Well, I see your point, but I meant, in this thread. 
Well how much should you make? $70,000? $150,000? $500,000?
How many cups of coffee does a Starbucks employee need to sell to cover his half a million dollar salary? Or how many customer service calls does an operator need to answer to be worth a million dollars?
Everyone likes to complain that they should make more money. But why SHOULD you be in a higher income bracket than you are? Did you invent something? Did you start up a successful company? Do you have some specialized skill or gift or talent? Are you a great leader or organizer? Are you a great entrepreneur or salesperson or motivator?
Der Trihs likes to shake his angry fist at the mansion on the hill all the time. Why is it you feel you have no opportunities to succeed in America? Who or what exactly is keeping you from success?
And what is a fair distribution of wealth? How much should a billionare give up so everyone else can have a little more? I only make six figures. Can I get a little more so I can get a nicer appartment or another suit?
Same thing in this context, really. If no one pays their taxes, it’s guaranteed the country will be laid waste. If you want stable country worth living in you need a functioning government; a functioning government takes money; that money is gotten by taxes; therefore paying what you owe is indeed patriotic.
There’s class warfare right from the start in the OP. Both in the whole argument that fairness doesn’t matter - which means you are arguing FOR the people presently benefiting from that unfairness; and in the whole attitude of why the less wealthy ARE less wealthy. As in :
In other words, it’s neither bad luck, lack of opportunity or because the more successful have advantages. It’s because they are lazy or inferior. And those who are doing well; they earned it; it’s not because of good luck or the efforts of others. And certainly not due to a lack of ethics.
The guy who owns that mansion and those like him; the small percentage who hog all the money and opportunity to themselves. What I do doesn’t matter much; I can work as hard as I like, or be the smartest person on Earth, but I’ll probably never have a mansion. Someone like the guy on the hill in his mansion will reap the benefits of my efforts, not me.
Why do you feel this way? Do you believe that, because he has all the money, then you can never get any?
Economics is not a zero sum game, and someone “hogging” money doesn’t mean there’s none left for you. Could your own self-defeatist attitude prevent you from getting ahead?
What do you do? What skills do you offer?
I am happy to pay, through taxation, for national defense, police and fire, roads, things of that nature. I balk at having my money taken and turned over to others, poor and rich alike.
I donate plenty of time and money to help others, and those sacrifices are totally okay with me. I get concerned when people look to the government to level the playing field - as stated above, it seems that the field is leveled by pulling down the top, not raising the bottom.
Of course. Nor can millions of other people. This isn’t about me; over the last few decades, social mobility has largely died out in America, except downward. If you are born poor; you stay poor no matter how hard you work. If you are middle class, you stay middle class - if you are lucky - no matter how hard you work.
When the top has the majority of the wealth, it has to be. There’s no place else to get the money.
If I steal $300 from a cash register from a gas station I will see more time than if I stole $300,000,000 from a corporation.* You think that’s fair?
*-I’m approximating, but if you call for a cite I’m sure I can find a far larger discrepancy.
Sateryn76, I’ve read the whole thread, but I’m pretty sure you haven’t responded to the above post directly (or if you have, then I’ve missed it). This is what I was going to write in response to the OP because I think this gets to the heart of reasoning behind progressive taxes, if that’s what we’re arguing about here. Progressive taxes make sense because the tax burden of a flat tax is much heavier on the poor than on the rich. Why should the burden of the poor be higher on the rich? This isn’t about rich-bashing, or jealousy or anger. This is about preserving equal opportunity for the poor.
Btw, the progressive tax system has been in place for quite awhile, and I don’t think it’s going to go away soon. The only question that Obama, Bush and others argue about is HOW progressive the tax should be.
So, from the premise “why should anything be fair”, the rich are arguing that they shouldn’t have to pay progressive taxes? Because there is some higher principle which means that taxes should only provide things which benefit the rich, like police to protect their property and roads for them to drive between their mansions?
So, … [drumroll] … it’s not fair for them to pay as much tax?
WTF? 
“Fairness” only matters when it’s “fair” in their favor.
That’s budget revision. Except in the case of people getting a tax refund on taxes they didn’t pay, and arguably in the case of welfare, the only redistribution of money is from all people to the government.
Eisner was booted following a shareholder revolt, incidentally.
And for every Eisner (or -better examples- Warren Buffet or even Bill Gates) there are several CEOs who drives their companies into the ground - and make millions anyway, plus a generous golden parachute.
(What we need to do is tie executive compensation to the S&P 500 and probably hand out stock whose sale is restricted for many years. But that’s for another thread.)
I know that I’m getting a little particular. I think it’s relevant though that existing executive compensation isn’t actually that performance-based. For example, no CEO controls interest rates, but if long term bond rates decline stocks will benefit and option holders will receive a windfall.
If you’re of a philosophical bent…
Most justifications for a graduated tax structure rely on some mix of utilitarianism and the notion that there’s a lot of social, physical and intellectual infrastructure that permits some to make hand over fist. Neither of these justifications call for vilification though: really, they’re just about burden sharing. Put another way, in an aggregate sense the wealthy benefit more from the US military umbrella than most people do, simply because they have more property to protect.
