Did you bother to listen to his speech? Tax increases for those earning over $200 K, a tax cut for the middle class. (Couldn’t be very big.)
Cite
If you’re making over $200K, my condolences. Otherwise, you’re being taken for a ride. And yes, he knows very well his taxes will increase. Some people care for those who aren’t rich.
We obviously need to do both - just like in the early '90s.
I confess a certain skepticism to what Kerry says.
I’m not rich. I might qualify for lower middle class. I’m a Democrat and never voted for Reagan, but I like and believe Bush, Powell, and Rice. I do not like nor do I believe the Democratic slate.
pervert, that is a really interesting division, though it is hard to put that in any quantifiable terms, and it strikes me as strange that federal road programs are debateable but health care is not? What about education? These seem along the same lines: creating a solid, reliable infrastructure without ignoring the obvious benefit of human capital as part of that infrastructure. But we’ve gone around this tree before. 
This is the theory. But it does not seem to actually work that way. The politicians don’t feel the need to keep the common people happy in order to get their votes. They believe they can get the common people’s votes by being able to spend more on TV ads than the other candidate. The pols need to keep the wealthy and powerful happy, so they will provide generous campaign contributions. Said contributions are used to buy the very expensive TV ads that get them re-elected. How do they keep the rich and powerful happy? They keep taxes low for wealthy people and for large corporations; they hand out tax perks for the rich and corporate welfare for the large corporations; they enact pretty much whatever legislation the big corps want.
But, due to loopholes, the wealthy don’t actually pay the percentage of their income that the charts say.
My point wasn’t mere semantics. Bricker’s assertion that a person should be solely responsible for allocating the wealth they had piled up seemed to be based on the false asssumption that the person was solely responsible for gathering that wealth.
Perhaps you are right about my perception of natural rights. You are certainly correct that relative morality can also be an excuse to refuse to examine the utility of a belief. Neither worldview lacks stubborn and lazy adherents.
Ethics are always seperate from reality. In this example the ethics are whether the law should be passed and the reality is whether the law can be passed. Only the latter is dependent on might.
I’m afraid I do. Again, ethics and reality are 2 different things. The laws exist. Period. Virtuous or no, they are real. We can measure their effects.
Why do we “obviously” need to do both? Government spending has been increasing much faster than the growth of the economy. Unless there is a really good reason for that, which I don’t think there is, the only “obvious” thing to do is to cut spending.
People like me think it is bad because under your plan I, a simple wage earner, am always subject to taxes on my W-2 Wage income, while you, an “investor”, don’t want to pay any taxes on the income you earn on your investments. I am not saying that investment isn’t important, because certainly it is, but capital without labor is like a human with a brain but with no muscles. Both are needed. Saying income earned on capital should be free from taxes and only income earned by labor should be taxed makes a distinction without a reason.
What a totally bizarre statement!! Do you make it a habit to believe people who lie and deceive you time and time again? It boggles my mind how anybody can believe anything whatsoever that this Administration says. They have absolutely no scruples in regards to telling the truth.
See
http://www.bushlies.com/
http://www.misleader.org/daily_mislead/Read.asp?fn=df07302004.html (a new mislead 5 days a week! Okay, some of them may be slight stretches but when you have to come up with one every workday…
I’m sorry, I mentioned roads because we can all agree (well, mostly) that a road is a road and that roads are part of the countries infrastructure. I did not mean to suggest that education or health care were not debatable. I was only trying to put the dividing line in more stark relief. My only point was that if you are going to justify taxes, and most certainly if you are going to justify the concep of private property itself, in terms of government services which we all need, you’d better be willing to defend which services we actually need.
Obviously, I would argue that health care and education are better off left alone by the government, but as you said we’ve been around that tree before. 
Look again at the charts. They are not simply a regurgitation of the tax rates themselves. They are data which measure how much various income brackets pay in taxes. You are correct that loopholes provide different people with ways to avoid paying taxes they would have to pay without the loopholes. You are incorrect, however, in your assesment that the rich do not pay taxes on any sort of large percentage basis. That is, they are not avoiding paying taxes nearly as much as you seem to think.
Well, but in doing so, I think you took his point to a ridiculous extreme. I don’t think he meant that every single thing a person owns was carved from natural resources by that individual person. But the idea that a person owns his property is not dependant on this restriction. If I trade goods or services I procduce for the goods and services of others (who produce them) then I can still say that I own my property even though much of it was carved from natural resources by others. You took the fact of cooperation too far in the other direction. You took the fact that others helped create my property to mean that they have some unfulfillable right to demand my property even if they were not directly involved with its production.
I should say that you are right. Adherents to any sort of moral code can be guilty of lazy thinking. I am not a fan of religion for the very reasons you cited as objections to natural rights.
