As for the answer of “whence comes wealth” and the assertion that it comes from crime and stealing, consider the lone adventurer, wandering the wilderness of some uninhabited land.
One day, he reaches a particularly beautiful valley with a stream in it and a wooded glade just on the other side. He decides to take a rock from the creek, fasten it to a stick, and hews the largest tree. Where this one falls, he claims “This is my homestead,” and proceeds to erect a cabin on top of it. From that day forth, he hunts the local deer to make clothing, tools, and food.
The cabin is worth more to him than the trees did when they were standing. The rock and twig were worth less to him when they were separate. The deer is worth more dead than alive. So overall, the man is more wealthy now.
That’s how worth is created. The man made 1+1 equal 3. No theft involved. Now, in your philosophy, to whom does the adventurer owe taxes?
Not slaves. Not exploited child-laborers. Not a lot of people who have, in the history of civilization, been taken advantage of.
Some of these people got exploited, and I’m living with some of the advantages their having been exploited earned. And some of lived long enough to procreate, and some of their decendents are less able than I’ve been to live a comfortable life, get a good education, learn some marketable skills, etc.
Is there any part of this you disagree with so far?
Yeah…I expect them to build a road just for me, to have a fire and rescue unit on call just for me, have my own police officer, possibly my own dingy for Coast Guard and Navy, possibly my own soldier as well, etc etc.
Seriously…where did you think you were going with that? We all pay taxes to the government because we all expect the government to provide certain services. Obviously it’s debatable as to which services and how much service the government should provide, but at the core we collectively want the government to provide something of value for the taxes we pay.
Just raising the concept that taking taxes completely off the table is unrealistic. We’re arguing about how much we need to pay in taxes, and on what, but this position that the Republicans in Congress are taking that no tax increases can be discussed (but only while a Democrat is the White House) is illegitimate by any sensible person’s standards.
Why? It’s a strawman that no one has raised in this thread. Like I said, it’s a fringe concept from the whack-a-do anarchist types.
Oh…so THAT’S what your thread is all about. A re-hash of the same arguments in the other threads on the debt increase and the Republicans hard line on no new tax increases. Sorry…I thought you wanted to talk about something different. I’ll leave it to you guys then since I really don’t have much to say on the topic.
Sure, anyone who creates more value for his or her company than he gets paid is earning it. A CEO who has created a lot of stockholder value has earned it, even. The CEOs who didn’t earn it are those who destroy stockholder value, and employee value, but still get the big bucks.
And not all real estate gains are unearned. The developer who puts together a project is earning his return. Even Trump. Assuming it flies - if the investors lose their shirts, not so much.
Well, this is the root of it, I think. There may be no taxes levied on hard-working Americans who generate their own earnings are entitled to keep all of it. That mindset can only operate in people who think it’s accurate to say that their income is 100% legitimately earned by them and them alone, and that taxes are imposed by an unwelcome and illegitimate governmen entity giving their income to people who have not earned the right to any of it.
100% of what I make is ‘legitimately earned’ unless I get it through illegal means. Again, you have a rather odd way of looking at things. I earn what I make and make what I earn. Out of the money I earn I have expenses…I have to buy gasoline for my car, I have to buy food for my table, electricity for my house, phone and data services, my monthly porn and game charges, other entertainment, etc etc…and I have to pay taxes for government services that I use or that the society I live in uses. None of this means I didn’t earn all of the money I make ‘legitimately’, it merely means I can’t have my cake and eat it too…I can’t make large piles of money but not pay any of it out if I expect to eat, roads to drive on, folks to fight fires or police the roads, etc etc.
Different political viewpoint groups have different opinions on what services governments should provide and what services are better provided by private enterprise.
For those who are of the opinion that one of the services government should provide is basic life support for people who are unable to provide it for themselves, whether because they are too young and lack responsible volunteer caretakers (parents or otherwise), or too old, or some other reason (there are many possible and it isn’t really relevant to list them all, except to say disagreements on what the list should include or exclude are also arenas of political disagreement), the fact expressed by the original poster (that no one’s wealth is created purely by forces fully within their personal control) is relevant.
Why should my hard earned money be taxed to pay for food for someone I never met and don’t care about personally? Because the fact that someone paid for my food when I was unable to care for myself is part of the reason I am able to create wealth by my efforts now. Because good luck that I was intelligent, able to do things others were not, made my efforts valuable and able to create wealth and earn money.
