OT: Higher taxes..

Might want to check on that. The 16th Amendment was passed in 1913, sold as a tax on millionaires.

a) The common good redistribution. b) Redistribution is harmful to the common good.

--
Cheers,
James Arthur

Point of clarification: everyone doing their share of a community project, jointly decided, is altogether different from one person being forced to support another, or to do everyone else's share.

Bill uses various confusions to advocate the latter, in the guise of the former.

Oops, sorry, my mistake... it was just *considered* for the War of 1812, but the war ended before they got around to passing it. There *was* an income tax measure passed for the civil war, but apparently it was so poorly written it was never uniformly enforced, and it was repealed in

1872, Google tells me.

Still, we're coming right on up here to 100 years of continuous income taxation.

In many cases, sure. But I think it's a fair argument that redistribution *can and should* be for the common good -- very few people have a problem with the redistribution of wealth to pay for the nation's defense in the name of the common good, after all.

I'm not necessarily agreeing with you here, but even if we assume that's true, wouldn't the question then be, "Is the harm done via redistribution more or less than the harm done without redistribution?" ...and IMO that's another one of those questions that's pretty much impossible to objectively answer because we'll never have unanimous agreement on how we value the state of society and its various resources and people.

---Joel

Very few groups/societies/communities (i.e., churches, the IEEE, the Elks, Boy Scouts, etc.) ever require unanimous votes before committing to a project, though -- in my mind without that, there'll always be what constitutes certain amount of force being used to support others, as your only other option is to withdraw from the group.

Charitably, perhaps he does it because to him there's little difference, rather than doing it purposely as a means to obfuscate?

---Joel

No one's arguing against tax.

Another point: churches aren't governments. Membership is voluntary.

You're not getting the point at all. Redistribution means taking from one person to give, unearned, to another. Charity. Not tax.

National defense isn't charity. It's also not 2/3rds of spending.

Roughly 2/3rds of every federal tax dollar you pay supports someone else who isn't working and paying tax like you are.

Half the country pays no federal tax.

No, it's easy to answer objectively. If you take what people make, they won't bother making more. That means there's less for every one. Everyone is poorer.

The more the gov't takes, the more human time and energy is spent avoiding that taking rather than making more. I think I spent five or six weeks last year on taxes, and paid

A proposition that's unsupported by any shred of evidence. Did the US work force start working longer hours when the 91% income tax band was scrapped?

Ask any right-wing nitwit and their intuitions will all give you the same answer. Much reliable than consulting reality.

Germany has a higher unemployment rate than the US? It's 7.4% at the moment.

Anecdotal evidence strikes again. The dependency culture is alive and well in the imaginations of of every right-wing nitwit. Finding evidence of it in real life does seem to depend on anecdotes from the right-wing press.

Jobs in China?

Investment in making the poor healthier and more productive is a much better idea. Somebody in the US may wake up to it in a century or two

- maybe earlier if they notice that their manufacturing industry has gone down the tubes for want of a skilled work force.

In the US, because the rich have exported most of the manufacturing jobs to China.

Actually, they are wondering how the rich managed to skim off the lions share of the last thirty years' worth of technical development.

Communism went down the tubes when the proletariat noticed that life wasn't getting any better for them. US capitalism may not be quite as vulnerable to dissatisfaction amongst the less well-off, but the Occupy movement does represent exactly that kind of sentiment.

Perceived unfairness does destabilise societies. You don't seem to be equipped to perceive the defects in your society, but quite a few other Americans don't share your satisfaction with the status quo.

Western European socialism does collect more in taxes from the well- off than US capitalism, and there's less inequality in income

you can order the list of countries on that web-site by clicking on the heading of the relevant table, and places like Germany, Sweden and Norway cluster at the more nearly equal end with Gini coefficients around 30. The UK and Australia are less equal, at around 35 and the US has some rather odd neighbours at 41, which puts it curiously close to China and Russia at 42.

In China the fat cats in the Communist Party collect a disproportionate share of whatever is available, and in Russia the fat cats who were in the Communist Party when it had any clout seem to be in the same happy position.

In the US you've got an equally disporortionately well-heeled minority, who've become a good deal more well-heeled since Regan came to power. Precisely how the people who collect the top 1% of US incomes have managed to do so much better than everybody else in recent years is an interesting question, and the other 99% have begun to look into it. They may not like what they find.

Since the German economy does seem to work rather well despite their socialist tendencies, you might be wise to study what they are doing right, rather than writing them off as wasting money on a "parasitic"

- but remarkably productive - working class. If you took a few leaves from their book - maybe adopting universal health care - you might avoid more disruptive forms of social reorganisation.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

In a group of ten people, should four do all the work, and the other six none?

While the four labor in their fields, what ought the six do? Lobby for more? Calculate their fair share?

If I work twelve hours instead of seven, am I luckier, hence liable for progressively more?

I don't think it's deliberate, I just don't think he's thought about this stuff enough to understand it. It takes serious thought and reading--capitalism, socialism, history, philosophy.

