What "Conservative Values" aren't based on bigotry?

What about, everyone paying the same percentage of Social Security Tax on all of their income, and everyone getting $3500 a month once they turn 65?

That seems pretty equal, based on your standards. Everyone pays the same percentage, and everyone gets the same amount. Equal.

Nope. All the “equality of outcomes” language is coming from the conservatives. The liberals are pointing out that whaat conservatives say is “treating people equally” is not treating people equally.

Look. Somebody built that fence in the first place. Maybe it wasn’t anybody now living. Maybe it wasn’t anybody with evil intentions. Neither of those is the point. The point is that the fence was built in such a fashion that tall people can see the game and short people can’t. That’s the unequal part. Fixing the fence so that everybody can see isn’t what makes for inequality; neither does supplying boxes as a stopgap in the meantime. It’s the way the fence was built that’s unequal.

More later, no time now.

If you believe that is equal, then you would believe that a counter proposal saying that everyone pays the same amount but gets a percentage of their income would likewise be equal. The fact that you disagree with the proposal shows that it is unequal.

A percentage on one side of the equation and a flat amount on the other side never would have an “=” in the middle of it.

Then it should be easy to provide a quote. (Hint: You can’t)

But it’s just “life” making those decisions, not actual humans, didn’t you just say?

What “Conservative Values” aren’t based on bigotry?

As others said, what a loaded and prejudiced question.

What “Democratic Values” aren’t based on communism?

Since when do Dopers have to defend themselves just because we have conservative beliefs?

I have always supported conservative values. These are mostly economic values and include individualism, business leadership and capitalism.

I’m against communism, I want the individual to be the person deciding. I am less conservative when it comes to social values, I could care less what other people do, and fairness should not be based on sexual identity.

I am Canadian, but would not have voted for Trump nor Clinton, and I always vote ( a civic duty I believe is compatible with a conservative beliefs, but not exclusive to).

We live in a mixed economic system which includes a combination of socialism and capitalism. I lean to the capitalism side as I believe governments are inefficient at allocating resources, and overspend the money that is available.

The problem is that the left, by some magic, thinks that everyone can be able to see the baseball game. They cannot. There is scarcity. Only a handful of people who would like to watch the game will be able to do so.

How conservatives would handle it is that the person who values the ticket to the game the most will spend the portion of his paycheck that it requires to buy it. If you are only moderately interested, you lose out to the guy who is more interested. But the idea is that everyone can choose to spend their money to buy the ticket. That is equality.

Yes, you have extremes where the rich guy who has little interest nonetheless buys a ticket when he really doesn’t care and you have the poor guy who would love to go but can’t afford it at any price. Unless you are prepared for absolute wealth redistribution, nothing will change these outliers.

It is a complex system that has worked for hundreds of years where resources are allocated to those who value them the most and make the most efficient use of them. You guys want to ignore the problem and hand out boxes and go home and sleep easily secure in the knowledge that you have done something good. It didn’t work, but you tried and have the warm fuzzies.

But you simply screwed with the system. You gave two boxes to the kid who would rather have stayed at home and played video games when another family would have paid you for the two boxes because they love baseball. Inefficient central communist planning is at the core of what you propose.

Differing magnitudes of problems require different magnitudes of correction, obviously. Yet it’s common among self-described conservatives, whatever their agendas or conditioning, to focus solely on those differences in correction *themselves *and call *that *unequal treatment, while either ignoring or pretending away or dismissing the existence of the underlying inequalities that those corrections are intended to compensate for.

Well, luckily I never said that.

Everyone pays the same percentage of social security tax on all income: equal. Everyone is taxed exactly the same percentage. You yourself state that a flat tax is “treating everyone equally”

Everyone gets $3500 a month: equal. Everyone gets the exact same amount. Sort of like the “standard deduction” for income taxes. Equal. If you somehow have a problem with that then try this instead “Everyone gets a $3500 tax credit every year”, sort of like the “Child Tax Credit” but contains no income limits.

Certainly it would be even more equal to remove the cap, right?

But income tax is what we’re talking about. I don’t see what the amount Bill Gates pays for cigarettes has to do with anything. Sellers can price goods however they like.

Income tax is collected to fund public goods that can’t be effectively provided by the market. Everyone in society uses them, whether they want to or not, and these goods are essential to keep society healthy. But even though everyone uses these goods, their ability to pay for them varies wildly. Some people can hardly afford to pay anything for them. Others could pay half their income and still be billionaires. So what’s society supposed to do? We can’t charge the billionaires the same percentage as the people on the other end of the ladder because if we charge the billionaires a meaningful amount then the people near the bottom won’t be able to afford it. And we can’t charge the billionaires the percentage that the people near the bottom would be comfortable with, because then the dollar amount extracted from the billionaires would be trivial and vital services would go unfunded.