Now when I say “taxed” I don’t mean entirely removed, as obviously (as well asserted in many replies above) some portion of the money is earned by efforts I do control (I come to work every day, I work for long hours, I take pains to do well, I take risks that pay off, etc). But if I have a stroke and am paralyzed and can’t think straight, I could no longer do those things or earn money. I’d instead be spending the same amount of effort to relearn how to speak or get across a room. That may not create wealth and earn me any money, but it wouldn’t be for lack of my working hard. Taxed should be a percentage; but what percentage it is? Is 60% less appropriate than 30%? That’s a matter of political debate on which both sides have reasonable stances.
My own personal opinion is that I consider paying taxes (not just me personally - but all citizens paying taxes) a reasonable exchange for government services (not just for me personally - for citizens in general), and I would support paying higher taxes and getting additional services in some cases. The case of medical treatment seems to be a clear winner in that when medical services are left to private suppliers, it generally ends up that needing them makes anyone less able to buy them (being sick means you are unable to work as hard and therefore creating less wealth and probably earning less money). It also leads to a lot of “snake oil” situations.
Governments are more likely to have the ability to investigate and properly allocate resources for medical treatment than the private market. This is not true for most other things (housing, for example) and I think it would be a good idea for government to get out of supplying housing. Food also may be a good candidate for reducing the amount of government spending. I think government supplying health care would actually be a better use of tax money than crop subsidies, food stamps, and other government spending that affects food supply. Keeping people healthy is very likely to allow more people to work more and create more wealth for the entire economy to grow.
My point here is that while you might argue for a moral claim to money earned by the sweat of the brow or from taking real risks, there is a lot less of a moral claim to money earned fortuitously. Stock options, the old way, are an even better example. My company handed them out willy-nilly (with the philosophy that they were for everyone, not just high management) and earnings from cashing them in when they matured came with no risk at all. I could write off stock I bought which went down, you can write off underwater options which expire.
So, where did the Louisiana Purchase get authorized? This didn’t fly even when the founders were still alive.
Once the income tax is acknowledged as being Constitutional, the rest is just negotiation. We have gone through periods where the government did take most of the income of the wealthy. There are lots of reasons why this isn’t good economic policy, but none of them are based on legality.
Plus, the total income of the person being taxed is of no consequence in determining the treatment of components of that income, except as all income is taxed progressively. I’m not saying that gambling winnings of the poor should be treated differently from those of the rich. In both cases they are morally different from income based on employment.
Get back to me when someone proposes tax rates so high as to put anyone’s life or health at risk. In any case. all we are talking about here is equal pain of your giveback to society. Is there a good reason why the rich should have it easier in terms of taxation than the poor or middle class?
Beyond this, we don’t choose our intelligence or our skills. I don’t take credit for being born the way I was or having parents who could send me to a good school, and my kids don’t think they are hot shit because I could afford to let them graduate from college debt free. I can justify making money for the value I add to society, but I sure don’t object to paying taxes to help those less lucky than I am (and giving to charity also.)
I’ve also found that making money gets easier the more you have. When you have enough money you get personal attention from a financial planner, who can put you into investments those who don’t get personal attention won’t know about or couldn’t afford, and if I had real money it would be even better.
Maybe the difference is humility. I don’t mind at all paying a bit more in taxes so some poor kids get decent medical care, since I could imagine being in that situation. If I believed in some God I could justify this by saying I was paying God’s children back for the advantages God gave me, but since I don’t all that I can say is that it just feels right.
I agree with everything you say here 100%. My question is more about PRR’s kind of bizarre assertion that no one who has ever had the tiniest bit of help or advantage “deserves” what they have. How do you measure what is deserved? How can you possibly assess how easy or hard any particular person has had it? Some people clearly have had every advantage, some have none at all, but most people fall somewhere in the middle. At what point on the scale do you have to be before the fruits of your labor are “deserved?”
Gambling is a losing “investment”, but yes, if you win you own the money.
That’s kind of a bad example. Stock options, even the kind you describe, are part of your compensation - something you earned and deserve to keep, IOW.
I haven’t seen anyone suggest that the rich should have it easier than the poor or middle class. That’s another of those straw men the left is so fond of.
