Mrs. Lutton’s article is the usual class warrior nonsense with no attempt to present both sides of the argument. Paul Krugman, Barbara Emerich and the Citizens for Tax Justice all have the same anti-tax argument and liberal bias. It might be nice to hear a conservative perspective and let readers decide but that is not in her agenda.
Angry that you did not “get” your slice of the pie Mrs Lutton? Well you already received the Earned Income Tax Credit, Section 8 housing (your “subsidized” apartment) and Kid Care. Sorry, I guess the rest of us should pick up your tax refund that you didn’t earn.
Can you believe Dick Cheney made 36 million last year? Typical Republican!One might want to remember However that he also paid 14 million dollars in federal taxes. Such tax payers should not only get a refund but a medal from the IRS. Someone has to pay for all those social programs Mrs. Lutton has enjoyed
brent:Mrs. Lutton’s article is the usual class warrior nonsense with no attempt to present both sides of the argument.
Welcome to the Straight Dope, brent, but it might be useful to you to know that around here it is customary for an OP (“original poster”, the initiator of a thread) to give his/her readers some vestige of a clue as to what he/she is talking about. E.g., it would be nice to get a link to or summary of the article that you mention, which you seem to expect we know all about.
Paul Krugman, Barbara Emerich and the Citizens for Tax Justice all have the same anti-tax argument and liberal bias.
(It’s also customary for the OP to do a little proofreading before posting.) Do you mean “pro-tax argument”? We liberals are not generally known for the vehemence of our anti-tax stance, especially the Citizens for Tax Justice, not to mention me.
*Sorry, I guess the rest of us should pick up your tax refund that you didn’t earn. *
Home-baked brownies on offer for anyone who can explain to me what this sentence was intended to mean.
Can you believe Dick Cheney made 36 million last year? Typical Republican! One might want to remember However that he also paid 14 million dollars in federal taxes. Such tax payers should not only get a refund but a medal from the IRS.
A medal? How come? Considering that that still leaves him a multimillion-dollar income after taxes, I can’t say that it sounds like all that much of a sacrifice. If there are any medals to be given out for the extremely commonplace achievement of paying one’s federal taxes, I’d rather see them go to the taxpayers who are actually struggling to maintain themselves in the necessities of life. Actually, bag the medals, if we’re giving those taxpayers something, I’d like it to be something genuinely useful like better shelter or health care or a living wage.
Someone has to pay for all those social programs Mrs. Lutton has enjoyed.
I couldn’t agree more. And IMHO the people who should do the most of the paying are the wealthiest ones, like Cheney, who can best afford it.
To say that the wealthy should pay more doesn’t contradict the idea that they deserve a medal. E.g., the most fit young men and women should serve in the armed forces in case of war, and they deserve our gratitude for doing so.
If Dick Cheney had spent his life beach-combing, there would be less tax money available for socdial programs.
december:If Dick Cheney had spent his life beach-combing, there would be less tax money available for [social] programs.
Maybe, maybe not. A great deal of tax money has gone into government subsidies for the industries from which Cheney makes the bulk of his income, so I’m not sure, if you factor in his share of that and other tax advantages, that he still comes out as a net contributor to the revenue system.
using my handy reactionary/English English/reactionary translator, I believe what was intended by that quote was:
The OP assumed that Ms. Lutton was a recipiant of such programs as AFDC, and housing subsidies (perhaps it’s true, we don’t have a link to the original column.), and not a tax payer.
The OP also assumes that Ms. Lutton is complaining about not getting one of the Bush directed tax refund checks this summer (tangential thought - my understanding is that what this represents is not a refund in the classic sense, but an advance on my assumed refund for this years taxes, which would then reduce what my refund would -have-been after filing in January).
Therefore: the ‘rest of us’ (ie good tax payers), should pick up “your” (Ms. Lutton’s reference to ‘her’ refund is used, I think in an ironic way, she claims it, but according to the government she isn’t getting one and according to the OP, she didn’t ‘earn’ it.), tax refund ‘that you didn’t earn’ (the OP didn’t trust us to see the ‘irony’ in her statement about ‘her’ tax refund, so made the specific reference here).