Fair enough. But the debate about whether or not the law aught to be passed, and the argument about whether it should be repealed are ethical arguments. The law and ethics are intertwined in this way.
Ok, but if you really mean this, then you have no objection to the tax proposals Bush enacted. You have no objection to the spending of monies in Iraq. If you have no ethical arguments about how such laws affect the world, if we can only debate the existence or not of such laws, then we are left to deal with their consequences without remedy.
I did not mean that major changes to the way Congress debates such things would be necessary. I only meant that a mechanism could be found so that the actual tax rate could be both more responsive to economic reality and less vulnerable to political infighting. When I talked about the budget process, I meant the process of spending and raising money as a whole, not seperately.
And for the record, I don’t really think such a mechanism is very feasable. For one thing, it would require that people argue their position in the tax brackets from month to month. Wealthy people don’t earn money the same way that wage earners do. They do not get bi weekly paychecks Sometimes their investments pay off big, and other times they do not. By paying taxes once a year, or even once a quarter, they smooth out the purterbations so to speak.
I think you are looking at a different chart than I am. Its pretty well indisputable that ‘the rich’ pay a higher total percentage of the federal tax than ‘the middle class’ and ‘the poor’ combined, depending on where you make the cut off as to what is ‘rich’ and what is ‘middle class’. Frankly ‘the poor’ don’t really even factor in, as they pay a very small percentage of total federal taxes.
The debate of course is, are ‘the rich’ paying enough, too much, or just right. This depends on several factors and is a complex question. I’ve gone into more detail on this in other threads (as has most of the major players in this thread), but my own philosophy is that everyone is paying too much in tax because the government is too bloated and doing too many things (many of them poorly for our money) that should be handled by private companies. Again, this is debatable, as other people in this thread don’t feel the government is doing enough and should be expanded, in which case ‘the rich’ should be burdened further to pay for it. However, my implied statement that ‘the rich’ pay a higher over all percentage of the total federal tax is pretty indisputable. Of course, it doesn’t tell the whole story, as jshore will tell you…this is a complex debate.
-XT
Woops, that quote was not from Pervert, but from Hazel. My appologies to both.
-XT
There are many objections to increasingly taxing ‘the rich’. On practical and moral grounds.
Practical grounds:
Putting an increasingly heavy tax burden on them acts as a pretty strong disincentive to achieve. It also takes away from them the resources they could use effiently, and redistributes it to people who have shown themselves to be not very good economic actors. This has the long-term effect of slowing down economic growth and overall progress.
You reach a point of diminishing returns, or even outright losses of revenue if you set taxes too high. The Laffer Curve describes this, although economists argue as to its exact shape and where we might be on it. But there’s no doubt that if taxes were 100%, revenue would be zero because no one would bother working. so at some point before that, revenue will start to decline as you increase tax rates.
Tax increases have unintended consequences. Make sure you’re not hurting the people you are trying to help. When the government enacted it’s amazingly stupid luxury tax, the net effect was to close down ship builders, airplane makers, luxury car makers, etc. The ‘rich’ weren’t hurt that badly, as they just spent their excess money elsewhere - it flowed to lower taxed activities. But it sure put a lot of blue-collar workers out of a job, and it COST the government revenue, because they never got much tax from the luxuries, and they lost the taxes that they would have collected on the workers and manufacturers.
It’s very dangerous to have a society in which the majority of the people do not pay tax. For me, this reason is enough to demand that middle and lower middle class people should always have to pay enough of the share of taxes for it to hurt. If they are voting for spending policies, they should viscerally understand that they are going to have to pay for that spending. It’s an important check against runaway government spending. But if the people who are voting for spending are not the ones who have to pay for it, what’s to stop them from voting their own bread and circuses? We are rapidly approaching this point, which is why there is so little opposition to government spending from the masses.
Constantly changing tax policy distorts the price system and causes short-term inefficiency. From an economic efficiency standpoint, the best tax system would be a flat tax that is guaranteed to not change with the whim of each administration.
Moral Grounds:
This notion that the rich are holding on to ‘our’ money is nothing more than a rationalization for theft. I’m not rich, but I’m getting increasingly comfortable. Everything I own was a result of decisions I made, work I engaged in, trades I made with other people of our own volition, etc. This is my property. It’s not community property that I just happen to be hanging on to. I flatly, categorically reject the notion that my life and property are chattels that belong to the state, or the whim of the electorate. The purpose of government should be to protect us from those things that encroach on our freedom by force. I entered a social contract with society because I recognize that it is in my interest to cede some power to a larger group that can protect my rights for me. Unlike what Spock says, the needs of the many do NOT outweigh the needs of the few. No one has a claim on my property, other than to demand of me that I pay my share for the infrastructure and services I consume.
