[quote]K2000 wrote:
EVERYBODY’S taxes helped pay for the roads, bridges, police force, court system, power grid, telephone system, etc.[/quote]
No, not really. Only about 50% of people who work are responsible for that.
The other 50% or so either pay almost no taxes or live off of the tax dollars the business owners pay. [/quote]
I responded to this talking point (half the population pays no taxes - false - they still pay Payroll tax, sales tax etc) but the Mods didn’t post my reply. The reason many people don’t pay Income Tax is because they don’t earn enough money to qualify. You can’t expect somebody making 15k a year to pay the same rate of taxes as somebody making 500k. That would be punitive. Americans have already rejected this idea, and will continue to reject it in the future.
Who will fight to defend the helpless, downtrodden wealthiest Americans from persecution?
[quote]K2000 wrote:
Take a Business 101 course if you need to understand how it’s possible that business profits are not just the owner’s salary. Duh. [/quote]
So you can’t explain it?
I never once mentioned anything about salary.
Again… Please explain your comment because you trying to twist the conversation away from it isn’t working.
[quote]K2000 wrote:
These people still pay Payroll taxes (if they are working) [/quote]
Payroll taxes empolyees pay fund 3 things:
Medicare
Social Security
The employee’s own personal tax bill
None of those build your amazing infrastructure. They are paying for social welfare. (Assuming the above example of people who pay no income tax)
Okay, so FICA & Medicare are 7.65% (Well Obama dropped it 2%, but anyway…)
What fucking state sales tax is 27% to equal your 35% bullshit number?
Really?
No, it is a fact I see everyday. Every day I witness what people pay in taxes.
Assumptive conjecture.
Um no, I would have been happier if the president of this nation didn’t just insult the very people that will be the reason this nation stops stagnating.
I bet you feel so good about yourself too. How nice. Here are some things you didn’t help do:
collect AR
increase sales
manage employees
manage inventory
reduce fixed costs
negotiate payment terms with vendors
lay away for weeks on end wondering if you would make payroll
fire people
pay down debt
close the books
pay their taxes
Handle customer requests
But you know what, thank god you contributed .00004% to the pavement on the street. America owes you so much thanks for making all that sacrifice. You are right, the above list is nothing, they didn’t build their business, you helped too much for then to take any credit at all.
Who do you think the government hires to build and pave these things? Private companies built off the sweat and effort of private citizens
who makes their guns, badges, flash lights, mace spray, hand cuffs, and bullet proof vests? Who invented 99% of that shit? Private companies built off the sweat and effort of private citizens
Who put hammer to nail and framed out the buildings these courts are held in? Private companies built off the sweat and effort of private citizens
Who supplies electricity and maintains the lines? Who comes to your house when a tree falls and takes out a line? Private companies built off the sweat and effort of private citizens
Verizon…
Yeah, I mean I get it was a huge day in the Obama household when he finally grasped what a society is, too bad he purposely sounded like Stalin trying to explain his revelation.
[/quote]
Wow, maybe you are really dense, or just feigning stupidity. The Federal government (meaning we the taxpayers) paid for the electrical grid, the highway system, the building of court buildings, dams, bridges and other PUBLIC projects. If private companies like Verizon had built the phone system on their own, there would have been no phone service in the boonies (not enough profit to run lines for just a few customers). Have you ever taken a US history class? Are you still in high school? (a lot of youngsters post here). There’s no financial incentive for a private company to run power to rural America – so taxpayers paid for it. That’s why there will always be a US Postal Service (besides the Constitutional mandate): because people in the middle of nowhere need deliveries too, even if it’s not profitable for Fed Ex. And BTW, you can think of those people as potential CUSTOMERS for small business, too.
Everybody who has ever paid taxes paid for US infrastructure, and without that there would be no possibility of small business ownership, for all practical purposes. How many times does this need to be explained?
[/quote]
you obviously didn’t read my post…
Who do you think the government hires to build/repair/maintain all this shit you talk about?
