ALL TAXES ARE ROBBERY. They are collected at the point of a sword. To a certain frame of mind, this is unconscionable coercion. Paying taxes to a progressive government is a necessary evil. Levying them oneself is a betrayal of one’s own conservative conscience and of the Law of Right and Good.
Now, I see taxes as being acceptable on roughly the same theory as rent, and far, far preferable to a free-rider-prone fee-and-fine funding system. Many would agree. But they’ll see social insurance as excessive taxation.
As a child of the Abrahamic tradition, I believe in that “alms” thing. But more to the point, I think the economy will find a higher level, & more stability, with some constant redistribution.
I don’t care much if this is “earned.” If necessary to feed demand, I’d gladly turn 15% of GDP into a reverse capitation surtax, no “workfare” required. (Every adult pays 15% of income, and gets an even share of the money collected. If you make the mean income, this would add 0% to your tax bill.)
But this is seen with horror on the right, robbing the rich to give to the poor.
I’m bemused by their horror, but I guess just because you grew up speaking English doesn’t mean you grew up with tales of Robin Hood.
I think you’re personal point of view is fine. But alms are not like taxes. Alms are given voluntarily as a form of charity. Taxes are taken. That doesn’t mean all taxes are bad, just that we should understand that very basic difference.
I’d also point out that this robs incentive to produce for yourself. As a member of “the right” (although I have missed a lot of meetings lately), I’m not so horrified that it’s robbing the rich to give to the poor, but that its having me work to produce for others that may not work as hard.
What’s the point of this taxation system (maybe I missed something in the OP)?
Colbert is now asking anti-tax fanatics like Grover Norquist (may I get a chance to dance on his grave) absurd tax raising scenarios - terrorist have kidnapped all the grandmas in New York, and the only way to free them is to raise taxes a penny. They all seem to reject the concept even here.
So, how about this one: We have a balanced budget, and, based on assurances from conservative economists that cutting taxes will increase revenue, all of which is to go to our military to keep our country strong, we do so. But the economists are wrong, and we begin to run a deficit. Can we raise them back?
In other words, is there a tax diode, where you can cut and never raise? In that case, I’d be against any and all tax cuts, since the other side is inflexible.
BTW, in my scenario the budget is so lean that cutting other things would lead to massive pain and even death. So I don’t want to hear the answer of keep cutting non-military expenditures.
I heard Donnie Osmond on “The Talk” (don’t ask, I’m already :o from typing that) saying that it is unfair that people who work hard should be punished by having to pay taxes on their earnings.
He is able to earn his money because there is an infrastructure, largely due to the government and intellectual property laws, that allows him to get rich from entertaining people. Why shouldn’t he have to pay for that infrastructure more than someone who benefits less from the infrastructure?
A similar comparison can be made to any business that can buy, modify and sell stuff without excessive worry about someone taking their assets.
IF it weren’t for the things the government does for the rich, they wouldn’t be rich because they’d spend all their money on their private police/legal system.
Fair taxes seem to be when others pay more and I pay less!
The reality is that we have to pay for the things we want the government to do. What that is and to what degree is the issue.
Most people want the government to provide a safety net, its just a question of who do we catch and how do we prevent some people from using it as a hammock.
For most people, the infrastructure the govenment provides is not feasible to build on their own. It becomes a matter for the details how much defense, which roads, which colleges, etc. should we buy.
No more so that any other payment. Whether it’s the government or a merchant, people pay instead of just taking what they want because of the threat of force from the government. All commerce ultimately has an element of unspoken force to it. Paying taxes is simply paying what you owe to the government for doing its job of keeping an advanced industrial society running. The anti-tax crusaders are parasites who want all the benefits but who don’t want to pay what they owe.
When the guy in that Ayn Rand novel blew up that building, that was the act of a FREE MAN not ruled by society’s mores. That wasn’t FORCE! FORCE is what the LOOTERS do to the OVER-MEN!