All of this leads me to what I believe is the correct tax policy - a flat tax, paid by all. Helping the poor should not be done through the tax system. If we want to help the poor, raise the flat tax for all, and cut cheques for the poor. This ensures that the true cost is not hidden away. Under a flat tax system, economic efficiency is maximized, and the poor still pay the vast percentage of taxes, simply because they make the bulk of the money. A simplified tax system will also minimize tax shelter and lower accounting costs across the board.
When taxes go up, EVERYONE should feel it. Not just the rich. You should bear the consequences of every new spending initiative you vote for. Maybe if we did this, we’d wind up with a more sane government.
“Increasingly taxing ‘the rich’”? I haven’t followed tax policy in Canada since I left there in '96 but here in the U.S., we are not increasingly taxing the rich. Their share of the federal income tax burden is rising only because their share of the income is rising. And, under Bush, we are giving the rich a considerably larger percentage decrease in their overall tax burden than everyone else, let alone the dollar amounts.
Would that “increasingly taxing the rich” was a problem that we were facing!
So we are told. But, the income growth statistics from the 80s and 90s haven’t really borne this out. In the 80s, when the tax rates were cut on the rich, the top 1% did very well (in real after-tax income gains) but the gains were not shared as you got down the ladder and the lowest quintile saw their real after-tax incomes fall. In the 90s, especially the late 90s, when taxes were raised some on the rich, the top 1% did very well (okay, no change of story here!) but the gains were shared more on down the ladder. See here. The hypothesis that tax cuts on the wealthy will trickle down to a significant degree is one that has not been borne out by any facts that I have seen.
Admittedly, economic realities are always compounded by other factors…But, at the very least, if the effect of cutting taxes on the rich is to help out everyone else and raising taxes on them hurts everyone else, there must have been strong factors that more than counterbalanced that which one would need to identify.
Well, the evidence that we are anywhere close to the peak is non-existent. In fact, the Reagan era cuts saw exactly what one would expect – that tax cuts led to more anemic growth in real government revenues for that decade as compared to the one before and the one after. (I’ll also mention that the “Laffer curve” is a simplified concept in that it reduces everything to one variable. I’m not saying it is useless, but one should remember that it is a very large simplification.)
Okay, this one I really have to call you on. This is actually an excellent argument for a very progressive tax system. Are you seriously going to argue that taking 25% of the income of someone making minimum wage is going to cause similar hardship to take 25% of Bill Gates’ income. In fact, I would argue that if we go for “equal pain”, the tax system would have to be so progressive that even I would think that it is too far in that direction and would argue that such a tax system would in fact reach the point of really impacting efficiency.
Also, the argument that, say, the lower half of the population is increasingly paying a smaller of the federal income tax (which worries the WSJ editorial page to no end) has less to do with the fact that their tax rate is so low (although there has been some increase in progressivity at the bottom with things like expansion of the earned income tax credit, which tends to enjoy a certain amount of bipartisan support) and more to do with the fact that these folks are getting an ever smaller fraction of the income. [It also ignores the fact that the poor and middle class pay most of their tax through the regressive payroll taxes and state and local taxes rather than the federal income tax.]
As I noted above, your argument about “pain” actually to me argues for an extremely progressive tax system.
I am sure you could find plenty of people who would be happy to feel the rich’s economic pain instead of their own economic pain. And, you would find few rich people who would trade the lower tax burden of the poor for their lower economic status.
Oh…and on this point, I would argue that the reason why there is so little opposition to this spending is that the current President has led people to believe that they can have plenty of government services and decreases in taxes at the same time! And, you can…In the short run! And, beyond that, I don’t know…but I guess it is some other person’s problem. (In this respect, I don’t envy Kerry if he gets elected! He may have to pull off a few miracles to avoid being a one-term President.)
I would also argue that the reason that the people have supported increases in spending over the last few years is a feeling that is necessary especially in regards to defense and homeland security…although I’d argue that they were sold down the river in certain respects on this, e.g., as regards the Iraq war debacle.
If you have a sailboat being pushed along by 10 square meters of sail and you have a 2 square meter kite flying behind effectively dragging on the speed of the boat you might indeed look to other factors besides a few percentage points of alteration in the shape of the kite.
My point is that the economy of the 80s and the economy of the 90s had many more variables than simply the tax rates levied on the richiest citizens. I don’t have the link to the paper you once found which discussed the income gap over the last century. But it made the point that several factors lead to an ebb and flow of the rates at which income is earned by various economic groups. In fact, if I recall correctly, it made the point that tax policiy certainly played a part, it was not nearly the primary factor you seem to indicate.
Here in America you certainly can own property you didn’t extract from nature with your own 2 hands. Because that’s allowed by the laws we have constructed regarding the social construct we refer to as “property”.
I did no such thing. Again, my posts merely explore the subject of property and how it is obtained.
Certainly.