Hang on. I was answering the question, “What’s wrong with taxing the rich more?” I wasn’t claiming that the rich HAVE been taxed increasingly. In fact, the top marginal rate has dropped from over 70% down to, what, 35% in the U.S.? Or is it slightly higher now?
In terms of marginal rates, I would agree. But that’s not the only form of tax. The luxury tax, which I pointed out in that message, is a perfect example of how increasing taxes can lead to lower revenues. Capital gains taxes may be another.
But one thing is sure - the dicincentive effect of tax increases will result in lower revenues than would be predicted if this effect isn’t taken into account. In other words, if you have a tax revenue of 1 billion, and you raise taxes 20%, you aren’t going to get 1.2 billion in revenue. At some point, you will reach diminishing returns, and perhaps an actual reduction in revenue.
Here you have a fair point. And it’s true - if we were trying to spread the pain equally between rich and poor, then we’d have to graduate the income tax to match the utility curve to get ‘equal pain’, and that implies a progressive tax system.
But ‘equal pain’ isn’t really what’s necessary - it’s just important that people voting for spending should bear enough of the cost that it becomes a factor in their decision making. The danger point is when a majority of the voters no longer bear the costs of what they are voting for. So I have nothing against subsidizing the poor, or making the rich pay a little more (at least, for the purposes of this argument), but it’s a dangerous game to shunt more and more taxes away from the middle class, because they make up the bulk of the electorate, and absorb the bulk of government spending. Taking the cost of that spending away from them opens the door to runaway spending and increasingly higher taxes on the rich. Eventually, we’ll pay the price for that.
By the way, I’d make the same argument against deficit spending. I favor balanced budgets, for the simple reason that requiring a balanced budget means that people have to pay NOW for the goodies they get NOW. Deferring the costs for years or even generations also creates runaway spending.
Feel free to attack Bush over this now - I know you want to. I agree with you on that.
Just a general point on wealth. The Bill Gates example is telling. This guy isn’t wealthy because he developed computer technology, he’s wealthy because he encrypted computer technology, and, if he is, for example, estimated to be the wealthiest person on earth, he would then, in fact, be the least valuable human being on the entire planet. He would be a nexus of encryption on the entire globe… the being most capable of supporting defense agencies that confiscate patents until they can figure out how to encrypt them, so as to keep social stratification stablized and assure the death of every human being who is currently alive.
Bill Gates is very wealthy because he was very successful at marketing the right product at the right time. He personally has developed nothing of any significance (as a programmer, he was not exceptional as I understand it), but he had a very good grasp of how and where to market first what he purchased, and later what his employees developed.
Encryption has been around for millenia. Microsoft has developed some, other people/companies have developed more. Like any other tool, encryption has no moral value, either positive or negative, in and of itself. Encryption does not exist in order to stratify society. It exists to protect the privacy of information that one person does not want another person to know. Like anything else, this can be good (do you really want your banking records or your personal history available to anyone who asks?) or bad. Encryption doesn’t create secrets, and not all secrets are bad.
Do you actually understand what encryption is? It is a means of altering information so that only the people you want to read it can. That’s all. You can’t encrypt a technology. You can encrypt information about a technology, of course. But then, you can also simply not send that information anywhere, which will keep the secret even more reliably.
The death of every person on earth is already pretty much assured. The defense agencies, by and large, are not dedicated to bringing out their deaths prematurely, because this does not benefit them, and they are not entirely composed of psychopaths. You may personally wish to die, but rest assured that most people do not. Since bringing about the death of every person on earth would include themselves, this is not something that is considered a primary goal of defense agencies.
olanv, things are not quite the black and white you seem to like to think them. Even the most evil person in your eyes probably has a rationale in his own that allows him to believe that his actions are good rather than evil. There is no Lex Luthor conspiring to bring about Chaos and Destruction. People’s goals tend to be much more mundane than that - they want comfort and status, things which are achieved via power and money. Neither of these is achieved by killing off the population base.
This analysis is just as flawed as President Bush’s defence of the very same tax cuts. You cannot simply look at how much money went to various groups and say the tax cuts helped some and hurt others. It misses the point of tax cuts in the first place. Tax cuts (tax relief as President Bush likes to repeat) primarily go to those who pay most of the tax. If you only cut one particular tax, then most of the benifit will go to those who pay most of that tax. President Bush’s tax cuts were directed at the federal income tax. Most of the money not collected went to the rich because they pay far more of this tax than others.
Now, one could certainly argue that cutting the income tax is unfair without simultaneously cutting the sales taxes, usage fees, and State income, sales, and property taxes. But this is entirely a different argument than the one you presented. The argument you presented is designed to show the recent tax cuts in the most negative light. President Bush made a similar logical mistake when he tried to do the opposit by talking about the relative changes in the percentage changes in tax rates.
