I am not sure what you are trying to say:
Your husband makes so much money that you don’t miss the $10K+ after tax dollars, or
Somehow defying all logic and facts the tax code resulted in you having almost the same after-tax income as before.
Well that was just adorable.
Yeah, I’m cool like that!
You said we have a “tax the rich government”. Those stats should tell you the opposite is true. Their taxes are dropping over and over.
I thought it was fairly clear that I’ve been talking about the “working rich” - you know, the guys Obama and his supporters want to start gouging, who earn $250K and up. I imagine the guys you’re talking about are the Hampton/Aspen group elucidator alluded to, and apart from the fact that there probably aren’t enough of them to finance the whole country once we’ve decided that everyone else is too poor for taxation, I’m not too terribly concerned with the amount of tax they pay.
IIRC, the tax raise suggested by Barrack Trotsky was something like 3% for the “working rich”. And, on your planet, that’s “gouging”?
It’s a start - because we all know you guys never stop. You’re famous for breaking out giant Slip 'N Slides on every slippery slope you can find. 
You acknowledge that your argument is fallacious in the very statement itself, you know that? The slippery slope is a fallacy - precisely because it allows you to argue against a certain position because you can concoct future positions that no one has actually taken to argue against.
If tax rates are a slippery slope, and they only go one way, and you have to fight for every inch - then why are the current tax rates historical lows? Why have tax rates on the highest bracket decreased by about 2/3rds since the 50s? Ah yes, your golden 50s, when everyone was free and the economy was booming and yet somehow the rich withstood tax rates several times higher than now without society crumbling. In fact quite the opposite…
I realize I’ve been gone all day. I’ll get around to replying to all the other stuff when I have some time.
For one thing, the 91% tax rate in the 50’s applied to precious few people. Plus ordinary income earners (and employers) were not burdened with such high Social Secuity withholding and matching payments and there was no Medicare/Medicaid to deduct from paychecks. Other taxes were lower too. The local sales tax the entire time I was growing up was 2%. It’s 8.885% now.
The reason taxes are lower now is because Republicans broke the 50-year lock on Congress and the populace saw first hand that welfare, housing projects and other throw-money-at-'em solutions vaunted by liberals were a waste of money and caused more problems than they solved.
As for your pending replies, take your time. There’s no hurry. Take a week or two (or three) if you like. Really, there’s no rush. No rush at all. 
Didn’t you just go through that whole speech about how we’re talking about federal income tax and it’s unfair to look at non-income taxes to determine an overall tax burden and blah blah and now suddenly the lower overall tax burden is a factor in showing why the rich didn’t have it worse in the past?
Does this look like a graph to you that supports the idea that the top marginal tax rate is a slippery slope, and once you give a little ground you’ll never go back, because the liberals will just keep pushing to take it all away?
Well, now you know.
SA wanted to make a soundbite policy point. There the federal income tax is progressive and has gotten more progressive in recent years because the poor are falling under the minimum income for paying taxes and Obama’s tax cuts were capitated (i.e. he gave every taxpaying household an $800 credit which threw a bunch of borderline taxpayers off the net taxpayer wagon.
So now the trick is to try to characterize the entire cost of government as being borne by the federal income tax or close enough to it that its basically the same thing.
I thought we were talking about income between 500K and 550K.
So you do not equate large budgets with big government then I’m not sure what your beef is.
Can we agree that the federal income tax is not the entire tax burden?
Can we agree that the federal income tax is at historical lows and the rate on the rich has not been lower for more than a handful of years since WWII?
Your complaint seems to be that the rate on the poor is ALSO lower than it has historically been.
Yes, I did. But now the subject has shifted from what I had been saying about the number of people today who don’t have to pay income tax, to why people had more prosperous lives in the fifties despite higher maximum tax rates. In other words, it’s an entirely different subject.
I’m more concerned with the overall tax rate for the largest number of people, and there is no question that due to liberal programs and legislation we’re constantly having to pay more of our income to the federal government. State and local governments too.
Conservatives don’t view government as the rightful provider of “services” and liberals do. Thus liberals are always agitating for more and more goodies from government and more and more money from the taxpayer to pay for them. Often this takes the form of government spending of the spend-it-now-tax-'em-when-things-get-desperate kind, a method famously elucidated by Barney Frank. So now we’ve gotten to the point where Republican leadership in this country has finally decided to draw the line and put a stop to it. I’m not to crazy about their timing, nor whether it’s the right thing to do as for the immediate future, but given the capriciousness of the American votership they have apparently decided to do it while they still have the chance because five, ten or twenty years down the line things will have gotten that much more out of control.
Our government is irresponsible. That’s all there is to it. It will spend and spend and borrow and borrow all it can in its never-ending quest to buy voter votes, and is perfectly willing to throw away hundreds of billions in interest, raid Social Security coffers scattering I.O.U.'s in its wake, and mortgage the population of the future all without an apparent moment’s thought to what happenes when the house of cards comes falling down - apparently in the belief that whoever’s around then will come up with some sort of solution and everything will work out in the end.
This is the way irresponsible people behave, and it’s the way our irresponsible government has been behaving for at least 80 years or so. And I’ll give you one guess as to which party has been mostly been at the wheel during that time and driving us toward that cliff.