Private companies built on the backs of private citizens.
Because one person doesn’t own a home and another does, this somehow means the tax is regressive?
[/quote]
I’m not talking about simply a progressively increasing rate structure. I’m talking about how purchasing power is affected disproportionally. People have less money to buy things that affect their quality of life.
As far as the mortgage interest deduction, someone can get a $1 million, all interest loan, and deduct approximately $40-50,000 on their return. AMT is only an issue for equity lines. Most people have a home that is 3 to 3.5x their income level, so lets say this person would make about 300k a yr. He now only has 250,000 of taxable income. When you include various tax deductions and investment interest, you could knock it down close to 200k. That is a disproportionally larger deduction compared to the standard deduction for the median family income.
It also subsidizes the housing industry and diverts capital away from productive assets such as labor and business investment and into a stagnant asset class, housing.
I genuinely made a mistake on that number. I’m not certain why I used that number.
Anyway… I understand it is a pay as you go system, but it effectively reduces the purchasing power of lower wage earners to a higher extent than it does for higher wage earners. When you take a flat % away from someone who is living pay check to pay check, it means a lot more than when you take it from someone who makes 500k a yr. As i said, purchasing power matters.
It is a fact that the wealth of the mega rich has been increasing at much faster pace than everyone else, and it has to do with the fact that a larger distribution of their income is related to capital gains. We experienced some of the highest growth rates in this nation’s history with higher capital gains rates in 95-97. Obama’s proposal to keep the rates under 250k the same and raise them on higher incomes is equitable to me.
I’ll just say that I’ve definitely seen some stuff. I knew quite a few small business owners that commingled their personal and business expenses and held checks. I knew quite a few medium size entities in the range of 10-20 mil valuation that often used tax strategies that misinterpreted the code. They never did anything that looked like blatant fraud, but they were violating the tax laws whether it was due to the preparer’s incompetence or they were intentionally doing so.
I’m also just going to post this chart to illustrate why I believe that this country needs a more progressive taxation policy.
median incomes for the working class have gone nowhere when you adjust for inflation while the top 5% of this country have experienced a massive increase in their incomes. the top .01% have increased their incomes by 400% since 1980.
The productivity of the working class has tripled over this same time period. Yet, the wealthy have pocketed these increases in productivity as their own.
When Obama says “you didn’t build that” (on your own), it’s kind of like Romney’s great leadership during the Salt Lake City Olympics. Everybody pitched in!
Romney didn’t build the SLC Olympics on his own, he got American taxpayers to chip in over ONE BILLION dollars, to help pay for hosting the Olympics. And the Olympics is a privately owned concern (unconnected with the US government) in case you didn’t realize (i used to think the Olympic team was sponsored by the government). This is the typical ‘corporate welfare’ story like “millionaire baseball team owner, wants taxpayers to build his stadium” but in this case, Romney milked the taxpayers for over a billion. (A billion is 1,000 million).
Make the costs public, and privatize the profits. What great business experience! We all pitched in, to build Romney’s Olympics!
[quote]D Public wrote:
I’m also just going to post this chart to illustrate why I believe that this country needs a more progressive taxation policy.
median incomes for the working class have gone nowhere when you adjust for inflation while the top 5% of this country have experienced a massive increase in their incomes. the top .01% have increased their incomes by 400% since 1980.
The productivity of the working class has tripled over this same time period. Yet, the wealthy have pocketed these increases in productivity as their own.
These guys believe that if you’re poor, it’s because God wants you to be poor, or because you are an inferior person. If you’re rich, it’s because you are superior, or it’s God’s plan. You work harder and smarter than poor people, and that’s why you’re successful. Poor people don’t work hard or smart, and that’s why they are poor.
Now, how do you explain the complete stagnation of middle class income over the last 30-40 years, while the wealthy have seen their incomes continue to go up?
