Well, I don’t find this a very compelling argument. The fact is that we are all in this together and we have to find the best way to structure our society. And, my extra few thousand dollars isn’t going to make much of a difference.
And, while you may feel “forced” to pay your taxes to the government, there are other things that forced upon us by this standard…For example, we are forced to live in a society where corporate law is written the way it is. These laws did not come from on-high you know. And, I for one believe that one of the trade-offs that I find necessary in a society where corporations are granted the benefits that they are, allowing the immense concentration of wealth, is to have at least a somewhat progressively-structured tax system.
Spectrum answered this well. I’d only add that the government is the enforcer of corporate law and of property and intellectual property rights…These ain’t small potatoes. Do you honestly believe that Bill Gates could accumulate even 1/100 of the wealth he has managed to accumulate without the trappings of our society…i.e., within some sort of state-of-nature?
I also agree with Spectrum’s point that progressive taxation can also be justified by arguments involving “least pain”…I.e., we have to raise the money for government functions somehow so how do we raise it in a way that produces the least pain. I think this sort of consideration would actually lead to a way more progressive tax structure than we have now (in fact, practically confiscatory at the top), but I think it has to be weighed against other considerations (such as having reasonable incentives for people to work harder, for example).
Once we dispense with anarchy, any government policy is going to have distributive impacts even a libertarian one. What seems to me to separate liberals from conservatives is that conservatives don’t question those policies that allow for the immense concentration of wealth…i.e., wealth getting redistributed upward, but complain about any government functions that tend to counteract this by redistributing wealth downward.
There once was a time in which the poor depended on the charity of the willing. They starved to death in the streets.
Frankly, those willing to make significant contributions to charity are few, and the problem is great. If you look at countries with no social safety net, you don’t see the wealthy stepping forward * en masse* to save the starving children.
The printing of money, and the maintaining of money as a currency of exchange, is a function of government. It’s not a resource you own in and of yourself. The government which causes your money to exist may choose to tax some of it. If you don’t believe you should have to contribute to the common good (that being determined by representatives you helped elect, at least in theory), maybe you should withdraw from participating in ventures that involve money. I can’t promise that you can live tax-free if you do everything according to barter, but it seems possible.
Question: When we speak of ‘resdistribution of wealth’ do we mean things like Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, which are these gargantuan Federal programs, or just direct welfare to the able-bodied poor. That kind of thing is mainly on the state level, but can we get some idea of how much of our tax burden goes to programs that can readily be replaced by these charities being touted? Would that include the schools, etc?
spectrumDoes not the government run infrastructure benifit everyone? Does the army somehow benifit businesses more than other citizens?
jshoreWell, your thousand dollars might not make much of a difference, but do you contribute it? The point is not to cast aspersions on your generosity. The point is simply to point out that if others sometimes question whether liberals are generous or simply want to tax more there may be a reason.
LissaDo you have any credible sources to back up these assertions? Can you point to a historical tally of the number of starvation deaths before welfare? Are any of the countries you mention as lacking a safety net rich enough to afford one?
AHunter3 As you question why some people link liberalism with communism re read your post and see how close you come to suggesting that since money is printed by the government that all wealth really belongs to the people.
sqweelsIf I am not mistaken, when we talk about wealth redistribution we are talking about all of the programs you mentioned. I would add regressive income taxes as well. While welfare is mostly administered by the states, it does constitute a pretty large amount of the federal budget. If I’m not mistaken, one of jshore’s links had this information.
Yes, Pervert, but there’s a difference between providing soup to the homeless and providing healthcare to the elderly. What I want to know is, which budget items are being targeted for replacement by the charities people are going to shower money on once their taxes are cut and what percentage of the average taxpayers bill will be cut so we can do that?
Money isn’t wealth. Money is a representation of wealth. This isn’t communism – if our government starts doing sufficiently irritating things with the money it keeps unto itself, we have the right to pick up our marbles and go home. Or, better yet, we can tell them to pick up their marbles and go home.
But to say “I don’t see why any of my money should be collected as taxes” is to say to the rest of us “I don’t see why I should contribute to the national defense, the maintenance of highways, education for our children, or even the ink and electricity used to print money at the US mint”.