I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it went something like this: The lowest income group pays 8% of the income tax and the highest pays 33%. If we lower both rates by 2%, then the lowest recieved a 25% cut while the highest recieved a 6% cut. So clearly most of the cuts went to the lowest economic group.
One can see the problems with this argument fairly easily. But the basic problem is the exact same one made by the Tax Policy Center. It is overly simplified to look at the numbers this way.
I think you’re misunderstanding: he’s saying he’d pay tax on the return from his investments. Remember, time is money, and where you may earn your money being a woodcarver, so too may he by researching companies in which to invest (which takes time), investing his money, and waiting for the right moment to take a profit - during which time he’s researching and making other investments. You get a shorter-term payback; he gets a longer-term payback. Both of you pay taxes on that payback.
We have a little thing called Iraq to pay for, remember. Unless you want to chop that out of the budget, along with other stuff, we need to figure out how to pay for it. If the rich don’t want to help support it, they can start lobbying to pull out.
I know you’ll deny it, but the tax increase/spending cuts of the early '90s, which got the budget under control, gave a tremendous shot of confidence to the markets, and helped start the boom. For the first time in decades, both parts of government seemed to know what they were doing. Tax increase -> boom. It creates such cognitive dissonance in conservatives they deny it. And certainly taxe cut not equal boom in the past four years.
I used to believe Powell. Then he sold out, and spewed lied to the UN. In any case neither Powell nor Rice have anything to do with economic policy. Powell seems to have very little influence on foreign policy these days either. Powell also is going to quit if Bush (Og forbid) gets reelected. So you are actually voting for Cheney, and his extreme right friends. If as a democrat you like Cheney, well I don’t know what to say. (A study published in the NY Times showed that, based on voting records, Cheney was by far the most extreme of the four candidates, far to the right of the Republican norm).
And, don’t you think a middle class tax cut is politically necessary if Kerry is going to restore the taxes to the rich? Assuming he can get it through Congress, that is one thing I think you can take to the bank.
No, IBM was successful at marketing the right product at the right time - the PC, with MS-DOS in it. Intel was similarly lucky. The Intel museum, at one time, had a display on “the most important sales call” where they convinced IBM to go with the 8088 instead of a technically superior processor from Motorola.
And after that, a large part of Gates’ wealth is from his status as a monopolist.
I don’t know what Gates thinks, but his father was against the tax cut.
Please explain to me how going back to tax rates of the '90s will be a disincentive? Yes, confiscatory tax rates are, but going back to the venture capital investment of the '90s, even as hurt by those high taxes, would be something I’d love to see.
BTW, you are right that a 20% increase in taxes might not lead to a 20% increase in revenue. But on the other hand, an increase in taxes that produced investor confidence might lead to a much bigger increase in revenue from a rising market than from increased taxes in a static economy. So, you are being just as simplistic as those you are addressing.
Also BTW, I agree that all should pay for services. I trust then that you agree with an increase in minimum wages, so that those on the bottom will be able to pay their share and not starve. As it stands, I assure you those on the bottom feel plenty of pain, and probably more in the US than in Canada.
Income tax takes from the rich and not the poor
Actually, I’ve heard it before. I’ve noticed the Kennedys (among others) kept saying they would tax the rich not me. Yet my taxes went up and the Kennedys are still very rich. For years I hear how Bush is very rich, but I see that compared to Kerry, he’s much closer to me.
I watched Clinton say, “I never had sex with that woman…” and I believed him. I felt bad that I’d ever questioned his honesty. He was so maligned by his accusers!
Except he was lying. And I was totally fooled. It occurred to me that maybe some of the others things he’d been saying might be questioned. Like the claim that he was going to cut taxes.
And then Bush did cut taxes and I got some of it.
Millions of fingers typing out “Bush lied…Bush knew…Bush this and that” but what actually happened is Clinton ignored these attacks for years and we got hit in the nuts. And Bush did something about it.
jsleek, what does your swallowing hook line and sinker the odious Republican propaganda of the last few years have to do with tax breaks?
Perhaps if the Republicans hadn’t been hounding Clinton for years over nothing – NOTHING, not one of the damn special investigations produced a single charge that could even be brought against Clinton until they put him on trial over his sex life and asked him personal questions that were none of the public’s business – he’d have had more time to focus on terrorism?
By all reports the man was obsessed with tracking down the terrorists after the 1993 WTC attack, but everytime he tried to do anything abroad, even lobbing missiles at al Qaeda targets, the Republicans threw a hissy fit and accused him of trying to start a war to distract people from his “scandals.” Scandals they created out of whole clothe simply because they wanted to destroy him.
You want to blame Clinton for September 11? That’s stupid, but okay. But just be sure you also blame the Congressional swine who made it impossible for him to effectively do his job. They put partisanship ahead of effective governance, and thousands are dead.
