If you’re asking about income levels in constant dollars, that’s easy to Google for. I’d do it for you now, but I’m not sure that’s your question. If you consider a more intangible sense of well-being the question becomes much MUCH more complicated, and would require a difficult thread in another forum. I will however address that question with one fact, probably too well known to need a cite: One strong factor in a human’s sense of well-being is that his well-being is in some way comparable to the others around him. In specific terms, if you have $40k income in a town where the average is $45k you’re probably much happier than if you had $55k in a town where the average is $100k.
By the way, The Other Waldo Pepper, in a recent thread I found myself wanting to respond to Starving Artist but fortunately did a Search first and found that the post I’d thought was Starving’s was instead yours! And now I am curious. So my questions are: Do you and he think similarly? Do you admire Starving Artist and his posts? (I want to ask him similar questions.)
DragonAsh made the claim that people were predominantly poor because of poor choices, not because of anything inherent to “they system” (which in this context includes tax policy). The evidence indicates that the top 1% of wage earners are doing considerably better relative to the bottom 50% than they ever have before - and at least twice as well as they were 30 years ago. My question is whether it makes sense to consider what effect the changes to “they system” since 1980 might have had to produce this result.
I’ve heard it; it just never rang true for me. If I get fired tomorrow, I’ll be miserable; I won’t be happier to hear that Johnson got fired likewise, I won’t be happier to hear that he got a raise; I won’t care. If I get a raise tomorrow, I’ll be happy; I can’t really imagine changing my mind upon hearing that Johnson got one too – or got demoted, or got laid off. I’m just not wired that way.
So, specifically: if I have as good a year next year as this one, and as good a year after that – what the hell do I care that in one of those years the super-rich lost out, and in the other they doubled their wealth? I don’t. I’m trying, but I just can’t. It doesn’t matter to me; I know it’s supposed to, but when you get right down to it I’m either rich or poor regardless of envy or schadenfreude or whatever – and I already know that, so “when you get right down to it” is pretty much where I start.
No offense to him or you, but I can’t say I’ve really formed an opinion of either of you; again, I don’t really keep score. If someone makes an interesting post, or a foolish post, or whatever, I react to it without paying much attention to which posters are which. There are exceptions – Bricker and Der Trihs, say – who sink in by having a signature style to their posts, but for the most part it doesn’t register the way a face or a voice would.
If there is a pot of money for raises in your department, a fairly big pot, and one guy gets all of it, you won’t feel ripped off? Even if he is a bit more productive than everyone else you would. How about if your boss took all the money.
And, btw, unless there are massive productivity increases it is impossible for everyone to be doing better. In the early '80s nearly everyone got 10% raises, but inflation was 10%, so those who got those raises didn’t feel all that much better about the people getting 20% raises.
In any case, the situation today is not only that the rich make more without paying a bigger share of taxes, but that the resulting deficits have meant that government services used by the poor and middle class have been degrading. Cops are getting fired. Even if a person in Oakland is staying at a constant salary, his or her quality of life is decreasing directly as a result of resistance to more taxes.
What share of taxes did they pay, and do they pay?
Well, let me first come at it another way.
The analogy I considered mentioning above is another fairly well-known phenomenon which also leaves me cold: that, all else being equal, gold medalists tend to be happier than silver medalists, and silver medalists tend to be less happy than bronze medalists. It’s counterintuitive, but the idea is that silver medalists typically think in terms of how close they came to getting gold, while bronze medalists think in terms of how close they came to getting nothing.
The problem, again, is that I know that, and so hope and expect to skip straight to the more sensible approach of valuing a silver medal more than a bronze one. To me, the whole point of bringing that counterintuitive result into the light is to destroy it.
But – in a completely separate discussion – it’d sure bother me to get a silver medal while someone else gets the gold despite not crossing the finish line ahead of me (or failing to put the shot as far or whatever). Again, I can’t stress enough that such an issue doesn’t actually have anything to do with the other point; it looks kinda similar if you squint just right, but it’s actually unrelated.
In other words, a lot is hanging on the “even if he is a bit more productive” angle. Shouldn’t I feel even worse about him getting the raise if he’s a bit less productive than the rest of us? Shouldn’t I therefore feel better about him getting the raise if he’s not just a bit, but a lot more productive than the rest of us?
If I were exactly as productive as him – or more so, even – you can bet I’d ask why he got the raise and I didn’t: not because of the admittedly similar-looking relative-to-other-people Septimus was just talking up, but because of something on the other side of that fine line. I’d want, for a start, to know why his significantly similar performance is being rewarded differently than mine.
So: if there was suddenly a pot o’ raises in my department, and one guy gets all of it – I’d want to know why, I’d want to know what I could do to likewise clean up, but I’m not sure I’d feel ripped off unless I thought the “why” was unfair, at which point I’d do my level best to haggle for mere equal treatment.
See, that’s absolutist talk I can get behind. And I’d feel better, in that situation, if my salary weren’t constant but increasing – and preferably, by enough to more than offset said degradation. If it is, I’d be happy regardless of how the super-rich are faring. And if not, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t feel better upon hearing that quality of life has gone down for the rich; why would I?
Do you have any ideas how marginal tax rates work? You don’t pay the new rate on your entire income if you get into a higher tax bracket, you just pay the new rate on the amount of income past that bracket. What this means is that there is no way you are not losing at least 50% of your salary, probably more. This is not an opinion sort of thing, it’s math.
Now if what you are saying is that you don’t “miss it” in the figurative sense, then that is an argument for progressive taxes because it demonstrates marginal utility at work.
