cruise ships

I trust you have no stocks that pay dividends.

Dan

Talks. Right.

Republicans act like they admire Communist China. The only

Greed is a fact of life. Government policy should steer that impulse to the general good.

The way to tell if you're productive: would society be better off if you died sooner or later?

air.

They shouldn't have to pay any tax--it's just a hidden tax on the consumers. Regressive.

Obama drives jobs and companies offshore. They must avoid taxes and other of Barackian imposts and impositions, otherwise they're not competitive and die. The alternative is for them to lobby for relief and favors; they do that too.

No one wants to produce domestic goods overseas--it's a huge pain. Everyone would rather do it here if it were economically possible. They're forced to.

Of course the Barackian stuff has been going on for a while at a lower level, he's just turned it into a revolution.

When my brother did a few hundred returns a year he kept up with the stats. That was a while ago, but most of the cap. gains were from people selling their houses. Most of the 1%-ers were one-time events too, not a static class.

In the stock market, cap gain or loss comes from buying part of a company, being, in fact, a micro-partner. People wouldn't do that if they couldn't be sure of selling when they wanted (or had) to.

So, cap gains still seems pretty important. It encourages lots of micro-investors to come together and pool enough to do something big. IOW, capital formation. 3 million people with $1 each can't hire anyone; 3 people with $1 million each can.

Since university, he mentioned recently. The lack of real-world experience seems a common thread through those with these theories, right back to Marx and beyond.

"God gives every bird its food. But, he doesn't throw it into the nest!" -- ???

James

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And you can reliably predict the future? You aren't even all that reliable about the past.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The Keynesian pump- priming - that James Arthur hates so much - does keep people in work in the US. It's not just talk.

At the moment US government policy seems to steer it more to the good of the 1% of the population with the highest incomes. They seem to be doing a lot better than the remaining 99%.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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He talks about it, but he's the reason they're leaving. Except, that is, where he's giving them other people's money. Like Solyndra, GM, GE, Buffett, etc.

Obama's anti-employer. So, we've got less of that. Small business is especially hurt--the big guys with cozy markets and big reserves benefit.

Obama's 2012 budget sought to double the revenue from corporate income tax by 2014. Nice idea Barack.

Outsourcing is simply capital fleeing oppression. Since we're still a free country, they can do that. If you make it uncomfortable enough, people who do stuff and make stuff don't have to do it here--they can leave.

I give preference to domestic stuff too, but it has to measure up. I don't reward bad goods.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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The dividends can go overseas and benefit non-US consumers - it's better to tax them while you can get at them.

Germany collects more of the national GDP as tax and it's industries manage to thrive, perhaps because the government spends the money more wisely. James Arthur doesn't see it that way, which is a fair example of the difference between being right and being far-right.

On a remarkably large scale.

The economic arguments are not all that good, but if you don't like paying your workers more than starvation wages and hate dealing with unions off-shoring is attractive. Better educated, better trained, better paid and healthier workers are more productive, but the average capitalist prefers to buy a rubbish work force at the cheapest possible rate - paying more only makes more money in the long term, and thinking ahead is too much like hard work.

Twaddle.

Any tax policy that you don't understand and sympathise with "kills jobs and creates poverty" even when foreign examples of this approach work rather better than your primitive arrangement.

I got unemployment benefit from 2003 to 2007, when I hit 65 and started collecting some pension income.

Wrong. I had a research grant while I was a graduate student - this isn't a dole payment but a government investment in higher education. The government normally make a large profit on the deal. People with higher degrees earn more money than their less educated counter-parts and pay more income tax on their higher incomes.

Marx did okay as a newspaper editor, and Engels made enough as an entrepreneur to subsidise Marx after politics got in the way of the journalistic career. Marx came from commercially active family - the Philips brothers who set up the lighting (and subsequently electronics company) were relatives of his - their father was a first cousin of Karl Marx.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

They pay 35% on ordinary income and 15% on capital gains and qualified dividends. Together, that averages out to something in-between.

You're repeating the leftist dogma that somehow mystical dodges let "rich" people escape paying any tax, the genius work of small-minded idiots who haven't added up the numbers.

The tables show that's FALSE.

Here, let's do some math.

Total taxable income of returns >=200K AGI = $1,619,441,376 Total tax paid by that same group = $434,280,006

Effective tax rate = (total tax paid) / (income) = 27%

That effective rate includes the effect of Buffetts and Romneys in its computation.

The greedy, needy, emotional, class-envy mantra that the rich aren't paying their "fair" share of your load is simply wrong.

Obama's argument is that because one guy, Buffett, benefits from capital gains, that means we need to increase cap gains and other taxes on a hundred million other people who already pay higher rates.

Obama has to raise taxes 60% to pay for this level of spending, and he doesn't give a damn how.

James Arthur

That's crazy, like shooting speed in your arm for years and expecting to stay high. Borrowing and spending, mostly to finance Chinese manufacturing and Saudi airlines, for decades on end, isn't "pump-priming", it's long-term destruction. The part line is always "we have to borrow and spend now, and then, after the economy recovers, we need to get serious about balancing the budget." Yeah, right. The government of the USA, and most of Europe, is in a continuous loop of having to borrow more and more to refinance spending and past borrowing. The national debts as a multiple of GDP keep increasing. This can't go on forever.

