Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
|
|
Ken your post makes absolutely no sense.
The fact is, according to the IRS website, that the top 5% of wage earners pay 70% of federal income taxes. That does not include payroll taxes like SS, property taxes, sales and gas taxes and local taxes.
Oh, BTW, the top 5% of wage earners do not earn 70% of the income.
Warren Buffet can boast about how low his taxes are because his income and his net worth are two different things.
My earlier mention of my neighbors as an example was bad form. Obviously I can't discuss their detailed finances here even if I were privy.
|
|
JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
|
|
So.....yes, they actually are [rich]. They may not live an [sic] rich lifestyle, but that doesn't mean that they don't have a pile of money that others don't
While I agree with Kris that Ken's post as a whole doesn't make sense, the quoted statement above tells much about the tax policy of the left.
Ken's right. They make a lot more money than most other Americans do. They also pay a lot more taxes than most other Americans do -- and a much higher percentage of their total income in income taxes than do those who make what the average American makes.
High wage earners not only must deal with higher marginal rates, but they also must deal with phased-out deductions. It is simply a myth that high-income wage earners can use deductions to shelter that income. That ended during the Reagan administration; deductions now cost real money.
I'm afraid, though, that it's useless to point this out. Those who religiously cling to the "rich don't pay their fair share" mythology will not accept those facts. There's always some study from some left-of-center group saying the opposite. If you're lucky enough to have data backing their exaggerated claims, however, those data say something different.
My favorite was a study from Brookings by Pechman and Ochner, saying that the tax code had huge "loopholes for the rich." Their biggerst "loophole" was the joint return. Their next biggest was getting Social Security payments tax free. Not surprisingly, when they counted the cost of those "loopholes for the rich," they counted how much everybody saved from getting their SS checks tax-free, and what every couple filing a joint return saved. The study was discredited almost immediately for that reason, but for a decade, left-wing Democrats quoted the Pechman - Ochner study's numbers as how much "the rich" saved through "loopholes."
I realize I'm either preaching to the converted, or to a brick wall, but the absolute nonsense that passes for good tax policy these days requires that those who know not keep silent.
John
|
|
the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
|
|
Yes the top 5% pay almost 60% of the INCOME tax, and they get about 35% of the income. But they also make more money from capital gains and dividends which are taxed at lower rates. This is one of the factors which may lead them to paying a lower overall rate than people will less income. Also since SS has a cap it is a regressive tax. So it ends up being a tax on the middle class to transfer money to the poor.
Ksolem are you making over a quarter million dollars I wonder? Why else would you not want people in this tax bracket to pay what they did before the Bush tax cuts? Look at the income inequality gap widening over the last 10 years. It's scary. The wealthy have a greater percentage of income and wealth than anytime since before the depression when people like the Rockefellers controlled everything. This is a recipe for long term disaster. We are moving to a situation where 99% of the wealth and income will be controlled by a few % of the population and the rest will become more and more poor.
Ideologically I find it distasteful to tax people to fix the situation (e.g. the death tax) but practicaly I don't think we can allow all the wealth to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands until the great majority of people have no wealth and a few have almost all of it. How long will people be happy and productive when they can't get ahead?
|
|
Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
|
|
To begin with, if I make a capital gain on an investment, the money I invested was already taxed at the rate for my tax bracket - Federal and State. I risked that money - wisely I hope but none the less risked - so you think the tax on money I already earned and paid taxes on should be taxed again because I made good decisions about my own money?
|
|
Degaine
climber
|
|
Since you want a serious answer to your faux serious question:
Why is it so important for you both to be able to claim that America is exceptional? You both seem fixated on the image of the USA being exceptional, why is that?
Why are Freedoms in America important and very special to the people who live here?
Are you for real? What kind of question is that?
No wonder the point misses you.
EDIT: There are others with more patience that may be able to give you the answer you are looking for. I stand by my original answer:
Read De Tocqueville.
Skip
1) I find it ironic that in an exchange where you ask everyone to think for themselves, instead of answering my question, you offer (without citing anything) the thoughts of someone else.
It's also ironic (or rather hypocritical?) that you chose the path of insult in response to my question (or what you call faux questions) given how much you've complained in this thread and elsewhere on this site of others insulting you.
