Same thing that would happen if you inherited a 5 million dollar home with a 4.9 million dollar mortgage on it and you didn’t have the income to pay the mortgage - you sell the house and pocket the 100k
Same thing would happen if you couldn’t pay the property taxes on the house yourself.
Same thing would happen if the estate didn’t have sufficient other assets to pay off the estate tax bill.
They don’t spend more, they invest it, causing capital market bubbles. See 1920s, 2000s. It’s actually much better for the economy to redistribute that money to low/middle income earners.
It’s hard to find anyone who can say what the other side thinks without speaking in broad, inane, generalities. Of course it’s also hard to find anyone who can say what they themselves think without speaking in broad, inane, generalities.
If I may presume to answer for ILM,V1.
A modern economy is always growing, so even if tax rates stay the same, revenue will increase. So the question isn’t whether it increases, but whether it increases more or less than other tax rate structures.
The second argument is that lowering taxes will lead to a short term dip, but greater long term growth. In that case, ask whether the increase outpaces regular growth, and can service the debt incurred while revenue was down.
Cutting taxes to raise revenue has been tried. Ten-trillion dollars of debt later, people still want to try it some more.
Hey, we’re almost out of the Obama recession, and we have Ronald Regan to thank for it!
Dude, seriously, any way you can control that power? Because after reading that I’m going to have to soak my brain in some generic disinfectant household cleaners for a while…since I can’t afford name brands.
That presumes they absolutely, positively, must spend the whole $1MM on contractors. Even the modestly wealthy can do quite a lot with $800,000. They don’t have to scrimp just because the mean old Democrats took away their Bush Bucks.
They don’t “withdraw” anything from society’s “pool.” There’s no “pool” to begin with; there is only privately owned money, and money that the government takes. Neither is a “pool” because they don’t belong to everyone.
And they don’t “withdraw” it, they EARN it! Either by dint of hard work, exceptional talent or coming up with something that a lot of people want to pay for. That ain’t easy and not very many people can do it. The rich don’t TAKE money, it gets PAID to them…by people who want what they offer!
The notion that rich people somehow benefit unfairly or disproportionately by virtue of their success compared with the rest of society is nothing more than a rationalization by which those with a socialistic bent can justify taking money from those who earn it in order that it may be spent on them.
And I’m reasonably sure the rich want the services that the government offers them. They want police and fire protection of their homes, offices and factories. They want highways so they can transport their goods to market. They want records of the fruits of their “exceptional talent” by means of copyright and patent records, and enforcement of their rights in the courts.
The government has something that rich people want. That ain’t easy, and not many governments can do it. Why shouldn’t the government get PAID, by people who want what it provides?
Bravo.
However, you could cast that in bronze and beat SA over the head with it, yet still not dent his iron-clad resistance to any change in his politics. He is impervious to logic.
In 1916 the tax was passed because the consumption taxes bore most heavily on those least able to pay.
That we should collect more from those who derive the most benefits and protection from the Government.
The rich have a ton of ways to avoid taxes . They game the system for a lifetime. Now they want to eliminate a tax that goes to people who did not earn the money.
Well, it’s not really taking, it is what people need to invest to pay for the services they demand. But if you want to act like it is wrong for the government to balance its books then OK, I’ll say yes, I do. But not right now. That is a long-term policy adjustment I’d like to see, but I don’t know when it could be implemented.
Like you, I want to see the government make better use of the money they already have. Everybody does. Look, my earlier post was based on emotion and reality. I decided to forgo all the careful couching of words and consideration of every last political sacred cow and just say what was on the “rather-amazed-at Americans’-bull-headed-selfishness” part of my mind.
I really don’t advocate a thoughtless philosophy of “throw money at it and it’ll be better”. But the taxes we pay are so ridiculously low that we must first set them at some point resembling reality (that is at least high enough to pay for all the shit that we all demand from our government) and only after that can we talk about the appropriate size of government and whether individuals should get to pick and choose a la carte how their financial responsibilities to their society and country are allocated. So first things first.
Want to pay for a Empire Adventure in the Sandbox? Pay before you play. Raise the taxes. Want health insurance availability equal to or better than the more civilized nations? Gotta pay to play. Raise taxes. Want to buy all the newest Boeing toys to insure we have move than enough fighter jets to kill every other nations fighter fleets 3 times over? Pay first. That means raising taxes.
Once we get taxes up to a rate that at least comes somewhere near to our expenditures THEN we can make cute political philosophy talk. First we need to get back to planet Earth.
The problem is that you want to attach a disproportionate value to social services and roads when it comes to the rich, based on the notion that they take more from society than everyone else. My argument is: number one, they don’t “take” money from society, society “gives” it to them in return for whatever it is that they are offering and which society wants badly enough to part with its hard-earned money for; and two, under a flat tax system they would already be paying their fair share for police and fire services, highways, etc. It’s when you tax them disproportionately and excuse that by claiming that they have somehow profited disproportionately as a result of the benefits provided by the society they live in that it becomes unfair, socialistic and confiscatorial.
They do. But it’s disproportionate and therefore unfair. A flat tax would insure that rich people pay their fair share. More than that is classist, socialistic and confiscatorial, as I said just above.
But the vast majority of the Right has no clue what an actual far left person is like and doesn’t understand this. They actually think Obama and Clinton are left wing! It’s amusing to think what their reaction would be if an actual left winger somehow became President.
