Well, I see that this thread has progressed down the usual paths. This pretty much sums up this thread (and the countless other threads on this same subject) IMHO:
Good grief. I don’t know why you bother, Sam…
-XT
The fuck? Millionaires don’t buy shit?
In other words, you got nothin’. Thanks for playing.
It’s pure masochism, I tell you. I must hate myself.
NO WAY! There’s a college graduate in our midst! How could that possibly happen?
This has to be the lamest appeal to authority I’ve ever read on this board.
Dude, you’re the one making personal attacks about whether I’m “of working age” or “know anyone who makes real money.” I answered your damn questions.
I said it was the best system I ever heard about and that it seems the fairest one to me – nobody gets too rich, nobody gets too poor, everybody gets to do what they enjoy. I’m not an economist and neither or you so my opinions are just as valid.
In other words, you’re just trying to stir up shit.
deleted…not worth a mod spanking
Carry on.
-XT
Sounds like all that money the government taxed, then spent, went no where. This year it’s 10%, next year 12% and so on and so on. You think all those babies currently on some form of social assistance are going to not be depended on it.
“need the government to help when they have a baby”
I’m sorry to be crass but STOP HAVING BABIES. Oh, that wasn’t crass, just loud. The solution isn’t more government aid, it’s less babies. I’m calling bullshit on this, it’s not longer a valid reason to need government assistance.
Right, he has, now who’s going to pay the $181 bill? No one, put it on the credit card.
To reiterate an earlier point, by progressively taxing the rich, the government feels like it has more money than it should. People get used to enjoying a higher quality of life than they should.
It’s not a tax break for the rich. It’s simply recognizing an upper limit to how much we expect one person to contribute.
Back to the billionaires and yachts:
We as a society still need their money. It has been suggested that after $1million in income we ramped up the tax rate towards 99% (marginal?) maybe take $500million. And as an extreme to the other side I let’s cap some where around $1million.
What I’ve noticed is that we end up taking that $500million, and from that use a chunk (say $200million) to pay for the services that benefit us all (schools, military, police, fire, parks, highways). His share of the pie if you will. And I’m willing to play along and say he should pay more.
But then, we end up with these pet projects described above that amount to welfare, medicaid, social assistant, section 8 housing. Lots of location specific terms, but all effectively giving money to those under the poverty line.
What if instead, as radical departure, we tax him at a reasonable level and let him decide how he wants to spend the remaining $499million.
With that, he can buy stuff. The money gets taxed and people get employed. The economy works.
I would like to argue that it is far better for Richy Rich to hire 1000 people at minimum wage, than it is to give even 10 people money to sit on their ass if you’ll forgive a rather blunt term.
You were right when you said that money is still there. We have a choice to let this guy use it to make the economy work, and there by hire people to do stuff. Or we can tax his income, then hand out the cash to people you think need it (to have more babies).
And better yet, maybe this guy will save some of it, so our banks have solvency, and companies have access to capital.
I am advocating a cap on income tax, so that the richest people have the ability to make our economy work, allowing for employment instead of handouts.
Said another way, the government needs access to LESS money, not more.
I wasn’t trying to attack you - I was trying to understand your background and experience, so I could understand how you arrived at your opinions.
I’m not just spouting opinions. I posted facts. Direct from the IRS. I simply pointed out that giving everyone who earns less than $25,000 a guaranteed income of that amount would cost over a trillion dollars a year, and that you can’t find an extra trillion dollars using the scheme you posted.
I cited the source for my data, although that shouldn’t be necessary because anyone willing to venture into this debate in a substantive way should already know how to find this data. Just go to the IRS web site and search the historical tax tables.
This takes it out of the realm of opinion. Your plan won’t work even if we grant the most liberal interpretations to all the data, and you don’t have to take my word for it. You can look it up yourself.
If you don’t have a response to that, fine. But in this forum, it’s not good enough to just have an opinion. You’re supposed to back it up. Appeals to authority don’t make the grade - especially appeals to an un-named professor in an un-named subject at an un-named college. Sorry.
Fuck all this math shit - take all the rich asshole’s money and hang him upside down and slit his throat until he bleeds out and use the blood to lubricate the industrial machinery of the people’s factories.
You said that unless **jrodefeld **used absolute dollars, not inflation-adjusted dollars, he was incorrect. But he was not incorrect if he used inflation-adjusted dollars - the facts show that taxes have increased used inflation-adjusted dollars. You did not mention GDP at all then. You also implied that the only way that s/he was right would be if s/he was dishonest. Why is it so difficult for you to admit that you were the one that was totally wrong and apologize to jrodefeld?
I’m not saying it’s the perfect system with all the math worked out; I’m saying the principle is sound – gurantee a minimal income that is a % of the average. Maybe not half, maybe only 1/3. Those people will spend the money and fuel the economy. To pay for it, you tax the people making above-average income, with higher taxes the higher you go. It’s fundamentally unfair to tax people making below-average income; it needs to come from the people who are already benefiting the most from society.
