But the fact that you don’t want him to do anything about his increased taxes doesn’t mean that he won’t. People do things to benefit themselves and their families more consistently than they do things out of altruism. That’s just a fact of life. Just saying “I don’t care about your interests” doesn’t really affect anything.
By your logic, yes.
Then we shouldn’t raise taxes on the rich, we should raise taxes on people like you, who don’t do anything about it.
Actually employing people?
Those bastards!
Same question as asked elsewhere in the thread - why are you wasting time posting on the Internet when people are dying in the streets? Why aren’t you spending more of your income on them? Why don’t you voluntarily send more of your money to the government to help them? The government would be happy to accept it.
Why is it necessary for the government to force someone else to do something about it? If it is that important, why don’t you?
And doesn’t that just sum up the right-wing’s views on taxes. Don’t tax the people with all the money; tax the poor schmucks who can’t afford to hire tax attorneys. Because, basically, fuck them, right.
They do not take most of the resulting profits. Take, for example, Ford Motor Company. They have over 200,000 employees. CEO Mulally’s salaryis on the order of $20M per year; if (speculation) the average Ford employee (and by “average” I’m including everyone from the freshman assembly line worker on up) earns $50K, then Mulally’s salary accounts for just 400 employees. Not only that, but a big ol’ chunk of profits is dispersed to shareholders, including millions of ordinary folks who hold Ford stock in their retirement portfolios.
You say the common people (whoever that is) do the work, and the wealthy merely take the money, implying that the company would do just fine without the input of the people at the top. This is clearly absurd, so perhaps you meant that large companies can attract qualified managerial talent by offering far more modest salaries than they currently do - say, $50K instead of $20M. So why aren’t they doing this?
Every company out there was started by someone who didn’t want to work for someone else. Bill Gates started life in the middle class, and is now one of the richest people in the world because he started his own software company. Henry Ford started what is now the giant Ford Motor Company, despite his beginnings as a modest farm boy. Google’s founders, now billionaires, started life as middle class computer geeks. Me? I have a steady day job, but I have a small side job in my basement manufacturing tools; if I was more obsessive about it and willing to take major risks and bust my ass for a while, I could probably turn that side job into a formal corporation and a full-time job. It’s rather sad to see that you would hold a grudge against me if I became truly wealthy in the process.
And so your answer is to tax the shit out of anybody earning a ton of money?
You’re hereby invited to think of a useful product/service, start your own company to provide it to a paying public, and run that company any way you see fit.
He asked how the bank executives would have gotten along if they hadn’t received their ungodly bonuses, the implication being that he would like to see those bonuses confiscated entirely.
Not the ones who can’t afford it; the ones who don’t care that their taxes have been raised and don’t do anything to avoid it.
You didn’t claim you can’t afford a tax attorney, you said you wouldn’t use one even if you could. That’s a fairly rare attitude, but it makes sense for the government to take advantage of it.
I assume you don’t claim any deductions on your tax forms. Because, after all, any effort to reduce one’s tax burden is selfish. You should be paying attention only to your job. Right?
Not a gotcha question, or a rhetorical question, but do you honestly believe that there aren’t people who are wealthy because they earned it? That they worked harder than you, took more risks than you, invested more time in education than you, sacrificed family time more than you?
Personally, I believe that on one side, there are people who have fallen on hard times and need a safety net as well as parasites on the system; on the other side, there is not just Paris Hilton.
These argurments of yours in which you ascribe some bass-ackward action upon me based on a truly retarded extrapolation of the points I’m making are growing tiresome, and I wish you would stop doing it.
Let’s get back to the main point. You said that we shouldn’t raise taxes on rich people, e.g., doctors, because then they might have skip actually doing things that doctors do in order to protect their money. I said that if that is the case then it is hardly anything laudable, and actually downright disconcerting, if not immoral.
Somehow that has turned into me, who can’t afford to blow off work and hire tax attorneys, being a total douchebag because I don’t donate to to charity my earned raises (which I desperately need so I can live). And somehow it’s even been further extrapolated into something along the lines of if I know how to do the Heimlich Maneuver and I’m not performing it every chance I get, I’m being just as immoral as a doctor who’s more concerned with his bank account than with his patients.
I claimed that if my taxes went up I would deal with it. If I felt I needed some H&R-Blocking, I would do it. I felt I needed to go to a Teabaggers convention and scream that I want my country back while toting around a rifle … well I probably wouldn’t do that, because I’m not a total effing loon, but I would deal with my dilemma in the most sound way I could think of. But my work wouldn’t suffer because of it. I wouldn’t go to my boss and say, “Gee whiz, I’m sorry I didn’t get the report done today, but my taxes went up and that’s more important to me that my job.”
Trying to lessen one’s tax burden isn’t a horrible thing, but I have no empathy for someone with sacks full of money pissing and moaning about how hard it is to pay taxes.
Heh, whenever I read a thread like this, I tend to get more polarized in my opinions than I am in real life.
Thing is, as someone who is a reasonably high earning professional and who also is a big believer in progressive taxation and a social safety net, the confiscatory tone of some of the arguments is somewhat annoying.
I do tend to think to myself ‘I busted my ass for years in schools and working long hours like a dog, while others I knew were having fun slacking - and now I’m supposed to cheerfully ‘equalize’ what I make with what they make, or I’m a selfish bastard? The hell with that’.
I have selfishly decided not to go that route and do white collar office work that PAYS MORE MONEY. The truck driver is also selfish in choosing to make money driving his 18-wheeler instead of joining one of those organizations and being happy with the stipend.
Since the vast majority (billions) of people would prefer a wallet fattening job over the humanitarian work, we are all assholes according to your words. I emphasize again that many of the humanitarian organizations DO pay you (the stipend) – they just don’t pay very much. But let’s not be hypocrites and choose the wallet over human lives ok?