And that’s you picking up your marbles and not going home. Excuse me, I think you’re standing on the taxpayers’ sidewalk. If you aren’t going to ante up and pay the piper on the commons, I think you should leave.
(Now, if you want to argue that you have not been adequately represented, that’s coming at it from a different angle. We have a “no taxation without representation” tradition, after all. But if you think the system is adequately democratic and the government duly elected by a process that gives you a fair and equal slice of the decision-making pie, I don’t think you have much excuse for not supplying the tax burden levied by your elected governors for the purpose of pursuing projects on behalf of the public good.)
Well, there are a lot of ways to implement the budget cuts we are talking about. The biggest problem is that we have this hyperbolic argument between liberals and conservatives where each side assumes the other wants to ruin the country. If you look at the Congressional Budget Office Historical Data you have well over half of our 2 trillion dollar budget going to entitlements and “other manditory spending” programs. Unless you can find some numbers indicating that social security and medicare expenses go to predominantly to well off seniors we have a very sizeable portion of our budget going to these programs.
The first question to answer when looking to replace all this govenrment spending is not where will the money come from, but how much of this money really needs to be spent. Do you have any good critics of Social Security or Welfare showing how much of the money really goes to help people and how much of it is merely enabling? That is, how many people would need this money if it weren’t there?
But let’s assume that a similar amount of money would need to be collected. I’m going to make up a couple guesses. Let’s say that 50% of Social Security and 50% of Medicare can be put into the same category as welfare expenditures in terms of wealth transfer. So (fromt he link above) Means tested expenses:286.1 billion, social security:452.4 (226.2) billion, Medicare:$253.7 (126.85) billion, Disability:96.1 billion, and Unemployment: 50.6 billion. These numbers are from 2002 and I will ignore the rest of the mandatory expenditures and only use the half figures for SS and MC. So we have a total of 785.85 billion dollars. This amounts to about 39% of the 2011.0 billion spent that year.
So, as a quick back of the napkin sort of calculation, let’s reduce taxes by 39%. This also amounted to 7.81 percent of GDP, BTW. Now, of course, I did not look at the overhead for distributing this money. I’m sure all the numbers are rounded.
I can’t find a good cite for how much Americans give to charities that would qualify to take over these functions. Hoepfully someone better at googling can fill this in for us. But as a first suggestion, what if we created an additional charity classification. Certain charities which do the sorts of things we are talking about. Then we change the tax break you get for giving to these charities such that the amount comes off of your taxes instead of your taxable income. I know some states have done this with certain education donations to good effect.
I’m not trying to provide a sound argument for the dismantling of social spending in such a limited space. I’m merely trying to point out that the situation is far more complicated than “the government must do it or people will starve” mantra. The point being that if liberals were truly motivated by helping the poor (as opposed to increasing the size of government and therby their own power) then they would be much more willing to discuss the possibility of privatizing them.
Just for the record, I’m not trying to paint all liberals with this brush. I’m merely parroting a common conservative view that liberals may be more interested in using the issues of aid to the poor as a political tool. And that this is one of the reasons liberals are often linked (tenuously and perhaps wrongly) with communism.
Well, AHunter3, I don’t think anyone is arguing that the government should not be paid for. We are simply arguing over what sorts of things the government should spend money on. Even that only in the context of why some people link liberals with communists. I’m certainly not arguing either point. I’m merely pointing out that there is a “certain logic” in the link drawn between liberalism and communism. I put certain logic in quotes because I have said that the link is not sell defined or easily defensible. It is simply self consistant.
You’re kidding, right? You must not be a history buff. Read any book about the Victorian era, even, if you don’t want to go back further. Learn about the over-crowded, dilapilated slums, the sweatshops, the women forced into prostitution in order to feed their children, and the child beggars who starved in the streets. Learn about the charitable institutions, who arbitrarily decided who were the “deserving poor”, and who were not.
No, I can’t give you an exact figure: no one can. The poor were people whose lives were not important enough to be recorded for the majority of human history. Their deaths meant very little.
I’m by no means an expert in contemporary global economics, but as I understand, most indistrialized nations do have social saftey nets.
I’ll leave this quetion to someone who is further educated on the issue than I am.
