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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Swimming in LEB tears.
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bookworm said want equal rights for women?
elect republicans:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/45832.html
Yes. Regular women will still make less money for the same work as men but by golly female Representatives in Congress will have their own bathroom. Equality now!
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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Rich people have the expertise to game the current system. That's why they often pay a lower effective rate than those at lower tax brackets
You're just making this sh*t up as you go along. Clueless!
The majority of income and property and sales taxes in the US are paid by the top wage earners. And a two income family in a big American city pulling in 250K with a couple of kids is not "rich" by any means. Still, they will pay up to half their earnings to the various taxes.
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shut up and pull
climber
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FEDERAL PROSECUTOR OF THE 1993 WTC BOMBING ANDREW MCCARTHY ON WHAT OBAMA IS ALL ABOUT:
Andrew C. McCarthy
October 29, 2008 6:00 A.M.
Obama’s ‘Redistributive Change’ and the Death of Freedom
There should no longer be any dispute that Barack Obama’s aim is to socialize the American economy — as he vaporously puts it, to bring about “redistributive change.” The real question is how he’ll go about it. Very likely, the answer lies in a potentially cataclysmic treaty that has gotten virtually no attention during the campaign: the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
To rewind, Obama expressly endorsed “redistributive change” in a 2001 Chicago Public Radio interview. Lamenting that the Warren Court (the tribunal that spawned a revolution in criminals’ rights) “wasn’t that radical” after all, Obama sought to prove his point by citing the justices’ failure to take on “the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.”
It was an early iteration of the socialist philosophy Obama recently made famous in an exchange with Joe Wurzelbacher, aka “Joe the Plumber.” Of course on the latter occasion, when Obama spoke of planning to “spread the wealth around,” it was a slip. The candidate is far more guarded now than he was in 2001, just as he was more coy in 2001 than in his mid-Nineties incarnation — when he first sought to represent an extremely left-wing district and embraced his endorsement by the radical Chicago New Party (ACORN’s electoral arm with ties to the Socialist International).
By 2001, as he eyed national office, Obama put on mainstream airs. He couched his radicalism in soothing euphemisms. “Economic justice,” however, is simply the finance angle of “social justice,” the idée fixe of Obama and his coven of Change-agents — like Michael Klonsky, the communist educator who ran a “social justice” blog on Obama’s official campaign website. Such radicals give the Warren Court high marks on non-economic rights, but flunk the justices on redistribution: the purported right of society’s ne’er-do-wells to pick the pockets of its achievers through the coercive power of government.
OBAMA’S ANTI-CONSTITUTION
As Obama sees it, the Warren Court failed to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution.” The judges instead clung to the hoary construction of the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties” — one that says only what government “can’t do to you.” For Obama, economic justice demands the positive case: what government “must do on your behalf” (emphasis added).
True to form, Obama has twisted the most elementary points. First, the Framers viewed government as a necessary evil: required for a free people’s collective security but, if insufficiently checked, guaranteed to devour liberty. The purpose of the Constitution was not to make the positive case for government but for freedom. Freedom cannot exist without order, and thus implies some measure of government. But it is a limited government, vested with only the powers expressly enumerated. As the framers knew, a government that strays beyond those powers is necessarily treading on freedom’s territory. It is certain to erode the very “Blessings of Liberty” the Constitution was designed to secure.
Relatedly, the Constitution does state the positive case for government in its opening lines. Government is required to safeguard the rule of law and the national security. These injunctions are vital: there is no liberty without them. Why, then, do Obama and other Leftists ignore them? Because they don’t involve picking winners and losers; they eschew social engineering. These guarantees, instead, are for everyone, uniformly: Government must “provide for the common defense” and “promote the general welfare” (emphasis added). The Blessings of Liberty are to be secured “to ourselves and to our posterity”—not to yourself at the expense of my posterity.
The question isn’t what government “must do on your behalf.” It is what government must do on our behalf. In general, the positive power of government is for the body politic, not the individual. Of course individuals have rights. But those rights comprise a sphere of personal liberty against government. In that sphere, each individual Joe the Plumber is free to work hard, or not; to make of his life what he will, bearing personally the consequences of his choices. Freedom, after all, includes the freedom to fail. Pace Obama, failure is a part of life — there is no right against it.
The framers understood that there is no societal good in a government that “must do” for individuals and factions. “Doing” is a zero-sum game. Government does not inherently have anything to give. What it awards you it must seize from me. What it gives one faction it must deny to others. Such an arrangement is inimical to the Constitution’s purpose “to form a more perfect union.” It is, in fact, a prescription for disunion, for a house divided.
