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danmohr wrote:

steve wrote:If you have an income in the hundreds of thousands cut in half, you still have an income in the hundreds-of-thousands, and you will have no problem surviving. If you have an income that barely keeps your family alive, and you lose half of it, you and your family will die.

Right, but it seems like it would be a fairly straightforward and necessary exercise to determine where the "barely keeps you alive" line is and set a line well above there where your income cannot be reduced below it by taxes.

It would seem that way but it's infinitely different for each person or family. Besides, who wants to be taxed to the point of bare necessity? How is that fair to rob your income to the point that you have no chance of saving anything? One bad week out with the flu and what have you got?

danmohr wrote:I can't get behind the idea that, for all people whose income is above the aforementioned poverty line and who derive their income from job wages, a "progressive" tax system is fair. It goes against the values I was raised with - hard work, education, frugality, etc.

Apparenly "etc." doesn't include generosity.

Taking away more of the income that I earned simply because I earned more than someone else seems like negative reinforcement for positive behavior.

So, you think the incentive to earn more money is that it won't be taxed more? And people will decline to earn more if some of it will be taxed? That isn't my experience.

Let's just pass a giant fucking federal sales tax on everything except food, health care, housing (including rent) and basic utilities and then we'll penalize everybody who spends money and presumably the rich will spend a whole bunch and the poor won't spend very much since they don't have much to spend...

You realize that is a flat tax, right? And that it just means everything is more expencive by (tax) percent, and that rich people can afford that better than poor people.

Flat taxes are unfair. Poor people need to keep more of their money than rich people bcause they can't suffer losses as easily.

The assumption that anyone can pull himself up by his bootstraps through hard work and self reliance hides an ignorance that some people weren't born with boots or the opportunity to earn boots. Being born with boots is by itself an enormous advantage, and not something to be taken lightly.

I find these discussions about tax amusing, namely because I live in Sweden.

Here, income tax is 65%.

Sales tax (VAT) is 25%.

Most other stuff (capital income tax, inheritance tax, etc) is 30%.

On top of that, you get taxed if your employer supplies you with a car, food or a cellphone. It's called "advantage tax" (my best translation). Is this something you have in the US?

Setting aside the question of how they're actually disbursed--which is a whole 'nother can of worms--there's no doubt that the principle on which taxes rest is a just one:

I make my income from a job. That job has been made available to me by a society which values the sort of work that I am able to do. Therefore, I owe back to society a certain chunk of that income, for two reasons:

1) It's the generous thing to do.

2) In the long run, it's in my own self-interest because it will (hopefully) make society an even better place in which to live.

One might reply that, in fact, it's not thanks to society that I got a good job; it's due to my own efforts and my own ingenuity. And, to a certain extent, this holds true. But ask yourself if those efforts would have been made possible without the accomplishment all of those tasks one takes for granted along the way: your trash gets picked up, your car gets fixed, your AC gets repaired, your clothes get sewn, etc. All of these people helped you, in a palpable and inescapable way, to get you where you are today. It is literally true that you could not have made all of your money without even a few of them around to do the thangs that they do. People who work in the Post Office and in the DMV get their paychecks from a tax-funded government treasury.

Then ask if that ingenuity could have had a proper outlet without a tax-funded public school system. You'd have been up Shit's Creek without a paddle if taxes hadn't provided for that, Chief.

Like it or not, we're all in this together. Don't try to play yourself off as a fucking David Hasselhoff up in this piece, driving around in a black sports car that looks like a flying dildo. Hoarding your money, or using it to buy fancy gadgetry, are ways of trying to isolate yourself from the rest of society and of pretending that all of the money you make is due solely to your own efforts. Not only is it ultimately self-defeating. It's blind to the way that society works.

In my opinion, the first priority for a Democratic Congress is to achieve a workable, federal health-care system. Taxes'll pay for that, Chief, and I'll be happy to spend them on it since, when I pull my back, I'll have somewhere to go. There's no fuckin' way I'm going to blow thousands of dollars on an HMO. It'll be much cheaper for me--and for everyone else--if I can get muscle relaxers and Valium--lots 'n' lots of sweet, sweet Valium--as a kickback from my taxes.

So, don't get all high and mighty, Hasselhoff. Yes, if you've somehow made a lot of money, pat yourself on the back for all of your hard work and ingenuity. Keep most of the money you've made for yourself. But give back a fair and sizable proportion to the people and the infrastructure that helped to make your current success possible. Because if you don't, rest assured that I will find where you live, knock on your door late at night, and then run away and hide in the bushes, looking at your fat face as you wonder why the fuck somebody woke you up in the middle of the night.

Flat tax fiasco as outlined by Forbes and other mega rich dreamers...

http://www.wordwiz72.com/flattax.html

chet wrote:EDIT: Couldnt you always add a sliding scale at the bottom if you were worried about fucking over the lower class?

You mean make it so it's not a flat tax anymore? It's my impression that most proponents of the flat tax have something like this built in, a tacit admission of the fundamental unfairness of a flat tax.

etch wrote:Flat tax fiasco as outlined by Forbes and other mega rich dreamers...

http://www.wordwiz72.com/flattax.html

I think this is a good article - required reading for people who don't want to argue from a position of ignorance. Matthew, of course, can skip it and go straight to Mallard Fillmore or whatever the fuck.

clocker bob wrote: And the solution for the poor people of Oaxaca is to bring in Wal Mart? Do you even know the first thing about the social strata of Mexico, and Oaxaca in particular? ( I know, why even ask? ) What argument is this long WSJ paste even supposed to be in support of? Your 'no minimum wage' argument? Your 'go get a job, you lazy bum' argument? What?

I was addressing Steve's arrogance with the Journal article. I think that was obvious. After all, Wal-Mart pretty much stands for everything reviled by liberals and leftists.....right, bob?

steve wrote:And when you build a wall around Chicago and DC, or a magic guns-don't-pass tollbooth, then you can have effective local gun control. Until then, you need a comprehensive policy, and it either needs to be pretty drastic or pretty liberal. I favor the liberal, but I admit that the drastic will be effective, if you're willing to put up with a police state to get us there.

If we're looking to get 100% of the guns off the street, then no, gun control laws will never succeed. But if we're looking to limit the availability of guns for angry people who could use a cooling-off period, or for those with a history of domestic (or other) violence, then even modest successes benefit the region more than a laissez faire approach.

And as far as flat taxes go, even the staunchest advocates have a laundry list of exceptions to the flat tax. Get them talking about taxes on dividends, capital gains, and estates, and suddenly they find "necessary" exemptions to the flat tax.

matthew wrote:I was addressing Steve's arrogance with the Journal article. I think that was obvious. After all, Wal-Mart pretty much stands for everything reviled by liberals and leftists.....right, bob?

As a liberal leftist, I'd say that it's arrogant people like you that are reviled much more than the Wal-Marts of the world.