, an orderly society with effective property safeguards is a very fundamental public good. Rich people depend on that protection to a far greater extent than poor people, because they have much more property. So why wouldn’t rich people’s “share” be bigger?
In any case, we sure as hell don’t set tax policy on the basis of such silly rationales as “someone has decided that you’ve reached the point where you’ve just made enough money”.
Liberals and conservatives alike want all taxpayers to pay their fair share of the tax burden. They just happen to disagree on how big those shares should be for various income categories.
THe only reason it seems silly to you is because you apparently ascribe to the conservative religious doctrine of private property, believing it’s some sort of absolute right. It’s nothing of the sort, of course: private property is a government construct that’s very useful and efficient when deciding how to allocate resources without bloodshed. But it’s not a right. It’s simply a way for the government to figure out how to let people allocate goods without bloodshed. Taxes are another way to figure out that same issue.
It’s possible to have good or bad ways to allocate use of property. One bad way would be to allocate everything to everyone equally, since that would remove a lot of the incentive to be productive. Another bad way would be to allocate everything according to a private property ideal, since that would result in mass poverty and starvation.
We can certainly have a reasonable discussion of appropriate ways to allocate material goods, whether through private property constructs or via taxes. But talk about taxes equaling theft are not reasonable discussion: they’re empty rhetoric.
Because if we are to live together in society, we must give up some of our natural rights like killing, raping, and stealing, else the benefits that are gained from our close association are not worth it.
oh for christs sake.:rolleyes:
If you want to live in a civilized society with laws and roads and schools and whatnot, it has to be paid for. I don’t feel like dealving into the minutea of how governments, monetary systems and the overall economys work, but generally most modern societies function by the government taking a cut of the wealth generated by the private sector and using it to pay for public infrastructure and services. It is legitimized by the fact that we have created these electoral systems in which the people can choose who governs them and how. As opposed to say, some local strongman with a lot of well armed goons.
The whole issue of “class warfare” is not about some ridiculous argument about whether the government even has a right to tax you because god forbid some of that money might be used to keep some homeless people from starving in the streets. If you want to preach anarchy and claim the government has no right to tax you at all, go live an a Unibomber shack out in the woods.
I have nothing against honest capitalism. If you can invent a good product and convince everyone to buy it I have no problem with you buying a dozen Rolls-Royces. However, I don’t think you should be able to “buy” a senator.
The reason so many Americans are in need of assistance is that the underlying assets held by their municipalities and pension funds were stolen by a bunch of invertment bankers and hedge funds who stealthily replaced the real cash assets with financial instruments that were the functional equivalent of magic beans. These criminals remain unpunished…even our own liberal president shrugged it off with “hey, that’s what those guys do”. And because the mechanics of this scam were really really complicated most people don’t understand what happened and the believe it when they get the blame for everything because they ran up their credit card bills or were scammed into taking out a bad mortgage
And the rich don’t HAVE to make good products that people want to buy anymore. They can just get their pet senators and congressmen to pass a law requiring everyone to buy or use their product.
The best example comes from the pharmacuetical industry. The health care debate has been huge…but if there is a point that both sides “agree to agree” on it stays out of the public eye. The Medicare Act of 2003 stirred up a lot of controversy with its provision to prohibit Americans from buying their medicine from Canada. However there was another provision to that bill and that is the one that PROHIBITS the government as well as insurers getting Medicare business from negotiating prices with the pharm companies. That’s right, the pricing model for presciption drugs is " the drug companies will make up the most outrageous price they can and everyone will be forced to pay that price".
Yet time and again I will hear that a single payer system is good for healthcare costs because the government will be able to negotiate great deals on drugs…and both sides let this statement go unchalleged.
All this pork and government interference plays hell with the free market system that I actually believe in, yet when any law that might actually benefit the consumer comes around, these guys will claim it is a violation of free markets.
Well, that’s kinda the point of the OP–if you’re not screaming “Gummint has no right to tax,” then you’re a willing particpant in the rational discussion of how much do we choose to allocate of the revenue available for taxation, which is not “class warfare”–it’s a discussion about policy, and it’s a complete diversion to go around screaming that YOUR plan is “class warfare,” but MY plan is reasonable. It’s classic well-poisoning, and I’m surprised more people don’t just discredit it from the get-go. If you call “tax policy” class warfare, you’re an idiot and don’t get to sit with the big people.
Who claimed the government doesn’t have the right to tax?
For my part, refer to:
I’m not complaining that taxes are paid under threat of force, I’m stating it is a fact that they are paid under threat of force. To buy the gasoline or to not buy the gasoline holds no repurcussion from shell whichever way I choose. I do not argue that the cost of government should not be paid, but that it should be paid equally by all.
With particular attention to:
I do not argue that the cost of government should not be paid, but that it should be paid equally by all.
This will limit how much we tax ourselves. If we are debating how much to tax the other fellow, why the sky is the limit and you might even have a President advocate 100%, until the Supreme Court tells him that would be unconstitutional.
And how does e.g. the building of a fire station not strictly fit within the definition ? It involves a transfer of wealth from some individuals to others caused by a mechanism such as taxation (plus nationalization of the land the station will be built upon), doesn’t it ? And because taxation is progressive, some people get more of their wealth transferred than others for the same fire station, yes ?
Yes. YES ! That is *precisely *the point. Hence the phrase: “all taxation is inherently redistributive”. Glad the horse has finally decided to drink
That’s a terrible proposal, but that’s not the biggest problem with your posts: the biggest problem is the implication that progressive tax policies are class warfare, which is just downright ridiculous. Is Warren Buffet a Class Traitor?