Freedom accepts that we are different. The endless variety of life assures that. I had every opportunity to become just as good a basketball player as Michael Jordan, but he has natural gifts and worked harder. If we played a hundred times, he would whip me a hundred times by about 500 points. No Change, no matter how rapturously framed, could alter that result without chaining him to the bench and rendering the game no longer recognizable as basketball. That would be perversion, not justice.
Yet, this is just what Obama’s “economic justice” envisions: that the government can hamstring Michael Jordan and give me enough freebies that, despite his talent and industry, he can only play me to a tie, destroying his incentive to excel while the Bulls go out of business, no longer able to afford even my mediocrity. Naturally, such an absurd system requires change. Redistribution smothers the freedom our Constitution is designed to foster. It is therefore antithetical to our law.
Obama knows this. Consequently, as he said in 2001, he is not surprised that courts saddled with such a Constitution have not been a useful route to economic justice. What is surprising, at least at first blush, is that Obama doesn’t fret too much about that. As a matter of fact, in his estimation, the civil rights movement was too “court focused.”
This is because Obama is a true revolutionary. It’s not that he doesn’t want socialist economic policies; he does. And it’s not that he doesn’t think the courts should impose “economic justice” just as the Warren Court imposed “social justice”; again, he does. It’s that he believes the Warren era reliance on the judiciary as principal change agent led to the atrophy of more forceful and promising methods: namely, “the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.”
Political and community organizing activities on the ground? Think of ACORN, Obama’s old comrades at the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now: engaged in massive (often fraudulent) voter-registration efforts to over-represent society’s bottom-dwellers; handing Leftist politicians a ready-to-enact legislative agenda of confiscatory taxes, laws forcing banks to make home-loans to unqualified borrowers, “living wage” laws that kill jobs, corporate “exit visas” to trap businesses in urban areas enervated by government’s central planning, “sustainable development” regulations to redistribute wealth from the suburbs to the cities, global poverty relief to redistribute wealth from American citizens to the third-world dictators, and Leftist political indoctrination in the public schools.
REDISTRIBUTIVE CHANGE: THE DEATH OF FREEDOM
Obama, the Leftist community organizer schooled in the radical methods of Saul Alinsky, recognizes that in the current legal landscape legislation will be necessary to impose the injustice he calls “economic justice.” Lawmakers needn’t do all the work. Politically unaccountable judges, many favorably predisposed toward Leftist schemes, can be a force multiplier. First, however, they must be given just enough legislative license.
As luck would have it, a President Obama may be well positioned to give that license at the very start of his term, without the political risk inherent in proposing his own detailed “economic justice” program. The solution is ready to hand: all it needs is an election-day tide that swells the Democrats’ Senate majority.
In 1966, with key help from the Soviet Union, the United Nations began promoting a monstrosity of a treaty known as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). It is chockablock with exactly the things Obama would say government must do on your behalf: provide housing, clothing, education, health care, employment, a living wage that accounts for comparative worth (meaning the government, under the guise of preventing discrimination, determines what you are paid), limited labor hours, paid vacation and holidays, paid parental leave, nearly unrestricted trade unionization, social security (including “social insurance”), “equitable distribution of world food supplies in relation to need,” and so on.
This economic-justice compact was so patently socialist that, even at the height of his Great Society and War on Poverty, President Lyndon Johnson declined to sign it. So did Presidents Nixon and Ford. But alas, there is always Jimmy Carter. Thirty years ago, he signed the ICESCR, but it has languished ever since, never ratified. President Clinton lauded the treaty but shrank from prodding the senate, where staunch Republican opposition made the required two-thirds approval margin a pipedream.
Obama, by contrast, expects to have the wind at his back, at least for a time. Gone is the Republican Congress of the Clinton years. Despite their appalling performance and historically low approval ratings, cocky Democrats expect to pad their congressional majorities. They anticipate inching close to 60 seats, or beyond. With an assist from the usual GOP moderates — who’d no doubt be anxious to join a charismatic new president in a bipartisan effort to “improve America’s image in the world” — the 67 votes needed for ratification could be attainable.
The Constitution stipulates that, once ratified, a treaty becomes the supreme law of the land. No longer would Obama need to worry about the “essential constraints” that relegate our fundamental law to “a charter of negative liberties.” Federal judges would now be unleashed to direct the redistributions necessary to ensure a “living wage” and the ICESCR’s remaining laundry list of economic rights. Congressional Democrats, egged on by ACORN and its hard Left allies, would craft legislation to further codify, explain and expand on them.