2) I've read de Tocqueville - in French - but his book is over 160 years old and was written in a context when the majority of the western democracies around today did not yet exist. In addition, my question with regard to freedom was not "what makes American freedom great?", but rather:
'What makes you think that people in the US have the most freedom? What does "the most freedom" mean to you?'
3) My questions were indeed honest. I truly don't understand your point of view, and was providing you with the opportunity to explain yourself to what you consider to be "the other side" given your penchant to just lump all "libs" together. It's pretty rare around here that someone with a differing opinion reaches out to understand the opposing opinion, but if you want to be a dick about it, hey, that's your choice, just don't dress it up in some faux intellectualism by referencing de Toqueville.
Here are my questions again, and yes I am genuinely interested in your answer:
Why is it so important for you both to be able to claim that America is exceptional? You both seem fixated on the image of the USA being exceptional, why is that? Why the incessant need to assert being number 1?
What makes you think that the US is culturally superior to other cultures?
What makes you think that people in the US have the most freedom? What does "the most freedom" mean to you?
|
|
bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
|
|
December 3, 2010 4:00 A.M.
Obama & Co., Growing Up Fast
Obama and his EU counterparts are learning that high-minded adolescence makes for bad governance. But it’s an expensive lesson.
Old laws predicated on human nature cannot so easily be discarded — even by utopians who think they have the power to cool the planet and stop the rising seas. Borrowed money really has to be paid back. Governments cannot operate without confidentiality. Nations perish if they cannot protect themselves from existential threats. Watching a therapeutic Barack Obama grow up and learn these tragic lessons is as enlightening as it is sometimes scary.
When they are out of power, modern leftists advocate massive government spending and large deficits. They applaud when Republicans and conservatives sometimes prove as profligate as any big-government liberal. But when invested with the responsibility of governance, they come to understand that Keynesian “stimulus” must eventually cede to the same unhappy logic as the private household’s indebtedness.
Maxing out credit cards does not exempt one from having to pay off the balance. Low or nonexistent interest on debt does not mean the principal vanishes. We are reminded that debt is real with the ongoing meltdown of the European Union, as a bloated public sector from the Atlantic to the Aegean demands that someone, somewhere cover its debts.
Here in America the same fiscal rules have not disappeared. In California, Governor-elect Jerry Brown will have few choices in January 2011. Since he cannot raise taxes much in a state that already has the nation’s highest income and sales taxes, he can only find a way to cut expenditures. He must then either finesse such reductions with a sort of green philosophy of “small is better” or plead that his reactionary predecessor gave him, a compassionate liberal, no choice. Either way, the creditors and bondholders must be paid. Even Barack Obama, after spending $1.3 trillion more this year than the government took in, now seeks to save a few billion dollars by freezing federal wages.
In short, from Sacramento to Athens the world is reminded that obligations, despite in-vogue euphemisms like “stimulus” and “Keynesian,” really do have to be met. There is an iron law that transcends politics and limits the application of fiscal liberalism: Print more money and money becomes less valuable; default just once and all future credit is lost or intolerably expensive.
In a similar way, the WikiLeaks mess reminds us of the adolescence of crusading freelance leakers and their enablers. This time the disclosures are not morality tales about Vietnam or Guantanamo. They concern a tough Hillary Clinton urging her State Department subordinates to spy on United Nations personnel. Barack Obama is not seen calling for the planet to cool, but is shown as so desperate to keep his promise to shut down Guantanamo that he is reduced, in tawdry fashion, to horse-trading photo-ops with the leader of any small country willing to take a detainee or two off his hands. In other words, those who once sermonized about the morality of leaking the Pentagon Papers and details of U.S. policy in the war on terror are now seeing that a let-it-all-hang-out transparency can be nihilistic rather than liberating. Will Hollywood now follow Rendition, Redacted, and In the Valley of Elah with a hagiographic treatment of WikiLeaks?
