You are so Tiring in that you ignore the FACTS
What FACTS am I "ignoring"?
You have not provided ANY "facts".
ALL you have provided are talking points.
Again, talking points ARE
NOT facts.
Can you not grasp that?
The poor and middle class pay SS on every dollar they earn. Some rich pay less than 15% total SS and income tax. FACT FACT FACT.
If it is a "fact" then you could find evidence to back it up. You have none.
But you have demonstrated a profound naivete of income vs. capital gains taxes as well as the difference between opinion and fact.
So ITS NOT APPLES AND ORANGES.
Denying an inference is not disproving it.
If you are going to compare income tax rates, you compare income tax rates. You don't compare income tax rates of one class with income tax rate
plus SS of another class.
You made the comment about the poor burdened rich people are paying so much more than there share of the tax burden.
So now you are creating straw men by inserting phrases like "poor burdened rich people" which is not what I was arguing.
Mistaking a
positive argument for a
normative argument is misrepresentation.
This is why I commented about the rich are getting richer and the poor and middle class are getting poorer.
You have yet to provide
any evidence that the "rich are getting richer and the poor and middle class are getting poorer".
Are you arguing that SS makes people poorer? That sounds like an argument
against SS.
You took it out of context. Even though its a FACT FACT FACT (TIRING).
Shouting that something is a "fact" does not make it so. Raising your voice does not change the truth.
I said it because under your philosophy I was explaining we would have to keep reducing the top tax rate because they would be paying a even higher percentage.
What "philosophy" is that? If you have shown anything so far, it is an utter ignorance of philosophy.
Also, what do you mean that, "we would have to keep reducing the top tax rate because they would be paying a even higher percentage."
In response to anything I was talkin about, that doesn't make any sense. Are you talking about a "philosophy" that you don't understand again?
Bush lowered the top tax rates to a rate lower than it has been in over 50 year and the economy has been worse than any other time over that said 50 years.
Actually, tax rates were marginally lower under Reagan.
How is an economic boom "worse than any other time over...50 years"?
Unless you are trying to pin the housing bust on the tax rate drop. But for that to be anything more then a baseless assertion, you are going to have to explain causation. HOW did dropping the tax rate lead to the housing bust?
Hint; taxes had nothing to do with the housing bust.
Reagan economics do not work.
Reagan's economic policies did
not create an economic boom that created the wealth necessary for the venture capital that allowed for the tech bubble in the 1990's?
You really should step away from the kool-aid and do a little research of your own. You are letting demagogues in the media do your thinking for you.
Is was the deregulation and economic policy's started by Reagan that lead to economy's collapse in 2008.
What deregulation?
SPECIFICS.
What rules were changed and how,
specifically, did they lead to the housing bust?
Again the comment the US is on the verge or Socialism. If we were the rich wouldn't be getting richer especially in a bad economy.
The only one who said the US is on the verge of socialism is you.
So, people aren't supposed to try and get richer in a bad economy? How do you propose we turn the economy around then?
Again The poor who work pay taxes and at a higher rate than some rich people.
again with that claim.
The poor PAY NO INCOME TAX. It is IMPOSSIBLE for them to pay more then the income earning rich who actually pay income tax.
I'm not really sympathetic if you do not work.
Oh, so you are not a very radical liberal.
You just mindlessly buy into EVERY SINGLE LIE they put out and don't seem to be willing to reconsider when confronted with facts and economic reality.
Do you know what bothers me the most about you intellectual types. Explain to me how you can think or justify that any one persons work could ever be worth 1,000 times more than any other persons work.
Can you say "loaded question"?
Tell me this; how can the result of natural processes be considered "unjust"?
The fact is that it is impersonal forces in the market that determine that; typically rewarding productivity and meeting (and creating) consumer demand.
Or explain to me why the goal wouldn't be compensation primarily based on there contribution to society.
That has been tried and it has FAILED every time.
It is
impossible to rationally determine ones contribution to society and divide things accordingly. Like all pursuit of utopian delusions, it has lead to overwhelming misery, suffering and death (specifically, over 100 million deaths in the 20th century alone).
Are you actually so naive to think that humans can design a better system then the free market?!
Have you even thought about the limits to the human capacity for knowledge and the amount of knowledge it would take to design the system you are talking about?
In order to implement such a system, we would have to essentially be all-knowing; we would have to be God. We would also have to be able to act on that information inhumanly quickly.
That was tried in both Communist Russia and in Mao's China and they didn't turn out so well.
You really should read
this.
You asked earlier if I thought I could do a better job than the CEO's. Well the answer is absolutely much better than some and not near as good as others. But they almost all got paid more than they were worth.
Do you not know how utterly naive and arrogant that makes you sound?!
There is a very particular skill set necessary to run those big companies and only an exceptionally few number of people on the planet have that capability.Of course, those people actually have an idea of how much they don't know, so you clearly aren't anywhere in their league.
But to think that YOU are in such a position as to determine what they are worth is, quite possibly, the most arrogant, ignorant statement I have read this year.
You don't own the company.
You don't know it's ins and outs. The ONLY people who are qualified to determine that are the people who own the company.
The ONLY people who have any
right to determine the value of a CEO are those who own the company.
Or are you against private property rights?
This was your reply to my saying the republicans walked out of the debt ceiling...