Both these options are unfair to the people at the bottom of the ladder who disproportionately use public services. In the first instance they’re forced to pay money they can’t afford. In the second, the public services they need (and which society needs to be able to provide) aren’t going to be there for them.

The only other option is progressive taxation. This allows every income group to pay an amount that they’re comfortable with.

Modern conservatism (or at least the most prominent chunk today):

“post-2016 election Democracy Fund study explains “send her back!” Trump rally; it identified Trump’s core base as “American Preservationists”, w/characteristics including: —“strong sense of racial identity”; 67% called their race “extremely important”; —“nativist and ethnocultural conception of American identity”; 69% say to be truly American, very important to be born here; 67% say very important to have spent most of life here; 59% say very important to be Christian; 47% plurality say important to be of European descent”

More from the same twitter thread:

“—“cooler feelings toward minorities”; 88% say blacks would be as well off as whites if only they’d try harder; 86% say discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as against blacks; 54% oppose affirmative action for women and minorities, while 18% favor”

and finally: “—“more likely to desire being around people like themselves, who have similar backgrounds and cultural experiences”; 70% say life in America is now worse for people like them than it was 50 years ago”

I looked at the tweets, I do not see a link to the study or poll being referenced. Can you point it out?

Are you being obtuse for the sole purpose of being obtuse? I’m not going to do your homework for you. If you can’t see for yourself that equality of outcomes is the desired ending and exactly what liberals are arguing for in this very thread amongst others, well, then you’re on your own.

“Life” as in the world we live in and the people who inhabit it. Yes, ‘people’ make life changing, altering, decisions. Some greater than others, some so great that they affect whole swaths of people. You might call them governments. Or the UN, or The Federation.

Anyway, I am pretty sure at this point you are just yanking my chain. So enjoy

I think this is it (hopefully this link works – pdf to download):

https://www.voterstudygroup.org/download?lv=oFQE9KgEK3PlI3EfNOdz%252BsyjShc6rIlFndeq9Yf2pmkGyY%252Ffco%252FJ%252F33nnCrg36iWk1RcqpHbX2m5V%252F8gACglcFInRuqdLtCKnal%252FPyt4Z%252F%252FU1SWQuYRv4usBXpbt4GGxq5o0av8D56akSkqnBLW519%252Fm5pe5xJWyUZob5Dq%252B4EZ%252Buw1Kbqv%252BZWQqqeIWzpLSjM6Ltktv%252FV%252F1ISYnp5Luk6WMjVxMaRClP2KkelWTm2y2gpKYzmLDo%252BG3YHOH5dUu

And here we have an attempt at the definition of “fair”. To be honest I don’t much disagree with you but keep in mind the entire reason that this equality argument is here in the first place.
Democrats want to use ‘equality for everyone’ as a platform. When it was pointed out that they don’t really want “equality” this whole scree of nonsense has been propped up.

IN reality fair and equal are entirely different concepts.

Fair might involve the ‘hurt’ that people feel when paying the tax bill (so some sort of percentage) but to pretend that it’s equal is disingenuous. I can actually even see an argument that if the percentage was the same across the board, that that could be both fair and equal.
But Will. Never. Happen.

Too many people would say that paying ANY amount of money by those on the lowest end of the scale is too onerous and then you have income tax brackets like now but likewise to pretend that this is “equal” is laughable.

It’s *your *claim. You may hold that view of what people not-like-you think so closely that it *seems *obvious to you, but it is in fact *not *true. If it were, it would have taken you less time to show an example than to make this claim of its obviousness.

As in, it isn’t just random, shit happens, suck-it-up stuff, but the results of conscious decisions made by people - people who lack sufficient power or interest to do any better, or prefer to keep their own superior opportunities locked in. Glad we cleared that up.

No, it’s about fighting ignorance. Some ignorance is just more tenacious than others.

I don’t think anybody ever claimed progressive income tax schemes were “equal” in a hard numbers sense - since that’s obviously absurd. As is the caricatural idea that progressives axiomatically want everything to be equal across the board at all times because… Reasons I guess ? Maybe we’re all *really *OCD ?

At best progressive taxes are equal in a social or socio-economic sense, that is to say everybody in a given bracket is subject to the exact same taxes (as opposed to ye olden days, where some people didn’t pay taxes because they were from that family ; and some other paid lower taxes because they lived in this specific city ; and yet some other paid more taxes because they were Italian or somesuch, and that one specific guy got a lifelong tax exemption because the King saw him fight at Agincourt and so on).
But they *are *fair. Everybody’s grokked that for fucking ever - the only people who object to them or pretend not to understand are the mega rich.