Change will have arrived. At long last we’ll have realized Obama’s ideal of economic justice. But freedom, the ideal that makes America America, will have perished.
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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Ksolem have you ever done your own taxes and owned a business? It is very possible to write off lots of income that a lower wage earner simply can not.
I have made more money in some years and paid less % in taxes. But I guess I'm making that up right? You are clueless.
The majority of income and property and sales taxes in the US are paid by the top wage earners.
It's funny when people say that they never also say:
The majority of income is also earned by the top wage earners.
And IT'S GETTING MORE AND MORE THAT WAY! The rich are getting more and more of the income and the middle and poor are getting less and less. Again why not state that unless you are just promoting your ideological views.
Pulling in $250K is rich IMO. When you earn 5 times more than the average household, you are pretty well off. But again it is the income ABOVE that $250K that would see tax rates go up. So the family making $250K sees NO tax incease. Again incorrect arguments are used to support an ideological argument.
Still, they will pay up to half their earnings to the various taxes.
Of course it would be better if we could get it lower but that is an ok maximum IMO. Over half (which happens in many countries) would be bogus, but rich people should be contributing up to half their income to create the kind of conditions that allow them to create that kind of wealth.
What the ideological righties must fail to see is that when everyone prospers the economy does well and the rich can make even more money. When the lower and middle class don't do well the economy suffers and they won't be able to do as well. Of course if the economy is doing well tax revenues are also higher and we could start paying down the debt, but of course they would just want to use that to reduce taxes and keep us in the hole.
The bottom line is that in the current economy the rich are doing better than ever while the poor and middle class are suffering. So why should the rich continue to get a tax break?
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dirtbag
climber
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Buffett's speaking the truth.
The thing is, smart rich folks like him recognize that continued increases in wealth disparity will eventually destabilize capitalism. FDR knew this. He helped save capitalism.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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Ksolem have you ever done your own taxes and owned a business? It is very possible to write off lots of income that a lower wage earner simply can not.
Yes. They are called deductions because they are funds you had to spend to run your business, therefore not money you could keep. Call it income if you like but it's not in your bank account at the end of the year unless you seriously bend the rules (like the Honoable Chairman of The House Ways & Means Comittee ;-)
I have made more money in some years and paid less % in taxes. But I guess I'm making that up right? You are clueless.
How about a higher wage earner who does not have their own business?
My neighbors here make about 250K. He is a police officer, she is a school administrator. They have a daughter about to start college, a modest home and old cars. They work really hard, and are not rich.
Of course it would be better if we could get it lower but that is an ok maximum IMO. Over half (which happens in many countries) would be bogus, but rich people should be contributing up to half their income to create the kind of conditions that allow them to create that kind of wealth.
Then we are in agreement that taxes should not go up. Right now with Fed and State income, property, sales, gas and local taxes more than 1/2 of many housholds income is going to the gov.
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Nibs
Trad climber
Humboldt, CA
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250K is the net income, not gross income ("My neighbors here make about 250K"). An administrator and LEO with a net income of 250K? is he on the take?
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dirtbag
climber
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Fatty, tax the f*#king rich. They can afford it.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Nibs,
Where did Kris say "net" income? He's clearly talking gross (i.e. before taxes) -- and yes, public servants in large cities can make that much, and have rather little to show for it.
I have yet to take a deduction that I didn't pay for. It is, after all, a tax on income, not gross receipts.
Finally, "tax the rich" is, quite simply, a mis-description of what we're doing. It's really "tax the rich more than we already do."
There is one anomoly in our tax system, though. We tax private workers almost 15% of their gross salaries for Social Security (yes, I know your pay stub makes it look like 7.25%, but that's another story) until they reach the FICA ceiling. This leads to a lower marginal rate for those making more than the FICA minimum, at least for a while. Two questions:
1. Since, as the liberals love to point out, Social Security is not a retirement system, why do we exempt public employees from "contributing" to it?
2. If it's not a retirement system, why restrict just the first part of one's salary to it, rather than all of the salary?
I think between points (1) and (2), I should be able to troll just about everyone on both left and right!
John
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Splater
climber
Grey Matter
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KSolem,
picking a cop and a school employee earning $250K is one of the worst examples you could come up with. I'd say that $250K gross income is rich.
But they effectively earn 250K x 1.09 x 1.28 x 1.06 = $370K
No doubt why California is going broke, when public employee unions can convince you how to pity them.
Assume roughly a 28% Fed income tax + 6% SocSec + 8 percent Cali state inc tax = Total marginal tax bracket for typical Cal $250K private worker of 42%.