Likewise, the notion that “civil liberties” were sacrificed in the effort to stop Islamist terrorism increasingly is shown to be a liberal talking point, not a serious criticism of responsible wartime government. Barack Obama conceded that argument when he flipped on every pre-presidential critique he had made of George W. Bush’s protocols. At one time or another, Obama, as law professor, state legislator, senator, and presidential candidate, had ridiculed the Patriot Act, wiretaps, renditions, military tribunals, the Iraq War, Predator strikes, and Guantanamo.
He ended up as president embracing them all, and even expanding some. I think he was quite confident that his liberal base, outraged by Bush’s supposed trashing of constitutional protections, would not much mind his own, inasmuch as civil-libertarian nitpicking was privately acknowledged as being as much of an advantage for outsiders as it was a liability for insiders. We live in an era, after all, where principled lawyer Howard Koh went from berating the U.S. for its use of renditions to now writing briefs empowering the U.S. government, for national-security reasons, to obliterate suspected terrorists in foreign countries by remote control. Surely one lesson is that when out of power one is not responsible for Americans’ being murdered, and thus has the leeway to call for a sort of cosmic justice in a way one cannot when in power.
We have also come full circle with radical Islam. Critics found it easy to charge that the U.S. had unduly polarized the Islamic world. We know that narrative: Both past and recent sins of American foreign policy had tragically radicalized some Muslims. And because the United States was culpable for much of the hatred shown us by Islamists, so too that antipathy could be mitigated by unilateral outreach, reset diplomacy, and atonement through both the pathos of grand apology and the bathos of bowing and kowtowing.
So under a new charismatic, postnational President Obama, we tried the Al-Arabiya interview, the Cairo speech, the embarrassing euphemisms like “overseas contingency operations” and “man-made disasters,” the description of Mr. Abdulmutallab as “allegedly” a terrorist, the promises to shut down Guantanamo and try KSM in a civilian court, the Ground Zero–mosque chest-thumping, the embarrassing NASA Islamic-outreach mission, the John Brennan outbursts against the Bush administration, the General Casey remorse over the fact that Major Hasan’s mass murdering might imperil army diversity programs — and all the other nostrums that did little to convince the would-be Christmas bomber, the would-be Times Square bomber, the would-be subway bombers, and the would-be Portland bomber to pause, appreciate our good intentions, and so desist.
The WikiLeaks disclosures suggest that the Pakistanis in 2009 did not warm to such outreach. The Saudis did not suddenly clamp down on their funding of al-Qaeda. Syria was not won over. Iran did not think a new friend in Washington made the acquisition of nuclear weapons superfluous. The Arab world is more eager that we should show reckless abandon in taking out Iranian nukes than it is pleased when we calmly pressure Israel into granting concessions to the Palestinians. At best, these suspect nations were indifferent to our new magnanimity; at worst they interpreted it as waffling to be exploited rather than good intentions to be appreciated.
Finally, when we strip off the thin veneer of good-times talk about the European Union’s being a cohesive community, and about a European continent of soft-power caring, we are left in the present recession with ancient squabbling nations, nationalist zeal, divisive cultures, differing religions, and antithetical customs — and, soon, the old remedies of diplomacy and alliances. Europeans chafe far more when their elites berate them as Neanderthals who were not up to their utopian dream than they do when their regional and national differences are honestly acknowledged and their disagreements recognized and dealt with diplomatically by sovereign nations with sovereign agendas.
What are we to make of this great history lesson of the last two years?
Behind the recent news of massive debt, looming defaults, WikiLeaks, the administration’s about-face in the war on terror, and the implosion of the European Union is a reminder that progressivism, at least as it operates today, is a sort of high-minded adolescence, as sophisticated in faculty-lounge repartee as it is near-suicidal in its actual implementation.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.
|
|
JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
|
|
Some ASSHOLE of an Assembly representative wants to remove serpentinite as the state rock.
-- DMT on his (excellent) New Idria thread
Guess the party to which said respresentative belongs?
John
|
|
cliffhanger
Trad climber
California
|
|
The New American Oligarchy
Andy Kroll
There is a war underway. I'm not talking about Washington’s bloody misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, but a war within our own borders. It’s a war fought on the airwaves, on television and radio and over the Internet, a war of words and images, of half-truth, innuendo, and raging lies. I'm talking about a political war, pitting liberals against conservatives, Democrats against Republicans. I'm talking about a spending war, fueled by stealthy front groups and deep-pocketed anonymous donors. It’s a war that's poised to topple what's left of American democracy.
