OT: Millionaires ask for higher taxes

[aemeijers]

On 8/10/2011 10:14 AM, [e-mail] wrote: (snip)

'from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs'

Okay, gotcha.

-- aem sends...

[despen]

Right.

Taxes under the current president are lower than they have ever been, going back to at least WWII.

Where do you see "too much of the time" in that?

There is a deficit and a recent temporary tax cut is due to expire. The current president is fine with extending that tax cut for everyone except people making a lot of money. Should we do something about the deficit or not?

Personally, I'm fine with letting the temporary Bush tax cut expire for everyone, but most people are convinced that would be bad economic policy in terms of a causing recession.

Basing taxes on ability to pay is lousy tax policy? Doesn't make much sense to me...

[despen]

Nice to have an ideology that allows you to stop thinking and just pull out a talking point.

Why don't we tax people that can't pay?

[Gordon Shumway]

You can blame Bush for that too.

When Clinton left office in 2001 the percentage of tax liability for a single person earning $55K in 2000 was 21.8%. When Bush left office in 2008 that same person was paying 18.3%. An average annual reduction of 0.44%.

With the anointed one in office the rates have continued to reduce because he begrudgingly extended the Bush tax cuts. I guess you can blame you-know-who for that. However, the reduction was slowed to about 0.1% annually. Just wait until Obama-Care taxes kick in. Maybe then you might start to understand.

[HeyBub]

There IS a difference between (most) governments and the rest of society (families, charitable organizations, etc.).

Non-government budgeters estimate revenues and adjust spending to match. The federal government, and most states, estimate expenses and adjust revenue accordingly, through tax increases or borrowing.

I just heard that the federal deficit has hit $1 trillion already with two months to go in the fiscal year. This is the third year in a row where the deficit has exceeded one trillion dollars.

[HeyBub]

We'll see. San Francisco recently passed (or is contemplating passing, I forget which) an ordinance prohibiting a prospective employer from discriminating against an applicant based on an applicant's former felony convictions.

If I own a business, and I discover an applicant has three prior felony convictions for arson of a business...

[HeyBub]

Giggle. The federal income tax rate was set by the Bush administration. Meanwhile, our current president raised taxes on cigarettes by 258% after only TWO WEEKS in office.

Absolutely we should do something about the deficit! We can start by rolling back all government budgets to their 2007 levels. As for raising taxes on anybody, certainly not.

Ever seen a movie admission ticket priced on some percentage of your adjusted gross income as evidenced by your tax return?

Someday the progressives will learn that you cannot mix a socialistic government with a capitalistic economy.

Or maybe they already know that...

[trader4]

And if you continue to follow the path of trying to redistribute the material things to all regardless of their willingness to work and do the right things, over time you'll have less and less of those material things produced. Why should someone work hard when they can get taken care of for free?

Well said.

[HeyBub]

I don't know. I've long advocated the "Flat-Flat Tax." Take the budget, divide by the population, each pays that amount.

The short version: There are those, admittedly, who don't have the cash to hand over $10,000 to the feds. They could, however, "contribute" one unit of blood platelets, valued at $1,000, each month for ten months. I call this my Tax Withdrawal Plan.

The teen-age mother of four bastards has an obvious problem. Overcoming it, she can "contribute" a kidney (fair market value $200,000) thereby having the tax for herself and her brood paid for four years. After four years, she could "contribute" a cornea. And so on.

[trader4]

Another gross distortion the libs like to offer up. Let's not just look at just FEDERAL INCOME TAX. Let's look at the TOTAL tax burden on Americans today versus WWII or even just a few decades ago. I live in NJ. NJ had no income tax back then, now it's anywhere from

3 to 9%. It also had no sales tax, now it's 7%. Property taxes were modest compared to incomes and prices where today I'm paying over $10,000 in property taxes. And much of that tax burden, while not going directly to the feds is either to fund federally mandated programs or similar liberal programs at the state level.