Public (state, city, county worker):
Pay no Soc Sec (add 6.2% posttaxes, 9% pretax)
Get massive pension (add 20% compared to avg US worker posttax, 28% pretax)
(Most private workers would have to save 20% of their income to get such a retirement)
Get massive health benefits (add 4% compared to an avg US worker posttax, 6%)
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Splater
climber
Grey Matter
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JEleazarian,
Soc Sec tax is actually called Federal old-age and survivors insurance trust fund and federal disability insurance trust fund.
Medicare tax is 1.45% ( X 2 including employer)
OASDI (FICA) tax is 6.2 % (X 2 including employer)
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/2010/tr2010.pdf
http://www.ssa.gov/history/hfaq.html
http://www.ssa.gov/history/repstud.html
1) No good reason to exempt anyone from Soc Sec. At the time they were exempted, it was not thought of as a loophole. Now that Soc Sec is actually 50% a welfare system (income redistribution from the middle class to the poor), it clearly is a huge loophole. City/State/County workers should have to pay into the welfare system and get their money redistributed just like other workers. Federal workers including Congress have been part of SocSec since 1984.
2) There should be no cap on Soc Sec earnings. Throw in all unearned income as well. This would easily pay all future benefits. Medicare has no cap on earned income.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, CA
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House Republicans have temporarily blocked legislation to feed school meals to thousands more hungry children. Republicans used a procedural maneuver Wednesday to try to amend the $4.5 billion bill, which would give more needy children the opportunity to eat free lunches at school and make those lunches healthier. First lady Michelle Obama has lobbied for the bill as part of her "Let's Move" campaign to combat childhood obesity.
House Democrats said the GOP amendment, which would have required background checks for child care workers, was an effort to kill the bill and delayed a final vote on the legislation rather than vote on the amendment.
Are you kidding me, Matt??? So now in addition to eveything else the gov't provides to everybody, we need to provide free school lunches???
Are you f*#king serious with this crap??? Did you realize that we have major deficits? Do you realize that it's the parents' responsibility to provide for their children?
I'm really tired of dropping C-Bombs, but this is communistic, where you defer your kids to the gov't!
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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It's the bill to regulate bake sales and what's available at concession stands.
How about a when to take a sh#t bill?
By federal decree only allowed between 7:00 and 8:00 Washington time.
What do the Feds have to do with what is served in a local school cafeteria anyway?
What's wrong with a little local accountability and control?
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dirtbag
climber
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Are you kidding me, Matt??? So now in addition to eveything else the gov't provides to everybody, we need to provide free school lunches???
Are you f*#king serious with this crap??? Did you realize that we have major deficits? Do you realize that it's the parents' responsibility to provide for their children?
I'm really tired of dropping C-Bombs, but this is communistic, where you defer your kids to the gov't!
So helping hungry kids is "communistic"?
Ayn Randian virtuousness of selfishness in action I suppose.
A fine example of "I've got mine-fukk you."
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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Swimming in LEB tears.
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Fatty said If there is a large, boots on the ground war, then taxes should go up. You're about to yell about Iraq and the Bush tax cuts, take a look at how well the economy and tax collections were in 03,04,05,06, those years were paid for.
I'm pretty sure without looking that that's a complete lie. They were "paid for" with some pretty amazing record keeping tricks and by passing all the war budgets as separate emergency appropriations from the actual budget. We borrowed PILES of money and you pretending that our debt went up by this much because of Medicare Part D is an assertion made on the assumption that nobody will challenge you rather than anything approaching actual fact. Pile on top of that the earmarks that Republicans were all too happy to attach and Bush all too happy to sign, the tax cuts, "homeland security" spending, walls across the border, more border security agents and an increase in defense budgeting for weapons systems that would have worked great against the USSR and not Al Qaeda and you have trillions of dollars we are paying interest on.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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ksolem says:
You're just making this sh*t up as you go along. Clueless!
The majority of income and property and sales taxes in the US are paid by the top wage earners. And a two income family in a big American city pulling in 250K with a couple of kids is not "rich" by any means.
SOURCE: US Census Bureau, 2005
$250,000 and above 1.50%
The above graph shows the percentage earning the amount shown on the graph or more.[6]
So.....yes, they actually are. They may not live an rich lifestyle, but that doesn't mean that they don't have a pile of money that others don't
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Jingy
climber
Somewhere out there
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mcchain is a blowhard....
Hey red blooded American Repuklicants.....
Gays and Lesbians are cuming to a troop near you!!!
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Skeptimistic
Mountain climber
La Mancha
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Just another example of republican obstructionism:
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SuperTopo on the Web
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Let us know!