Bullshit. My income comes from my hours of labor and are being utliized by the state. There is no logical reason why a poor person cannot donate to society in the form of labor.
How you make your money is your business, whether it’s by digging ditches or sitting by the pool and getting residuals for your guest appearances in “My Mother, The Car” which are now being rerun on Nick at Night. The fact you didn’t lift a finger in 2008 to get those residuals means jack-all to the IRS.
You are being taxed on your income, not your hours of labor. Very cleverly, the Government has decided to call this form of revenue the “income tax.”
I’d be curious as to the times in our history, if any, that the Federal government accepted payments in kind for tax liabilities. Do you know?
You’re being disingenuous in your response. I earn my money by working. I pay taxes based on those efforts. You can’t answer the question as to why a poor person cannot support society with labor just as I do because the answer is they can. 5 or 10 hrs a week of labor is not much to ask for someone receiving welfare benefits.
Obama’s refundable tax credits apply only to those who work…
Is John McCain’s health care plan welfare too? Because it uses refundable tax credits as well.
Because it costs a lot to train them, give them benefits and supervise them. We had and still have the CCC, CityYear, and PeaceCorps, etc.
They had this idea with "welfare mothers’ where the idea was to have one mother in 4 give childcare to the others so they could work. Then they thought of the liability issues and “not so much”.
You must be in the wrong thread. We’re not talking about those who receive welfare. We’re talking about taxes.
I’m being completely accurate: taxes are about wages and income. You’re trying to make taxes about the hours someone works. That’s just absurd. Obviously, two people can work the same amount of hours and pay different amounts of taxes and be subject to a different tax rate.
Look, you gave it your best shot at sidetracking this debate, and you’ve failed. Taxes are about wealth, not work. Give it up.
As for your other point, I think it’s a stupid idea to require the poor to essentially get a second job to support the government. If the poor have the time and energy to put in additional labor, they would be better served by getting another job to earn more money to either alleviate or bring themselves out of poverty. Making the poor sweep streets because they can’t afford to pay taxes is just a dumb idea that doesn’t solve any problem whatsoever, other than maybe making some wealthy, greedy conservatives feel better that they can walk on clean streets without having to pay more in taxes to achieve their desired comfort.
This is a key thing Cliffy. I’m always amazed that the “don’t tax me/taxes are theft” crowd simply don’t realize that the alternative to taxes isn’t “no taxes”, it is “crowd of angry peasants putting your head on a stick and parading it through town.” (figuratively if not literally) It’s in the rich people’s own self-interest to keep the populace reasonably happy.
<hijack> I always read Cliffy’s posts in a Cliff Clavin voice. Makes them sound very authoritative)
If those figures reflected the reality, I would agree with you…everyone would be “rich”, Yay!
But that’s not what is happening, in the US and elsewhere. Instead, wages of the poor and middle class are stagnating or increasing at low rates and poverty is rising :
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/10/21/oecd.income.ap/index.html
This does not bode well for an economy like the US which relies so heavily on consumer confidence and spending to keep moving and growing, which is why this is extremely relevant in a discussion of tax and other economic policy.
Unless we, in the US and elsewhere, implement measures to reverse this trend or at least mitigate it, the consequences could be even more dire that what we’ve seen already.
Yeah, I think things got a little sidetracked. The point I had made earlier was that those on the very low end of the scale be given the option to “work-off” their taxes. I was not advocating them having what would amount to a second job. (Though some might welcome one if they could find it.) I was talking about someone working two weekends out of the year, or something like that. I really do believe it would be beneficial in more ways than one. I’m not understanding why the idea is met with such hostility. WHY is it a “dumb idea”? And those clean streets would likely be in the areas where the poor live, improving the streets for those in his neighborhood, or similar ones. Why does this make conservatives greedy. For me it’s not about money. It’s about giving/allowing everyone to pull on an oar for a while. I find such fervent resistance to even discussing this idea exceedingly odd. Perhaps you can it explain it.
I think I see what you’re driving at: you’re saying that every able-bodied member of society should make some net-positive contribution to the government. If their incomes are so low that they don’t pay any net-positive taxes—and especially if their tax burden is net-negative—then they should have to put in some volunteer work instead.
This has a specious appearance of fairness: hey, everybody who is able to work should contribute something! If they can’t afford to chip in some money like I do, then let them chip in a little extra labor! Sounds reasonable, no?
But when you look at it closely, it doesn’t really make any sense. Who would organize and implement plans for volunteer work for the more than one-fifth of working American taxpayers who have a net-negative tax burden? How much would such a program cost? Would the value of the resulting contributed labor be anywhere close to enough to offset the overhead costs of the program? Is there any real point to instituting something like this, given that the working poor already hold jobs?
Yes.
If we’re paying someone to maintain a park or other civic endeavor then we can pay the same person to train and monitor similar jobs. There is no increase in cost, just an increase in available labor. The labor of 1/5th of the population gets a lot of work done even at a few hours a week. I would love my alley cleaned after the garbage truck flings crap everywhere.