I take it you are simply going to ignore the points I raised. Let me repeat them for you...
Name ONE TIME that Democrats have actually debated in good faith on debt.
They didn't when they promised Reagan they would cut spending if he raised taxes.
They didn't when Bush (41) agreed to a similar deal and they used his agreement to that deal as a weapon against him in the next election.
Republicans had EVERY reason not to trust the Democrats in the debt debates and the Obama Administration's only furthered that; specifically, moving the goalposts as a deal is close to finalized, rejecting attempts to increase tax revenue agreed to by Republicans and initially proposed by Obama's own debt commission, and demonizing Republicans as "economic terrorists".
Also, define "tax loophole" in a manner that is not subjective. What is the difference between a "tax loophole" and a tax break?
While you may have missed these points on MSNBC, they were all made in the debate. The highlighted portions were done by President Obama and his surrogates! That first highlighted point is WHY the Republicans walked out.
Of course it is much easier to dismiss a group when you avoid the context of their actions. It allows you to attribute whatever motive you prefer to their actions.
...I do not care if the rich paid 99% of the tax burden if the working poor are paying a higher rate.
Actually, that would be the top 50% of income earners who pay about 97% of income taxes. That top 50%
includes the middle class.
It is rather telling that you don't care about tax burdens though. Apparently fairness is irrelevant to you. What seems to matter are arguments that appeal to envy because they are emotionally gratifying. Whether they true or not is irrelevant, right?
Gee I wonder who could take the time and money to make graphs showing how the rich are getting the short end.
If you look at the
link that chart comes from, it is from the Tax Policy Center. It is made up of the Urban Institute (which claims to be non-partisan) and the Brookings Institute (which is a
Left leaning think tank).
So it is all meaningless unless you know almost all the facts. Common sense can go a long way.
Actually, all you need is to look at their methodology, have a little background in economics (a basic, econ 101 course should be sufficient) and then add in that "common sense" you talk about.
Any such study is only as good as the assumptions behind it and the logical theory they point back to. If you know basic economic theory and examine the assumptions in the methodology it is easy to determine if they are misleading or honestly attempting to find the truth.
An example, why would Warren Buffet lie.
People looking out for there own self interest is probably the most basic assumption behind EVERY economic theory.
From
here:
Buffett Profits from Taxes He Supports
Buffett regularly lobbies for higher estate taxes. He also has repeatedly bought up family businesses forced to sell because the heirs’ death-tax bill exceeded the business’s liquid assets. He owns life insurance companies that rely on the death tax in order to sell their estate-planning businesses.
Buffett Profits from Government Spending
Buffett made about a
billion dollars off of the Wall Street bailout by investing in Goldman Sachs on the assumption Uncle Sam would bail it out. He also is planning investments in ethanol giant
ADM and government-contracting leviathan General Dynamics.
If your businesses’ revenue comes from the U.S. Treasury, of course you want more wealth.
Whether Buffet is intentionally lying or is simply mistaken is irrelevant. The fact is that his broader point is wrong and, most likely, the point he raised about his own personal tax is a half-truth at best.
Do you really think Buffet sits down and does his own taxes? It is easy to pick out a number from the filings your accountant gave you and run with that as confirmation of your social views. It is much harder to understand how that number was arrived at and how it fits in with everything else.
Just because you found some graphs doesn't make it a fact. I think you could use so common sense.
So now, inconvenient facts are irrelevant?
That graph is simply a physical representation of IRS data with the assumptions behind the calculations spelled out in the bottom of the graph. If you want to honestly challenge it, you have all the information you need. If you want to simply ignore it, you dismiss it with a cheap excuse. It is telling which way you went...
The truth is that under a generally capitalist economy, the rich get richer while the poor get richer at a slower rate. This is what gave rise to the middle class and the inarguable increase in prosperity and living standard for ALL. This is also what has given rise to a huge number of dishonest arguments and strategies to keep that exploitation narrative going; redefining "poverty" in more broad terms, co-opting Freud and expanding on the notion of a "false consciousness", Potemkin villages and dishonest elites buying into the illusion they created, biased statistical studies mistaking static categories for reality and even the rejection of objective truth and reason with the rise of postmodernism and cultural Marxism.
You seem to be demonstrating that highlighted part very well.
The whole point of Cultural Marxism, political correctness (Herbert Marcuse's repressive tolerance), critical theory and postmodernism is to discredit objective, empirical truth, undermine culture and get people to see through the capitalist "false consciousness" and realize the underlying "truth" that capitalism is "immoral" and "unjust". It also serves to create a moving target with regards to Leftist ideology.
The way they end up going about this is to simply confuse the issue and dumb down the conversation to the point where they can re-frame the issues based on emotional appeals. Those ideas and strategies from the 1960's have taken on a life of their own to the point where they have been adopted by most of academia, Hollywood and the news media; often unknowingly.
This is why it is impossible to actually have a reasonable conversation with someone on the Left. Their understanding of history is based on partisan half-truths and lies. Often they don't even think of themselves as ideological. the idea of pragmatism itself has been redefined in partisan terms leaving journalists and politicians to mislead when they use the term. The result is that many are HIGHLY partisan and HIGHLY ideological without knowing it.
Shag, you'll get no-where trying to talk to the blank density of a brick wall.
KS
Teachable moment?