You really think CEO’s work as much as real workers? The factory guys working overtime? Or the middle managers. Nearly killed my dad with his ulcers and high blood pressure. But the execs at GM when he was there used up all their two months vacation every year and had boondoggle trips to the Caribbean to discover their manufacturing secrets.
Soaking the Rich ,is Lutzian. Frank Lutz is the guru of slanted language. He came up with 'death taxes" for inheritance taxes and many other gems. You win by framing the subject in a terribly slanted title that causes a predictable reaction. The rich do not get soaked. Not now, not ever.
First of all I didn’t say that it was shitty for a doctor to spend time with a tax attorney; I said it was shitty for a doctor to spend time with a tax attorney at the expense of his patients. I swear, that’s the last time I repeat that.
Secondly, **Shodan ** accused me of claiming that doctors should spend every waking hour with patients, which I haven’t done. I claimed that if a doctor decides that, “fuck my patients, I need a tax break,” that that’s a shitty thing to do. I don’t care what the break-down of his daily activities are. I’m talking from a 10,000 feet up top-down view … doctors should doctor; if they need to curtail their doctoring for the sake of the almighty scheckel, then they aren’t being very true to the Hippocratic oath.
If a doctor takes fewer patients, do you consider that to be “at the patient’s expense?”
If you can’t get specific, then your statements are worthless. Doctors would like to only doctor - but people seem to think that they need a business license, they have to pay rent, they have to hire people, and they have to pay taxes. Each one of these takes away the working hours of the day. If you add to the workload on the business side, that WILL reduce the hours spend on patients.
You can repeat it 1000 times but it doesn’t help when you don’t clarify in concrete terms what you mean. What does “at the expens of his patients” mean in numbers? What’s the threshold? If the doctor works 30 hours but spends 10 hours working on tax strategies, that’s unacceptable to you. What about 40 hours of “doctoring” but 10 hours of tax? Or is it 60 hours to 10 hours?
How many hours must the doc work before he has your approval and blessing to spend some time working on taxes? 40? 60? Infinite?
How presumptuous of you to pass judgment on what adults should and should not do with their training.
The Hippocratic Oath is about treatment of patients and not about lifestyle allocation choices.
The parsing of phrases can get tricky. Does it make a difference if the doctor cancels appointments to meet the attorney versus telling his staff “don’t schedule anything next Thursday afternoon”? How about if he treats all of his current patients but doesn’t accept appointments from new ones?
Besides, you can’t tax the rich (or corporations). They have the ability to shift their taxes to customers, etc. That is, if I own the company I set my own “salary” and if you raise my taxes, I raise my salary and keep my net income the same. My higher salary is a business expense that I take care of with higher prices, the poor customer will pay that. Clearly those are broad generalizations…
Well that only works if none of your competitors decide to compensate for tax increases by increasing volume sold instead of costs. Suddenly your company’s jacked up prices aren’t selling so well, and there’s are.
Yes. It was a generalization. Price elasticity, microeconomics, blah, blah, blah.
The point is that the soak the rich assumptions usually hold everything else equal and that is not valid. This topic has made that point that some people will do things that are worse for society, some will accept it, some will takes steps to avoid it. It doesn’t matter what mix of these actions you pick, you can’t just raise taxes on the rich and assume that nothing will change except tax revenue.
Jesus H. Welby.
My original bone of contention:
My point is simply this. If raising taxes on people causes them to “shift from productive work, and towards avoiding paying the tax,” then fuck them. I don’t care if it’s a doctor, a pilot, a lawyer or the Roto-Rooter Man.
What is that anyway? Trickle down greedy whining?
The free market determines the worth of a person’s labor. One person may put in as many hours as the next, but if he’s more productive than someone else, or if there are fewer people who can/will do his job - either because he’s naturally smarter, or better educated, or has some quirky skill/ability - then he earns more money.
Person A cuts lawns for a living. He uses a walk-behind mower and can do eight lawns in an eight-hour workday.
Person B also cuts lawns for a living. He uses a riding mower and can do twenty lawns in an eight-hour workday.
Both are working equally hard - actually, person B works less hard since he’s basically sitting on his ass all day - and person B earns more than twice as much money. Is this unjust? Where is the outrage against person B’s excessive wages?
Person C services residential septic tanks. It’s a nasty, disgusting job cleaning up other people’s excreta eight hours a day; there aren’t many people willing to do this job, so there’s a strong demand for his services. Because of this, Person C earns even more money than person B. He’s blessed with congenital anosmia - can’t smell a thing - and this special blessing means the job doesn’t cause him any suffering at all, and at the end of the day he’s only as tired as person B.
Should we tax person C - and person B, for that matter - until their take-home pay is equal to that of person A? Should we despise him, since he didn’t work any harder but took home more money?
There aren’t many people willing/qualified to be CEO of a big company, and so, presto, they get to ask for huge salaries. Don’t want to pay a CEO that much? OK, your company gets to hire somebody less talented who is willing to work for your meager offering.
