So you are admitting that many middle class people work less hard because they know that the work will not be comensurate with the rewards? That, in a nutshell, is why too progressive of a tax encourages less work, less output and less creation. So why should we punish the rich for being successful…I mean other than jealousy avarice and greed.
So I don’t want to be rich to have a nice house, to travel, to send my kids to great schools. I don’t want my own company to create jobs, or to benefit the economy. Noooooo! I am just a viscious bastard who wants power. Man, where did you get this image of the wealthy? Why do you want to drag them down?
You said it before. The job of the government is to assure our liberties…to take down barriers to happiness and success. You are proposing that the government be a tool to bar success and happiness by taxing the crap out of the wealthy;
By the way, I should let you know that I am an inventor and a corporate doggy. My family is all small business men. in fact, something like 99% of all businesses in the US are small businesses. MAny of those making over $250k made it by creating things and not by inheriting it. I don’t know one wealthy person that does not work his/her ass off. I resent your stereotype. In fact I am getting so mad I am wishing this was the pit.
You, who have never started a business, never created a job, and here you are wanting to punish those that have done so by taking away their money. For investing in successful buisinesses (which create jobs and a tax base), for starting businesses, for managing their money well you would reward them by forcibly taking their property. And it is not enough just to slap a 37.5% tax rate on them. No, you need to add healthcare costs, and then, if they still manage to keep some money, you would take a chunk of that to make sure that their children don’t get it. And why, Zero? What possible rationale can you have for this?
I see no reason whatsoever tht you shouldn’t become a burglar. Hey, I can afford another TV. I am well off…I *deserve to be robbed!
Just remember kiddo, to a lot of other people you have too much. How about we drop that tax bracket down to your level for a while.
Work less hard than whom? The wealthy? Being a middle class person, do you feel like you don’t work very hard? Because sometimes I feel like I work way too much. Heck, according to a labor study shown on C-SPAN a few weeks ago, the median number of hours that the average American * wishes * to work per week is 31. According to the same research, many lower class people actually want to work more hours. I think that’s very surprising. I end up working almost 50 and sometimes more. Many of my colleagues work similar hours, and they’re in the middle class. So, no, I don’t think they “work less hard”.
Do I work hard to gain wealth? Well of course not. I work to sustain my comfortable lifestyle and because I enjoy my career. I have a lot of pride in my work, and being a productive worker makes me feel good, regardless of what I add to the stockholder value. But just because I work hard doesn’t mean that I will rise in class; with some exceptions rising above middle class has more to do with luck than persistence.
Who is “we”? I thought you said you paid $32k in taxes. If so I consider you middle class just like me; you’re hardly the one I’m attacking here. Back to the point, taxing the rich to supply universal health coverage for everyone seems like a good idea to me. Back in my ideal world, if there wasn’t so much wealth stratification, there would hardly be area to argue over. If 50 percent of the population paid 50 percent of the taxes, then the tax burden per individual for universal health would be well distributed.
Unless you’re living in the Bay area or Manhattan, I suspect you can buy a pretty nice house on a middle class income. I happen to live in one of the more expensive areas in the state, and even I can afford a very nice house. Sure, it may not be 3000 sq ft with an indoor pool in the basement, but it’s quite comfortable.
Education, ditto.
Now, more travel would be nice. But of course I have to take off work to travel. Are you saying that if I were rich, I’d have more time to travel? Maybe that is incentive, but it goes against what you say about the rich working more.
Like I said before, I’m not saying that the wealthy don’t work a lot. I know they do. Actually the average person in the US works a lot more than the average world citizen. I’m saying that many middle class people work just as much, and not everyone becomes the upper echelon. Sometimes making the transition from middle class to upper class requires gambles. In essence, many rich became rich not because they worked harder than others, but because they took a risk and got lucky. Look at luck from a different perspective: many poor people became poor not because they didn’t work enough, but because they acquired a medical condition which drained their equity. Now, I think that’s unfair.
Actually, this reminds me of another study I watched on C-SPAN (What a great channel, BTW). A fellow from the Rand Institute was discussing accumulation of wealth among individuals over the last 50 years. Guess what? The typical person who went from middle class to upper class over that time acquired most of their wealth from stock market investments. On the other hand, one of the main causes for wealth loss was acquiring a medical condition that needed expensive treatment.
