I voted for Obama, and was going to vote for Obama before the comment was made public, and I think the comment was false, clueless, and tone-deaf.
Having established that, I do think it would be better if more low-income people paid federal income tax, even if it’s not much.
If you don’t pay a particular tax, you have no concern how high it goes on the people who do pay it.
I don’t think it would matter because:
If you take more money from low-income people, you’ll end up having to give it back in some sort of assistance.
Marginal rates are easy to raise at the high end without affecting anyone but the well off. (By “easy” I mean mathematically, not politically.)
Having said that, I do agree that there is something not right about people voting for taxes they don’t have to pay, but other people do. Not sure there is a good solution to that, though. Maybe it’s just something we have to accept about democracy.
True that. Why exactly are 47% of Americans exempt from income tax? I get that they don’t make a lot of money, but like another poster said, everyone should have some skin in the game.
Because they’re too poor. Everyone gets a standard deduction, which is meant to give you the ability to pay some basic living expenses with pre-tax money, the same way you get to pay for health insurance or retirement funds or a lot of other things with pre-tax money. If you don’t make enough income to exceed your deductions, then you can’t be taxed on it.
However, poor people are disproportionately affected by payroll and other regressive taxes, so their percentage of taxes paid from income, if not from the income tax itself, is still quite high.
Besides, if we were to raise tax rates on the top marginal bracket, the guy making $15,000 a year isn’t going has no more skin in the game if he pays $0 in income tax or $2000. It’s not affecting his bracket.
The idea that the a major problem with this country is that so many people are so poor that they can’t manage to pay taxes, and the solution to that is to tax them anyway, is a bizarre, evil construction of fox news and their allies. It should be the fact that they’re too poor to be able to pay taxes that’s the concerning part, not that they’re not taxed enough.
Of people who don’t pay Federal Income Tax, 22% are retirees. 60% are working and just don’t make enough, but still pay their federal payroll taxes, state taxes, and local taxes. Only 8% of Americans don’t pay any federal tax at all in a given year
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/18/who-doesnt-pay-taxes-in-charts/
They don’t pay federal taxes because greedy fucking assholes like Mittens don’t want to pay them enough money so they can pay federal taxes. People like Romney make their money by helping to push down wages as low as they think they can get away with. Then they have to nerve to whine that their underpaid peons are not paying their fair share.
The lucky duckies arguments is bad enough. Coming from someone like Mitt with more money than he will ever need it was one of the stupidest possible things he could have said.
I’m not sure why this is hard to understand.
It is certainly closer to the weasel words you are using to pretend that you were making a different claim.
As here you are making a claim without basis. One did not need wealth to avoid the draft, just enough interest in an education to go to college. At that time, one could get into a reasonably decent school for $800 a semester and government backed loans were available. By putting the word convictions in quotation marks and pretending that wealth had any bearing on the topic, you reveal your actual claim about his “avoiding” the draft, regardless of any semantic games you wish to play.
And pretending that you are “not” accusing him of “dodging” the draft when you then go on to call him a chicken hawk is the height of ridiculousness.
A distinction without a difference. You want to be able to call Romney names and insult him, but you object to anyone else’s perfectly acceptable translation of your terms, then you insist on asserting motivations of which you have no knowledge and supporting them with claims that are inaccurate.
I am utterly unimpressed with Romney’s lip-service support for a war that he failed to support materially, but your claim that he used special means to avoid service is simply not accurate and objecting to Marley pointing out that you do not know his real motivation is silly. College deferments were common and he was in college before the draft ramped up to feed the meatgrinder. Similarly, all the evidence about his mission indicates that he took it very seriously. His single recorded counter-protest favoring the war occurred during a sit-in at his campus at a time (May, 1966) when the anti-war movement was, itself, just beginning to get going and was not always even that popular among college students.
This thread discusses his current lack of respect for those who are not wealthy. You attempted to show that his lack of respect extends back to his teen years, but you have attributed to him beliefs that are not present in the record and relied on claims that are not factually supported.
The following point is a further example:
Utter nonsense.
The first draft was held in December, 1969. There were modest reductions in U.S. troop levels from 1969 through 1971, mostly corresponding to the increase in South Vietnamese troop levels, but the “winding down” did not occur until 1972.
