I hate all you rich people. All you rich people do is complain that because your taxes are too high that you can’t afford the chlorine for your swimming pools.
I give it a .0 as far as rants go:)
oh, yes, all we do between gulps of champaigne and caviar, is bitch about tax cuts. We plan of new ways of snatching more money from the poor, while ordering our chaufer to run over as many homeless bums as they can. As we lay in our mansions, watching the hired help scurry around, we light our cuban cigars with 100 dollar bills. Who cares if we don’t remember our kids names! That’s the nanny’s job! Really, it’s not like we don’t give to charity! Why, just last week, I threw some pennies at a philipino family.
Really, ungrateful pesants.
:rolleyes:
You came all the way over here to say THAT! What, do you think all of us at The Straight Dope are multi-millionares? Where the bloody HELL did that come from?
Know what? I don’t want to know, just fuck off.
Oh god…
I tell you what, conservatives. I’ll promise not to listen to Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan if you promise not to listen to this guy. Ok?
The urge to register as “T. Herman Zweibel” and have Standish to box this mis-creant about the ears is almost over-powering…
It’s not the price of the chlorine that’s quite cheap, it’s me affording that cute pool boy three times a week. Hush though, my man doesn’t know a thing about that, he thinks I clean it myself.
< time for another Bon Bon and a whiskey >
TECH’EMS!!! 
Ranamon,
I think the problem is that chlorine and swimming pools don’t really indicate the rich, it’s seen as a more middle class thing. While pools are expensive, and there are, of course rich people who own them, so do a lot of people who aren’t rich. If you had used an example like “jewel encrusted backscratchers” (just off the top of my head…I know it’s a bad example), people could have said, “Yeah, jewel encrusted backscratcher…you gotta be rich to buy one of those”, or if you had gone with something more conventional, like toy poodles or fur coats, it could have had more of an impact, but I think the thing you want in a rant is either righteous indignation or humorous exaggeration…you know, either the way of the preacher or the satirist…either Jonathan Edwards (even though he may have been more comfortable in Great Debates) or Mark Twain. It also might help if the rant was a little longer. Saying, “The rich don’t like tax cuts because they can’t afford chlorine for their swimming pools” doesn’t have the length to be effective. You’re new at this, and I’m sure you’ll get better with time.
Sweet-ums, call the Skip-ur and have this beees-tly gentle-man es-corted off the eye-land.
Sua
{thick Bugs Bunnyish Brooklyn accent}
Yeahhhh…Jonathan Edwoids. Dat’s da ticket.
{rich plummy Princeton/Yale tones}
The first object of a virtuous benevolence is Being, simply considered: and if Being, simply considered, be its object, then Being in general is its object; and the thing it has an ultimate propensity to, is the highest good of Being in general. And it will seek the good of every individual being unless it be conceived as not consistent with the highest good of Being in general. In which case the good of a particular being, or some beings, may be given up for the sake of the higest good of Being in general. And particularly if there be any being that is looked upon as statedly and irreclaimably opposite and an enemy to Being in general, then consent and adherance to Being in general will induce the truly virtuous heart to forsake that being, and to oppose it.
{as before}
I sweah, ya can’t make dis stuff up. From “Da Natchuh of True Virtue,” 1765.
Fuck anyone who says the rich don’t pay enough in tax.
The rich control the bulk of the money in this country and pay the bulk of the taxes. They are already in the highest tax bracket and generally pay about half of every fucking dollar they make in taxes. I hate the fucking government, I think income tax is legal highway robbery. Other than the national defense, law enforcement, and maintenence of the infrastructure the I0 shouldn’t pay the government for shit. Let everyone else worry about how they’re going to pay for healthcare, or the elderly, or giving some crackhead a welfare check cause they don’t feel like working. Keep your hands off my fucking money. Rich people get absolutely fucking ripped off every April. If Uncle Sam took 50 cents or more from every dollar that a poor guy made that poor guy would be (more) outraged. And if that same poor guy hit the lottery and then saw 100 million shrink to 50 million he’d understand why it’s bullshit to be penalized for being successful. Fuck any ignorant, self-pitying, unrealistic dickhead who says that the rich don’t pay enough taxes.
It may be true that the rich pay more income taxes, and that it’s, like half (which incidentally is like, nothing compared to other industrialized nations), but the rest of us pay more in payroll (i.e. Social Security and Medicare) taxes because there is a maximum income that can be taxed. The present budget surplus, in fact is almost entirely due to these payroll taxes. In the name of “fairness,” however, we are told that we need an across-the-board tax cut, creating an enormous transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. Also most of the services conservatives consider essential (say defense, law enforcement, and providing those interstates that can get you miles from the nearest black man in 20 minutes) mainly serve to protect the rich from the beatings they so richly deserve. That’s why Romanan hates the rich.
I think you misunderstand what being rich is all about. “All we do is complain,” indeed.
Dude, we’re rich! We hire people to complain for us.
BTW, if one really worries about the price of pool chlorine, one is not really rich.
Hope that helps.
No, it’s due to a good fucking economy.