Clearly, rich people are working harder now than they did 20, 30 or 40 years ago. (sarcasm) It’s a result of economic policies that favor the wealthy, at the expense of everyone else, actually. This is the class warfare that ZEB references, except it’s coming from the top down.
Time for a course correction, to make things fairer for everyone.
I appreciate a normal, civil discourse BTW. Thanks
[quote]D Public wrote:
I’m talking about how purchasing power is affected disproportionally. People have less money to buy things that affect their quality of life.[/quote]
Okay, but that still doesn’t make what you said true.
In real life this isn’t happening, but okay for your example, fine.
This isn’t correct. AMT, or Alternative Minimum Tax was a tax put in place a million years ago to make sure the rich “paid their fair share.” What it does is insure someone that should, based on the rules, pays right around 28%. Now it was a non-issue for a long long time because no one ever qualified for it.
There is a partner at my firm that had never seen it apply in 20 years prior to it applying to just about everyone in mid 2000’s.
AMT is typically triggered by Taxes. You can deduct your state, local and real estate taxes paid to arrive at AGI. Well with AMT you have to add back those taxes. There are other nuances and formulas, but basics are that AMT is triggered by taxes paid, and is right up the ally of the “redistribute wealth through taxation” camp.
100k of deductions on 300k of income is high I feel like, but irrelevant, I see what you are saying.
I never really paid attention to the % of income people’s deductions are compared to what % the standard deduction would be for someone else… I really can’t speak on if what you are saying is common or not.
But then the person living pay check to pay check will get more out of it later by your logic. Again, would you prefer that the person making 500k paid in double % and received double the benefit at 70 years old? No, people would lose their collective minds over that.
SS is social welfare that forces people to save for retirement. It isn’t there to keep the “common man down”. It is their to try and prevent them from starving in the street when they are 70. Of course making someone who doesn’t make as much save some of their income is going to be tougher, but if the generations before him weren’t foolish, we wouldn’t have to worry about it.
Asking someone who makes more to pay more into SS, and then subsequently to take less than their fair share out, which is what I assume you are suggesting, is like making people that buy a Prius to pay double for a gallon of gas.
The poor person will not pay tax the the benefits they receive in retirement. The rich person will. SS isn’t some program made to help the rich get richer, it is there to force the current earning generation support the previous earning generation.
[quote]
It is a fact that the wealth of the mega rich has been increasing at much faster pace than everyone else, and it has to do with the fact that a larger distribution of their income is related to capital gains. We experienced some of the highest growth rates in this nation’s history with higher capital gains rates in 95-97. Obama’s proposal to keep the rates under 250k the same and raise them on higher incomes is equitable to me.[/quote]
It is discrimination. Which apparently in the PC world we live in is okay as long as the target has enough money.
But whatever. Fine. Wealth does beget wealth, and it has been this way since the beginning of society. If it makes the masses feel better about themselves to punish others for what they have, so be it. It is going to make my road to the 1% harder than it already was, but it isn’t going to stop me. And I thank god every day for the American’s that feel the same way I do. Because it will be people like me that carry people who cry about “occupy”. Yes you are welcome.
Fuck that and fuck all the tree huggers in America that think they are entitled because they are alive. I earned every penny I have. I am putting my children in a position to be better than I was, as my parents did for me. I can’t wait until people hate me and my family for success.
…he ordered the sniping of Osama, I will give him that.
[/quote]
Obama left it to Admiral McRaven and made sure to give himself an out:
Former SEAL Team 6 Commander Ryan Zinke: “Navy SEALs, Special Operations Personnel and Veterans across America have been outraged since Barack Obama conveniently took credit for killing Osama Bin Laden for political gain. The President has failed and he is jeopardizing the safety of our troops, their families and our National security for political gain. Obama has exposed the identity of special operations units, leaked classified information, and limited the rules of engagement of forces on the ground.”
To those that say a sales tax in place of income tax is regressive, how about exemptions for food, and perhaps other basic necessities. How then is that regressive?