A less common discussion of fairness is put forth by John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice.
There are also harsher formulations offered by populists and Der Tris, among others.
I honestly don’t know whether you’re kidding.
The federal government is basically a huge pension plan that happens to have an army. There’s a lot of redistribution: it flows from the taxpayer to the elderly. Some of it goes to pay for the military.
Some of it pays for the prerequisites of economic growth: these include a judicial system, roads, and in the case of the US the best university system in the world.
To say that the money just flows away from the people is nonsensical, right? It’s not like dogs or cats own the government.
Inequity aversion is neither rational nor exclusively human, although we can be pretty selective about it when it happens to work in our favour. Hence the schizophrenic nature of fiscal policy.
In the broader sense, sure. But we’re talking about redistribution here, the implication of which is that the extra cash taken from the rich is sent directly to the poor. But really money is being taken from everyone and given to the government, and then the government spends the money on stuff. So calling taxes “redistribution” isn’t a good analogy. A better analogy is “charging”. It’s like a store charging people different prices for the same merchandise, whereas “redistribution” would be more like the store taking money from their customers and giving them to other customers and not giving anyone merchandise.
Because socialism serves the lowest common denominator.
I spent 10 years in post high school education. Then worked 60 hours a week for five years trying to rob Peter to pay Paul.
Now I’m considered wealthy.
Should I now give that away to someone who blew off high school, spent their late teens and early twenties pushing fries and burgers and blowing their paycheck every Friday at the bars 'cause they just didn’t want to put in the effort for school?
Screw that. Anyone with that bent should go live in Cuba or North Korea or some other socialist country and see how that ‘wealth redistribution thing’ works out for ya.
America gives everyone an equal opportunity to fail or succeed on their own merit. In fact it gives multiple opportunities to fail miserably and still rise from the ashes as a financial phoenix.
Every day i see 400lb#+ food stamp engorged patients in my office waddling in when they feel like it-brought by a taxi service–covered 100% for all medical services–showing up late because the cleaning service that comes to their apartment ‘didn’t get the windows right.’ When my taxes get confiscatory to pay for all this–that is the day I stop supporting my government with taxes.
The proportion of this country living off a ‘mail-box’ income is getting dangerously high. As the baby boomer generation enters the retirement pool in mass we are going to see a collapse of the system.
I work hard for my toys and paid my dues.
Offer financial help for education. Privatize schools. Stop entitlement programs that are continuous and multi-generational.
Pess (People are entitled to a fair shot, not birth to grave support.) Mist
Well, see, that’s the thing. I did not claim that I should make more money. In fact, I believe I am adequately compensated in proportion to my contribution to the company. I am not a revenue generator. I do not sell new clients and I do not close deals. I do not put in 100 hours a week to travel around the globe closing those deals, nor would I want to. I made the choice a long time ago that I would never advance to the higher levels of management because I like my free time. I like to end the day at a reasonable hour (between 5 and 7) and spend the evening at home or with my friends or family. I’m not willing to sacrifice everything that means anything to me for the almighty dollar and a McMansion. I don’t deserve a half-million dollar salary and I wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.
And I stated that I think it is fair that an executive or CEO should make several times what I make. Those people are willing to work a hell of a lot harder than I am and make a lot more personal sacrifices in order to generate revenue, grow their companies, and reward the stockholders. I am a cost center. I make every effort to be a good steward of my company resources, but at the end of the day, I’m costing the company more money than I am making for it. (I am an editor for a giant publishing corporation.)
What I said was, sure that CEO should make 10 or 20 times what I do. That’s reasonable to me. But should he make 400 times what I do? No, I think that’s too extreme. While that CEO may very well contribute 10 or 20 times the value to the company that I do, I don’t think anybody is Superman/woman and contributes 400 times what I do. I really don’t understand why this isn’t logical.
Now what enrages me is when the company makes stupid inane little cuts, such as forcing me to travel coach or not travel to important meetings, cutting bonuses, reducing salary increases or not giving them at all, while the Executives collect interest on their golden parachutes. Sure Michael Eisner made $1 billion. Good on him. At what price did his employees have to pay? Did he start making them pay for their own uniforms or something? That’s unreasonable to me. If you are posting record profits, then you can afford to throw a bone to your peons, without whom you would not be able to post record profits. No worker bees = no company.
When you are cutting your own people off at the knees to save a few pennies so that you can make a few hundred dollars, that undermines your own company. It makes me not want to give a crap about saving your money and helping to contribute to profitability because I know you are going to rip me off with your other hand. Example: Give me a 401(k), then drop the match in half. Or offer the 401(k), but make the match only in company stock (See also: Enron).
I think there’s a happy medium here and people can and should be adequately compensated proportionally to their contribution toward the company goals. But the disparity in some companies (hey, some offer profit sharing and pay 100% of your benefits, I’m all for it) between the entry level and the executive level is what outrages people. I can barely afford dry cleaning but the CEO took home a $2 billion bonus? Feh.
See what I mean about class warfare ? If someone is poor, if someone needs help - why, that’s proof that they are worthless lazy scum. Not unlucky, not disadvantaged in any way.
Like, oh, the brutal tyranny of Canada ?
Pure garbage.