I've only studied it myself recently, watching Obama fail.

--
Cheers,
James Arthur

But only if you can get work. The US has exported a big swathe of manufacturing jobs to China.

But collectively funded infra-structure - from roads to universities - can greatly facilitate individual enterprise.

The US seems to have lost sight of this important detail.

I was lucky with my parents - but their wits and education helped me even more than than their upper-middle-class income. Her parents did put my mother through university, along with her brother and her older sister, but my father paid his own way, studying part time, and had turned what he'd learned into an upper-middle-class income by the time I was born.

If you could choose your parents this would be relevant information, but here it's just more evidence of the fact that Ken s. Tucker lacks the wit to construct a coherent argument.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

At least in the U.S. citizenship is voluntary...

I'll grant you there's a distinction there, but I think there's plenty of grey area as well: Taxes funding the national defense enrich corporations and individuals in return for those corporations and individuals generally creating some good or providing some service; entitlement-style redistribution enriches individuals in return for their attending college (or other educational venues), keeping their family stable & well fed, and actively looking for jobs.

The end result of both of those redistributions can and should be for the greater public good.

Charities can and should fund both types of operations as well, as doing so is in the public's best interest.

(Of course, in reality in both cases there's abuse to be found, but that's a separate topic.)

You're generally not in favor of any entitlement-style redistributions, though, correct?

They may not be working in a traditional job like I am, but they're certainly bound by a long litany of regulations regarding what they

*are* actively doing and not doing.

I don't have any objections to tying entitlements to something more visibly productive from individuals, such as having people perform roadside maintenance or whatever (like the old WPA program). But while I think that can work fine for, e.g., able-bodied individuals without kids, it gets very messy to try to figure out what to do with single mothers with several kids (where the father can't be found) -- in that case, trying to get her educated and employable, even on the taxpayer's dime (e.g., Pell grants), is often IMO the best thing for the common good.

Sure, but they pay plenty of other taxes.

Assuming you're only taking some of what they make, that's certainly not universally true: If I work to make something and you hand me $1 vs. $0.90, whereas if I work twice as much and you hand me $2 vs. $1.80, I still have plenty of incentive to work harder. It's almost irrelevant to me what the amount taken is -- I primarily care about how much I'm able to end up with and what that much will buy me relative to having used my time to do something else.

How can that be? The money you took from me wasn't destroyed, it was just handed to someone else. I might be able to see its results (e.g., the water I get from the public water utility flowing out of my tap, streets that I drive on, etc.) or have to infer it (e.g., it seems like there are fewer homeless people on the streets, my friends aren't quite as worried about losing their jobs, etc.), but it surely must have done someone some good and was generally applied in a manner that was intended to further the common good.

No, but you voluntarily chose to spend that long on your taxes. Perhaps a different option would have been to just spend a day or less on your taxes, pay whatever the number come out to with a day's worth of effort, and then spend five or six weeks being paid to do something more productive -- you might have actually made more money than you had to pay in, right?

Probably not, but the limit of that line of thinking is that unless we're all working every waking hour, we're not operating in society's best interest or making the most of our creativity.

What you did was no worse for society than if you had, say, a neighbor who didn't happen to owe any taxes either and chose to spend 5 or 6 weeks out at his primitive fishing cabin just alternating between fishing, reading some good books, and sleeping. :-)

Yes, I agree there's some tipping point where that happens. Maybe we're already there?

No, but these days in most states there's no means whatsoever to have the state permanently feed you; if you don't keep hunting you're going to starve. (Although anyone who actually gets to the point of exhausting their lifetime welfare benefits is likely mentally ill and in need of serious help.)

---Joel

Say James,

Here an interesting article to ponder:

In brief: If you (the taxpayer) stop a subsidy for the purchase of contraceptives, at least on the college campus studied, while the amount of sex does drop, the number of unplanned pregnancies actually increases.

I'd say that the cost of those additional unplanned pregnancies is high enough that it's preferable to subsidize the cost of contraceptives instead. What say you? :-)

Humans are surprisingly irrational creatures...

---Joel

What makes you think that? I've never had an opportunity to look at one. I dealt with Australian and UK tax forms without any difficulty when I was younger, but these days I can afford to leave the job to specialists.

Your untrammelled "free market" activities have buried quite a few people - search on "banana republics" for a few examples. If I'd been born a bit later, it might have buried me in Vietnam along with a few other Australian conscripts who got caught up in your imperial ambitions. Pearl Harbour represents a Japanese attempt to carve out a Japanese "greater east Asia co-prosperity sphere"

from the one the US was busy setting up. My younger brother did even better than I did, being born six weeks premature and six hours too soon to be eligible for conscription into that nasty little war. Do you remember the "domino" theory that was supposed to justify it?

ws him to prohibit Catholic beliefs.

What he actually said was that the Catholic Church had to pay for health insurance for their employers which covered stuff - contraception and abortion - that the Catholic Church doesn't approve of. That isn't prohibiting belief, it's just pointing out that in a democracy, the laws passed by the legislature apply to everybody, including people who don't happen to agree with them.