Of course, this thinking relies on looking only at amounts paid by a person into the category of ‘federal taxes paid’ and comparing it to only the ‘amount of direct personal subsidy given by the government’.
In our society, the term ‘tax payer’ can legitimately be used for damn near every adult - anyone who makes purchases pays some tax, anyone who has a phone pays some tax etc.
And, as Kimstu points out, the idea of some one being the recipient of tax payer benefits, that category actually encompasses quite a bit more than simply those receiving food stamps for example.
Kmistu, when you “give” people things in our society you take away from others as well. Want to “give” people a living wage well increase the minimum wage. But you will throw many people out of work by doing so. Want to “give” people better shelter and health care. Our health care system is the best in the world. Get hurt in Sweeden and be prepared to wait 12 hours for treatment. Our we could just tax food and clothing to make up for the cost of more subsidized housing. There is a trade off for everything.
Liberals screeming for the downtrodden in the United States should remember that the poorest 10 percent of Americans Have a better standard of living than two thirds of the earths population. (according to the world bank)
Our free market system focused on individual responsibility works rather well.
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*Originally posted by brent * Kmistu, when you “give” people things in our society you take away from others as well. Want to “give” people a living wage well increase the minimum wage. But you will throw many people out of work by doing so.
Isn’t this the same thing that gets said every time the minimum wage is raised?
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I’ll give you a definate maybe.
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You’re kidding, right? Our medical care may be top-notch, but the beaurcracy involved is hardly the best.
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Cite please?
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We could, but then we’d have to restructure the entire IRS so that certain money goes to certain things, which might not be a bad idea, but what do I know?
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Agreed.
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True for the most part, but not very helpful to your arguments.
brent: *when you “give” people things in our society you take away from others as well. *
It’s not always that simple. Government investment in things like education, public health, infrastructure, and so forth, that might seem to be “giveaways” to people who couldn’t afford to bear the whole cost of obtaining them on their own, actually tend to increase economic growth for everybody.
Want to “give” people a living wage well increase the minimum wage. But you will throw many people out of work by doing so.
A common shibboleth, but you will have difficulty supporting it with actual data. As this Health and Human Services report comments,
So it is far from clear that raising the minimum wage really does “throw many people out of work,” intuitive as that may seem to you. After all, we last raised the minimum wage in 1997, and unemployment remained at record lows. Mind you, there are certainly tradeoffs involved in mandating a higher minimum wage, and raising it to the level of a “living wage”, which would entail nearly doubling it, would almost certainly have drastic effects. But the results are by no means as simple and obvious as you seem to think.
Want to “give” people better shelter and health care.
(By the way, remember that I brought this up simply as a hypothetical contrast with your somewhat pointless suggestion about awarding people medals for paying their taxes. If you really want to hijack your own thread to a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of various levels of the “social wage”, though, I’m happy to join you. But I should remind you, for the sake of the readers (me among them) who may still be wondering what exactly the OP is discussing, that you still haven’t furnished any more information about this alleged “Linda Lutton article” that you started off ranting about.)
Our health care system is the best in the world.
Why yes, for those who can afford good coverage and treatment plans, it probably is. Considering our comparatively high rates of afflictions like infant mortality and deficiency diseases, though, as well as the fact that over 41 million Americans have no health care coverage at all, it seems a little optimistic to say that the system as a whole is “the best in the world”. I quote from this AMA report:
Get hurt in Sweeden and be prepared to wait 12 hours for treatment.
Well, I know people who’ve waited 12 hours in American emergency rooms, too. Many American health care consumers have to deal with all the disadvantages of socialized medicine while not reaping any of its benefits.
*Liberals screeming for the downtrodden in the United States should remember that the poorest 10 percent of Americans Have a better standard of living than two thirds of the earths population. (according to the world bank) *
Nearly half of those two-thirds live in what is defined as “extreme poverty”, subsistence on the equivalent of less than $1 per day. Most of them don’t have access to sanitation services, and about a quarter don’t have clean drinking water. Even the best-off of that two-thirds have a standard of living far below what we’d consider acceptable for ourselves. Are we really supposed to be greatly impressed that the poorest people in the richest country on the planet are better off than that?
