I come from a rich family. Personally I only pay $3k a year in taxes so I am poor?
But my mom pays over a million dollars plus in taxes every 4 months in estimated taxes. Her net worth is over 100 million dollars and she worked hard for it.
And yes she is a job creator. She owns her own real estate company and owns many warehouses and small businesses where hundreds of people get a paycheck monthly due to her entrepreneurship.
Her tax burden is 4,000,000+ a year.
Is 4 million dollars of taxes enough to stop the whining occupy hippies? Is $4 million a fair share? Or is more money needed? lol
But you haven’t mentioned either your income or your mother’s income. You mention how much you both pay in taxes so privacy doesn’t appear to be an issue.
You pay $3000 a year in taxes. Is that on a $10,000 annual income or a $100,000 annual income?
Your mother pays $4,000,000 a year in taxes. That’s a lot of money but if she’s making $40,000,000 a year then she’s only paying ten percent on her income in taxes and that’s less than I’m paying.
If you’re drawing conclusions from graphs like this, maybe that’s part of your problem. For one thing the x-axis stops at $500k. Many Americans make more than that. For another thing, have you ever considered that … (gasp) … actual numbers might be useful when discussing numbers?
We still didn’t hear what you think “nearly all” means, but, repeating my earlier claim, you either define it preposterously, or silly graphs have deceived you into gross factual misunderstanding.
Considering that the OP’s question left the definition of both “the rich” and “fair share” open to individual definition, I’m not sure how either of those answers can really be citable.
I won’t ask you for a cite (you’d post another inane graph), but this statement may be the most incorrect and ignorant statement I’ve ever seen on SDMB. (Not you, dear Doper, unless you want to move to BBQ Pit. It’s just the statement, doubtless posted by your pet hamster while your attention was diverted. )
Even a relatively modest tax increase on the rich could raise trillions of dollars over a few years. This is in contrast to the MILLIONS of dollars right-wingers want to save by laying off food inspectors and defunding NPR.
I’ve illustrated the relative magnitudes of trillions and MILLIONS by varying the font sizes. “trillions” are “chump change” and “rounding errors,” while right-wingers soil their pants in glee when they have the opportunity to save MILLIONS.
(This is a reason why today’s intelligent Europeans have great trouble believing Americans were able to land on the Moon.)
Considering the top 0.1% reported a total of $0.8 trillion in 2008, can I assume your definition of modest is confiscation of all income?
Maybe get all those rascals in the top 1% (any return over $380k)? That’s $1.7 trillion. Maybe take all the money of the big income dudes and say around half the other 0.9%. Yeah, that’s the ticket! That’ll get $1.2 trillion/year! Do that for 5 years and we got our trillions. Of course the debt’s still growing since we’re not covering our nut. But we’ll figure it out; maybe 75% on losers who couldn’t get into the top 0.1%? Nothing will change for a few years; they’ll continue to bring in that much until everything gets fixed!
I don’t choose to quibble here whether $400k/year is “rich” or not. I will note you managed to overlook the S when I wrote yearS, and also seem to be unaware that SDMB policy is that the plural is used on any amount over 1. $1.1 trillionS is proper usage here, or so I’ve been informed.
But if we’re quibbling, let’s establish the conditions of agreement or disagreement: If only $0.8 trillion would be raised over “a few years” by restoring taxes to 1990’s level, would you be in the camp that ridicules that as pointless “chump change” and “only a rounding error”?
The SBMB has a policy about plural usage? Who knew?!
So I supplied an illustration:
Bolding and underlining added.
You asserted that “a relatively modest tax increase on the rich could raise trillions of dollars over a few years.” I showed that you have to essentially confiscate the income of the rich to raise trillions of dollars over a few years.
Which camp am I in?
I’m in the camp that believes that taxing “the rich” (whoever they are) doesn’t fix the problem.
I’m in the camp that’s fascinated that it doesn’t faze you at all that confiscatory taxing such as I illustrated above won’t even eliminate the deficit let alone bring down the debt (or stop it from growing long enough so that inflation does the same thing) to serviceable levels.
I’m in the camp that thinks the debt is somewhere around $14 trillion and not $14 trillions.