The right wing won the opening battle. In the 2010 midterm elections, shadowy outside organizations (who didn’t have to disclose their donors until well after Election Day, if at all) backing Republican candidates doled out $190 million, outspending their adversaries by a more than two-to-one margin
for the rest: http://www.truth-out.org/andy-kroll-the-new-american-oligarchy65597
|
|
Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
|
|
"To begin with, if I make a capital gain on an investment, the money I invested was already taxed at the rate for my tax bracket - Federal and State. I risked that money - wisely I hope but none the less risked - so you think the tax on money I already earned and paid taxes on should be taxed again because I made good decisions about my own money? "
In short, YES. It is income. Someone else risked their time, their bodies. They might not get paid. They might get hurt.
You certainly don't mind claiming 100% of a deduction for any loss, asking every other taxpayer to subsidize your stupidity! So if you are NOT wise, you want the taxpayer to INSURE your wisdom? WTF is that?
|
|
JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
|
|
You certainly don't mind claiming 100% of a deduction for any loss, asking every other taxpayer to subsidize your stupidity! So if you are NOT wise, you want the taxpayer to INSURE your wisdom? WTF is that?
Ken, it's an income tax, not a gross receipts tax. Deducting losses from receipts does not constitute a subsidy; that's how we compute income.
Also, you cannot offset the full amount of a capital loss against ordinary income. For example, if I loan someone $10,000.00, and they discharge the debt in bankruptcy, that bad debt loss is a capital loss that I can only deduct over several years -- even though I paid the money out all at once years before.
In comparison, if I work and don't get paid for the work (something I've done far too often), I get a 100% immediate deduction -- I never have to take the payment I don't receive into income.
There's also another unfairness in capital gains: the government, through inflation, can manufacture a capital gain that has no economic basis.
There are sound reasons for our policy in taxing capital gains, but they seem unsound to those who fail to see saving and investment as productive activity.
John
|
|
Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
|
|
|
|
Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
|
|
|
|
Nibs
Trad climber
Humboldt, CA
|
|
FT -Obama is a socialist? what crap; no wonder we cannot have rational debate. If Obama is a socialist than how is it that he has he alienated the left? every time I see that i will post:
Fattrad is a fascist.
|
|
Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
|
|
No, Fatty is doing the best he can with what the Lord gave him to work with.
|
|
the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
|
|
To begin with, if I make a capital gain on an investment, the money I invested was already taxed at the rate for my tax bracket - Federal and State. I risked that money - wisely I hope but none the less risked - so you think the tax on money I already earned and paid taxes on should be taxed again because I made good decisions about my own money?
Haha, and you called me clueless.
You don't pay taxes on the principal you already paid tax on, you pay tax on capital GAINS, that is income from your wealth.
Suppose on one hand say you have an average income worker making $50K a year per household and they have to pay taxes on the income from their hard work. On the other hand you have someone rich with millions (perhaps from inheritance) of dollars to invest. That person who can sit on their ass and you think they should pay NO taxes, while the full time worker pays for all the govt. services that are needed to have a healthy economy. Har-har.
Personally its been good for me to have the low capital gains rates we've had, BUT as far as being a contributing memeber ofsociety I think it's pretty bogus. But of course I'm not going to pay any extra on these low rates because that puts me at a disadvantage to everyone else. And the argument that lower capital gains rates spurs investment is bogus. What are people going to do with their money if they rates were higher? Just sit on it? No they'd still invest and just pay what they had to in tax.
|
|
corniss chopper
Mountain climber
san jose, ca
|
|
This sums up the Liberal malfunction
|
|
dirtbag
climber
|
|
Fatty, you're slipping in you trolling. That was an argument for more socialism in health care, not less.
Heh-heh...that thought crossed my mind too.
|
|
Jeremy Handren
climber
NV
|
|
"Fatty, you're slipping in you trolling. That was an argument for more socialism in health care, not less".
No, despite all the bluster he's just not bright enough to understand the concept of a mixed economy.
Socialist this.... socialist that... blah blah blah.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!