How exactly would some conformity in global tax rates destroy the world economy? Wouldn’t it make the global economy more efficient as folks stopped making their business decisions on local tax rates and on actual economic factors?
I don’t get the whole sabotage reference except that encouraging a tax “race to the bottom” is in noone’s best interest. And lower tax rates can in fact hurt coutnries when the tax reduction is made at the cost of budget deficits (you can track most of the current national debt to tax cuts without corresponding spending cuts). Because of our ability to borrow, we have seen that starve the beast tactics do not work. If you want to cut taxes, show me how to cut spending first.
Not really sure what the implications of a world government (in the EU/NATO/UN sense) are, why exactly would it be destructive to have a global framework for things like financial regulations, environmental regulations, tax coordination, etc?
The free market does have some redeeming qualities, creating wealth and innovation are among them. With that said, governemnt controlled economies seem to have worked for the Asian economies pretty well (considering where they were 50 years ago) and seems to be working extraordinarily well for China. Sure there is waste but the free market generates a lot of waste and “creative destruction” as well. I don’t know that we could manage the same sort of government led success here considering our less autocratic forms of government but its not automatically the case that government led economies do worse than free market economies.
Where do you get this faith in the ability of government? Just what evidence do you have that governments can be successful at this sort of thing? You’re willing to throw your hat in with a world government just to soak it to the rich, and yet all the evidence we have is that such governments are at best ineffective and at worst destructive to human beings.
I’m guessing that your guess is wrong…but that’s only a guess, and it’s based mostly on a perhaps overly optimistic appraisal of the 'doper community. Based on my assessment of 'dopers who would actually be interested enough in going back and reading the information in the linked thread, they are going to conclude that you either don’t understand (that would be my ‘guess’) or you are deliberately trying to confuse the issue and manipulate the discussion for your own reasons. I’d have to say, using the context of your comments in this and other threads on this subject, that the ‘Dick Dastardly really don’t understand any of this stuff at even a basic level’ is going to be the prevailing viewpoint.
FWIW, you’ll probably pick up a lot of support from the ‘SOAK THE RICH!’ 'dopers who aren’t going to be bothering to read into the discussion any more than to get all riled up about the class war.
The stark reality is that pretty soon, our kids are going to be competing on an almost direct basis with kids in India and China and if they want to achieve that $50K/year, they aren’t going to have to convince a US employer to choose them over their neighbor, they are going to have to convince a multinational employer that they are worth $50K/year in light of the pay scales in China and India.
Pretty soon we will be running customer service call centers for Indian companies and Indians will be compalining about the horrible American accents they hear on the phone from people who claim their name is Rajesh.
WTF are you talking about? You have got a real sense of entitlement don’t you? 25K/year is $12.50/hour. That’s an honest to goodness paycheck, nothing exploitive about it if you are an unskilled worker or recent college grad. Noone is entitled to a higher standard of living than they can earn.
We as a society have decided that we don’t want to see children starve to death on the streets so we provide AFDC and WIC, we decided that the poor should not die at the emergency room steps so we provide medicaid, that is the society that we want and we have to pay for that society with taxes. There are prgrams we have put in place to alleviate suffering not to guarantee some standard of living. Now we may have gone too far with some of these societal benefits but that is an entirely different debate.
Taxes are always distortive and we should try to reduce the tax burden but the conservative approach seems to be to reduce the tax burden and damn the implications. I thought this debate was about how to distribute the tax burden.
Highest Gini Coefficient
DC
New York
Connecticut
Mississippi
Louisiana
California
Texas
New Mexico
Alabama
Massachusetts Lowest Gini Coefficient
Wyoming
Idaho
Washington
Indiana
Alaska
Nebraska
Wisconsin
North Dakota
New Hampshire
Iowa
Yes, because in your world, everything will be provided for you by the Socialism Fairy.
I find that working under the constant threat of unemployment and the resulting loss of health benefits (if you have them), and homelessness is a surprising motivator.
