For most of us, the answer to that one is a resounding “yes”. Work at McDonald’s? You got your job from the people who come in and buy food, most of whom are poor. Work at Ford? You got your job from the people who buy cars. No matter where you work, your job ultimately comes from those who buy the products or services you provide.
Even if we accept your (highly questionable) premise of “All jobs are created by the rich”, it’s a fallacy to conclude from this that all rich people are job creators. If you want to use the tax code to reward businesses for hiring, there are much more targeted ways to do it than “Everyone who makes more than $X gets a tax break!”
For example: “Everyone gets a tax break for every person they employ”. Of course, they already do get that one in the form of corporations being taxed on profit instead of just revenue, so the cost of employing someone, being a business expense, is a deduction.
“The rich are job creators” is just a modern-day rephrasing of the feudal idea that aristocrats rule because of their divinely-ordained merits as rulers.
Then they don’t understand their own legislation. The reduction in money coming in to the Social Security trust fund is being made up out of general revenues.
Yes, that adds to the non-Social Security deficit, and you can argue that that’s just moving money between accounts without any real effect. But if you make that argument, nobody’s underfunding any particular program at all - you simply have a U.S. government deficit.
And, in particular, we are making up a tiny bit of the overfunding of social security over the past few decades, i.e., when we have used some of the Social Security revenues to fund the rest of government.
Yes, the current underfunding of social security is not sustainable over the long term, but we still have a lot of money to make up for with the overfunding over previous decades.
Because poor people (and by poor people I mean people who earn anything below 150k a year) pay it and because Obama is in favor of it.
What is really annoying is the conservatives who think Obama raised their taxes and the GOP wants to lower them when the reality is the opposite, the tea party has been pushing to end the payroll tax cut since they won in the house. The jaw dropping misinformation gets hard to deal with. I need to move out of Indiana.
As kindly as I can say this, and I’m probably still skating too close to the edge of the rules here*, is you really don’t know what you’re talking about.
Sheesh. This again? I wonder from where Republicans are pulling this canard lately. :rolleyes:
Many jobs in the US are created by small businesses, a good percentage of which are run by people who are not wealthy, some of whom are barely scraping by but need to hire in order to provide their customers an appropriate level of service and to get more customers.
I recently became part owner of a company that services the pharmaceutical industry. My partner and I have 4 employees, all of whom have advanced degrees in their specialty and the compensation packages to go with it. Believe me when I tell you that I’m not rich, far from it. To get started we had to apply for SBA loans, provide personal guarantees thereby locking down all of our personal tangible assets, capitalize the business from our savings, take salary cuts, retain a corporate attorney and a business accountant, and spend gobs of money to get the business up and running, not to mention taking time we should be spending with clients to negotiate leases for office space, equipment, professional services, etc… For the first time in my life, I feel as though I’m living paycheck to paycheck. I’m not, but money’s being spent like water, which makes me nervous.
My point is many businesses are run by people just like me, who do exactly as I did, or more, just to ramp up. We’re not the rich; we’re perhaps the upwardly-mobile middle class. Now, if you think paying more taxes will stop my partner and me from hiring, then you have no concept of how business works. We don’t have the luxury to not hire. Our clients require a certain level of experience, commitment, and competency and if we don’t have the resources to provide it, then we shouldn’t be in business in the first place.
Most won’t, so you’re wrong there. They’ll suck it up and pay the extra tax and like it, because the alternative is so abhorrent a thought as to be almost unfathomable. Those who do choose not to hire because of higher taxes are simply playing games, and are either not serious about running a business, or are so insulated against what it takes to do so that they should probably just retire anyway.
A friendly bit of advice to help you on your way to financial security? FOX News is not your friend.
- Apologies in advance if I went over the line there.
You’re right. Probably something like .1% of “the rich” don’t pay FICA. The poster I was responding to, which seems to bother you not one bit, missed the other 99.9% of “the rich” with his sweeping statement.
Good catch!
But the GOP wants to lower income tax rates on the rich- and the overall effect would be higher taxes on the middle class (due to higher payroll taxes), and lower taxes on the rich (because the income tax cut would be more significant than the payroll tax), as compared to Obama’s plan.