There seems to be a lot of anger in this thread toward the high-profile CEO’s who have done a poor job of running their companies - lately, this is banks and auto companies - but there are many, many other large corporations who aren’t in the news, presumably because their CEO’s are doing a reasonable job of keeping things on an even keel. Yet people’s blind rage toward the few badly-performing/rapacious CEO’s extends toward these others as well (as evidenced by the general desire to “soak the rich”), for no good reason I can see.
Additionally, **Shodan **seems to suggest, in that initial comment, that in order to make sure that doctors don’t leave patients untreated, we shouldn’t raise their taxes. I suggest that taxes shouldn’t even be floating around the same concept as “should doctors treat patients.”
Really - so everyone should just use the short form and not take any of the deductions available from the long form? Why are you so mad at people for using the tax code as it is written?
Sorry - but you really sound like someone who has never been in a business position where understanding the tax code can have a significant impact on income. I drive an SUV because it is cheaper than driving a sedan, all due to the tax code. I am putting up solar, rather than a new deck, all due to the tax code. I will spend time with a tax specialist every quarter to make sure that all of my personal and business decisions sync up with the current tax code’s incentives (and disincentives). That is what intelligent, successful people do once they hit a certain threshold of income.
You suggestion ignores that treating patients is a business.
The question is, would the fairly small reduction in price caused by a tax decrease result in a significant increase in demand? Certainly large discounts do, such as your example and Cash 4 Clunkers. If we were going to stimulate demand through taxation, I suspect lowering the sales tax would be far more effective. Reduced corporate taxes would not entirely go to lower prices, depending on the product - the pricing might be optimal for the competitive situation as it is, and all the tax decrease might go to the bottom line. if you reduced taxes on Microsoft, do you think any of it would go to reducing the cost of Office or Vista?
But the OP issue is not corporate taxes, but personal income taxes. Do you think increased taxation (not that there has been any) had anything to with the demand crash? In the past year we have come close to deflation, and demand has increased only slightly. Giving more money to the wealthy (drying out the rich?) will not result in lower product prices, or increase demand in any significant way. The argument has always been that this will increase investment, useful in a period of a shortfall in investment capital, but not now. You didn’t address this point at all.
Also, since corporate taxes are on profits, lowering them is not going to help out the car companies, and will not reduce the cost of autos and thus increase demand. Companies making money have the option of lowering prices if that would actually increase sales and profits. That they don’t (and they can obviously lower prices more out of profits than they can from a tax cut) argues that the desire to cut their taxes is a desire for the public to provide the money to reduce their prices, not their owners.
Since we have a zero sum game, the question is which tax decrease or way to spend our money is most effective. The very slow recovery in jobs and wages after the Bush tax cuts argues that drying the rich isn’t the optimal approach.
This is true. The question then seems to be will things change for the better or the worse at what rates? What tax levels will produce the best outcome? Or in the spirit of the thread title. how thoroughly should we soak the rich? No obviously different people have different perspectives, but I think msmith537’s questions earlier are a good starting point.
Economically the tax rates that provide the best answers to questions like these are the best tax rates.
Given the failure that is the current economy during “trickle down” economics clearly some level of soaking the rich higher then current levels is better.
I don’t know about GM execs, but the ones in my company have a lot of 7 am meetings and seem to answer their email in the middle of the night. Usually more than middle managers too. But not 200 X the salary of a factory worker’s worth.
Jack,
Help me out here, because I seem to be a bit confused by your position.
You seem to be saying (and please correct me if I’m wrong) that a person who becomes less productive to save some money is acting immorally. It doesn’t matter (if I understand you correctly) whether it’s a doctor who sees fewer patients, a plumber who fixes fewer toilets, a pilot who flies fewer flights, etc. If they’re taking time away from their jobs to save a few bucks, it’s bad.
But the reality is that people are not slaves to their professions. They should be able to allocate whatever time to their job as they see fit. If a doctor decides to cut his hours in half to take musical lessons in hopes of becoming a classical pianist, is that wrong? If I take an hour or two off per week (by leaving work early) to go to grad school (as I am doing) is that immoral? Or are the doctors, pilots and so on enslaved (from a moral point of view) to the idea that they must spend their time in pursuit of their trained professions?
And, if the answer is no – that they can morally take time off to pursue other ventures, then why is it any worse if they want to take some time off to plan better tax strategies and save some money?
Zev Steinhardt
But you were the one who said that a doctor would spend ten hours with his tax attorney, which sounded like you considered it a bad thing, not that it would actually happen. From what I’ve skimmed after I posted that, the entire doctor debate has gotten absurd on both sides, so I’m not endorsing anything Jack Batty says.
I’ll agree with **Voyager **that all the different positions, examples and extrapolations that we seem to be attributing to each other has crossed into the absurd.
You’re right, they’re not.
If the doctor does not want to fully employ the skills he possesses, he should not have to justify his decision. As long as he has not made any binding agreements with an employer to do otherwise, it’s up to him if he works an 8 hour week or 40. He is not a slave to his job just because he possesses skills you find useful.
Raising taxes is something you have to justify. Taking control of other people’s property without their consent is inherently bad, so you have to prove your reasons for doing so outweigh that harm.