by Middle Class WarriorRepublicans want you to worry about rich people because they believe that rich people employ the 'others.'
They also want you to worry about the 'unfair tax burden' on the rich because the rich pay all of the Income Tax, 80 per cent according to Rush Limbaugh.
First, of all the rich are fully capable of taking care of themselves. Most of them have attorneys, accountants, stock brokers, mangers to help them. They don't need to the middle class or the poor to look after them. Most of the affluent are self sufficient.
Second, the taxes the right wing whine and bitch about are the progressive taxes like Income Tax and the Estate Tax. Most taxes in the US are, in fact, regressive. Sales tax, real estate tax, licenses and government fees, excise taxes, tariffs and other government taxes are not graduated like a progressive tax is. All of these taxes are regressive.
Third, most people are employed by the government and corporations, not individuals. Of interest 60 per cent of US corporations pay no corporate income tax at all.
In fact, it was a Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, who created a progressive tax system in the US. Teddy Roosevelt believed in both a progressive income tax and an estate tax:
Roosevelt endorsed a progressive income tax:
"At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. . . At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth . . .
"No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar's worth of service rendered? . . Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective, a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate."
When a Republican talks about a flat tax or a fair tax, they are really just talking about their prefered regressive tax. Social Security is one of the worst regressive taxes because it is capped at $106,800. Once a person makes more than that amount, they pay no more Social Security tax.
If Americans were more tax savvy, they should laughing in the faces of Republicans who want to flatten the tax system because almost all taxes Americans pay are already regressive with the exception of Income Tax and the Estate tax. By the way, George W. Bush suspended the Estate Tax and Obama has yet to restore this tax.
Are you starting to see the pattern on the taxes conservatives want to change?
Why do the rich pay the bulk of Income tax. It isn't because the tax system is unfair, it is because the wealthy make an excessive amount of money.Economists use the GINI coefficient to evaluate the distribution of income in the US. Anything above 0.4 indicates a distribution of income problem. The US coefficient is above 0.4 while our Canadian neighbors are below the warning threshold. The distribution of income in the US is similar to Russia.
To make matters worse, the distribution of wealth the US is far worse, but that is a different matter. Alan Greenspan has even commented on the income and wealth disparities in the US.
Of course, when Democrats talk about income disparities, the conservatives start tossing the S-word around, socialism.
Rightardia suggests that if you want to live in a country where a CEO makes 300 times what the average worker makes, perhaps you should be prepared to pay more than 300 times what the average worker pays in taxes.
In summary, don't let the right wing fool you about taxes. Tell them about Roosevelt views on progressive taxation and point out that most taxes Americans pay are flat regressive taxes that the wealthy like. Also, ask them about that US $20 billion that 52,000 conservatives hid in the UBS bank in Switzerland.
Quit your bitching, righty, and pay the tax man!
http://blog.beliefnet.com/stevenwaldman/2008/10/teddy-roosevelt-socialist-advo.html
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2 comments:
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In my Tract The Age of Turbulence: Plea for a New Economic Order, I explain the nature and causes of economic depressions.
In fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is a fluid regime characterized by chaotic, stochastic property changes. This includes low momentum diffusion, high momentum convection, and rapid variation of pressure and velocity in space and time.
A Turbulence is a Chaotic, Discontinuous State of a Liquid. It Owns Most of the Proprieties of Keynes' Liquidity Trap.
It proves that after the inflation of the Mother of all Asset Price Bubbles the ominous fate of this economy is Keynes' Liquidity Trap.
Its consequences are a new, bigger Crash causing, this time, a Real Great Depression II.
That bipolarity of the Market is the problem: any irrationally exuberant person, as any psychiatrist would tell, is unable to understand that he is irrational and that he will necessarily fall in a deep depression. He just doesn't want to hear the warning no matter how many times he had the experience.
What do we do Before The Crash?
My Strategy: Preparing for the Crash, The Age of Turbulence. answers that question.
Using the yield curve as a predictor that strategy covers Treasuries, Corporate Bonds, Minerals (Oil, Precious Metals and Base Metals.) and Stocks.
Its aim is to profit from both the Asset Price Bubble and Irrational Exuberance and The Crash and Economic Depression that will necessarily ensue.
It tries, and for the time being very profitably, to accomplish Alan Greenspan Mission Impossible:
"That is mission impossible. Indeed, the international financial community has made numerous efforts in recent years to establish such oversight, but none prevented or ameliorated the crisis that began last summer.
Much as we might wish otherwise, policy makers cannot reliably anticipate financial or economic shocks or the consequences of economic imbalances.
Financial crises are characterised by discontinuous breaks in market pricing the timing of which by definition must be unanticipated - if people see them coming, then the markets arbitrage them away."
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The clear evidence of underpricing of risk did not prod private sector risk management to tighten the reins.
In retrospect, it appears that the most market-savvy managers, although conscious that they were taking extraordinary risks, succumbed to the concern that unless they continued to "get up and dance", as ex-Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince memorably put it, they would irretrievably lose market share.
Instead, they gambled that they could keep adding to their risky positions and still sell them out before the deluge. Most were wrong."
Alan Greenspan
The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World [Economic Order?].
That Strategy Will not Any More be Available to the General Public as of September 1st, 2009. However the Members of My Networks Will Still Have Access to It & Will be Regularly Updated. Join My Networks Now!
The Yield Curve - Plea for a New Economic Order.
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But what do we do After The Crash?
I propose a plausible alternative solution to the Depression: I designed a System that will allow us, when The Crash will come, to get out of Credit Based Free Market Economy, Capitalism, and transfer to my Adjusted Credit Free, Free Market Economy and Abolish the FED:
To participate in our New Economic Order you need to Enter Your €5 in the Public Cra$h R€gi$t€r Before The Crash - It is Fr€€!..
I.10.82
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice.
But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.
I.10.83
A regulation which obliges all those of the same trade in a particular town to enter their names and places of abode in a public register, facilitates such assemblies. It connects individuals who might never otherwise be known to one another, and gives every man of the trade a direction where to find every other man of it.
I.10.84
A regulation which enables those of the same trade to tax themselves in order to provide for their poor, their sick, their widows and orphans, by giving them a common interest to manage, renders such assemblies necessary."
Adam Smith
June 5th, 1723 – July 17tn, 1790
An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Inequalities Occasioned by the Policy of Europe.
March 9th, 1776
The Tract Will be Published on September 17tn, 2009. It Will be Withdrawn from the Internet on September 1st, 2009. Buy The Tract Now!
You will certainly enjoy my popular articles:
Ron Paul vs. Bernanke.
Ben "Systemic" Bernanke.
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