Promise.
Here's the thing, people rail about redistribution of wealth and how it's whatever negative adjective they wanna use. The thing that kills me, absolutely slays me, is that tax policies are always going to sway wealth in one direction, this or that. The way the tax policies have been for a while has made it so that the middle class bears a heavier burden and the wealthy get wealthier.
People listen to this or that by an idiot like Rush Limbaugh and they think that the GOP is somehow trying to make it fair. They're not saving us from socialism. But only lucky for them, tons of people in the US have no idea what socialism is, so it works out great.
My mom has a heavier tax burden than most people b/c financially she's getting screwed by the tax codes. And by my mom, I mean your mom, and then your friend's mom, right on down the line. And that's not even talking about food, medical expenses and normal life and the taxes that are associated with that. When you add every tax together that you pay, including on food and clothes and gas, who do you think pays more of a percentage of income, Trump or you? You do. It's not even close.
So if you wanna know real truth, if you wanna know what's really up, if you wanna see what the tax code has really done to people, look here and then look here.
I'm not some crazy lefty liberal here. In this regard I'm very, very centrist. People just need to know the truth. You wonder where the middle class went? Now you know. Occupy Wall Street, don't dress in 18th century attire and spout false histories of our founding fathers.
And I promise now that I'll go back to my regularly scheduled blog posts about sports that no one but me cares about.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Last like this for a bit
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9 comments:
Tithe everybody! Seriously. It could work. Even my parents agree with me on this one.
Do you mean like a flat tax?
Yes. It makes sense to me to have everyone pay the same percentage of their income. Obviously I'm no economist, but it seems to work pretty well in the church. :)
if it could really work like it does in the Church, but the Church brings in lots of other revenue (like from their farms and stuff), plus the Church gets a lot of money from fast offerings.
One lovely hidden nugget is that when you average things out tax wise between the top percent and the rest of the 99% of us, we're as close to a flat tax as we've been since the 1920s, and things are kinda sketchy right now.
Have you heard of a regressive tax rate? That's kinda what a flat tax ends up being, even if it's not technically.
Here's a forum where the first few entries are pretty good at discussing it.
A flat tax is an interesting concept, but with how messed up we are right now, I don't now if it could solve things currently. Maybe later if we could get our financials grounded. Who knows.
Do you think that a regressive tax rate is the solution?
No, in fact, I think that it is the regressive nature of the tax system that was started in the 1980s, fixed up a bit by Pres. Bush, 41, and Pres Clinton (with a GOP Congress), and then again implemented by Pres. Bush, 43, that is destroying the middle class.
What's happened is prices have steadily gone up and up over the last 30 years, but our wages haven't. So we pay a percentage of our taxes as the middle class that's been fairly steady, but the cost of living has jumped up a bunch. The truly wealthy (the 1 or 2% that have over 40% of the nation's wealth) often pay a smaller tax percentage that you, me or our parents.
What I meant by "regressive" is that the tax burden becomes heavier on the middle class because we have less money after taxes to deal with necessities; we simply don't have the money to help the economy grow again after its latest collapse.
So if we look at the tax rates, it seems like people making over $1,000,000 pay a huge chunk, but really, after tax breaks, they don't. Beyond that, they have tons of money left over, and we don't because income tax isn't the only tax we pay (think food, property, gas, etc.) This makes our percentage paid in taxes a higher percentage of income that the wealthy. Because even though they pay, those, too, and even if they live more extravagantly than us, the percentage of $$ of income taxation is still smaller.
I don't think the wealthy should be punished just because they have money. But our system is so skewed to benefit 2% of our population that we are being destroyed by the inherent greed of what's going on. Remember how the country really grew after WWII? Take a look at how high income taxes were and how few tax breaks for the wealthy there were (under Eisenhower the rate was as high as 91%!!). If high taxes really stifle a country's growth, why did the country explode in the 50s and 60s? Yeah, exactly. If we really wanted to stabilize the country right now, you know what would be the best thing? Something like raise the taxes on the 2% that have all the wealth and practically none of the debt (and close their bogus loop holes that they don't need), then funnel that into ways to help the middle class, like student loan debt relief and similar programs. Then the middle class would be able to put money back into an ailing system. The wealthy would still have all that money, but we wouldn't be drowning.
This is what's gonna kill us, not the absolute LIE of "high taxes." Our tax rates are some of the absolute lowest in the world.
I'm totally on board with you, And if people here think we pay high taxes, they should go to Scandinavia! And actually, things work a lot better there than they do here.
I miss you calling me Jarede. UCI has no Portuguese for me to get my healthy dose of affricative allophones. Oh and tax the rich!
That's triste demais, Jarede. Affricates really are the best. They make Portuguese my fave.
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