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Perhaps if the Republicans hadn’t been hounding Clinton for years over nothing – NOTHING, not one of the damn special investigations produced a single charge that could even be brought against Clinton until they put him on trial over his sex life and asked him personal questions that were none of the public’s business – he’d have had more time to focus on terrorism?
By all reports the man was obsessed with tracking down the terrorists after the 1993 WTC attack, but everytime he tried to do anything abroad, even lobbing missiles at al Qaeda targets, the Republicans threw a hissy fit and accused him of trying to start a war to distract people from his “scandals.” Scandals they created out of whole clothe simply because they wanted to destroy him.
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Scandals created out of whole cloth? I am having images of a blue dress. A dress, by the way, without whose existence your wonderful president would have absolutely destroyed and discredited the young lady in question, as he was able to do with so many of his accusers. But the issue was not sex - the issue was perjury, of which WJC was definitely guilty, but which was deemed not to fall under the heading of “high crimes.”
No you didn’t figure it out. You’re a sucker, friend. Bush gives his rich friends lobster, and you a spoonful of peas, and he says he’s feeding both of you, and then he sticks you for half of the tab. And you say, well, the guy is fat, he deserves more food.
Remember the big terrorist attack associated with the Year 2000? No. That’s because Clinton and his team stopped it. No one sent them an email with time and place. But Bush got handed a report saying aQ was going to attack, and then went on vacation - and then whined about not having the flight and seat number of the terrorists. You don’t have to be too smart to figure out to do something after you’ve been attacked - stopping it would have taken some initiative.
The rich are still rich after taxes - breaks my heart. Bush started with more than Kerry, by the way. And he’d probably have more money now if he hadn’t run so many companies into the ground.
Voyager already addressed your post more cogently and succintly than I could.
But, just to fill you in a bit on a few things: Yes, Bill Clinton lied to you about his sex life. But those of us who had actually been tracking this Administration policy before Iraq knew that this Administration lied and deceived about policy as a matter of course and in fact told people that right here on these boards when we were discussing back in late 2002 and early 2003 what Iraq likely had in terms of WMDs and serious capabilities to threaten the U.S. And, the fact is that in retrospect most of us who were doing that feel burned that the truth was even further away from what the Administration claimed than most of us were guessing it would be. Whether Bush lied to us about this or whether he simply deceived himself along with everyone else is largely irrelevant. If they did actually believe what they were telling us, their piss-poor job at securing potential weapons sites in Iraq means that if there had been WMDs, they vastly increased the chances that they would have ended up in the hands of terrorists…an error of stunning incompetence! As SimonX, a conservative poster who can’t stomach what the neo-cons have done, has said here: Mendacity or incompetence: We report, You decide.
This board is about fighting ignorance. We have given you cites where you can go and see all the lies, half-truths, and deceptions that this administration has engaged in. We’ve given you resources to understand how the tax system works in reality and who pays what. However, in order for ignorance to be fought, a person has to want to reduce their ignorance and make some effort to do so. I unfortunately don’t see any evidence of this desire / effort coming from you and thus I think our efforts here are basically wasted on you.
He was just as much your president as he was mine. I never voted for him, and I supported impeaching and removing him from office. However – HOWEVER – the only reason he committed perjury was because the Republicans were hounding him left and right about things they had NO RIGHT to hound him over, and they financially supported rafts of litigation against him which was all basically groundless. They were trying to nail him on anything from day one, and that was flat out wrong. They had no business spending millions of tax payer dollars to harrass the president over Whitewater, the travel office and other ‘scandals’ that were nothing.
And they were wrong to fund the attacks of Paula Jones and others. They just wanted to destroy him, simply for being from the other party, and that’s just flat out wrong.
As was his perjury. He never should have been asked those questions or been in that trial, but upon being asked under oath he had no legal choice but to tell the truth. By choosing to lie and break the law, he should have been removed from office for committing a major legal offense.
However, that’s not germane to the fact that the Republican congress, with their bully Ken Starr, did everything they could to cause Clinton to stumble and fall while president. They kept setting him up to fail, and then turn around and blame him when exactly that happens. It’s disgusting.
It is a sad testament that some people believe that a President lying about consentual sex with another adult warrants a full-blown public hearing and impeachment proceedings, but do not raise a fuss at the idea of a President invading another country on false charges of WMDs, then giving away billions in no-bid contracts to old friends and croneys.
rjung, perjury is perjury. He should never have been forced to answer questions about his sex life, that was stupid Republican nonsense. But once on the stand, no one has the option of lying, not about anything. He could have take the Fifth. He could have told the truth. He chose instead to lie, and that’s a crime, like it or not.
Clinton was a much better president than Bush has been. Still doesn’t excuse lying under oath.
Just because nobody shoved his beloved bible under Bush’s hand before he lied to the entire world about Iraq’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks and its possession of WMD supposedly poised at the ready to attack us again, doesn’t make it any less and unconscionable lie.