Because they’ve been allowed to hog most of the nation’s wealth to themselves, and to reshape society until America is basically one gigantic machine to benefit them. Because if we don’t society will collapse, due to the progressively impoverished general population having less and less ability to carry the wealthy on their backs.
It would ruin the country and create general chaos. Mass starvation, economic collapse and a nationwide collapse of services would be the result.
Yeah, that fuckin’ Starv! That sonofabitch won’t become a liberal no matter how hard you beat him on the head. What an asshole!
Do you think I became a conservative just by pulling a number out of a hat? I am not a conservative by whim, you know. There are concrete reasons why I believe in conservative politics and they are decades old and founded in common sense and values of fairness, individualism and freedom from government control. Why should I abandon those values based on arguments that caused me to become conservative in the first place?
Just because you want something doesn’t mean you get it.
Actually it’s been increasing except for the past couple years. Since there has been less income to tax most likely
I think the US has finally reached the point where the rich are just like Marie Antoinette completely flummoxed as to why, if there’s no bread for the poor, they don’t just buy more expensive pastry instead (even if she never actually said it). They live in a whole new world of anal-retentive greed where money is a value of personal validity in its own right and even when most of their wealth does nothing more than sit on electronic media because it is impossible even for them to spend in a year as much as they ‘earn’ in a month, they are totally paranoid that surrendering the tiniest bit of it makes them less of a person. In a way they are right because these warp-heads are nothing more than what they have.
Their predecessors in the USA and in earlier societies like the Renaissance and the Classical world believed that they achieved what they did because they lived in the society they did, therefore it showed their honor and that of their dynasty to future generations to endow charitable Institutes, to found churches and schools, to build aquaducts and roads so that their name might live forever. The present generation are too mean and ungracious to the society that gave them the chance to get their money. They are more like grasping Lords of the Middle Ages than Medici and Romans.
Since they have lost the sense of giving a damn to support the society that gave them their chance, and in fact do everything to undermine it so that they can become Dark Age barons politically as well as economically, it is the right of that society to force them to contribute to its upkeep and always has been. The times they look back to as free from ‘government’ interference taxed everything in sight. But of course it was their equivalents doing the taxing and not government! What are profit and interest but kinds of personal taxation?
It wasn’t my argument to begin with. I never said they benefited disproportionately. (Although in things like patent protections and securities trading they certainly use those services more than I do.) I just thought your post that the rich are noble EARNers was hopelessly flawed.
Yes, they do earn. Good for them. I enjoy many of the things that they invent and sell. If I want one of those things badly enough, I give them money.
Based on those facts alone, what do I conclude about tax policy? Nothing.
A bit of a devil’s advocate position to start. Who says the government has to be fair? Does a car dealership sell identical cars for the identical price? Did all the passengers in coach on a particular airline flight pay the same price for their tickets? The value of a good or service is established by how much someone is willing to pay. Businesses try to maximize their revenues, why shouldn’t the government. Bill Gates is able to pay more to be a free citizen in this country than I am. Why not charge him accordingly?
If we accept that the government does owe a degree of fairness to its citizens, who says it applies only to income? The government hires, trains, and equips the military primarily to safeguard the territory of the United States. I live in an apartment; someone who owns 100 acres is clearly receiving a disproportionate benefit of the government’s protection. Let him pay for it. (There are property taxes, but not at the federal level.) There are so many definitions and variables that any attempt to calculate true “fairness” is hopeless.
I haven’t read the thread yet, but I thought I’d offer my perspective.
To some, this is just a matter of principle, even if it’s ultimately against their best interests. I, for example, am for estate taxes even though I stand to be an heir of a taxable estate. It would be in my best interest if estate taxes disappeared. I’d get more money. But it isn’t money that I particularly want or need, and the only thing I’ve done to “earn” it is not be a total shit to my mom. I think, honestly, that there are better things to do with money than hand it to your kids, but I don’t have all these illusions about myself that if I had someone standing there giving me a check that I would piously wave it away and tell them to give it to the lepers.
(One of the reasons I think taxes are effective is that they can be decided on in rational moments and then the decision doesn’t have to be made every minute of every day.)
So, people can simply decide the principle of something is more important than their personal gain from it.
I think there are other people who are for tax cuts because its in the platform of the party they have chosen for other reasons. It takes more to deviate from your party on any one issue than it does to go along with that issue. When you’re a Democrat around Democrats, you’re assumed to have beliefs X, Y, and Z. When you’re a Republican around Republicans, you’re assumed to have beliefs A, B, and C. If you have beliefs that are outside the mainstream of your party, they might drift into the mainstream through the sheer amount of repetition or expectation you encounter.
So, if you’re a Republican for social issues, you could end up defending Republicans and Republicanism, and eventually embrace what you’re defending. It’s psychologically easier.
It’s easier to be an anti-gun Democrat than a pro-gun one. It’s easier to be an anti-gay Republican than a pro-gay one. There’s nothing inherent to the DNC or the RNC that makes this true, only the sheer weight of all the members for whom it IS true.
Then you just have your fools and your damned fools, or maybe I already covered this when I talked about self-harming principles.
Well, Starving Artist has made an issue of the uncouth and impolite nature of those he politically opposes. I make an extra effort to be succinct and non-acrimonious when I directly disagree with him. An enoucnter with a polite liberal can either be enlightening or drive him nuts.
I’m only liberal in comparison, really. And I’m non-acrimonious to pretty much everyone.
See my post #144 in this thread. In essence, yes, revenue has gone up. A better question is whether it has gone up more than if taxes had not been cut.