How do you know I’ve never started a business or created a job? Actually, I just hired an intern to take on some of my . And, I always hire the neighborhood kids to do chores for me. Or aren’t those real jobs?
The idea that without the rich, the world would be a bleak place without inventiveness or motivation is a misleading portrait to paint. Like you said there’s always going to be the small business owner providing jobs and services. Many of those people are still middle class citizens though. I suspect that even with a middle class majority, we’d have tons of inventiveness and productivity, maybe even more.
I guess I don’t understand why you’re sympathetic to the wealthy. Heck, they probably spend most of their money overseas because American goods aren’t good enough for them. At least we get their tax money. Their buying of German sports cars, or Italian yachts, or vacation estates in Estonia doesn’t help my neighbors or me. From my perspective, if they got rich of the American system, the least they could do is give something back to the system that produced them.
Thanks, Dad. I’m quite aware that many other people would like to live my normal middle class lifestyle. Q.E.D.
And you got lucky because you weren’t born retarded. Is that fair? no. But that does not mean that we should go around making all the smart people stupider so that the stupid have intellectual parity.
You are confusing gambling and risk taking. Believe it or not, investing takes more skill than playing roulette.
As for all of this crap about hard work and rewards, you are blowing out a lot of generalizations and rhetoric. it is impossible to debate because it is simply the “world according to zero.” Hard work is relative and it does not guarantee success. You have to work hard and work smart. But if you are smart then you are just “lucky” which isn’t “fair” so anything you make over some arbitrary milestone is not really your own, so it should be given to those with less wealth. Right?
I will ask again, why do you and all of us other proles have a right to the money earned by the wealthy?
From what I have heard, you don’t like unequal equitable distribution of wealth, you think the rich don’t earn their money, and you want simply their money to pay for your health care. Please, correct me if I am wrong.
Another question: In your ideal world, the rich are taxed so that the wealth is distributed evenly through society. Tellme, why should I invest money and time into making inventions if all of the rewards will be taken from me?
Cracks like this
** is beautiful in its melding of stereotype, jealousy and egocentrism. If you inserted “blacks” for the rich and watermenlon and fried chicken for “yachts” and “mansions” everyone would be quick to point out your prejudice.
Ack. This is turning into another rich vs. poor debate. I’m stepping in a little late, at the invitation of Mr.Zambezi no less, so lets see what I can bring to the debate.
Anyone can tell horror stories about socialized medicine. For evry story you can tell, I can tell one even worse about what privatized medicine has done here in the Bay Area. There really is trully disturbing shit out there. So let’s avoid that.
I’ll be honest. I know very little about how well socialized medicine works presently or has worked in the past. So far no one in this hread has done anything to enlighten me. I’ve heard heresay and anticdotes, but no real facts. I’ve heard stories of people from Canada coming to the US to get surgery. I can counter with as many stories about people going to Canada for surgery. That won’t really acomplish anything.
The question is, does the American public deserve socialized medicine. My answer is yes. We have socialized fire protection, socialized police, even a socialized millitary, I would think it makes sense to socialize people’s health. But, to do it we would need to do it right. A lot of money. Make sure that people have full access to preventive care. If people no longer had to worry about their health they could worry about other more important things.
And mr.Z. in deference to you, this is one of those things that would indeed be a pain for a minority, but it would be for societies benefit so it’s ok.
No, but you could support universal health care so that mortality rate for poor babies isn’t as high. Maybe that’s too fair for you, though.
I don’t see any difference semantically between gambling and risk taking.
I admit that I generalized a bit too much in the last part of my last post (see below), but using rhetoric does not embarrass me. This is “great debates” after all. Perhaps you feel good being a middle class slave, and I have no hope of convincing you otherwise. But, really I don’t expect you to change your mind, but perhaps my rhetoric may help broaden my support amongst the lurkers with similar feelings.
**
On the definition of “success”: Most people I know view financial success as achieving middle class. Who knows, maybe I associate with too many “left-wing, liberal communists”.
From what I have read most wealthy people gained their money via investments. Investments require risks, and the wealthy are the ones who beat the odds statistically.