The concept behind progressive taxation is the theory of marginal utility, which says that the value of a dollar goes down with each additional dollar earned. For example, if you only have $10, an extra dollar is a lot more valuable to you than if you have $1 million.

The curve of utility is not linear. In other words, a 10% tax on someone earning $30,000 ‘hurts’ a lot more than a 10% tax on someone earning $1 million, because a 10% loss of 1 million is generally less painful to the taxpayer than a 10% loss from $30,000.

If that was all that mattered, a progressive tax that matches the utility curve averaged across all taxpayers would be fair and reasonable.

HOWEVER…

Socialists say they don’t want to plan and run the economy centrally. But for that to happen, you need capitalism. And capitalism needs capital. It needs rich people. In a world of 70-90% effective taxation, there will be no money to invest in the next SpaceX, or the next Apple. Any venture large enough to require large amounts of startup funds will not happen.

It’s ironic that Silicon Valley seems to be filled with young socialists, all of whom are dreaming of their own start-up. And who funds Silicon Valley start-ups? Primarily, venture capitalists. And who are venture capitalists? People with lots of money - often people who started up their own tech companies, sold them, and now invest their money in other tech companies - along the way, helping those companies with the lessons they learned on their own ladder to wealth.

Even in your own little town, you’ll often find small startups like restaurants and such funded by wealthy investors. Sometimes it’s a wealthy uncle in the family, or a family friend, or an angel investor someone knows, or whatever.

Get rid of the billionaires and millionaires, and you end capitalism. And then you are forced to centrally plan everything, whether you intended to or not.

There are other ways you can destroy capitalism and force central planning on people. Federal regulations, for example. Make it too burdensome for private individuals to thread the morass of regulations laid before them, and you can cede a market to the government and force central planning on everyone.

But the main point is that taxation isn’t just about applying equal pain to everyone. If you truly believe in free markets, you have to believe that people are free to profit from those markets in proportion to how much value they deliver to their customers (value measured in people’s willingness to trade dollars for what you are offering). A key aspect of capitalism is that capital must be allowed to accrue to those who have demonstrated the ability to generate value with it, and they must be free to re-invest that capital in the economy and not have it taken away by government.

If Elon Musk had his profits from PayPal taxed at 90%, or even 70%, there would be no SpaceX today, because Elon spent pretty much all of his millions on the Falcon 1, and would have been flat broke had the last Falcon 1 exploded. All his chips were on the table. Had he had 50% fewer chips, SpaceX would never have happened. The same goes for Jeff Bezos and Amazon and Blue Origin.

Government planning gets you the SLS rocket, which has cost $18 billion so far, which will not fly for two more years at least, and which will cost 1.5 billion dollars per launch. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy can lift about half of SLS, but it does it for less than 10% of the cost per launch, and it’s flying now and only cost somewhat over $500 million to develop. Space launch costs have dropped from $6,000 per kg to under $1000 per kg. If SpaceX’s next rocket flies successfully, it could drop to under $100/kg. That will save space launch customers more money per year than the revenue that the government would have got from Elon Musk by taxing his PayPal money away.

We are FAR, FAR better off having allowed Musk to keep his money than if government would have confiscated most of it, because that billion dollars would have been lost in the maw of government and would have changed nothing.

In terms of helping the poor, the low cost of space launch created by the private market has enabled the development of a global constellation of tens of thousands of internet satellites that hold out the promise of providing global high-speed, low latency internet connections to everyone on the planet. This wll provide instant competition to every ISP, and it will do more for development in 3rd world countries than most government aid has done for decades.

All because we let billionaires accrue capital and government didn’t manage what they did with it. And you can look at all the other world-changing statups, from Apple to Qualcomm to Fed Ex and Amazon, and see the same pattern. In a world of 70-90% taxation of the ‘rich’, none of those companies would exist today.

I don’t see conservatives failing to vote for Republicans, who consistently support Trump. I don’t see them opposing any of the policies I’ve pointed out. Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama never got that kind of support from Democrats or the left in general, and in fact often faced harsh criticism from their ‘own side’, so there’s nothing remotely equivalent. Conservatives claim to operate from a set of principles, but I see that things like ‘support our troops’ are clearly not conservative principles because they don’t support queer troops, so the actual value is something more like ‘Support our troops, as long as they’re not the kind of minority I want to attack’.

I will also note that you’ve neglected to list any additional non-bigoted ‘conservative values’, almost like you can’t think of any.