Eliminating all of the programs the Republicans want to eliminate also won’t eliminate the deficit. In fact, that would fall a lot (as in, an order of magnitude or more) shorter of eliminating the deficit. When you’ve got two plans, neither of which will entirely solve a problem, but one of which will almost solve the problem and the other will do barely anything, shouldn’t you be concentrating most on the plan that almost solves it?
If I’d written “hundreds of billions” instead of “trillions” or “several years” instead of “a few years” there’d have been no objection except from the “Taxing the Rich offends Jesus” fringe.
That I chose “trillions” instead of “hundreds of billions” was to make a point (using font sizes) about Republican hypocrisy. It was also intended to be humorous.
If you didn’t find it funny, fine. I do wonder if you at least understood the point.
I asked a yes/no question and you didn’t answer it. Are you of the ilk that believes that since increasing taxes on the rich won’t immediately solve all fiscal problems and cure cancer, that we should lower taxes on the rich instead?
Nevermind. I’m increasingly uninterested in Republican “thought.”
Because in five years we’ve increased outlays by about $1.2 trillion (44% in 5 years - it was also around 44% from 2001-2006, so this isn’t a political party problem). I don’t think the solution to that is tax someone. I can do math well enough to see that the only way to address the shortfall via taxation is to get into the pockets of the top 50-95%.
If we double the income tax collection (go from about $1 trillion to $2 trillion) we still have a $400 billion deficit. We can get that $1 trillion by confiscating half the income of the “rich” (say anyone making over $380k) and get there - i.e. triple their tax rate. But I suspect you can only do that for 1 year.
Or we can wait for inflation.
Or we can wait for another internet-like runup (let’s at least hope for tulips though) and have the receipts to mask the problem for a few years.
I’m guessing some combination of the two. Damn that poor national math score deficiency!
But … I do apologize if my numbers were a little off. I’m normally one to Google for such things, but don’t memorize every statistic I come across. Regoogling seems kind of pointless when correct numbers were probably given in a week-ago thread, and this week we already have the “competition” posting an inane and wildly inaccurate graph.
I used to be more careful. Sam Stoned exaggerated one of his numbers by almost a factor of two; I corrected it; I was accused of “nitpicking.” Then, in another thread I posted a correct “hundreds of billions” number and the same Sam Stoned ridiculed this amount as “a rounding error.”
If you’re someone who needs exact numbers to decide whether taxing the rich or defunding NPR is the better plan for cutting the deficit, then you’re welcome to do your own Googling. I hope this helps.
So the “relatively modest tax increase” that was your premise was a feint. Devilish!
I don’t think anyone’s in the camp that thinks $800 billion is chump change or a rounding error.
I’m not in the camp that “believes that since increasing taxes on the rich won’t immediately solve all fiscal problems and cure cancer, that we should lower taxes on the rich instead” (you’re sneaky, you’ve established a new camp this time - but I caught it, so I believe I’ve answered your questions).
In addition to the camps I said I was in, I’m in the camp that wants to fix the spending problem.
I might want to visit a camp that leaves revenue alone or one that fundamentally changes how federal revenue is raised.
We have spending problem and we’ve had one for a couple of generations.
These are word-for-word quotes from Sam Stone. I was astounded; insisted he repeat it or retract it; he repeated it.
We can agree that no serious thinker considers $800 billion to be “chump change” or “a rounding error.”
I’m sorry to cause confusion with hyperbolic numbers but, given Sam Stone’s hyperbole, and the bullshit graph already presented in this thread, I think you can understand why I no longer bother to present numbers with three sig figs in these threads.
How do you arrive at that conclusion? Even though Clinton had the hottest economy of the last 50 years, the national debt still increased every year under his watch. The “surplus” that he had was only by adding the SS Trust Fund which was supposed to be in a separate account.
Or do you mean “greatly lowered” as in not “lowered” in the normal sense of the word meaning “less than now,” but “lowered” as in “less than it might be otherwise”?
I wish I could get my wife to buy into that argument. If I only spend $75/day on booze, and I project that next month I will spend $100, why doesn’t my wife congratulate me on by booze deficit cutting measures when it turns out that I only spend $90/day next month?
“Sweetheart, as you can clearly see, I have cut spending by increasing it $15/month!” But then again, she wasn’t an Econ major, so she wouldn’t understand…
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