I just love thier sweet, child-like faith, that if they just explain it simply enough, tell us once again that taxation is taking!..taking!..private property…yes, that’s right, actuallly taking something that belongs to somebody…taking it away from them!..we will gasp in horror, reel away in shock and revulsion, crying “blasphemy! blasphemy!”…
The trouble with this line of argument is that there is very little correlation between how hard people work and how much money they earn. (If anything the correlation is probably negative. People who do back breaking labor in horrible conditions almost always earn relatively little. People who sit in plush, air conditioned offices talking on the phone usually earn lots.)
Nor do earnings correlate with someone’s contribution to society. Teachers and trash collectors, IMHO, do work that is a lot more useful to the rest of us than, say, someone who earns millions by gambling on the stock market (or, come to that Donnie Osmond). It may take hard work to be successful stock market trader (albeit the work is done in rather pleasant conditions), but it is not work that really benefits society in any systematic way.
Beyond that, many of the wealthiest people do little or no work at all.
The whole idea that just because people have a lot of money, even when that money is in some way earned, that they therefore deserve to have that amount of money (and that someone who has, or earns less must, somehow, deserve to have less) is completely baseless.
“I made $10 million. If I make another $1 million I’ll only keep $700 thousand. I will not would rather not have that $700 thousand so I’ll stop earning money.”
I just have trouble believing that a businessman would have that perspective. If they did, don’t those free-market people realize that if there is $1 million to be made ($700k after taxes), that someone else will step into that void?
If I had to pay 75% taxes for a system (infrastructure) that lets me make a million, I’d be better off than making nothing.
I think the “work hard to pay for people who don’t” is a bit of a red herring. There are people who want to live off of society but unless someone can show me good statistics I don’t think it is significant.
One website puts it at about 1% on welfare, about 12% get food stamps, 4% get unemployment.
Suppose you are paid by the hour. The first forty hours a week that you work, you are paid $20 per hour. Any overtime you work, you are paid $10 per hour. You will always work a sixty hour week, right? After all, that’s an extra $200 a week.
That number is actually in line with what is considered “full employment” (there is never such a thing as 0% unemployment).
So, if we average that 2-7% out we get 4.5%. Obviously that is a bit of a fudge but it gets us a ballpark answer which says at 4% unemployment pretty much everyone available to work was working. People will go out and get a job if there is a job to be had. The unemployed people are people between jobs or maybe new mothers or people who are injured and so on. Some few will by layabouts but they are not many.
I would work the overtime actually, depending on how much I needed/wanted the extra money. If my company said that by coming in and putting in the overtime not only would I be earning an extra $10/hr but also they would be spending an additional $10 per hour to educate the children in my neighborhood and provide nutritious food to people who couldn’t otherwise afford it I would be putting in additional hours every week because it benefits both myself and society.
That quote said “…high marginal tax rates…” No one is seriously proposing anything more than rolling back the Bush tax cuts which gets it to the level in the 1990s when the US economy was actually doing pretty well.
I am generally anti-corporate taxes. However, it is because large corporations can shift most if not all of their tax burden to their customers, not because businesses would quit earning to avoid slight increases in the marginal rate. Yes, at “high marginal rates” that might happen but save that one until there is a serious proposal for a 30% marginal rate, much less the 50% you put in your red herring.
I’m for corporate taxes, but I don’t expect to gain tax revenue from them. Corporations should be taxed on profits, not gross revenues. The point is to goad corporations into doing something more with their revenues than simply piling up profit, or into cutting their prices. It’s a form of economic manipulation.
I think the base line normal is that we should work for what we earn. Unfortunately, we have two extremes.
On one is the extremely greedy, the people who earn far more than they will ever need because they game the system- the CEO who earns 8 figures when his company needs a bailout and still insists he should get his bonus.
On the other are the people who have been on welfare for three generations and think that’s perfectly normal.