Who is in the wrong thread? The title is Obama’s Tax “Cut” for non tax payers and the premise is idea that refunding tax money to someone who isn’t paying taxes is actually welfare.
Let me say this first: saying the poor should work 5 or 10 hours a week is a dumb idea, which wasn’t yours. First, this bizarre policy relies upon the fiction that there are significant numbers of poor people out there who do absolutely nothing but sit on their ass all day and receive a nice sized government handout.
Second, as I said before, I think any time that the poor may have would be better suited to getting themselves out of poverty rather than paying back an imagined debt to society or the government.
Your idea is much more reasonable, and I think I agree with you on the benefits of volunteerism.
But there is something which strikes me unfair in accepting that the well-off can write a check to satisfy their societal obligations, but the poor are looked upon as a source of physical labor. It reminds me of the stories about the draft in the Civil War, where wealthy people could get out of physical danger by paying a poor person to take their slot in uniform.
Regardless of that ill-explained feeling of unfairness, I’m entirely comfortable with the concept of taxation, but I’m not as comfortable with the concept of the government requiring labor – even for positive ends – of people who have done nothing wrong. I would have to say that compulsory labor would likely make people more pissed off at the government than feel part of their community, and as others have commented, the last thing we need are peasants with pitchforks and torches – metaphorically speaking.
In summary, I think the idea of getting people to pitch in to their community for a couple weekends a year is a great idea, I just don’t think coercing them to do it is a smart move.
Poor people pay payroll taxes. Tax credits aren’t welfare. This was all covered a long time ago.
:dubious: You think there’s no more time and labor involved in organizing, training, supervising and documenting the labor of dozens of part-time workers than in doing an ordinary unskilled maintenance job? I think you’re being way too sanguine about this.
If no civic employee cleans your alley now, how do you figure a “labor tax” program would be able to keep your alley clean at zero additional cost?
Wow! You convinced me! You must have gone to business school!
I believe it was John Maynard Keynes who said that if one man can dig a ditch in one hour, then sixty men can dig the same ditch in one minute. Your astute argument in this thread have finally proved Dr. Keynes correct. I’m sure he will send his gratitude from the Great Beyond.
So, Magiver, to get down to brass tacks, is your proposal that we completely eliminate the negative income tax for all low earners? As in, the average low income worker should have their tax rates go up by about 2 to 5 percent?
I understand that. The mechanics of the system aren’t lost on me, but the general idea was that these things are not government handouts. The individual pays for them, and then when it is time to retire, they receive a stipend based on the amount that was paid in.
If I make $50k/yr and pay FICA taxes, then I will get a bigger check on retirement then if I made $20k/yr and paid FICA taxes on that. If the working poor are “refunded” money to the point that they don’t pay FICA taxes, then their social security becomes a form of welfare, no?
I’m just trying to understand this. If the IRS withholds $1000 from your paycheck, and they send you a $5000 “refund” at the end of the year, that is not a tax cut. And I don’t understand how anyone can call it anything but welfare. The government paid you a net $4000.
Now Obama comes along and wants to pay you $4500, and he calls this a “tax cut”. I don’t buy it. Am I making mortgage payments to the bank, or are they making “net negative” payments to me?
When a mortage payment increases in an option ARM, can the bank say that it is simply a “bank expense cut”? (since more money flows to them from you)?
It is a torturous use of the English language, and shouldn’t be allowed alongside waterboarding…
Is there a tremendous of amount of training involved pickup up trash or mowing park land? I mean, in the distressed parts of town they organize voluntary cleanup crews to do just that now. Are you suggesting that there are more people than jobs that require 5 minutes of training? One person who use to cut the grass becomes the teacher of a group of people to do similar tasks.
At what point in this conversation did I suggest this?
If the tax credit exceeds the tax paid then it’s welfare.
Isn’t this kind of a wacky and potentially confusing use of tax language, though?
I mean, according to your argument, if I’m busting my hard-working low-income ass at my above-minimum-wage housekeeping job so that my income is just barely high enough for me to pay a small amount of net-positive income tax, I’m not on welfare. But if next year I lose that job and have to take another one that pays less, and my income becomes just barely low enough for me to receive a small net-negative tax credit, then all of a sudden I am on welfare!
What happened? I’m still just as much a hard-working fully-employed wage-earner, and the difference in my net income is trivial, but all of a sudden you’re telling me I’m a welfare recipient!
Does that really make sense? Does it really correspond to the way we’ve traditionally used the term “welfare”? Being “on welfare” conventionally means that someone is supported by the government instead of working. Do we really want to attach that stigma to low-income people who are working, just because their earned income happens to fall below a certain threshold? Do you think you’re going to appeal to a lot of voters by stigmatizing hard-working wage-earners as “welfare recipients”?