Furthermore, once again, many of these “pay check to pay check” people will 1) pay no income taxes and 2) receive benefits for child assistance, housing vouchers, food stamps (food stamps are good for around twice my monthly food budget), and other things that far outweigh anything they would be paying in a sales tax. Call it a marginal reduction of benefits received.
The issue is people that have just enough that dont qualify for these benefits, and are thus worse off than someone making 5-10k less than them in real terms.
You want to talk about the tax structure making rich people rich? Ok, but it also provides a huge disincentive for certain people to better their lives, improve their education, work more, etc. Think of all the generational poverty. I can tell you about high school kids claiming SSI for 400 bucks a month. This is for doing nothing. I am not making this shit up either. If you combine all this in aggregate, you have a system that pays people to be unproductive, which is essentially double taxation on the nations GDP.
I understand, the altruistic sense is to “help the poor”, but you do that by teaching them to fend for themselves and incentivizing good life choices.
[quote]K2000 wrote:
EVERYBODY’S taxes helped pay for the roads, bridges, police force, court system, power grid, telephone system, etc.[/quote]
No, not really. Only about 50% of people who work are responsible for that.
The other 50% or so either pay almost no taxes or live off of the tax dollars the business owners pay. [/quote]
I responded to this talking point (half the population pays no taxes - false - they still pay Payroll tax, sales tax etc) but the Mods didn’t post my reply. The reason many people don’t pay Income Tax is because they don’t earn enough money to qualify. You can’t expect somebody making 15k a year to pay the same rate of taxes as somebody making 500k. That would be punitive. Americans have already rejected this idea, and will continue to reject it in the future.
Who will fight to defend the helpless, downtrodden wealthiest Americans from persecution?
Answer: Republicans[/quote]
LOL, you don’t help the down trodden by handing them free stuff and giving them a free ride. 48% of America pays no federal income tax and in fact many get money from the government. A person making 15-k-30-k should pay something even if it is just $100. Everyone needs to participate it helps them appreciate our system and contribute to that system. When half the country is pulling the wagon and the other half is riding we have a system that will not last very long.
[quote]D Public wrote:
I’m also just going to post this chart to illustrate why I believe that this country needs a more progressive taxation policy. [/quote]
Yes, I think you make a good point. Right now the top 1% only pay 37% of all income taxes and that’s not nearly enough. I’m thinking we should place a larger tax burden on them. What do you say to the top 1% paying 60% of all taxes? That way the middle class can get some tax relief from that incredibly high 30% rate that those poor bastards have to put up with.
And when we nearly double the already too high tax rate on the wealthy we can look forward to less business start-ups, and less expansion, more lay offs and paying higher prices for products and services.
And of course more people on unemployment, welfare food stamps and the many other hundreds of government programs.
These guys believe that if you’re poor, it’s because God wants you to be poor, or because you are an inferior person.[/quote]
Nonsense, but we do know that if you are poor the worst thing that government can do is put you on some sort of semi-permanent government program which only encourages you to stay poor. Ever take a Psych 101 class Einstein? When a behavior is encouraged it gets repeated. I think you can figure the rest out for yourself.
More nonsense, but at least this time you have part of it correct. If you work hard and smart you can succeed in America. But success for you might be holding a steady job. And success for me might be starting my own small business. We are do not have the same skills or initiative. And all the government programs in the world isn’t going to change that. The poor are poor for a reason. If you tell me that some can’t help it I would agree. The old, the disabled, the mentally challenged. But we both know that the long line at the welfare department is filled with people that do not fit those categories.
The “rich people” that you seem to hate employ a whole lot of middle class people that you don’t hate so much. You have to stop thinking “us against them” and start thinking of the economy as a multi-sided “machine” where every piece fits together. If you attack someone’s small business you inadvertently harm his 20 employees. When you raise his taxes you are taking the raise that he may have given his employees. You also take the money that he would have used to expand his business and hire 20 more people. And what has become of the money?