No, Lissa, I’m not kidding. I have an interest in history and have read several books. I assumed that since you were making these assertions (although I was not trying to pick on you the assertions are common enough) that you had specific knowledge about starvation. I’m certainly not looking for an exact figure. just a general idea. You see, ALL of the population numbers I have seen suggest that during the 1800s and early 1900s the western nations underwent a very large boom. I’m not trying to suggest that the horrors you list did not happen. I only question the interpretation that capitalism or small government caused them. Also I question whether government intervention solved them, or whether the economy simply exanded enough to accomodate the regulations and the problems.
Guinastasia I’ve seen seveal histories about those events. I can’t figure out what the flood has to do with anything. Am I missing something?
The fire seems to have been a nasty accident. Certainly made worse by the practices of the time, but not different than others of the time. Certainly not were anyone would want to work then or now, but it is difficult to judge the past by the technology of today.
The strike is altogether different. It is clearly a conflict between workers and management. It obviously involved excesses on the part of management. But I think it also involved excesses by labor.
I’m not sure what, exactly, this has to do with our discussion of liberal=communism. I’m not sure the beliefs of liberals of the lat 1800s and early 1900s can be said to be equivilant to the beliefs of liberals today. Perhaps I am reading too much into your very brief post.
I would be happy paying just 10 percent of my income in a flat tax – for one thing, it would mean a my taxes would go down considerably. But I would have to be assured that all the J. Randolph Gotrocks and Corporate America Inc. were paying their 10 percent, too. And I just don’t believe it. What I am sure of is that they would have their lawyers and lobbyists hard at work in Washington, chiseling loopholes into the law, and that in very short order Gotrocks and the Corporates would be paying all the nothing they presently pay in taxes, and I would be paying the same ten percent.
“Acedemia generally means liberal (Socialist, Communist, Progressive, whatever name they are presently hiding under).” -MFitz
My statement was in reference to the political universe within the U.S. Other folks here have already pretty much defined the seperate terms, but I’d like to lay it out systematically and then show you why it is accurate in that context (in addition to being irritating to them) to say what I did.
Libertarians/Constitutionalists: (Keep in mind that Libertarians comes in different degrees too)
Social Freedom: Yes Economic Freedom: Yes Government Scope: Localized, and as small as possible Libertarianism is a political philosophy which advocates individual rights and a limited government. Libertarians believe individuals should be free to do anything they want, so long as they do not infringe upon the equal rights of others. They further believe that the only legitimate use of force, whether public or private, is to protect those rights. For libertarians, there are no ‘positive rights’ (such as to food or shelter or health care), only ‘negative rights’ (such as to not be assaulted, abused, robbed or censored). On the Nolan Chart, libertarianism rests in the upper right quadrant, or that of high economic freedom and high personal freedom. http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
Socialists:
Social Freedom: Yes Economic Freedom: No Government Scope: Centralized, and very large In its broadest sense, socialism is a belief that human society can and should be organised along social lines - that is, for the benefit of all, rather than for the profit of a few, which it argued had been the case hitherto. Its key ideas are a belief in equality, both political and economic, as well as opposition to capitalism. The socialist view of social organisation is well encapsulated in the following saying (attributed to Marx): From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
Communists:
Social Freedom: No Economic Freedom: No Government Scope: Centralized, and all-encompassingly large
*Communism, or communist society is the name of the social formation, which, according to Marxism is a classless society in which all property is owned by the community as a whole and where all people enjoy equal social and economic status.
Marxists believe that just as society has evolved from feudalism to capitalism, it will evolve into socialism and eventually communism. However the method by which this evolution occurs distinguishes communists from other socialists, in that communists believe that this evolution will be accomplished by means outlined by Lenin. *
Progressives: (The modern Democratic Party = Socialism):
Social Freedom: Yes Economic Freedom: No Government Scope: Centralized, and very large
wealth redistribution, socialization/centralization of essential sectors (education, health care, labor unions, trade restrictions)
government sanctioned rascism/sexism/sexual orientation (Affirmative Action, Quotas)
Fascists:
Social Freedom: No Economic Freedom: No Government Scope: Centralized, and all-encompassingly large The word fascism has come to mean any system of government resembling Mussolini’s, that exalts nation and often race above the individual, and uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition, engages in severe economic and social regimentation, and espouses nationalism and sometimes racism (ethnic nationalism).