Hate him as much as you wish, but try to get your facts straight.
Incidentally the article I referenced points out the following:
We don’t even know how much skin he has in the game anyway as he refused to release many of his tax returns.
Yes.
Being a chicken hawk has nothing to do with dodging the draft. What are you talking about?
Rush Limbaugh is a chicken hawk and supposedly he was not draftable because of health problems.
Where are language and the meanings of words decided around here?
If I wrote ‘war avoider’ it is for a reason. There was nothing illegal about seeking deferments to avoid conscription to the military. Dodging the draft is a serious offense. It is a distinction that I find necessary to mention and consider.
I don’t accept willy nilly changing meanings of words to bend an argument to one’s favor.
If Romney had indeed been a draft dodger that meant he was very clearly opposed to the war and the draft. We know he was not. And If Romney had been a draft dodger it is unlikely that he could run for President, specifically for the Republican Party.
Romney is a war avoider. Words and phrases have meanings. Romney was also and still is a Vietnam war supporter. If nothing else his judjment sucks big time.
Where did I claim that Romney used "special means’ to avoid service? You have read something into the facts that I cited that is not there.
Romney used all the regualr means that everybody else did at the time. The point I am making about Romney is that other college students protested the war although they could avoid it. I say if you support a war you should go fight in it. IF not - oppose it, or if you don’t have to go and really don’t care about such things, just shut up about it. Don’t take a side. Specifically the side that wanted over 50,000 American men to die in it.
The Mormon Church was a strong supporter of the war and apparently thought the use of missionary stints may have been abused. That is not what I wrote. I merely posted a report that stated it.
Again. I am not accusing Romney of doing anything significantly special or different than what millions of American males did during the Vietnam era.
I am saying that he was among the hypocrites who did have ‘a choice’ as a young man, but publically favored denying that ‘choice’ to everybody else.
There must have been men who did not want to go but did not have a choice.
Do you agree with that?
Or do you think everyone who was drafted loved the idea and were happy about it?
It is a very strange argument you are making as you try to make mine out to be something absurd , by injecting things into my points that I did not say or use translations beyond and outside the actual words that I wrote.
You better get your facts straight before going around badgering others about theirs.
The First Draft Lottery was held in 1969.
That is true.
But the draft existed prior to that. I think Romney’s number was 300. He would never have been drafted.
But until the lottery method was put into effect, Romney was required to report to the selective service board in his hometown just like everyone else.
Romney sought and got his deferments prior to the lottery draft that went into effect. But there was a draft prior to that.
But Romney could have done Like Senator Kerry did. Sign up to go.
I admire Senator Kerry for joining, and then for doing the right thing at the time after seeing it first hand. And opposing it.
But Romney talking 'longing to fight in the war of his generation forty some years after the facts is repulsive to me. If its not to you, fine… But don’t call my objection to what that man says and did, aburd and not based on facts.
I did not make up anything about the record and what Mitt Romney has said and done.
If I did, I’d appreciate it being pointed out.
You used the words “war avoider,” which I’ve never heard before and which seems to me to be indistinguishable from “draft dodger” in any ethical sense. Both suggest someone who evaded military service through questionable means and that was obviously your point. It doesn’t really matter if those means required avoiding the draft specifically. (In your last post you said “draft hypocrite,” which cuts it even closer.) I did google “war avoider” just now and I see the phrase applied by various people to Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Rush Limbaugh among others. I think every single one of them was accused of dodging the draft. So even if you weren’t talking about the draft specifically the difference doesn’t seem relevant. We know Romney didn’t go to Vietnam. Your post suggested he did did some shady things to stay out of the war, and I don’t think that’s true.
I’ll grant you that the “I longed to be in Vietnam” comment is some pure bullshit and would rank high on a list of the most insincere things I’ve heard Romney say.
Just to be clear, Romney is a despicable lying sack of shit. And a hypocrite too. And if the Mormons were patriots they would have let him do his mission after military service. (Maybe they did, but he chose not to.) I was saying, for the benefit of those who have the good fortune to not have been of draft age during the war, that deferments were not limited to the rich and powerful. Maybe anyone going to college was rich from your perspective, but I knew a kids whose father painted houses. And I definitely agree that someone who put in at least some effort to avoid going shouldn’t say how unhappy he was to not have served.
