Still, it was the GOP who called for paying off “outside” T-bill holders before paying back Social Security, if necessary to avoid total default. Obama didn’t start that.
Furthermore, the idea that Obama is the nasty one screwing over pensioners here is fraud. It’s been the case for 15 years that great numbers of us (both right-wing and libertarian) have argued that SS is generational theft, & that the GOP has been deliberately trying to gut the welfare state (or so they claim–I think they just have to cut taxes to get anyone to vote for them).
To blame Obama for pointing out that the beast is starving, when you yourself done starved it, is the act of a party that knows it does not have the people behind it, & is trying to pull one over on the populace.
Buffet doesn’t bother with tax lawyers. He just pays what it says in the tax code :
Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.
It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”* http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html?ex=1322197200&en=0cf877b05b918674&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Don’t you think that the wealthy should at least pay the same effective rate of tax that the rest of the country pay? How about corporations too?
We have higher corporate taxes thsn elsewhere but you also say that corporations just find loopholes to avoid tax. And they do! Like GE, who make billions in profit but don’t pay any tax and actually get money back from the government. A lot of the biggest US corporations actually have a similar negative tax rate. US corporations managed just fine back in the 1950s when they paid a vastly bigger share of national taxation than they do now. They had vast sums to invest, made vat profits and employed vast numbers of Americans compared to now. So clearly taxation rates don’t have the kind of negative effects on them that you claim. Don’t you think that they should pay a fair share of the tax burden?
Even the Wall street Journal just published an article saying tax breaks to the wealthy do not create jobs. it was part of a polling of economists who overwhelmingly agreed. Seems strange that rightys will reject them and believe Bachmann, Palin and Cantor.
They are just picking and choosing so they do not have to face their own economic ignorance.
The stock market’s best year ever was 1933. The Great Depression lasted until ~1941. Also, 1937 was one of the worst years ever for the stock market. In other words, the stock market is not a very good indicator for the overall health of the economy.
The Journal has been advocating lower income tax rates for quite some time as they (rightly) believe that will encourage investment and development. They’ve also pushed to reduce the complexity of the tax code and eliminate as many of the loop holes as possible. Really though, they’re for lower rates of income tax.
So, there are no campaign ads or campaign donations on your planet?
BTW, I’m still waiting for a cite that demonstrates that the rich are indeed so overwhelmingly opposed to paying taxes.
If people really wanted to soak it to the rich, they could simply elect people who absolutely commit to do so. Campaign ads and donations do not physically prevent people from voting for candidates of their choice.
Now you could argue that campaign ads give people the wrong notion (that they should vote for candidates who won’t heavily tax the rich). But that’s really a different issue, as it is one of why more people don’t insist on candidates that heavily tax the rich.
Campaign ads and other propaganda convince people to vote against their best interests all the time. Anyone saying they want to increase taxes on the rich gets attack ads saying “HE WILL INCREASE YOUR TAXES” or get called a Socialist, or get accused of class warfare. And they appeal to the dreams of people. Look at Joe the Plumber, dead set against a policy which would benefit him because he had a fantasy that someday he’d get rich.
If people only did things that didn’t hurt them, there would be almost no smoking and McDonalds would be 1 /100th the size it is today. Murdoch bankrolls Fox News, and millions of people believe the crap they hear on it.
The answer is that a scarily high percentage of non-rich voters have been suckered into believing that taxing the rich is more unfair and unjust than skimping on social services that help the poor, the elderly, and the sick. They’d rather live in a society that allows a rich man to sink a few extra dollars in his Swiss bank account than live a society where ERs aren’t overflooded with indigents who can’t pay the bill for their uncontrolled diabetes.
I agree, and I think that is the real problem. The rich aren’t going to agree to raise their own taxes. I work with many of them, and the Warren Buffets of the world are the exception. The wealthy people I work with, you’d swear that making them give an extra dollar to stop someone from dying in the street was the equivalent of invading their home at gunpoint.
Instead, the question is why is the average schmuck so gullible as to be pro rich? The Economist had an article recently that suggested Americans are much more concerned about opportunity than class. That is, in a Lake Woebegone type of way, most Americans somehow think that they might get rich some day, so let’s avoid taxing the high life now because they don’t want to give up a penny of the imaginary “some day” wealth they have in their heads.
(Of course, the entire notion that America is a land of equal opportunity is itself a joke, as the article points out indicators that it may now actually be easier to climb class ladders in Europe than it is in America. Just another thing that the common person is misinformed about.)
Cast aside the debate over whether this “80%” number is a fabrication or not (we could have a whole 'nuther topic on just the statistical manipulation that creates that figure).
If we think a minute about this, this should mean that Obama should seek to impose a tax increase that increases taxes on 80% of the American public. At a time when it’s alleged that forty-something percent (give or take, depending on who’s arguing) of the tax-paying public pays no income taxes.
I have thought and I have thought, and I cannot come up with a rational reason why this would be so. How does it follow if 80% of the people want a plan to reduce the deficit to include tax increases, then the tax increases should be on 80% of the people? I don’t follow.
Let’s look back over the last decade – who’s income has been affected by the current rates? If someone’s wealth has gone up, they have benefited by the rates, and should pay more. If someone’s wealth has stagnated or gone down, their cohort should not.
I’ve done pretty well by the tax cuts – I wouldn’t mind paying my fair share. I don’t see any benefit in increasing taxes on the unemployed or very poor…