I’m going with yes here.
CMC fnord!
'Course since I’m poor I’d gladly pay a 90% tax on a million dollars. Hell, if anyone’s interested in giving me a million dollars (or any amount of money) I’ll gladly give you 90% of it right back!
Would you play a roulette wheel in Vegas if 36 out of 38 of the numbers were 0? Go ahead, make your bet on black - after all, you’re losing money on the proposition anyway, what does it matter how we tweak the odds?
Do you understand how lotteries work? A set amount of numbers are drawn. You’ve got 1 in X odds to win regardless of how many people play. Now a greater number of people means a greater chance for a split, but that’s not really the point you were getting at.
Besides which, how do you think lotteries generate their jackpots? If people aren’t playing, no one will care to enter for their 1 in 150,000,000 chance (or whatever) of scoring the big prize of $20,000.
What’s the use of this step?
This is a pretty weak parody thread. Oh noes, tax money going to educate the plebians? FETCH MY MONOCLE AND SCHEDULE ME THE SENATOR!
If your goal here is to say “see lol taxes discourage working/lottery playing!!! gotcha!”, do you really think playing the lottery and working for pay carry the same motivations and incentives? That they’re so similar that we can model them the same way?
I don’t think that’s exactly what he’s getting at in this thread. 
-XT
Can you explain what he is getting at? Cause I can’t find anything that’s an earnest attempt at a debate, or even a remotely insightful bit of parody.
Post #9.
Do it up! I have already decided that when I win the lottery (please let it be tomorrow!) I’m going to pay the taxes without pitching a fit, including gift taxes when I share it with the fam.
Maybe you are trying to make an anti-tax point, but I’m completely fine with this proposal. I do like Bosstone’s suggestion to make the after-tax amount known. You can put the big amount on all the billboards, just as long as the ticket itself shows the tax rate and the estimated after-tax take, in the same size print as the jackpot.
Also pretty much ok with taxing casino and gambling winnings like this.
Well, I wouldn’t, but I also understand risk.
Are you suggesting that if we reduce the potential payout people will be less likely to take risk?
Not sure, but I think it’s to punish people for acquiring unearned/stolen wealth.
Isn’t this the opposite of what you said at the beginning of your post?
[QUOTE=SB]
Can you explain what he is getting at? Cause I can’t find anything that’s an earnest attempt at a debate, or even a remotely insightful bit of parody.
[/QUOTE]
Sure. The heart of it, IMHO, was in this exchange:
[QUOTE=Fear Itself]
People would stop buying lottery tickets.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=emacknight]
Why would they stop playing? They still get plenty of unearned money.
[/QUOTE]
IOW, emacknight is saying it would be a good idea to tax lottery winnings at 90% (as a theoretical question geared towards risk/reward calculations), and Fear is pointing out that if they did that fewer people would play…or, perhaps no one would play anymore and the game system would collapse. Yet, emacknight says why would that be, since the folks who win would still get something, even if it was much less than they get now.
So, would people still play, even though their risk/reward calculations have changed so much? That’s the debate, IMHO. It’s an interesting question, though people seem to be taking it badly since it’s fairly obvious where this is all going.
JMH interpretation, any resemblance to reality may be complete coincidence…
-XT
Also, as a tangential point, I personally am against advertising pre-tax numbers. I’ve often thought about what I would do if I ran a business; if it was a store, I would include tax in the listed prices. If a book was listed on the shelf as $7.50, it would ring up at the register as $7.50, not $7.86. If I hired employees and told them they’d be making $10 an hour, their actual salary would be calculated taking all withheld taxes into account, so they’d really be earning $13.16 but take home $10.
So yeah, I see nothing wrong with advertising the lottery at post-tax numbers.
I think it’s more a case that he assumes everyone’s political beliefs are as impractical as his are.
Sure, chance of success and payout of return all factor into the expected value of a risk.
Now I’m on board. Surely if the top tax bracket were 36% instead of 33%, no one would take the awful risk of having a job.
Uh, ok. Well go ahead and keep trying to make points that you’re “not sure” what the message is. It’s working out great so far.
No. The idea of having a job and earning a living doesn’t trigger the same decision cycle someone would have when buying a lottery ticket. So even if you were to prove your case that a 90% tax on lottery earnings kills the incentive to play the lottery, it’s a silly simplistic message to say “SEE LOLOL GOTCHA!!!”
You’re also engaging in absurd hyperbole. “Can we raise the top marginal tax rates from 33% to 36% where they were?” “BUT IF THE TAX RATE WAS 90% NO ONE WOULD BOTHER TO WORK!!! SO NO!!!”
For what it’s worth his views on liberals are equally wrong.
If you don’t want to be accused of that, stop doing it
Mockery threads don’t really belong in Great Debates.
[QUOTE=SenorBeef]
You’re also engaging in absurd hyperbole. “Can we raise the top marginal tax rates from 33% to 36% where they were?” “BUT IF THE TAX RATE WAS 90% NO ONE WOULD BOTHER TO WORK!!! SO NO!!!”
[/QUOTE]
See, you DID get it. 
The thing is, that people aren’t suddenly going to say ‘The tax rate is too high…I’m not going to bother to work!’ when it reaches some arbitrary number like 90%. Instead, you will get people either working less hard or getting out of business, or finding other ways to get compensation besides salaries. With the lottery you are going to get a fall off in participation, but probably not what Fear Itself said about no one buying tickets at all unless you go to 100%. What it will mean is that you’ll have less and less people participating in the game as you increase the amount taxed, which means that the rewards will also go down (less participants mean less prizes…and less resources going to the state and local governments running the games of course), which will further drop the number of folks playing, which will lower the prizes more, etc etc.
The same can be said about taxes. It’s a sliding scale, and moving it at all is going to have some effect on the system as a whole…moving it a little will have a little effect, moving it a lot will have a greater effect.
-XT
How about we make the lottery winnings the cost of the ticket +$1. Everybody would still play right? Why would you turn down free money?!
Seriously, that argument is… something that would get me a warning.
Are you saying that taxing an addition unearned million at 90% would be confiscatory? How low should the tax rate be on an addition million dollars be so that it’s not?
The assumption that seems implicit in such an argument is that it’s a linear relationship; that increasing the tax rate by 60% is simply 20x the effect of increasing it by 3%. There’s zero guarantee that’s the case.
If the tax on an addition $1million was raised to 90%, would people be less likely to take risk?
And if they are less likely to take risk, is there a potential downside?
Lastly, can we offset that potential downside by transferring wealth to a group that wasn’t able to take risk in the first place?
The problem with your thinly veiled analogy is you assume poor people and rich people value money the same way. Poor people, having so much less of it, notice the loss of a dollar more than a rich person, who uses them to light cigars. Poor people know the difference between $200 and $200,000, whereas to Fatty McBigbux, that is just what slides unnoticed off the pile of cash he sleeps on.
On the other hand, rich people work harder than poor people, and if there is one thing they will work like beavers to avoid, it is becoming poor. The higher we raise taxes, the harder they work to make up the difference; it is in their nature. The point of diminishing returns is around 97%, where even their industrious little hearts burst from the effort to keep up, so we back off the top marginal rate to 90%, and they happily run on their little wheels, generating fat cash for socialist programs, plus enough to keep themselves in mansions and yachts. It really is a win-win.
Pay your taxes. You work for us now.