So no backtracking necessary.
Wrong and innumerate again.
- The percentage of “rich” who pay no or insignificant FICA is much more than .1%.
- I find it hard to believe you don’t understand how innumerate it is to suggest, as you’ve done repeatedly in the thread, that a tax with maximum of $6,826.20 applies equally to two people, one with $110,000 income, another with $11 million income.
Let me repeat that again, in a larger font:
A 10% increase in SocSec tax will cost both the man with moderately-large salary, and the multi-million dollar executive or celebrity $682. To continue to claim the tax applies equally to rich shows a most astounding level of confusion.
Do keep trying though!
Jeezus, John. If the FICA tax goes up, both A-Rod and I would pay a little more. However, it would amount to an infinitesimal fraction of A-Rod’s income compared to mine. But you continue to hide behind the skirt of absolute dollars and not acknowledge the reality that those wealthy who pay the payroll tax pay a pitifully small percentage of their income.
Wealthy people have not suddenly become more productive, intelligent or valuable to humanity in the last fifty years. Most Americans are working more and more and are far more productive per hour worked than back then. Yet the gap between the middle class and the top .1% has skyrocketed. What they have done is corrupted the political process and the media to tip the scales of compensation and taxes more and more in their favor. It’s as plain as day no matter how much their lapdogs prance about the issues.
Since I mostly worked for small businesses before owning one, I can safely say that everyone that employed me was “poor” enough not to be affected by letting the Bush tax cut expire for those making $250,000 or more.
First, it is a misrepresentation to say, as the Republicans do, that “some small businesses are taxed at the personal tax rate”. They are talking about businesses that are “C” corporations, like mine. This means that the PROFITS I TAKE HOME from my business are carried over to my personal tax return and taxed as income. Once they are carried to my personal tax return they can then be OFFSET by deductions for my kids, medical expenses, mortgage interest, tuition and retirement savings.
The business pays no other Federal taxes other than payroll taxes and unemployment fund contributions.
And the $250,000 number is based on something called ADJUSTED gross income. So it the struggling small businessman takes home $300,000 in profits, she pays more tax, right…NO, PROBABLY NOT …if he has kids, sends them to school, contributes to a retirement fund and owns a house, these deductions will drop his gross adjusted income to well under the 250K mark.
Now lets say our struggling businessman manages to realize even more profit…enough that his adjusted gross income is 260K. Wow, this will be a HUGE tax increase for him, right??? NO, not if you have any understanding of how marginal tax rates work. He would pay an extra 4% tax …not on the full 260K but on the amount by which his income exceeded 250k…in this case 10K. The tax increase on our not really so poor or struggling businessman would be $400 a year.
I am familar enough with the small businesses that I have worked for to know that none of y employers ever came close to making the income they would need to make to pay one penny more if this tax break was not extended. Most of them don’t even come close. I have my business and I “create jobs” and my friends think I’m rich but I could double my income and still not be affected …yet every struggling Joe the Plumber out there thinks they are one clogged toilet away from being rich.
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” - John Steinbeck
It might be a little more than that. I thought that the proposed increase was on income over $200,000; so 4% of $60,000 is $2,400. The $250,000 figure was in comparison to some other rate schedule (lower taxes on the first $200,000, higher taxes on income above that, so that the break-even point is ~$250,000).
Thank you for posting that. It is now my Facebook status.
Now I think I’ll go look up a cite to back it up.
Close enough.
Look here.
I don’t think so. Actually, it looks like the cutoff is actually higher than that now because of indexing for inflation…$267,000 AGI for a family. Now, what you might getting confused on is the fact that the $250,000 figure applies to families; a single-filer would be subject to the new rates on AGI over $200,000 (but really now $213,600).
That may have been part of it, but there was also the sense that I described. Depending on what you’re comparing to, raising the rate for income above $X doesn’t mean someone who makes $X+1 pays more. The cut on the first $X counteracts the increase up to some break-even point.
For political reasons, different people will describe that in different ways; as either a crushing burden on those hard-working people who make $X, or a small sacrifice on the mega-rich above the break-even point. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any reporting on the issue that even tried to explain the math behind it.