Government has used it in an inefficient way to pay bureaucrats, to give free things to people which only enables them to continue getting free things (remember the psych 101 example) and to perhaps create make shift jobs. Big government helps no one in the long-term, but harms many in the process!
If we truly want to make things fairer for everyone we will lower the burden of taxes on the top 10% of income earners who currently pay 70% of all income tax. This can be done with a flat tax which is the only fair way to tax. If you are talking about making everyone equal that will never happen as each has different initiative and skill sets. Some bring great wealth and others barely get by. But if you leave more capital in the hands of the job creators guess what they’ll do with it? They’ll create more jobs!
If you are talking about making everyone the same that will never happen. Just like in College some get “A’s” some get “B’s” others fail.
It’s called life. Now take a deep breath and try to contain your jealousy for those of us who have succeeded financially in life.
I would like the safety net programs to be better.
I would like benefits given to those who are not employed to be restricted in some capacity(there needs to be more covenants). I would like the level of food to be controlled directly to prevent obesity. I would prefer if we also adopted germany’s unemployment system where the government pays businesses to pay employees for brief periods of time, so they can learn valuable skills to allow them to find work in the future rather than paying them to do nothing.
I like the earned income credit, and I would prefer if similar credits were established rather than hand outs.
However, I wasn’t even talking about people that qualify for such entitlements. I was talking about the working class who do not qualify for such benefits. I would like things to be slightly more progressive. I’m not asking for socialism. Just fairer.
I thought clinton had some good ideas in this video…
Time for a course correction, to make things fairer for everyone.[/quote]
What kind of course correction are you advocating?
How is it not fair that someone invented something useful that people are willing to pay for or someone started a service business that people are willing to pay for and use?
It IS fair but it is not EASY to start a business. But ANYONE can do it.
You sound like someone that has never poured their heart and soul into something and either succeeded or failed. You want the rewards but aren’t willing to take the risk.
[quote]D Public wrote:
I would like the safety net programs to be better.[/quote]
Something like 1 out of every 6 families are in some way on the government dole. Would be be happy if half were being taken care of?
Yes, good idea. That does not mean extending unemployment to two years! As a business owner I can tell you that this drives down the number of people really looking for jobs. Keep in mind that it is human nature to keep doing the easy thing that gets rewarded.
That is a noble thought but not very practical.
Good idea. But almost anything is better than the cluster fuck that we now have and has been perpetuated by Obama.
Yep.
[quote]However, I wasn’t even talking about people that qualify for such entitlements. I was talking about the working class who do not qualify for such benefits. I would like things to be slightly more progressive. I’m not asking for socialism. Just fairer.
[/quote]
To make the system more “progressive” as you say you would have to raise the taxes even more on a group of people that are over taxed already. As I’ve said the top 10% pay 37% of all income tax. The top 10% pay 70% of all income tax.
What are you looking for? How much money do you want the government to steal from those who have been productive? And how does taking money out of the hands of those who build businesses and employ people help the economy?
I would like benefits given to those who are not employed to be restricted in some capacity(there needs to be more covenants). I would like the level of food to be controlled directly to prevent obesity. [/quote]
Funny story time:
So WIC, at least in MA, wanted to cut down on the fraud some people were commiting with their vouchers.
They instituted a program that vendors had to have a POS system that would reject a voucher if the individual didn’t purchase the foods listed on the check. Things like Peanut Butter, Formula, Milk, Bread, Cheese. All the horrid stuff your not supposed to feed your kids.
Well, turns out the big chain markets had no issues doing this, and it works. The small mom and pop stores on the corner, they are the ones handing over cash for checks, and allowing people to buy bullshit instead of their baby’s formula. So WIC goes to stop his from happening.
The stores cry poor. They can’t afford to upgrade their POS… The government says that forcing small stores to upgrade is discrimination.
Forcing the “poor” to do something “unfair”, discrimination. Forcing the “rich” to do something “unfair”, totally awesome.