I guess you should blame Obama and the Demorcrats too since they are not in favor of raising taxes on anyone except those earning $200K and above. So, they are obviously OK with the tax rates below those levels.

[trader4]

I don't think aemeijers is the one that's stopped thinking. All he did was bring up a quote that shows Karl Marx thinking is exactly like yours. I'll bet most of the libs trying to start class warfare don't even know the quote.

[Kurt Ullman]

But that isn't what is happening since, according to IRS, the top 1% pay twice the percentage of income taxes that they get in income (roughly 16% and 32% respectively depending on the year). I would say that is already taxes on ability to pay. Again, ability to pay is such a squishy number that it boils down to what I was saying before. Of special interest in this debate is a new study on inequality by researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris (See they spell their name with an "s" and are in Paris so that means they are European and thus GOOD by definition) reveals that when it comes to household taxes (income taxes and employee social security contributions) the U.S. "has the most progressive tax system and collects the largest share of taxes from the richest 10% of the population." The study showed that the U.S. tax system is far more progressive--meaning pro-poor--than similar systems in countries most Americans identify with high taxes, such as France and Sweden.

Here is the PayOff so read closely.....

Even ***after accounting** for the fact that the top 10 percent of households in the U.S. have one of the highest shares of market income among OECD nations, our tax system is second only to Ireland in terms of its progressivity for households.

The U.S. collects ***more household tax revenue from the top 10 percent of households than any other country and extracts the most from that income group relative to their share of the nation's income***.(emphasis added)

[HeyBub]

AND

There are only two countries in the world that tax income from overseas employment. The Philippines is one. Care to guess the other?

[HeyBub]

Oh, they know it. They know it.

[Kurt Ullman]

And the Philipines have always viewed their citizens as essentially an exportable commodity. Why else are their nursing schools based largely on a westen model and enroll almost 3 times what the country needs (among other professions).

[notbob]

Better than illegals!!

I worked in hi-tech for years. We were definitely a world company, hiring from all free countries. I was shocked at the difference in cultures. The Chinese are idiots. The Japanese, morons. Arrogant morons. South America? Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but hard working and more than willing to learn. Euros? Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Of all the nationalities I worked with, the Filipinos impressed me the most. Smart, clever, polite. Always smart, never presumptuous. Usually overqualified to the point of embarrassing.

Perfect example. Qwest, my ISP, jes got absorbed by Centurylink. Did anyone tell the customer? Hell no! So, my email accts are all hosed and I call support. Two hours and 4 support ppl later, a young tech in the Phillipines solves my problems. Two US based techs and one Indian were clueless droids. No surprise, here.

Oh yeah! Filipino food is killer. ;)

nb

[despen]

Lets see, the subject was too much of the time. Too much of the time what? Something about taxing the rich.

So now a cigarette tax is a tax on the rich?

Not serious about the deficit are we?

Hmm, government tax policy should be modeled on movie ticket prices?

Then we get a few "but socialism" things thrown in.

[HeyBub]

YOU were the one who brought up "the current administration."

Sure. Some rich smoke. But I was mainly carrying on the theme you raised about the "current administration."

Sure. We could make a BIG dent in the deficit by regressing the federal government's spending levels to those of 2007.

Once again you have it backwards. I was postulating movie tickets modeled on government tax policy. If you want to erect a government tax policy on "ability to pay," why would that scheme not work in a similar "fair" fashion for a can of beans?

[trader4]

Spending has gone up 40% since 2007. So, a perfectly reasonable and serious proposal to eliminate the deficit is to do it by cutting SPENDING, not raising taxes. Yet the libs screamed bloody murder like some major actual cuts were taking place. After all was said and done, only $60 bil of real cuts will take place in the next two years. That's $60bil, or a whopping 4% reduction in the deficit. BFD. And the sad thing is that is after the Tea Party pushed as hard and held as fast as they could have. Had they not done so, we would have had no cuts.

[krw]

Words to live by.