You guys remind me of an employee who worked for me in my younger days when I was managing a large auto parts warehouse. He came to me one day and told me he needed a raise because he and his girlfriend had just moved into a larger apartment and bought a newer car. I had to explain to him that things don’t work like that. First you get the money, then you buy the goodies. Businesses aren’t going to pay you more simply because you overspent, and taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay the government more simply because it overspent.
This is why Republicans by and large support a balanced budget amendment and Democrats don’t, and why reining in spending is the responsible thing to do and why continuing to borrow and spend isn’t.
It’s still dishonest to selectively ignore overall taxation. If your point is that the poor don’t pay taxes, suddenly it’s “I very specifically mean federal income taxes”, but if we look at the booming economic times when the taxes on the very rich are very high, it’s “oh, well all their other taxes were low, so their total tax burden…”
Got another graph for you.
Until very recently, that graph is relatively flat. It was actually Reagan and Bush who spearheaded the most noticible upward trends. You’re going to blurt out something about “but look at it now!” ignoring that we’re talking about your claim that liberalism has always slippery sloped its way to greater federal spending. Is there any amount of factual, hard evidence that will have any impact on these erroneous views that you’ve grown comfortable with?
Oh? Conservatives aren’t into having police and fire and roads and such? Those are services. Everyone has an arbitrary gut feeling about what government should and shouldn’t do. Some of those arguments have merit, others don’t. But it’s silly to say somethign so broad as “conservatives don’t view the government as the rightful provider of services”
In my lifetime, liberals have been far better about paying for stuff as they spend it. The republcians have been borrow and spend, and the liberals have been tax and spend.
Yeah, better to cause sure economic collapse now than risk that it might happen down the road sometime when we still have time to mitigate or prevent it.
I generally agree with this. But your views about how republicans and democrats actually treat these issues is ideologically driven and counter-factual.
Actually, please do. Give me some graphs that show how under democratic leadership the country has suffered, and under republican leadership it has prospered. I’d be interested to see the data.
Actually, taxpayers should be forced to pay because the government overspent. Their elected representatives did it on their behalf. What’s the other option, rack it up on the credit card bill and then skip town when the bill comes? Is that the responsible conservative option?
Weird how that’s not how they acted when they actually had the power to enact such a thing, but suddenly it’s all the rage when they can be the minority party sniping from the sidelines. Why do you think that is?
A government that is constantly seeking to insinuate itself into our lives and control what we have and do, and which seeks to forcibly redistribute income from one population group to another. And as I just said to SenorBeef, which seeks to borrow and spend and not live within its means. That is what my beef is.
Sure, if it turns your crank that much I don’t see why not, you know, given that it’s true and all. Still it might be helpful if you’d stop trying to lay traps and just get on with whatever point you’re driving at.
Sure, as long as we can agree that historical highs were due to unusual circumstances such as war recovery and/or 50 years of Democratic domination of congress, and have nothing whatsoever to do with what rates ought to be now.
In that regard my complaint is twofold: 1) More and more people are being classified as “poor” regardless of whether anyone would reasonable define them that way by any other standard; and 2) yeah, I think that if low income earners can be expected to pay gas tax and sales tax and state tax and local tax and Social Security and Medicare/Medicade payments, they can also pay at least something in the way of income tax. The advantages of living in this country are touted by the left constantly to excuse higher taxes on the rich, yet poor people have access to the same roads, the same police and fire services, the same military protection, etc. as everyone else. Simply having an income lower than some arbitrary number set by some government bureaucrat should not exempt you in my opinion from chipping in to supprort the country whose benefits and protections you enjoy as well.
Sorry, Senor, but I’m gonna have to bail for now. I’m in the middle of a good book that I’ve been ignoring for two days in order to spend my life on this board. I’m gonna take a break for a while and get back to it while I can still remember what it was about. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day. I’m sure this thread will go on for days.
Take your time. There’s no hurry. Take a week or two (or three) if you like. Really, there’s no rush. No rush at all.
Just remember that post when you come back.
The 91% rate was applied to income over $200,000. In today’s dollars it would be between $1.5 and $2 million. Sure its not a lot of people but there were a lot more brackets back then too.
My local sales tax was always 8.25% growing up and its still 8.25% in NYC. But I thought you were ignoring all other taxes besides federal income taxes. Or are we just ignoring them when they are inconvenient for you?
The tax rates took their first significant drop in 1964 from 91% to 70%. Lets see the President was John Fitzgerald Kennedy (D) of Massachussetts; the senate majority leader was Mike Mansfield (D) of Montana; and the speaker of the house was John McCormack (D) also of Massachussetts.
The next big drop for earned income came in 1970 from 70% to 50%. The senate majority leader and speaker of the house were the exact same folks. Nixon was in the white house.
THEN came Reagan.
The Reason taxes are THIS low right now is because of the Republicans but the reason taxes are below 50% is because of Democrats. They may be tax and spend types but Republicans were the borrow and spend types. They cut taxes they couldn’t afford to cut.
Democrats have historically been the party of tax and spend; Republicans have historically been the party of borrow and spend. After WWII, Democratic governments have been responsible for the vast majority of the surpluses and the Republicans have been responsible for the vast majority of the deficits.
They aren’t supporting a balanced budget amendment, they are supporting a supermajority vote for tax increases at a time when we are at historically low tax rates.