I don’t think the problem is so much with the tax system as it is with the way income and wealth is distributed in this country. You have a small segment that owns most of the wealth in the country. You have a bit larger segment of working professional people like me with high incomes and some wealth accrued and then the bulk of the people out there with low income and no net assets to speak of.
I don’t believe soaking the rich to pay for public services and entitlements does much to help increase the wealth of the lower classes though. These are people who often don’t have a lot of disposable income to save or invest and often don’t have much financial wherewithal. For example there was a poll on this board asking people what they would do with something like $100,000. The only correct answer is “pay down debt”. Followed possibly by “invest” or “down payment for a home”.
I also don’t believe that soaking the super rich (say, $10 million plus) reduces their desire to produce. Plus I have a hard time believing that these CEOs and other superstars are really worth that much unless it’s a business they started themselves like Gates, Buffet or Bloomberg. It is the middle and upper middle class that drives new job growth through small business creation. These are the people smart, ambitous and educated enough to start businesses and have some amount of financial means to do so.
In your world the wealth international corporations will take care of you. They don’t care about you or this country.
What the hell did Gates invent? He was in the right place at the right time when IBM was looking for someone to produce home computers for them. He didn’t have an operating system so he took another guys. His invention was licensing the OS . That way he got a guaranteed pot of gold. That was a smart move but not an invention.
If you are waiting for someone to invent a new huge idea that will employ everyone ,you are delusional. Most inventions are problem solving. When you produce a product, you spend a lot of time trying to improve the production and the product. Since we moved our production to China ,the patent office in China has been very busy. Not so much here. We gave away a lot our innovation when we moved our industry abroad. But who cares as long as the guys on top are getting richer and richer.
We can’t balance the budget by taxing the rich, we will have to cut entitlements and military spending as well but taxing the rich are being taxed at lower effective rates than they have been historically and they are taxed at lower effective rates than most other industrialized nations. Many of the Bush tax cuts were both uneccessary and unwise.
That’s more than a bit misleading. The 1.6 trillion dollar number includes presumably one time expenses associated with the stimulus package and TARP. In most other years the deficit will be closer to 400 billion. Still a lot of money but not something we can’t cover with cuts in medicare/medicaid, social security, military spending and yes higher taxes especially for the beneficiaries of the bush tax cuts.
Oh, I am too. What I question is your understanding of those words and of the subject in general. But as you say, leave it up to the individual reader to determine for themselves.
You seem to think that everyone has the right to make a living wage doing something they love. That has never been true in history and will probably never be true. Some few fortunate among us get to make a good living doing what we love but most of us call it “work” for a reason.
The entire notion makes very little sense to me. You are going to have to explain it using smaller words or seomthing because it sounds pretty retarded.
For those who think the wealthy are taxed too much, I’m curious when you think a good time would be to reduce taxes on them.
Let’s say the government cuts spending to the point that we begin to run surpluses again. Is the existence of a surplus reason enough for you to advocate more Bush-style tax cuts? Shouldn’t we retire a good portion of the debt that has been racked up in the last 30 years before we seriously consider more tax cuts, especially for the wealthy?
Despite my position that the rich aren’t paying enopugh taxes, one of the premises of that position is that we are not anywhere near the sort of tax rates that discourage labor and investment. Once you get to something like 99% (or anything in excess of 50% federal marginal rate) you aren’t just discouraging labor and investment, you are production.
To some extent its about dividing up the pie but with your premise, the pie will shrink to almost nothing.
Oh boo hoo. I don’t expect anyone to take care of me. I work for a large corporation (technically a limited liability partnership, but I know people like you use the term “corporation” to mean any large business) because they pay me to perform whatever work needs doing. If for some reason, either of us decide that arrangement isn’t working, I’ll go find someone else to pay me to perform some service for them. The reason they are willing to pay me is because I spent a significant amount of time learning the types of skills they pay people to perform. I’m not sitting around feeling like someone owes me something just for being born.
He turned a good idea into practical products that millions of people use. The greatest invention in the world doesn’t do anyone any good sitting idle in someone’s basement.