Many people believe that drawn out, politics can be represented as a circle, with Fascism and Communism becoming identical at the bottom. However, my view (Constitutionalist/Libertarian) is that the circular model omits Constitutionalism completely. So when explaining it, I draw:
…Anarchists
…Constitutionalists
…Liberals…Conservatives
…Communists…Fascists
The circle simply has a line extending from the top, ending at Anarchy, with Constitutionalism bisecting it.
So… I lump those groups together because they all work for larger central government and are therefore in direct opposition to the U.S. Constitution.
MFitz
*“The germ of destruction of our nation is in the power of the judiciary, an irresponsible body- working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall render powerless the checks of one branch over the other and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”
I have no idea where you came up with this guess. And, it flies in the face of recent arguments by your libertarian-oriented breathren (at NCPA oand perhaps Cato too) who, in fighting for privatization of SS, were arguing that the current SS program as a whole is actually neutral or regressive. (See here. For a somewhat different view, see here.) Now, I am not sure I completely believe them…This issue is not easy to resolve when you are dealing with cross-generational transfers because it depends on how you assume you discount money over time and such. However, I find it amusing that SS can either be regressive or massively progressive depending on what argument a libertarian-oriented person wants to make.
I gave something like $3300 to charity and activist groups in 2002, including about $1000 to the local United Way alone. I think this was something like 14% of my total spending for the year (not including money paid to income and payroll taxes)…Admittedly, it was a much lesser percentage of what I earned since I saved a lot and paid a good chunk in taxes. (I don’t have any of the classic tax deductions like a home mortgage so I would venture to say that the percentage I pay in income and payroll taxes is about as large as anybody’s.)
As I said, no one will ever know the exact numbers, but there were famines all over the world during the Victorian era which killed millions. In India alone, several million perished.
I hate to restrict this discussion only to Western nations, but during a quick search, the best numbers I found were for Victorian London.
Yes, the Western world did experience a population boom during this time, but this is not necessarily because everyone was suddenly prosperous. Increased santiation (clean water supplies, for example) reduced infectious disease. The fecundity rate in the time before reliable birth control had always been high: disease had just killed off most of the children.
During this population boom, the ranks of the poor swelled. This article, written in !861, states that a million people in London lived in grinding poverty. (The next article notes that more than 300,000 of them are recipients of poor-law relief.)
This article is also very interesting. As to the swelling population, it notes:
It claims “only” 3,292 people died of starvation and cold between the years of 1848-1857. However, knowing the rather sloppy record-keeping of the time, I would suppose that number to be somewhat unreliable. It could be much higher.
One interesting quote, contrasting private charity with government funds:
I wasn’t trying to suggest at all that industrialization either caused, or aggravated the problem. People starved to death long before mechanization was ever concieved. Actually, things got a bit better during the Industrial age, because finally there was at least a small effort to help the poor.
However, I will assert that government intervention has gone a long way toward keeping people from starving. After all, when was the last time you heard of anyone starving to death in the United States? Starvation here, today, is almost always deliberate. We don’t have Bread Riots any more, no do we se beggars dropping dead in the street.
What changed? Charity certainly didn’t turn the situation around. I assert that it was the advent of welfare and other social programs.
I agree the welfare has a place. But I would assert that the growth of the economy has done far more than government programs to"turn the situation around".
There was a good interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with journalist David Cay Johnston, who has written a book "Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich – and Cheat Everybody Else. " You can listen to it here.
One of his facts: In 2000, all Americans paid federal income tax at the rate of 15.3% of their total income. The top 400 taxpayers, who earned an average of $174 million, paid at the rate of 22.2% of their total income. If the Bush tax cuts had been in effect, they would have paid at a rate of ~17.5%.
So, as you can see, the federal income tax is not all that progressive at the very top. Note also that the average taxpayer will be paying a significant percentage of income in payroll taxes whereas the top 400 taxpayers will pay only a miniscule percentage of income in payroll taxes. In addition, these numbers deal only with reported income and Johnston argues that there are ways that the superrich use various schemes to avoid even having to report some income.
Doesn’t that still amount to several times the amount of taxes that the average person pays? Even if you count other government revenue streams, don’t those 400 citizens pay many times what the averabe person pays? And at that, we are discounting their share of whatever corporate taxes they pay.