Our free market system focused on individual responsibility works rather well.
Wrong: our mixed system combining free markets and centralized planning and regulation, focused on fairness and social capital as well as on individual responsibility, works rather well. Let’s not go arbitrarily awarding all the credit to one part of the system. There is no evidence that a pure “free market system” would work any better, and there are a lot of reasons to think that it would in fact be much worse.
Actually, re-reading the OP, it’s clear that Ms. Lutton is indeed a card carrying tax payer (otherwise she’d not have gotten the ‘kid credit’ which allows a tax payer to credit a small part of what we’ve already paid in child care costs annually, towards our taxes, and she’d not been eligible either for the Earned Income Tax Credit)
-generalizations like “you liberals” and the like do not go over very well around here. Nor do straw men arguments. If you make such statmens about the 10 percent of americans and health care in Sweden-you sure as HELL better be prepared to back them up with sites.
Yes yes so sorry. The article is titled "Congratulations! You Lose! Bush’s Tax Refund Checks Are On The Way. Don’t Get Too Excited. Author Linda Lutton.
It says among other things that a $1 rise in the minimum wage will further reduce teenage employment by between 145,00 and 436,000 jobs.
Does that AMA report point to a country the United States might model their health care system after? I doubt it. If you want to increase lines at health care facilities just socialize health care. You might want to ask people in the former Soviet Union and Easter Europe about this however. They might not have a glowing report.
Of cource any capitalistic society must have some type of central planning and regulation to work.(what is social capital) I still believe that our system works because America has less central planning and regulation than most countries. It might help explain we no longer live on $1 a day.
ARGH!!!
I would think it would more explain why we have such a great wide gulf between rich and poor? Or the exploitation of workers in third world countries by American businesses?
One of my professors is an expert on American policy in Latin America.
It could be both. A free enterprise system will produce much greater total wealth than a controlled economy, but it will allow the more productive workers and entrepreneurs to become far richer than the lazy and ineffectual ones.
Kimstu, as you say, “…Moreover, other studies have concluded that minimum wages have no effect or a positive effect on employment.” I’ve read the details on one of these studies involving fast food workers, and it was sickening. The methodology was preposterous. Unfortunately, the whore-economists who conducted that study were treated very well indeed by groups who liked their result – labor, in, particular.
The concept that an increase in minimum wage will reduce employment is an application of the Law of Supply and Demand – the most fundamental tenet of economics.
IIRC serious studies have shown that the minimum wage is low enough that if affects relatively few workers. So, today’s minimum wage law has a limited impact both pro and con. The one group harmed is certain teen-agers and other entry-level workers, particularly Blacks.
If an increase in the minimum wage does not cause a drop in unemployment, it’s for one reason - because the effective minimum wage is already higher than the new mandatory minimum. In which case the minimum wage law is irrelevant.
Unless, of course, the economy tanks. Then, minimum wage laws strip employers from having the ability to lower wages to match the lower productivity of their workers. When that happens, you wind up with massive unemployment.
Thus, a minimum wage law can do two things - it can cause direct unemployment, while increasing the wages of some workers ‘on the margin’. Or, it can have no effect at all.
But regardless of what positive effects it has, it does one other thing every time - it makes the economy much more brittle and unstable in times of economic decline. We’ve had such susstained growth for so long that people have forgotten what it’s like to actually have a serious contraction. But if one happens, worker productivity falls. If the productivity of a worker falls below the wage he earns, the employer either has to lower his wage or fire him. If he can lower the wage, at least that person stays employed and off social assistance. If the government won’t let him, you have a problem.
I think both december and sam stone give thoughtful, reasoned analysis. You explain it better than I could.
Guinastasia, you should ask your professor how those workers in South America would make a living if those evil American corporations packed up and left. One dollar a day is better than no dollar a day.