In other words, if you take 100 people with equal qualities, there will be a few on one end that achieve more wealth, and there will be a few on the other end that achieve less wealth. A random distribution. This is fine, but now in round two some people have a financial advantage, and others have a financial disadvantage. The tax code helps redistribute so that people can achieve the same success regardless of where they started.
Why punish someone by restricting their access to health care just because they were unlucky enough to not be able to afford it?
Again: From my personal experience, business owners work hard, and are successful, but none that I know have achieved great wealth.
I don’t claim we have a “right”, but I think that without imposing some restrictions our democratic freedom will become despotic slavery. Call me paranoid, but I see it happening already.
Actually, for the record, I don’t mind unequal distribution of wealth. It’s going to happen, period, so why try to fight it?
I mind a system where some citizens, although supposedly created equal, don’t have access to necessities of realizing their ambitions equally. This means access to education, health care, food, and housing. Granted we’re not talking caviar and penthouses here, but access necessary for achieving their ambition.
I don’t know. Maybe if you hate your job so bad you should change professions?
Yeah, I agree, this is a little far fetched of a generalization. But since I don’t know any people who gross more than say $500,000 / year except for a few local CEOs and those that I see through the media, it’s what I perceive. I suspect that most of the excess income is reinvested. But I’m sure that they also pamper themselves with items out of the reach of the average consumer like the few individuals I know do.
If it were indeed to society’s benefit, I might back such a move. but there is no evidence that it is. Can you imagine health care run like your state’s DMV department?
Besides which, it would only make sense to offer it to those who currently don’t have coverage. With medicare and medicaid, as well as non-profit clinics, anyone who is too poor to pay for insurance has insurance. It is the folks who make enough money but choose to spend it on other things that are the problem.
Sorry for the rant with zero, scratch. I am about to go to market with my invention and the thought of my hard earned money being taken away so that the middle class get free health care makes my head explode. I don’t think making $10 million means that I am a leach on society. Nor do I think that my wealth automatically means that I must be forced to give it away. I want my grand children’s children to be old money. With guys like zero around, I will be lucky if I get to keep anything.
I don’t think the facts really bear out Mr. Z.'s claim that the hardworking rich are being whaled on by the sheer numerical predominance of greedy losers who want to spend other people’s money. He said: “Since the top 10% richest housholds pay 90% of the income tax, 96% of the population would spread the remaining 10% out amongst themselves. So a vast majority of voters would really be voting to spend someone elses money. One can assume that those who would be voting themselves the goodies would not have health insurance and would most likely be in the poorest demographic that pays little or no tax.”
How does that assertion fit in with the following statements?
It seems clear from the above, and also from sources like this article, that in fact the majority of US citizens aren’t voting at all, and the poor ones are voting at much lower rates than the middle-class and wealthy. The income redistribution schemes you dislike so much are being perpetrated on rich people largely by other rich people, who were voted into office primarily by the middle and upper classes. Looks as though most Americans, not just greedy or lazy or poor people, feel that it’s reasonable to require the rich to pay for a lot of benefits for the non-rich: after all, they can afford it, and it makes for a better life for everyone.
Another remark by Mr. Zambezi I frankly don’t get at all:
Huh? I don’t see what’s offensively stereotypical, jealous, or egocentric about that. You have pointed out ways in which rich people’s activities often benefit their fellow citizens (creating jobs); zero is simply pointing out other ways in which their activities are often less beneficial (funneling money into foreign rather than domestic consumption). S/he’s not being any more “jealous” or “egocentric” than you are. As for “stereotype”: when I read the Robb Report (just for laughs, I hasten to add, since nobody could ever mistake me for a rich person! :)), it’s obvious to me that the luxury market is indeed heavily international, and does indeed run to such well-known high-end goods as yachts, sports cars, and vacation estates. Your analogy with racist “Sambo” stereotypes makes no sense as far as I can see.
(However, you provided me a very helpful explanation of direct and indirect pronouns back in the Spanish-for-English-teachers thread, and I haven’t yet thanked you for that: thank you! :))
It might be lovely to offer everyone unlimited access to healthcare, but it’s impossible. There is not enough money in the world.
The $24,000 Mr. Chance cited for a two week ICU stay is a drop in the bucket; many, many people stay in ICU for months. We had one young woman who was with us for 6 months in ICU (with a bad gallbladder) and her bill passed the million dollar mark a couple of months before she died. (Her insurance paid.) More typically, the bill runs in the hundreds of thousands for a serious injury or illness.
