But what percentage of $0 are you going to get out of the stay at home mom? Are you going to squeeze the senior citizen for what little they have to eat and heat their home with? You can’t always get any blood out of a stone, no matter how hard you squeeze.
The facts have a well known liberal bias.
I didn’t want to get into it but here goes. A stay at home mom is supported, in theory, by a husband paying into the system. His tax rate affects her directly. Same goes for a recent HS graduate living at home. As for seniors, well, that is another story. In my opinion they have paid their dues. Many of them are taxed on their benefits if they are high enough. Also, many of them are concerned about their children making a decent living and may oppose tax hikes even if it improves their situation.
My point is that, ideally, only a small percentage of the working population should be exempt from taxes. As we approach 50% of the working population that pays nothing in federal taxes then we have to be concerned that there is no disincentive for them to vote to increase taxes even on the poorest taxpayers. And, with almost a majority, they effectively have the key to the Treasury.
Meaningless. American politicians don’t pass laws according to the desires of the people who elected them; they pass laws according to who gave them the most “campaign contributions” aka bribe money. It doesn’t matter who the voters have an incentive to tax; it matters who the campaign contributors have an incentive to tax.
I’m sure Sam Stone is flattered, but the posters you are mentioning are being insulted, which is not allowed in this forum. Don’t do this again.
In this country you have a right to a public education. Noone can deny you access to the public education system. Does teh constitution guarantee you a puiblic education but like I said that is a very narrow definition fo rights. The original list seems to think of rights in a much more expansive way than that but your definitionof what constitutes a right seems to be limited to the rights outlined in the first ten amendments.
I don’t think the sunset provision is a deception, it was a combination of an accounting mechanism (to lower the cost of the tax cuts) and a political accomodation. Everyone knew that there wold be another fight when it came time for the sunset. Just like everyone knew there would be a huge fight over estate taxes this year (still waiting for that one to materialize).
Oh, I see. Well I would say that the tax cuts were based on lies because of teh “dynamic scoring” that was presented alongside the proposal for tax cuts taht showed the tax cuts paying for themselves.
There were in fact some tax cuts that did pay for themselves in the short term by surrendering long term revenues (for example letting corporations pay 5% income tax on its foreign source income if they reported it that one year led to a huge amount of income being reported.
I don’t think abnyoen was duped by the sunset provision. We all knew this would be a fight when the tax cuts were about to expire.
It is in fact sleazy to characterize Democrats refusal to extend the tax cuts for the rich as a tax increase. If we were talking about the Democrats refusal to renew something like the AMT patch which has happened every year for decades then yeah, I could see calling that a Democratic tax increase but this doesn’t really fit the bill.
I also don’t understand what is so god awful about raising taxses to the Clinton era rates. I paid the top marginal rates during CLinton and Bush and I gotta say that for a working stiff, it didn’t make that much of a difference. The people who REALLY saw a big difference was the investor class (and I don’t mean people with 401(k)s and IRAs).
They were deficit funded tax breaks for everyone but the benefit was concentrated at the very tippy top and the very bottom. They virtually eliminated the income tax for the poor (we weren’t really collecting much from them anyway but the principle of a shared sacrfice was violated), they cut taxes a little bit for everyone else but they REALLY cut taxes for the top 0.1%. You were carrying mroe than your historically proportionate share of taxes if you made more than 80K and less than about 500K but if you were making more than 500K, you were doing pretty well.
Tell that to the monolithic Republican caucus.
I agree that tax cuts can be a good stimulus. I once suggested having a payroll tax holiday as part of the stimulus. The problem is that the tax cut had a sunset provision of 7 to 9 years. There is something to be said for the psychological effects of one year tax cuts versus tax cuts that seem more permanent promoting more spending instead of more saving (which is why things like unemployment is such a good stimulus).
gonzo, this chart shows me (see Table 4) that while those earning over $68k (and I’m having a seriously hard time calling that “rich,” but never mind for now), “got” 67% of the Bush tax cuts (because, naturally, they were paying more to begin with), they ended up paying a greater proportion of all taxes after the cuts than before, and the bottom brackets ended up paying a lesser proportion.
Sure, when you establish cut points for a distribution in order to obfuscate, you end up having a seriously hard time. The gross distinctions in that table mean that Bill Gates and I are in the same income category. Voila - the Bush tax cuts did not disproportionately benefit the very wealthy!
And they hurt the economy for everyone. Some just felt the associated pain more acutely than others. This gets to why I don’t think that an “equal pain” rationale for tax policy makes much sense. If you are benefitting way more than I am from the present system, you have a much greater interest in perpetuating it, don’t you? I don’t have a problem with the taxes I pay, because I want to help America continue to survive. However, it doesn’t make sense that my “pain” should be the same as Bill Gates; my “pleasure” sure hasn’t been.
You are incorrect. You have no RIGHT to be provided with a public education. You have the right to get an education without government interfering with your pursuit. The fact that government has set up a public system that does not turn people away does not make it a right.
If, tomorrow, the government simply did not have the money to provide public education, are you telling me your rights have been violated?
I agree but the nature of the tax cut is important.
Just my conspiracy theory but I think that the Bush administration was doing everything it possibly could to make the war as painless to the American public as possible. Everything from the tax cuts instead of tax increases to the use of mercenaries instead of enlisted personnel.
Are you saying that you have been misunderstood or that you have been doped?
Yes and i’m saying that payroll taxes, state and local taxes, and even sales taxes are contributions to the system.
For example social security receipts have been aprt of the general budget since LBJ.
That was my point.
A stay at home spouse is filing taxes on a joint tax return. Even teh senior citizen on a fixed income should contribute to the system. It can be a very small amount like the woman in the story with Jesus but rich or poor, everyone must sacrifice something. Of course the sacrifice of a dollar or even a flat percentage of income is far greater for the poor than it is for the rich, so we have a progressive system, even a drastically progressive system but not paying anything detaches you from the system in a way that is probably unhealthy for our democracy over the long term.