You act as if money is something society grants its richer citizens as a privilege. Not a single penny of a poor person’s money will end up in the hands of the rich. I don’t see how that counts as a “transfer”. Care to elaborate?
You think the cops would be able to afford the riot gear that kept mobs from COMPLETELY obliterating LA if the only people that got taxed worked at minimum wage? Bill Gates gets far less benefit from his taxes than 99.9999…% of the people on the planet ever will.
Are you some sort of psychic?
It’s not the good fucking economy, it’s the payroll taxes. Without Social Security payroll taxes going into the treasury as general revenue, the federal government would have begun to run a surplus only in fy 2000. The economy certainly helps, by helping people who ordinarily would have made $20,000 a year pull in 30 and thus pay more and more in payroll taxes until they reach $74,900, but before the Social Security rate increase kicked in we had a good fucking economy and record deficits.
There are myriad ways tax revenue winds up in the hands of the rich. One quarter of the federal budget is for debt maintenence, which is money paid to holders of government bonds. Most of the government’s debt is held by rich people. Why does the government pay so much in debt service? One reason is the S & L bailout ten years ago. Again, mainly to the rich. And I won’t even get in to corprate welfare and the dependence of the internet economy on fiber optic cable (the government’s laying that).
[quote]
You think the cops would be able to afford the riot gear that kept mobs from COMPLETELY obliterating LA if the only people that got taxed worked at minimum wage?
[quote/]
If the cops were trying to prevent South Central from being obliterated, they didn’t do a very good job. They didn’t need to keep mobs from obliterating the homes of the wealthy, thanks to the Intercounty phase of the Eisenhower Interstate Sytem, which provides a geographical separation far more effective than any riot gear. And, yes, the LAPD could easily havee afforded riot gear on the taxes that just the 600,000 working poor in the city of LA pay. The payroll tax is 15% off the top, no refund, no minimum (although there is a maximum, so Bill Gates pays the same as you do, most likely).
Also, Romanon’s card was the Queen of Diamonds.
Cite?
Cite?
::sigh:: Cite?
You’re right, the National Guard did. South Central may not be Paradise, but it’s far from “obliterated”. Again, do you think the authorities could have contained the problems if all the revenue was generated from people earning minimum wage?
As I do? Bill Gates pays “zero”?
Uh…
Oh, I get it! You assume that I’m wealthy simply because I recognize that “Rich” does not equal “Evil”!!
Here’s a hint, jackass… don’t make assumptions.
That’s pure bullshit, bullshit as bulls shit on the prairie.
God damned not only that it was 1987-1988 not 1990, get your facts straight. I live in a main area where the S&L situation happened. Ever heard of the “Foreclosure Capital” aka Colorado Springs? Damn, my father would be one rich mother fucker had the S&L crisis never happened. Okay so he’s still a rich mother fucker, hey he fucked my mom so I can say that oh and he’s got a lot of money. But fucking A, the amounts of money he and his business lost during that time is tremendous.
Don’t sit there for one second and claim the “rich” didn’t loose a fuckload of money then, they did. Oh and BTW, because a man is wealthy does not mean that he is a heartless bastard with no respect or caring for those less fortunate. As I told someone elsewhere, my father is semi-retired, out of the need to work for his emotional health not his need for money, and probably donates to charity more than many of you make in a year. I know he donates more than I make in a year and I make a lot of money.
So, on that end, fuck you. Don’t you even state that the wealthy got out of the S&L situation unscathed. My father lost a fucking lot more money than you have ever have in your checking account, that’s cumulative over your lifetime and then some. Fuck, so many builders left my dad with so many unpaided bills for windows and doors it’s unbelievable. My father ended up having to sell stock in his company to save his ass because of the S&L fuck up.
God Damned I hate it when people like you think the wealthy only profit from disasterous financial times…and I hate it when people assume that all wealthy people are republicans, there are many wealthy democrats out there. Fuck. No wonder I shouldn’t come to the Pit…people who make asshole like statements like that just fucking piss me off. And here I was making light of the OP but then some dumbass steps in…
I forgot to add, why do I know that my father is so God damned wealthy? Because a study done with the top businessmen in Colorado Springs had him in the top 10. There’s a lot of fucking wealth to go around in this town…and Mr. Cray (of super computers) was #1 or #2, so if my father fits within the top ten of this city I sure as hell know he aint living on rice and beans.
So anyone care to step in front of his Jag, Lexus or Land Rover?
I’m with ya, Techie.
I, too, hate hearing people bitch about rich people getting tax cuts. Why is it fair for only POOR people to get tax cuts? If I pay $10K in taxes a year, and I. M. Wealthy pays $100K, how is it logical to cut my taxes by 50% but not I. M. Wealthy’s?
I think that if the bulk of the people out there knew just how little $$ they have to make in a year to get into the higher tax brackets, they’d all shut up pretty fast. It’s not only the fabulously wealthy people who pay a lot of taxes. It’s the mid to upper end of the middle class as well.
And don’t even get me started on Alternative Minimum Tax… fuckin’ piece of shit legislation where you get to pay tax on money that you never have…