People demand high tech, intensive treatment. We have continuous dialysis now for people who are too ill to tolerate regular hemodialysis; this is even more expensive. In one memorable incident, I was caring for an elderly lady who had had a massive stroke, was comatose, had various other complications, and who was clearly not going to survive. She also had a rare, acquired clotting disorder. Her family opted to give her the clotting factor she “needed”. As her daughter said, “We know she’s probably going to die anyway, but since Medicare’s paying for this, we figured we might as well do it”. This drug was $36,000 per dose, far more than I make in a year as a nurse. The woman received the drug (courtesy of your tax dollars) for about five days, twice a day, until she died.
As a less dramatic but extremely common example, consider TPN (total parentaral nutrition; nutrition is given via a large vein when a patient is too ill to take in nutrients through the digestive system). This stuff costs $1,000 per bag and the patient uses at least one bag per day. Twenty days on TPN = $20,000. That doesn’t include the cost of the tubing, filters, IV pump, or the central line IV.
If an expensive treatment is offered at no additional charge, people will almost always want that treatment, no matter how futile it is. That way, they can reassure themselves later on that “at least we did everything we could do”.
Other prohibitively costly medical measures include neonatal intensive care and organ transplants. Should expensive treatments be rationed? (They would simply have to be.) How does one go about deciding where to draw the line?
As for preventive care, most people won’t take advantage of screening when it’s offered OR they won’t act on the results if something is amiss. It costs nothing at all to get your blood pressure checked, yet many people with hypertension decide it’s not so important to take their medicine as prescribed or otherwise keep an eye on their condition… until they have a massive stroke or their kidneys fail or they go blind. Then they want the doctor to save them at any cost. It doesn’t do much good to check a person’s cholesterol if he’d rather undergo heart surgery than give up his daily dose of bacon and eggs.
I would not begrudge paying a bit more if I knew that it made the people of the country that I choose to live in better. I do not like to see sick people on my streets. I don't want their pain, suffering, and death on my hands. I begrudge that people have to choose between taking their baby to see the doctor or feeding him right because the healthcare hasn't come through. I hate that people have to make those choices, and if I could do anyhting to make it better I would. I see it as my civic duty to look out not only for myself, but for the people around me, and I can't see healthcare as anything but a need that cannot be ignored. Sure, i could live in a country with low taxes and no social services, but the truth is I don't like dead bodies. I especially don't like preventable dead bodies. I am not usually that patriotic, but this is my country and I want to do what is best for it and it's people, not just my greedy punk self.
I submit that anyone who feels the need to provide healthcare to the poor above what is already provided through Medicare and Medicaid should start donating money to free clinics. My wife has worked for many of them. They not only provide good healthcare, but are also a good training ground for the medical community.
What I do not support is you forcing me to spend my money on them.
As for my comment on zero’s slur on the wealthy, which portrayed them as all shipping their money out to foreign countries, I see no different between saying “all rich people just ship all of their money overseas which means that it doesn’t help me a bit” and “all blacks just waste their money on drugs and fried chicken which doesn’t help me a bit.”
It is just inflammatory and prejudicial. Besides which, buying a foreign car does benefit zero, and all of us by a) providing sales tax income, b) paying for tarrifs c) supporting shipping and import companies, which pay tax d) supporting the car dealership which pays tax e) supporting the employess of the dealership who pay income tax.
AS for the low voter turnout of the poor: good. They are excersizing their right to not vote. I hold that they are not voting because they are not fed up or angry. They are fairly satasfied.
Uh-huh. :rolleyes: In any case, if the poor are not voting in substantial numbers then they are not the ones responsible for the soak-the-rich schemes that you dislike, as you hypothesized in your earlier post.
No, it is often wealthy liberals who I blame. The poor could forseeably bring on universal health care by voting in rich liberals such as Gore. If we were to face a situation similar to the Depression, and the poor were starving, you can bet that they would be motivated to vote.
And yes, people tend to vote less when satasfied. Other possibilities do exist, but when times are very tough, voter turnout increases. Perhaps some American scholar here could explain how this came into play with FDR and his socialist programs.