I used top figure out how much I made on overtime. Working long overtime, I wound up making less per hour than I did on 40 hours. But I had a job to do and delivery dates to meet. i never thought a minute about how it affected my paycheck. I was dumb enough to believe the company and I would both prosper if we got the jobs out on time.
Workers do not sabotage the company. Most work their ass off for not much money.It is the American way.
This doesn’t make sense - do you have too many negatives in there?
It’s not figurative, it’s based on the fact that I can still pay all of our bills without worry, put some money aside and still go on vacations, buy stuff, etc. After my husband adjusted his withholding to reflect the lack of my salary, he had enough in each paycheck to hand me enough money that I have almost exactly the same amount to work with as I had when I was working, and he has pretty much the same left over as he always had to buy the stuff he buys.
Now, this may all be skewed by the fact that I am getting a small disability payment every month, but even with that we are still making +/- $20K less a year than when I was working.
I wonder what it is like to be so sure of one’s knowledge that their mind is completely closed AND they feel the need to make fun of anything that doesn’t fit their narrow view of what is “right”. Odd way to live.
I would change that from “knowledge” to “opinions”/“ideas” if I were you because almost every political argument made on this board (or anywhere else for that matter) is merely an idea, not a fact that one can have “knowledge” of.
And making fun of or insulting people for holding non-liberal opinions is virtually de rigueur on this board. Hadn’t you noticed?
It’s math. You might as well say that I have a closed mind on whether 1+1=2. The way our taxes work, there is simply no way to reduce your pre-tax income by $20K and end up with the same amount of post-tax dollars. This is not about what is “right” it’s about what is “correct”.
It’s disturbing that people want to make decisions based on incorrect information. We hear it all the time" “I got kicked into a new tax bracket and ended up making less money”. No, they didn’t. It’s simply not possible. That’s not the way marginal tax brackets work.
We can argue all we want about whether tax rates should be progressive, or what things should be taxable, or what the tax rates should be. But you can’t just make shit up.
Yup! This one is just a bit more amazing in that we have a poster here telling me that I am wrong about my own money.
There is no way that our tax system is even close to 1+1=2.
As you understand the tax system. Are you saying that you are such an expert on taxes that you can tell a stranger that they are completely wrong about their own finances? It’s not like I’m talking post-tax dollars here, so you really cannot know with just the few facts I’ve presented everything that might affect our incomes. Shoot, for all I know, this just happened to coincide with the Bush tax cuts and that affected us more than I know.
Which is exactly what your problem is. I am not arguing about anything, I am merely telling you that the loss of my job has made almost no difference to us financially.
I think almost everybody knows that you can not have less income from wages and have the resulting reduction in taxes make up for it. Taxes do not work that way.
Which you made in the context that high taxes disincentivize a person from working. Are you now going to claim that the Bush tax cuts did it instead?
In any rational discussion we assume that we are holding some things constant when making a comparison. So yes, if there was a tax cut in addition to you losing your job you may have needed up with the same amount of money. But what possible point about tax policy could you draw from that? Maybe your husband made more money, maybe you inherited money, maybe you robbed a bank, but when you claim that when you stopped working the reduction in taxes resulted in no difference in how much money you have to spend we assume that you are comparing apples to apples and that the difference in taxes is the reason.
Sigh, another one who cannot or will not bother to read. Right there in that quote I said “that is how it sometimes seems to turn out” - that is not a “claim”, that is an observation. If I wasn’t disabled, the way our finances have been more or less unaffected by my not working would be a very big disincentive for me to go back to work. Similar things could happen to poor folk, I don’t know.
As for the Bush tax cuts, if you had been following this discussion you would know that they couldn’t have had anything to do with it, since they happened years before I quit working. I guess I should have checked on when that happened before I made that comment, tho even then I knew they couldn’t have made that much difference. It was partially sarcasm and partially frustration.
I’m going to try another tack here. You claim your household income is now 20,000 less than when you were working but that you have experienced no noticeable difference in your income. You feel, apparently, that the lack of any relative difference between your lifestyle now and the one 20,000 dollars ago must be because of income taxes you are no longer paying. You feel if this is the case taxes are too high because it would provide a disincentive for people to work.
Ok, I’m going to try explaining the other point of view to you..
Nobody gives a fuck what the hell you ‘notice’ or don’t. We don’t give a wet shit whether, in your opinion, you can take a 20,000 dollar hit on your household income and not notice. Money exists or it does not. It is taxed or it is not. People have been trying to tell you that there is no way the taxes you paid were enough to make up a 20,000 difference in your income. It is IMPOSSIBLE, the numbers do not lie.
Now, that was harsh but arguably you deserve it. Ever stop to consider the fact that your perception about your overall cost of living may be skewed by not working? Maybe you’re happier and don’t spend as much as a result now, maybe you had a lot of hidden costs involved in you working (transportation costs to and from work, clothing budgets, eating out, less time to shop for bargains etc.). The point is, nobody cares about your perceptions or personal situation. We’re concerned with numbers, facts and the tax system in general. Not you.
If you’re asking about income levels in constant dollars, that’s easy to Google for. I’d do it for you now, but I’m not sure that’s your question. If you consider a more intangible sense of well-being the question becomes much MUCH more complicated, and would require a difficult thread in another forum. I will however address that question with one fact, probably too well known to need a cite: One strong factor in a human’s sense of well-being is that his well-being is in some way comparable to the others around him. In specific terms, if you have $40k income in a town where the average is $45k you’re probably much happier than if you had $55k in a town where the average is $100k.