"Doing better" just means they haven't spent as much as they might. Accumulating wealth by the 1% reduces spending by the 99%. Given that such spending would be mostly destructive right now, it's a good thing that some people are stashing some money.

A lot of the wealth of the 1% is "invested" in government debt. If the government taxed it, and gave it to the general population to spend on Korean wide-screen TVs and Chinese power tools, we'd be worse off.

But massive taxation of the upper 1% would have a minor effect on the current deficit level, and probably bad long-term effects.

We see that locally, productive people leaving California to become residents of Nevada. Incline Village, just across the line on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, is called "Income Village."

You don't get it. If you're not productive, and are unlikely to become so, and are being supported by the government and consuming stuff and space and generating CO2, the sooner you die, the better off everyone else is.

How much do they collect from industry?

Quite likely. European bureaucrats are selected on the basis of highly competitive exams; ours are selected based on entitlement.

James Arthur

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He may be given as the reason they are leaving, but America has been off-shoring jobs for a very long time.

Mostly in response to the financial catastrophe created when the house price bubble - engineered by your favourite bankers engineered to feed their bonuses - finally burst. George W Bush did exactly the same thing in his last few months in power.

More precisely, not as single-mindedly pro-employer and anti-labour as you'd like.

Not for that reason - the responsibility for the current recession rests squarely on the shoulders of the bankers who made the ninja loans that casued it.

As always. Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" is in part about the way right-wing economists favour alternations of boom and bust because they can get away with murder during the busts, when everybody is to busy surviving to be too critical about what's going on.

Even nicer if it had any chance of working in a congress packed with corporate lobbyists, who have been working for years to exempt their particular clients from corporate taxation, with rather too much success.

Not exactly. It's just capital fleeing sensible employment policies. Healthy, well-paid, well-trained employees are more productive and - in the long term - more productive than cheap foreign labour working for subsistence wages, but capitalists have a weakness for making more money now, and setting the discount rate high enough that a discounted cash-flow analysis justifies the simple-minded approach.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Sure. 17% is "in between".

Nonsense. Paying 17% isn't not paying any tax - it's just paying less than most of the population.

Buffett sits squarely in the greater than $10M per year catagory who - overall - pay 24.6%

You'd like to thing so, but the evidence does point the other way.

I don't know exactly how most of Buffet's income gets to qualify as capital gains or qualifying dividend - have you got some kind of privileged access to his tax return?

I'm sure that he is very interested in the fine detail - if nothing else it is going to affect who votes for him this year - but you felt the need for a little emotional hyperbole and let reality go hang, not for the first time.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Okay then, add it up. What percentage of the population pays more than 17% effective rate? What percentage of taxpayers pays more than

James Arthur

Shunning taxes that go to the government for redistribution is one thing, but you should at least recognize the fact that the playing field is tilted. If you want to say that "taxes are bad" you should consider changing the laws that make the rich richer, so there is less need for the government to be taking money back and redistributing it. At least that way it doesn't go through the government. But you appear to want it both ways. You want the rich to rake in more money and pay less taxes. I wonder if you are aware of the fact that the rich and big government are one. If it weren't for big government to protect them, they wouldn't be rich. They use our laws, they do not use their hands, to maintain and increase their riches. Do you really think that Bill Gates has worked 1 million times harder than an outstanding but common janitor? Or do you just despise ordinary people? If it weren't for our law, Microsoft would never have become rich. I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, I'm just pointing out the fact that our law is what the rich depend on. Sucking up to the rich while pretending to be a conservative for small government is odd.

"We're helpless!" cry the Republicans. But in fact, the jobs left mostly prior to Barack Obama's administration. I'm not suggesting that Obama really cares about US manufacturing jobs, but he doesn't care any less than Republicans.

You are ignorantly parroting your partisan blind pseudo-conservative line. Congress set up a fund for companies like Solyndra to go under. The prepaid fund is over 10 billion. Solyndra cost taxpayers about 1.5 billion.

Communist China is being allowed to take advantage of our market because big business wants to destroy labor and because too many of us feel okay about Communist Chinese slave labor. You don't actually own the slaves, so you don't feel the guilt. But, eventually, outsourcing will destroy our markets. At that time, companies will feel free to leave, but the world will be in a shithole too big to climb out of. And then we will all be like the Communist China that you admire.

In other words, Communist Chinese slave labor is just fine with you. Your "Greed is good, jobs Americans won't do, I couldn't care less about anything except money" is the mentality that is shipping jobs to China and running up our debt.

"We are helpless!" cry Republicans.

Are you suggesting that California is a beacon of conservatism? If California were Nevada's market, California could tell Nevada how to treat its workers.

It takes large-scale leadership. If we had the political will to shun Communist Chinese slave labor, if slave labor were not so desirable to big business and women, we would team up with other democracies. Your Communist China cannot survive without our market, at least not until outsourcing our jobs to Communist Chinese slave labor dictators eventually destroys our market. Communist countries cannot thrive like they are now without our markets. The problem is lack of political will. Big business won't bankroll our leaders and women won't vote for them unless they keep destroying our labor so that labor costs and prices will stay low.