I want to draw a distinction here between universal healthcare and making sure that the poor have health care. I do not have a problem with medical coverage being provided to teh poorest segment of our society. It is clearly in society’s interest to have a healthy citizenry. However, universal healthcare provides healthcare for thos who can afford it as well as those who can’t. IT is ridiculous to tax the top 6% to provide something that most people can afford, but do not find important enough to pay for.
Perhaps next we should contemplate universal auto and property coverage?
Then are you also in favor of means-testing Social Security, Mr. Z.? After all, handing out taxpayers’ money to wealthy people who can perfectly well afford to finance their own retirement seems even more wasteful than providing health insurance to middle-class workers who might (or might not) be able to cover their own medical expenses.
How about removing home ownership tax deductions for the wealthy, since they can easily afford to buy houses without getting tax breaks for them?
If you’re going to allocate deductions and benefits based primarily on whether recipients could afford to do without them, I think you will end up soaking the rich to an extent that liberals only dream of.
I am not in favor of increasing any tax. I am for limiting benefits to those who need them. There is a difference between taxing the rich more and more and being more selective with who gets benefits.
I do not see how someone could support increasing taxes on the rich so that the middle class get free healthcare.
I have a very simple test for this. If you have cable and/or a cell phone, you are not eligible for free health care.
The main argument I hear for universal health care is that no one should go untreated, and no one should be bankrupted by medical expenses.
A main argument against universal health care is that when the cost of something is low or zero, demand for it skyrockets. So then you need some other kind of rationing, because there isn’t a country on Earth that can afford all the health care it wants.
Fine. So why not simply have a system of hardship relief? Health care remains privatized, but if you get sick you can apply for hardship relief, and a review panel will look at your finances, decide how much you can afford, and cover the rest? In essence, it would like having a deductible on an insurance policy, except that the deductible is a percentage of your wealth rather than a fixed amount.
There. No one goes bankrupt or winds up in debt for life due to medical problems, everyone is covered, but you’re still going to pay for you own health care. We can argue over what the ‘deductible’ amounts should be - it should be enough to cause you some discomfort, but not enough to ruin your life. And if you want, you can buy private insurance to cover that deductible part, which should drop the cost of private insurance substantially, making it available to the working poor.
Anyone see any immediate problems with this idea? At least as a compromise between full-scale socialization of medicine and the current system?
This is what I love about the SDMB! I can throw out a question and go away for a few days and people are trying to make a go at solving the worlds ills right here!
And I started it all
-JC
looks forward to being the catalyst of many a great debate
This claim has no basis in fact. Viewing voter turnout statisitics for several countries over the last 50 years indicated no evidence for this. If you can provide some evidence, not that people vote less when satisfied, but that low voter turnout corresponds to satisfaction in a country, I would be most apreciative. What you do see is people voting when they believe they can actually make a difference. (this is my opinion, not fact) When people believe that their vote won’t change anything they won’t vote. When presented with two lousy choices they won’t bother. It doesn’t mean they are satisfied, just that they don’t think they can do anything about it.
The deduction of home interest paid out is not a tax “break”. Many people think that this is something put into the code to encourage home ownership, but that’s not true.
If you’re going to have a system that taxes income, and counts interest received as income, then the only rational way to treat interest paid out is to deduct it from your income. Imagine that I borrow $1000 from the bank at 8% interest, and loan it to Mr. Zambezi at 8.5% interest. I’m getting a half-point of interest for my trouble. The money I make off that half-point is taxable income. Mr. Zambezi pays me $85 interest during the year, which counts as income, and I pay the bank $80 in interest, which is deducted from my income. I’m left paying tax on the remaining $5.
If I have a mortgage for $100,000 at an 8% rate, and I also have $100,000 in the bank drawing 8% interest, should I pay off the loan? In our current system, it doesn’t matter, because the tax on the interest I make on the $100,000 deposit is exactly offset by the deduction I get for the interest I pay to the bank. If you were simply to eliminate the home-interest deduction without changing anything else, you’d be putting an artificial force in the money markets, because people would have incentive to pay off their mortgages to avoid the taxes on their savings.
That’s why any proposed changes to our tax system which eliminate the home interest deduction also eliminate taxes on interest income. They have to balance.
