And they starved in the streets. Life in that period was horrible for anyone who wasn’t rich.
Then modern society collapses because that isn’t enough to pay for a modern government.
Modern American taxes are too low, not too high; especially on the rich.
The average rich person pays something like 20%. You lose nothing by just making that the uniform tax rate on the rich, no deductions.
And modern government can easily be funded on 15% of GDP, unless you assume that the primary purpose of a government is to take money from working people and give it to people who are not working.
Nonsense. We need much higher taxes on the rich, to reverse the decades-long tilt of the nation’s wealth in their favor and get that horded wealth back into the economy.
More nonsense. We need more tax money for everything from reducing the deficit to national health care to repairing our infrastructure. We certainly don’t need a massive revenue cut like that. And no, America is not spending huge amounts of money on “people who are not working”. It’s funneling huge amounts of money to the rich.
No, most of the budget these days is entitlements, which almost all go to non-working people.
And you won’t get much money out of the rich. The real money is in the middle class. And they are pretty hard to tax given their voting power.
Ie retired people who’d paid into the system when younger.
Not if you factor in state and local taxes which often end up being hard on the poor. That said, I’m open to a VAT once we close all loopholes, limit deductions severely, and restore Clinton-era rates on estate taxes.
I’m not making an argument about tax distribution, just pointing out that you get the most revenue from taxing the middle class, while taxing the rich gets you only a little bit comparatively.
A government financed mainly by the rich will by necessity be a small government. Big government requires high middle class taxes and it helps to get as much as you can from the poor as well, through sales taxes and hitting the politically weak single poor people for a little income tax, which the current system does. A single person making only $15,000/yr owes income tax. But given that there are quite a few people in that income range, it’s actually a lot of revenue.
Yet more right wing talking points. America is not the welfare state you are trying to claim it is.
That’s nonsense. The rich have most of the money in the country. You can’t get blood from a stone; the middle class doesn’t have that much more money that can be taken from them, and are getting smaller all the time anyway since for decades they’ve been being converted into the poor and their money diverted to the rich.
In the long run we either raise taxes on the rich, or the nation turns into a Third World style hellhole with a tiny rich elite in walled compounds with the rest of the population in utter poverty.
That is up to the voters, through their representatives, as provided for by the Constitution. Just because they support spending you deem frivolous doesn’t make it tyranny.
One of these statements contradicts the other. And vice-versa.
It’s true that the US is not a welfare state compared to most other Western countries, but we still spend more than half the budget on entitlements.
The rich have most of the WEALTH. The majority of the income resides with the middle class. The Bush tax cuts for those making $250,000 and under cost $3.3 trillion over 10 years. The tax cuts for those making over, only $700 billion.
If you want to get serious revenue, there’s no way around it than to tax the middle class more. And I don’t agree that it’s like trying to get blood from a stone. Median household income in the US is greater than any other country in the world, but we have the lowest tax burden. If Swedes and Frenchmen aren’t in poverty due to their taxes, Americans can handle it too. That’s obviously not my preferred policy, I favor smaller government, but if we’re going to have a big government that’s how you fund it. You ALSO raise taxes on the rich to French or Swedish levels, but that only gets you a small part of the revenue you need.
That’s not likely unless the government goes bankrupt.
Now if your plan is to raise another $1 trillion in revenue from taxing the rich(about as much as you can expect) over ten years, and cutting the remaining $7 trillion from spending, that’s a reasonable plan to avoid insolvency.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call it tyranny, but it’s definitely a problem. I don’t like the idea that Wesley Snipes and Lauryn Hill went to jail for public radio or agricultural subsidies. And I don’t think many people would support that if they made the connection.
Or Chris Gardner, who was already homeless when the government seized his bank account to pay an overdue tax bill. These are the real people, the real collateral damage in the war for social justice that liberals are waging. But like any war, innocent people get caught in the middle.
Of course most people aren’t silly enough to think that’s a good argument.
Do me a favor, and tell me what percentage of federal taxes support public radio and agricultural subsidies.
If he didn’t pay his taxes, he is not innocent.
People fail to pay taxes for the same reason they fail to pay other bills. You can’t in good conscience demand that someone’s assets be seized to pay taxes but not any other debts.
The Founders disagree. See the Whisky Rebellion. You either support a strict interpretation of the Constitution, or you don’t; I think yours is a little squishy. You like it when it protects individual freedoms, not so much when it enforces civic responsibilities like taxes.
I’m fine with enforcing tax collection. Provided taxes aren’t onerous(they weren’t in the founders’ time) and only pay for essential things(which was also true of the founders’ time).
No one understood better than they the seriousness of taking money from the citizenry and they treated it like the sacred trust it was. Modern politicians treat the citizenry like an ATM to pay for anything they might imagine wanting to pay for.
Gosh, if only we had a means for the people to decide what is onerous or essential and what is not. Perhaps through elected representatives, according to the will of the majority. Think that might work?
It works when the public is aware of the direct connection between asking for services and paying for them out of their own pockets. However, there’s been a bipartisan effort to sever this link. Democrats, by showering services on the masses and assuring that someone else will pay for it, and Republicans, by showering services on the masses and assuring that we’ll just borrow the money and the economy will grow somehow.
At the local level, the public is keenly aware that services cost money and more services means higher property and sales taxes. It’s a natural check on the cost of local government. State government is checked less, but still fairly substantially, especially in red states(blue states have taken to raising taxes on smokers or rich people to pay for things). The federal government is no longer checked at all. There is no demand too unreasonable to spend money on and no responsibility to actually demand that the citizenry pay for it. And since it’s not costing the average person a dime more, who could oppose it?
So, since the constitutional process has failed, what do you propose?
I don’t think the process has failed so much as gone temporarily out of whack. Math can’t be dodged forever, anymore than physics can. Eventually the bill comes due and people have to make some choices.
One of the unsettled questions about whether democracy can succeed or not is the “will the people vote themselves the treasury?” conundrum. In most countries, the answer has been yes. So now we get to find out what happens when the money runs out. Do they stick with democracy, or do they blame someone else for their problems and turn to dictators who preach hatred towards the other who supposedly caused their problems?