The opposite assertion, that the rich need to be taxed just because they are rich, is not a straw man, however. It underlies most of the discussion of income disparity on these boards.
This entire thread seems to be based on the flawed assumption that taxes go to help the poor, and thus any refusal to pay taxes is some how hatred of the poor that would otherwise get that money.
Do you realize that right now you are free to donate as much money as you have to any thing you want?
If helping poor kids get medical care there are dozens of private charities that could use your donations:
United Way
Children’s Foundation
Hands Across America
Ronald McDonald House
Helping Kids Clinic
as well as any of the children’s hospitals in your area
How much of your current [federal] income tax currently goes to helping poor kids get medical care? And what percentage of any new taxes do you think would go there?
I personally think it’s a great idea to help all children have access to medical care, which is why I’d rather cut out the middle man and give it directly to the charities that I think are doing a good job, as opposed to the ones paying interest on massive debt, funding multiple foreign wars, paying for a failed war on drugs, and promoting homophobic view points.
In case you didn’t notice, the middle man in that scenario was the federal government, that does a shitty job helping the poor.
Let’s say for sake of argument that in high school I won the lottery and used that to pay for university. Your premise seems to be that I’m “lucky” and therefor all (if not most) wealth derived from my education is unearned, and should therefor be taxed.
But luck didn’t get me the education, it simply funded it. I still had to spend four years going to classes, writing lab reports, and taking a damn lot of exams. I had to earn that degree.
And even before all that, I had to make the conscious decision to use that money to go to school, as well as what degree to get. I could have pissed it away on hookers and blow, which would have ironically enough left me poor, sick, and in need of government assistance, if not houses in a federal corrections facility.
Personally I see it as yet another attempt to justify taxing people that make money. Recently there was a thread that true riches were the result of a criminal act. Once you establish that a persona’s wealth isn’t theirs than it’s easy to justify taking it by force.
At this point I’d suggest reading Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers, he goes through a lot of the world’s riches people and best athletes and is able to point to certain key events that gave each of them a slight advantage. The conclusion though is that they were never unique to them alone, they were simply willing to put in the 10,000 hours required after the event to benefit.
And I believe that here you have hit on the key point of most of these discussions. If you can demonize a group and establish that what they have they have through unjust means (and don’t ‘deserve’) then it becomes easy to justify doing anything you like to them…like, say, taking what they have and giving it to people who are more deserving (presumably the folks who don’t have anything because they were unlucky).
Perhaps I was being too subtle. We’re not talking about owning the money, that is obvious. We’re talking about the morality of the government taking some of it. Now, we all agree that the poor shmo working his ass off to make ends meet has a really good moral claim to his money. Just don’t treat the money raked in opportunistically or by chance the same way. This isn’t just an opinion, psychologically people put money coming from different sources into different buckets.
Knowing you’d say this is why I mentioned that the options where shmeared. It was a part of compensation, but, strictly speaking, so is our free soda. But unlike other compensation it had zero value until the first options matured, and then very possibly zero value forever. Their increase or decrease in value was totally independent of anything I did, since I wasn’t high enough to make that much of a difference in the bottom line.
Those people who say there should be one tax rate for all are saying exactly that. Those against progressive taxation are saying exactly that. I’d guess that those against the tax rate for the rich going back to pre-Bush levels are saying exactly that.
The rich of course do have it easier. Comes with being rich. Let’s just make it a teeny bit harder for them and a teeny bit easier for everyone else.
To quote Willy Sutton, they must be taxed because that’s where the money is. Plus. increasing their tax by the tiny amount proposed will not hurt them much if at all, while using that money for healthcare for the poor, or for keeping senior centers open, or for making it easier for kids to go to college without crushing debt, or a million other things increases the general welfare quite a bit. I’m including state activities also because the protect the rich at the expense of everyone else meme is not limited to the federal government
I think PRR might be going to the opposite extreme of those who seem to be saying that taking even one penny from the very richest of us is robbery, perhaps necessary but fundamentally immoral. We have entitled to everything versus entitled to nothing. We wouldn’t be having this discussion if we showed a bit more humility. To reference the past is better thread, maybe one way in which the '50s were superior was that it seemed that most people didn’t mind paying taxes, knowing that much of them were going to repay the debt for the war that kept us free. Contrast with those who thought going into Iraq was absolutely essential - but not essential enough to pay a cent more in taxes for.