Nobody who could’ve served should say it at all. It’s really tasteless. You can almost imagine Romney saying this to anyone he considers a rube and a social inferior.
The draft ended when I was a Senior in High School. I was F4, which meant they weren’t going to draft me, they just wanted to have my name in case they changed their mind. 
At any rate, a draft dodger was someone who used illegal means to avoid the draft; fleeing to Canada, for example.
To confuse the issue, some people used it for those who sought legal means to avoid the draft.
He made it clear that his word choice was because one was legal and one wasn’t. There’s also a substantial ethical difference between not going to the war because you thought it was a horrible, destructive, futile etc. exercise and because you simply wanted to save your own ass at the expense of somebody else’s.
NFBW, we’ve had discussions in the past about what a chickenhawk is, without a consensus emerging. My own definition is “somebody who thinks a war is worth somebody else’s lives but not his own”, a definition that covers some of the loudest Iraq-invasion yahoos, including more than one on this very board. Limbaugh has been mentioned, he was obviously one for both Vietnam and Iraq. Romney has never made it clear why he chose the repeated deferment route, for college and his LDS mission (in Paris 
), rather than go, but the implication is pretty strong.
If he’d said today that he *regrets *not enlisting and envies those who not only came back but had that irreplaceable life experience; that his explanation was that as a young, naive, married guy he was focused on himself rather than any higher good; that if he knew then what he knows now he’d have gone, that would be fine. If he said he “holds his manhood cheap”; so do lots of people who would sympathize. Except he obviously still doesn’t know and he’s *still *a self-centered weasel with no apparent principles other than money and power.
snerk Loser!
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I don’t see where he made that clear. Maybe I missed it, but in several places he implies that the deferments were shady or the result of privilege or something else. As I said, the initial post seemed to imply that Romney’s intent was to avoid the war rather than go to college or go on his mission, and I don’t see the evidence for that.
Of course there is. This isn’t something that really needs a lot of attention in this thread and maybe I’ve spent too much time on it considering how little it matters to the topic, so I think that’s the last I’ll say about it.
As I mentioned earlier, the 47% came about in because of the following tax acts:
So the Repubs doubled the % of people who didn’t pay FIT, Clinton increased it slightly, then the Repubs caused another 15% of Americans to not pay FIT, whereupon that % dropped slightly under Obama.
That subject pretty much IS the point of the extended discussion we’ve already had about Romney’s antisocial thought processes. Perhaps a reread of the whole thread is in order?
Then you should stop engaging in that behavior.
For example:
This is an example of you changing meanings of words and bending them to favor your point in an argument. Nothing in the phrase “draft dodger” indicates an opposition to the war. Actual opponents of the war who avoided service were more often called “draft resisters.” “Draft dodger” was a generic term that simply meant someone who was opposed to being drafted and took steps to avoid that event, regardless of one’s opposition to, support for, or neutral beliefs regarding the war. I knew several guys who went to great lengths to avoid being drafted all the while ranting that we should nuke the North or that we should be sending even more troops (as long as the ranter was not among them).
You referred to his convictions using ironic quotation marks, indicating that you did not believe he actually held them, you also referred to his wealth as if that had any bearing on the topic.
You made the inaccurate claim that the lottery did not go into effect until the war was winding down. I have pointed out that error.
You now seem to be implying that he did not actually report to his local Selective Service Board when, in fact, he could not have obtained his 2-S and 4-D deferments without reporting to them.
= = =
You are allowed to hate Romney for whatever reason you wish. However, you first attacked him by condemning his motivations regarding the Vietnam War. When Marley pointed out that you have no evidence that you even know his motivations, you went into one of your typical multiple paragraph harangues that basically boiled down to a claim that he used his wealth and the mere appearance of his religious beliefs to avoid service. I simply noted that he did not need wealth to obtain an 2-S deferment and that his religious convictions, (leading to his 4-D deferment), appear to have been sincere.
He may still be a jerk, but your specific claim has errors that Marley pointed out and I have substantiated.