Yep ,Ford started a car company and became rich. I missed where Edsel, Henry Clay ,and all his kids also started car companies and became rich.
Gates was lucky that IBM needed someone at the right time ,and he was there. Of course his kids are now starting their own computer companies.
Paris Hilton is a busy girl running a huge chain of hotels. She certainly should get tax breaks for her innovative business talents.
Paulson and the other educated hot shots who destroyed the economy certainly deserved the multiple million they earned. They took the world economy down, but they surely deserve tax shelters and breaks for their hard work.
I realize it is annoying when someone attempts to get you to stick to one standard, but it is necessary nonetheless. For instance -
Could you make up your mind, please? In post #36 you said you would not go to H&R Block. Now you are saying you would. Which is it?
I get this part - it is immoral for doctors to act in their own interest instead of yours, because they have so much more money than you. Fine. Compared to some African peasant farmer, or a homeless guy on the street, you have a lot of money, too. Therefore, it is downright disconcerting, if not immoral, for you to act in your own interest.
The rich doctor should sit still and let his money be taken away for the benefit of those less rich than he. You should also sit still and let your money be taken away for the benefit of those less rich than you.
What if your boss told you you had to work overtime at the homeless shelter for free? You would just do it without complaint, right?
Actually, you just got finished saying that it is a horrible thing, for people who make more money than you. But there are lots of folks who are as far below you in income as you are below the typical doctor. How come they don’t get to make you sit still and fork over?
I think I see your mental roadblock. You said in post #4:
Just because a person gets a license to practice medicine does not mean that is required to do so. We have people graduating from schools with economics degrees that are not economists and law school graduates not practicing law. A person is not defined by the label of their training (doctor, lawyer, architect, whatever) for which people like you form an opinion of how they should allocate their 40 hours a week. A person is defined by the activities they choose to do on a day-to-day year-to-year. Sometimes those activities happen to align with the training they received in school, but sometimes they do not.
If a “doctor” wants to set his schedule such that he sees 5 patients only on Monday while the rest of the week, he sits at a computer tying to write the next bestselling fiction novel, that’s his prerogative. Whether he spends time away from from patients doing non-doctor activities such as writing books, playing golf, or finding tax deductions is not for people like you to judge.
So your “valid reason” for what a doctor should and shouldn’t be doing on his own time is not valid at all.
I said I wouldn’t blow off work to do it. Brush up on the comprehension skills.
For the third time, I wish you stop these retarded extrapolations. I never said it was immoral for a doctor to act in his own self interest. I said it was immoral if he’s blowing off patients to do it. The rest of your stupid example is rendered moot.
It’s called paying taxes. Deal with it.
I’m not even sure what this is supposed to mean. If your boss told you you had to paint yourself purple and walk around the streets telling people you were a pretty little violet, would you do that? I mean, each of these questions seem to have the same bearing on the debate.
Here, you have again completely, and conveniently ignored, the part where I said that it would be a horrible thing if he was ignoring patients to do it. I’m not going to address you again if you offer the same argument.
And they do get to make me sit still and fork over every April 15th. Why is this lost on you?
I’m with you. I don’t mind paying my fair share. I don’t even mind paying more than my fair share (as I do now!). What I do mind is paying more than my fair share and having to fend off why I’m such a bad person for not wanting to pay MUCH more than my fair share.
This thread (or it’s mirror image on the poor on welfare) tend to get mired in the extremes. One side yells that all the poor are parasites who deserve what they got for bad decisions while the other lionizes them as all victims of circumstances entirely beyond their control. As if there aren’t examples of both (and everything in between).
This “let’s soak the rich” is silly. Most of the people I know would probably qualify as “rich” by some standards. They also, by and large, have worked their assess off and continue to do so (often when they have already made a comfortable nest egg for themselves). Yes, parasites like Paris Hilton are annoying and everyone likes to see them get knocked down a peg, but she doesn’t represent the wealthy anymore than the proverbial welfare queen represents the poor.
God, I wish the moderates would stop pandering to the extremes.
Then, as has been pointed out, every minute a doctor spends doing anything besides treating patients is immoral. If he takes a full hour for lunch instead of ten minutes, he is acting immorally because he could see two or three patients in the time he spends eating. If he works forty hours a week instead of fifty, he is acting immorally.
What is your boundary? The doctor spends forty hours a week seeing patients. He has the choice of spending the forty first hour with his tax attorney, or he can see two other patients. He can make $100 seeing the patients, or save $150 setting up a tax shelter. If he chooses to set up the tax shelter, is he acting immorally?
I think we have hit on the crux of the problem. Every time it is suggested that someone else should be obliged to give away more of his income, you tell him to “deal with it”. Whenever it is suggested, on the same grounds, that you should be obliged to give away more of your income, you start coming up with excuses.
I would have thought it was obvious. You say that other people should work uncomplainingly for the benefit of others. Shouldn’t you expect to do the same?
It’s not lost on me at all. They should make you sit still and fork over more. And you will be quiet about it. Because that’s the moral thing to do.
“Soaking the Rich” is a loaded term. The fact is throughout our history the rich have paid more taxes than they do now. They are getting tax breaks like crazy now. There is plenty of argument about what is their fair share. The Cheney/Bush regime went way overboard and the pendulum has to swing back.
There are plenty of coupon clipping, stock market gambling , jet setteing rich people who add no jobs. There are companies that are gleefully shipping our jobs abroad to further enrich the owners. There is nothing holy about being rich. They just have a huge impact on laws and make sure they get preferential treatment.
Buffet says there is a class war between the rich and poor going on. He says his class is winning.