I wonder whether people on the left realize just how few in number the people are who carry a large amount of the load?
According to the IRS historical tax table for 2007, the number of returns filed for incomes of $10 million or more was 18,362. That group of people paid 9.9% of the entire country’s income taxes - $111 billion dollars.
The top million income earners in the U.S. - less than 1% of income tax filers - paid $413 billion dollars in income tax - 37% of all income taxes.
People who earn $100,000 or more make up 18% of all income tax filers, but pay 75.1% of all income taxes.
The bottom HALF of all income tax filers only pay about 5% of all income taxes.
This is dangerous for several reasons. For one, you have a situation in which a majority of voters are completely disconnected from having to pay for the policies they are voting for. That’s destabilizing. For another, putting so much of your financial burden on such a small group of people leaves you more susceptible to revenue losses due to income shocks and recessions.
And yet, many in this thread think that taxes should be even more progressive - drastically so.
They’d better create a world government, because it won’t take too many people to move their capital out to destroy what’s left of the government’s balance sheets.
See, here’s the problem:
Generic reference to “the load”, implying all taxes.
Specific reference to income taxes.
Specific reference to income taxes.
Specific reference to income taxes.
Specific reference to income taxes.
And back to all taxes.
Pick a side, income taxes or all taxes! We’re at WAR!
And one more plug for my weird new system:
If you take away that power from government (the idea that we can keep taxing the rich) all they are left with is to take the middle income earners ($50k to $300k).
Why is this good? Because it reconnects voters, with social policies, and then makes them pay for it.
If they want more carrier battle groups, they are the ones that will have to pay for it. If they think the poor need free shoes, again, they are the ones that will have to pay for it.
The individual people paying, will be voting, and have the ability to decide. If paying for other people’s shoes is important to them, they’ll do it. If they’d rather have that money to buy their own shoes, they won’t do it. The tax revenue is then directly relatable to each individual voter.
If I had more time I could put this into comparable numbers, but this back to dinner.
If the people at the table wanted to spend an extra 5% more ($181 to $190), it means little to each of them because the rich guy is still paying 10 times as much as they are. 50cents more from each of them means $5 more from the rich guy.
9 votes to 1, each person pays another 50cents, but benefit from $1 more food.
Instead, let put the onus back on to the voter. 50cent more in services means 50cents more in taxes. Some times it pays of (like with UHC) other times it doesn’t (like with UHC).
Well said. How to we isolate the various forms of taxes in order to have a meaningful discussion?
So raise their taxes by one-third, and let the rich pay ALL the taxes. Problem solved.
Yes, that basic idea is sound. Milton Friedman even advocated a form of negative income tax that would amount to a guaranteed income. However, it varied in great detail from your plan. First, his negative income tax would be much smaller - enough to find food and shelter, and that’s about it. Maybe $8,000 per year. Also, the money would be reduced by every dollar you earned, but by not as much as a dollar.
So let’s say the negative marginal rate is 10% up to $5,000, 20% up to $10,000, and 30% thereafter. That means if you earn nothing you get $8,000. But if you earn $5,000, the government’s tax credit drops by $500, so you earn $12,500. If you earn $10,000, You lose $500 of the first $5000, and $1000 of the next $5,000. So you still get a $6500 tax credit, bringing your income up to $16,500.
If you make $15,000, you lose the $1500 in credits on the first $10,000 of income and another $1500 on the next $5,000, giving you a $5,000 tax credit and a total income of $20,000.
You lose an additional $1500 in credits with each $5000 increase in income: At $20,000 in income, your tax credit is $3500. At $25,000, it’s $2,000. At $30,000 it’s $500. At $33,000, it’s gone.
The feature of this is that there’s always an incentive to work. There’s no point at which your personal finances don’t improve with a job. Also, this was intended to simplify public welfare by getting rid of a whole host of programs and laws - minimum wages. food stamps, various low income tax credits and subsidies. The idea was to replace the whole mess with one simple reverse tax that achieves roughly the same level of social welfare without all the bureaucracy, duplication, waste, etc. It wasn’t meant to be a means for people to live on the dole for their entire lives.
It was also proposed in a different era before welfare reform, where millions of people were essentially on permanent welfare in a system that gave them no incentive to get out. The negative tax was proposed not as a great thing, but as the lesser of two evils.
I hope you understand that spending does not create wealth. The reason we’re talking about stimulating spending at this particular moment is because aggregate demand has fallen below aggregate supply in a recession. In normal times, what builds an economy is not spending, but the optimal allocation of resources in society towards the production of things people want and need. Taking money from producers to give to spenders will not help the economy - it will hurt it.