cruise ships

To the country or the economy, nothing. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if it ended up making some individuals a good deal wealthier.

Jeroen Belleman

The power of propaganda. Slowman's bit it hook, line, and sinker. He's sunk. Give it up; he'll never learn.

Subchapter-S.

It's blank, alright. The problem is that no chalk will ever stick to it.

You're preaching to the choir, now. (your point of him giving it away rather than let the government waste it is perfect)

You might be successful with ordinary people. Slowman? Never.

I've learned just how dense matter can be by reading this group. Slowman and Nymbecile never cease to amaze.

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No. That in the final call is reserved to we the people. Think it through. We do nominally put up with their sometimes wrong decisions as that is a LOT less confrontational than reconstructing the Government.

Error! Must sterilize! =20

Bill Sloman IS that dedicated to his imaginary universe, he is a TRUE BELIEVER (tm).

sunk.

I wasn't influenced by propaganda, I was influenced by the income tax rates that I've paid and that other people that I know have paid.

James Arthur is much less open to evidence and rational argument, and you don't have a clue about either.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I think you've captured=A0James Arthur's approach to argument.

I'm not dedicated to any imaginary universe. Once I managed to find the US 2009 tax statistics - I've now got the Excel file copied onto my hard disk - I was obliged to recognise that James Arthur was right and that in 2009 only 5% of the US tax-paying population paid out more than 17% of their income in income tax.

This still strikes me as oddly low - I've never paid that little when I've actually had a full-time job, nor has anybody else for whom I know the figures - but the US is a strange country with some very strange habits.

I don't know which is stranger - Warren Buffett only paying out 17% of his income in tax, or James Arthur arguing that this is an acceptable

- apparently even a desirable - state of affairs.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Which is rich, coming from krw, who is pretty representative of the right-wing nit-wit teflon white-board tendency around here, who haven't had a new thought in years, and remain convinced that everything they were every taught in civics at primary school is infallibly correct.

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Except of course that James Arthur's idea that the government wastes it is straight Ron Paul libertarian nonsense. The government doesn't distribute it as effectively as some idealised competitive free market would, but the ideal free market is a right-wing fantasy, and there situations (usually described as natural monopolies) where the free market approach works a whole lot less well than the civil service.

James Arthur's idea of saving America seems to involve adopting Herbert Hoover's approach to coping with Depression - I doubt that America could survive another bout of that kind of salvation. It barely survived it in 1933, and now that Keynes has shown you a better route, any right-wing administration that tried to be that stupid again would be thrown out by a popular up-rising.

I doubt if ordinary people are as susceptible to right-wing nonsense as you and James Arthur like to think. Common sense is not uncommon, even if you two obviously missed out on it. I know a lot too much not to see the gaping flaws in your logic.

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An interesting coupling. If you go far out enough on the right wing - we are talking inter-galactic here - pretty much everything in the real world is a long way to your left, and you start ignoring what are actually fairly gross distinctions.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

sunk.

I learn from it. I wonder where people get their beliefs, and Bill explains it. E.g.upthread when Bill said

"It's one of those facts of life. You don't have to research it to know that it is true."

That pretty well says it.

Bill learned too. Even he learned his envy argument was off by more than an order of magnitude.

There's a class of people with no sense of proportion, that's one thing I'm learning. They're emotional, instinctive; operating on primitive nature, without appreciation of quantity, numbers, extent, etc. They can't distinguish between the effect of a few isolated cases, and a general, deleterious effect.

And, they're credulous, and susceptible to falsehoods.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

I was too loose with the word "deduction." I meant the litany of special preferences. Actual costs are obviously not part of your income, personal or otherwise.

James

:-)

The courts will put you-the-people in prison if they decide that you have broken the law. And the courts decide what laws are constitutional and which are not. Think that through as you sit in your cell.

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's sunk.

Since the lower quintile in Germany gets 9% of the national income, where the lowest quintile in the US gets 5%, it's certainly true. The puzzle is why you thought that it needed researching.

"Envy argument"? You keep on making this claim. I'm supposed to be envious of people whose incomes are low enough that they only pay out

You thought - without checking it out - that the German poor are poor as the American poor. Sometime or other you seem to have swallowed at least one obvious falsehood.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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krw seems to be confusing education and the process of attempting to persuade people of nonsensical beliefs. When young, I got educated to the point that I walked away with a Ph.D, in Physical Chemistry, so the process has worked at least once.

James Arthur has been trying to persuade me of a number of nonsensical economic and political ideas for some years now - "John Maynard Keynes got it wrong" is one that comes to mind. That he hasn't succeeded doesn't suggest that I am in-educatable, merely that I've had enough education to recognise nonsense when I see it.

It is all a bit over krw's head - he's not exactly one of the better informed or more creative of the regular posters here, and in fact doesn't seem to do anything beyond posting "me too" from time to time.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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You were right, only 4% paid more than 17% in 2009.

I can understand that you'd prefer to forget that you did it.

You've snipped the section where I explained why it wasn't Obama who'd significantly changed the the condition of the US poor but the greedy bankers who gave you the US housing price bubble and the sub-prime mortgage crisis in quick succession, and you haven't marked the snip. This is simply dishonest.

All true, but Obama didn't do it - the sub-prime mortgage crisis did, as I pointed out. You couldn't find any way of countering the argument, so you chose to snip it.

You claim that I'm disconnected from reality, but I'm not silly enough to snip a valid counter-argument and try to pretend that it was never made.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

air.

James Arthur purports to be unworried that the supposedly progressive US income tax system stops being progressive - in practice - at incomes above $1M per year, where the taxpayers paid out some 29% of their income in income tax. He's even less worried that the progression goes into reverse for incomes over $10M per year, where the proportion actually paid in 2009 went down to 26.3%.

Warren Buffett and Mitt Romney - who've had years to organise their affairs to avoid as much tax as possible - only pay 17%.

He wants to claim that anybody can get that rate - which is rather contradicted by the simple observation that they don't - and can't seem to realise that because this kind of tax avoidance is going on the US system of personal income tax is broken, and in immediate need of fixing.

This is remarkably selective ignorance on his part. Granting his enthusiasm for text-chopping and other obvious dishonesties, one could reasonably call it wilful ignorance.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

At least half of that is total crock. Warren Buffett's corporation

has apparently never made a profit and consequently never paid any taxes. Quite how Warren Buffett syphons money out of the corporation to pay his living expenses hasn't been revealed. Mitt Romney may not organise his financial affairs as efficiently, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Search on "imputed tax" sometime.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Something I never see mentioned that always bugs me: Even a flat tax rate is *already* "progressive" in the sense that 10% of $10M is more than 10% of $30k.

Now how you should set the actual tax rates for different incomes is a matter of opinion or politics or morality or whatever.

But the situation you describe is not in itself *inherently* unfair, unless you think that all inequalities are inherently unfair.

Which some people do of course.