First of all that’s factually incorrect. The United States is the top manufacturing country on the planet. Manufacturing is only about 12% of our GDP though and it is highly automated so it’s a much smaller percent of the workforce than in the past. But assuming you are correct, how does increasing taxes for the wealthy keep jobs here in the United States?
Maeglin - I didn’t read through the entire 35 page paper. Did the lower income classes experience real economic growth or just growth relative to highest classes. Or to put it another way, did a decrease in income disparity result in an increase in the standard of living for the poor?
The lower income classes experienced real pre-tax income growth (net of welfare transfers). Table 1 on page 28 contains the breakout by income percentile.
Sure, if you think food stamps were supposed to solve hunger after a few years. I’d say that folks who would have gone hungry got to eat and the number of people who need help to avod hunger has increased in part because of the growing income disparity in the country.
And you don’t think that increasing income disparity might have something to do with it? Considering that these benefits have been shrinking over time but the number of people who need them have been rising over time, do you really think the problem is that the programs exist?
I always thought of America as a place with a lot of social mobility where a child of a poor family can grow up to pay taxes and not need food stamps to feed their own kids. Is your point that poor kids become poor adults so we should get rid of poor kids (perhaps require people on government assistance to take chemical contraceptives). Or is your point that poor people shouldn’t have kids at all and leave that to people who can afford to send their kids to private school.
You are not going to get rid of the poor, “the poor will always be with us” and we can treat them the way we would want to be treated if we were poor or we can treat them like inconvenient unproductive economic units.
Let me ask you a question. Other than medicaid, how much do you think our country spends on things like food stamps and welfare? Because from the way you go on about the poor you would think it was half our budget.
I am trying to imagine what our country would look like if our birth rate was reduced to people who would be able to afford to send their kids to private school.
So being a poor 1 year old with no food is no longer a valid reason to need assistance or are you saying we should teach the parents a lesson by letting their children starve and that would make them not have kids. Kinda like how people in poor African countries stopped having kids after they saw their kids die of hunger.
Why haven’t they if things are as bad as you seem to think? For the most part, they wouldn’t make this kind of money anywhere else in the world. You must think that if a wall street banker moved to Monaco, the investment banking business he handled would move with him. It wouldn’t. Someone would step in to perform their role and make the money they used to make. Even if a significant number of investment bankers moved to Monaco, the investment banking industry would remain in NYC. There are reasons why Wall Street hasn’t moved to Greenwich and Incline Village, a lot of the reason they make that money in the first place is because THIS society, THIS country has created the conditions for them to make that money.
Are you saying that we are spoiling ourselves with free highways, public schools, military etc. on the backs of some poor rich people?
Why do we have to put a hardcap on tax liability again? I haven’t heard any economic or equitable argument to support that position.
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.
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You have a very skewed view of where our tax dollars come from and where they go . First of all, you will not find a single billion dollar tax return with anywhere near a 50% combined effective tax rate. Every single one of those returns include a disproportionate amount of capital gains and dividend income taxed at 15%.
Secondly interest on the antional debt, the military, social security, medicare and medicaid account for about 80% of our budget. Of that medicaid is about 8% of the budget that prevents us from having poor people die in the streets for lack of medical care.
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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.
The government buys stuff too. You are proposing a 0.1% tax rate on that billionaire. I don’t think most people would call that reasonable.
And if that were true, you might have a point but in fact Richy Rich doesn’t forego hiring 1000 people to pay for 10 people to sit on their butt. I think you need to read about teh Welfare Reform Act of 1996 before you keep going with this diatribe about our welfare state.
So you think billionaires put their money in savings accounts?
The government has access to all the money it wants regardless of the taxes it levies. Its called borrowing.
What the rich don’t pay in taxes to the government, they are likely to lend to the governemnt by buying treasuries. The Bush tax cuts transferred tax revenue from the rich into borrowing money from many of the exact same people.
If you want to address governemnt spending then address government spending, taxation is not the way to get at it.