Or floats the corpse.
Yeah, the ones who held a gun to the mortgage broker and forced her to write that loan. Or the ones who had a good job until the crash of the system caused them to be laid off. They should have known. Or the ones who saw the value of their house fall by an unprecedented amount.
This is laughable. You do realize that the person seeking the mortgage has to 1) find a place they want to buy, 2) fill out, sign, and submit a mortgage application, and 3) go through with the sale.
Hmmmm, who to blame when I take a mortgage with no money down and I owe the bank $1,500 per month, but bring home $1,700 per month after taxes and bills and have no saving s to speak of. Must be the guy I went to to help me buy the house I found. :rolleyes:
People that make loans are responsible for allocating others’ savings. If they fail in that duty, they should be held responsible. Suggesting so does not eliminate any other blame which may fall on other parties.
It is perfectly reasonable to talk about the amount of inequality in a society, and to make quantitative comparisons between different amounts of inequality: Gini coefficient.
There’s nothing wrong with saying that there is too much income inequality in the US, and you can’t hand wave that away by saying “there’s always inequality!” There can definitely be different degrees.
All people are tax takers.
Personally, I don’t care much about tax whining. “It’s not fair, waaaaa!”. Pardon my French, but screw “fair”. Life ain’t fair.
A society needs money to function. Schools, higher education and research, infrastructure, police, health care and social security cost money. Someone has to provide those money. The poor have very little disposable income, no matter whether they pay “their fair share” of taxes or not. The wealthy have more disposable income than the poor, even if they pay a measurable chunk of it in taxes. Ergo, society should take the money where they are available, and from a cynical POV, regardless of what’s “fair”, society should take as much as it can without stifling personal initiative and removing the motivation for entrepreneurs to build enterprise. This was perhaps the genius streak of the Norwegian Labor Party government when oil was found in the North Sea: They understood how to tax the oil companies to the max, but still not so much as to discourage the industry from coming there. As was once claimed, they were able to twist the oil companies’ arm to the breaking point, but not beyond it. And the money went to the general populace and helped build confidence in the society among the 99%. Compare this to some of the oil producing countries in other parts of the world, where the oil revenue mainly ends up in the pockets of the corrupt upper class and the international oil companies. Or to what has happened in the PIGS countries. I recently heard a joke about the Greek situation: “There was a referendum among the Greek taxpayers of whether they should accept the EU regulations or not. Two of them voted for, the other three against”.
A country can compete economically in two principally different ways: Either by providing cheap labor and low prices, or by providing highly skilled labor which is worth the higher price. Only developing countries can take the first route. China has chosen the first route. For the first world countries, only the second route is available unless they want to decrease general wealth to the level of a third world country. And to be able to choose the second route, our entrepreneurs and CEOs need access to an educated workforce. How do we get a highly skilled and educated workforce? IMHO by providing opportunity for the bright kids, rich or poor, to get good nutrition, good health, good education and the motivation to pursue an education, i.e. a dream of being able to get a decently paying job sometime in the future. Not by lowering social standards and building slums (or what it’s apparently called on your side of the pond: “inner city problems”).
Even the 1% benefit from a functioning schooling system, health care system and social safety net. Which all require tax revenues. The problem is that the benefit is long-term. And our (i.e. the West’s) current political and economic system doesn’t reward long-term planning. Our current political and economic system rewards short-term profit.
Not always. Mortgage brokers were known to cold call people whose houses were fully paid up and convince them to get the money just sitting in them out - at the usual rip off rates. And then they lost their houses.
And you do know that Countryside pushed hard for these type of loans as a matter of business policy. And that brokers got compensated more the worse the loans were. And that the applicants were not the ones pushing for non-documented loans, the brokers were. You must not believe in capitalism if you think that paying people more for a particular action won’t result in more of that action.
If you are still unaware at this point of what went on you must be blind, deaf and dumb - or reading right wing rags and watching Fox News, which is the same thing.
De poor widdle bankers- people with barely high school educations were outsmarting them left and right. Boo hoo.
If unsub asked “Would America be more productive without a welfare state that encouraged laziness?” we might get a useful debate ( 
). But questions about “fairness” show confusion.
Is it fair that some people develop leukemia? Is it fair that some people are denied insurance and then need appendectomies they can’t afford? If not, what remedy would OP propose?
I suppose the wealth of Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, and Vinny Basciano is fair – they’re job creators – but what about the guy who won the lottery with #1883472 when I was stuck with #1883473? Is it fair that he won instead of I?
And what about that guy who was born with a handsome face and dated all the hot girls I couldn’t have. Was that fair? Shouldn’t he have to give dollars (or girls?) to me to even things out?
I think it’s fair to say that those who speak of “fairness” in connection with taxes don’t have answers to the above questions about fairness.
Oh sure, if you count FICA, but then the 50% that the OP is whinging about are paying federal income taxes, and we’re back to bullshit.
What a wonderfully succinct response. Nicely done.
I’ve been scratching my head over this, and I just cannot figure it. How is it mathematically impossible? Are you suggesting that there is no correlation between two variables that will yield equivalent proportions all along the distribution?
I mean, it’s not likely that you’d see it in reality, but it’s not mathematically impossible.
I think what he means to say it that unless we use poll tax/tax per head the richer is always have to pay more. Even if the income tax rate is set at lets say 10% for everyone the rich would still pay more and they would argue it’s unfair. So even at flat tax rate they would still whine regardless only when employ poll tax or tweak the rate for rich people to be lower would the “fair” argument to be completely invalid. It’s too bad I don’t think anyone would go for poll tax or give the rich special tax rate.
The only way it is mathematically possible is if everybody had the exact same amount of whatever you were looking at, income or wealth. Otherwise, someone who is wealthier than average has more than is “proportionate” by definition.
He may have dated all those girls - but he could marry only one, so you (and I, not being that handsome guy either) got the leftovers.
If our marriage system matched our economic system, 1% of men would have 50% of the women (or vice versa, perhaps.)
Now we’re getting somewhere!
The top 1% make over 50% of the income, and you’re bothered that they pay 40% of the taxes?
Guess what? Life isn’t fair. Great private sector wealth isn’t fair, government doesn’t have to be nice and “fair” to the wealthy.
How it is fair that my husband and I will pay a combined tax rate of about 25% this year but Mitt Romney will only pay a tax rate of 14%? I don’t hear the Reps whining about that fact. Capital gains should be treated as oridinary income. It’s brutally unfair they aren’t.
The entire issue is nonsense. There is no magical divide between the imaginary groups of tax takers and tax payers. Everyone pays taxes and everyone uses things that are paid for by taxes.
It varies from person to person; some people pay income tax, some people pay sales tax, some people pay property tax, some people collect welfare, some people drive on public roads, some people were educating in a school. But all of us put something in and take something out.
COMMlE!