The Church is free to tell everybody that it's a sin to take advantage of these services but it isn't free to deprive it's employees of access to these services.

Granting that Tea Party would have blocked any confirmation, he didn't have a lot of choice.

Health care is commerce? You are a barbarian. But in the US the Good Samaritan would have been prosecuted for practising medicine without a license, and sued for malpractice if the guy he rescued didn't recover completely. The untramelled free market does tend to leave footprints on its customers.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

No.

Nor would I blame anyone who felt the U.S. had become that lop-sided to be vociferously rallying for change... or considering moving to another country. :-)

I think those six are working in management, marketing and sales? ;-)

But seriously, though, it is a bit ironic that in this country people who do the most break-backing crappiest jobs typically make very little compared to those who get to sit in a posh office all day and work on spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. I know, I know, supply and demand and skill-sets and all, but it's still ironic.

---Joel

Well, the Wall Street Journal hasn't bothered to pick up whatever it was you thought that you could read into the video.

You may want to believe that, but every society of which I've been a member has had - and exercised - that right. What's depressing about yours is that they haven't exercised their right to convict your bankers of fraud and set them to work in a chain-gang.

So you admit you can't get a job, just like me. My current excuse is that I'm 69. What's yours?

You may like to think so, in the same way that you like to think that "Society has no right to compel one person to labour for another." but you happen to be deluding yourself here too. And quite blatantly enough that nobody is going to take you seriously.

Why should I bother? I'm not in a position to vote for the guy. Or even vote against the Republican clown car.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

f

Or so you claim. Taking money from you and spending it on roads and bridges, the police and the defences forces, is harmful to the common good?

Which part of cloud-cuckoo-land do you inhabit?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

"No" on the actively looking for jobs. "Yes" on the raising families, basket-weaving and entitlement-studies degrees, etc.

You simply don't understand it at all. About half the people I encounter these days don't work, don't want to, and get checks. The excuses are various.

No they don't, not enough to pay their way.

After you've worked 14 hours on a given day, the remaining hours become markedly more and more precious to you, yet you're allowed to keep less and less of each one if used to produce things (goods and services) for society. That is, your hourly pay plummets. So why bother?

Thus, people work less than they would have. Less is made. Society is poorer.

That's basic econ.

It reduces your incentive to work harder, and the recipient's incentive to work at all. Less work is done as a result.

But you're not understanding what the money's used for, or how much is spent on what. I envy you that.

You're still not getting it at all. You keep talking as if

85% of the money is going to infrastructure, instead of 5-10%. You're also assuming that the guy paying gets any benefit or pleasure whatsoever of the transfer expenditure, when he DOES NOT.

Let's try it like this: if you take an extra $30k from an employer, how many extra people will he hire? How much extra product will he produce? How will it affect his prices?

Now you give that $30k to 1,000 slackers. How many people will they hire? What will they produce (not consume, produce)?

The HECK I did!!! They threatened me. They were dead wrong, too, but they have prisons and guns.

I'd be in court or in jail. Or I could've spent 3/4 as much time and paid someone else three-week's pay to finish what I did, and trade infinite phone calls, etc., for a worse result.

You describe a fuzzy theoretical world I've not seen, where SNAP and WIC and what-not produce productive college graduates.

In real actual life, where I live it produces large families of high-school drop-outs, who in turn start large families themselves, plus criminals, and drug addicts.

Most of the people I encounter today are on permanent handouts, and live to a higher standard than mine, based on a wide range of excuses and gov't handouts.

--
Best,
James Arthur

t

I think James Arthur is confusing doing work and making money.

When Mitt Romney, Warren Buffett and a bunch of Wall Street bankers start labouring in a field, we might start talking this argument seriously. What they are actually doing is creaming off the results of other peoples work - not labour, that's mostly done by machines these days - and it's justified because they organise that work so it's more productive than it might otherwise be.

It's all complicated stuff that depends on society providing a lot of infra-structure to support it, and it's not unreasonable that they turn over a larger share of what they earn to society than do people whose productivity is more localised.

Does Warren Buffett work a 56,000 hour week? The US median income is about $45,000 per year, and Warren Buffett made $62,900,000 in 2010

James Arthur has Warren Buffett labouring in a field, and he thinks he can claim that I'm confused.

,

Because I've though about it, and come to conclusions that differ from those of James Arthur? Clearly, I don't understand it the way he does, and he should sue whoever taught him to "understand' it in the way that he does.

And James Arthur's serious thought and reading have yet to get him to the point where he can tell the difference between socialism and communism. His efforts so far have promoted him to the dizzy height of being a deluded idiot.

If he really applies himself he may yet work his way up to gullible fool.

Where the Republican clown car would have swept to success ...

At least James is good for a laugh.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Sure, I can accept that that's what you're seeing. But to me it means we need to work on enforcing the rules of the system -- I'd wager that the many of those people you're meeting who "don't work and don't want to and still get checks" are violating one of the many rules they agreed to in order to receive entitlements.

Perhaps not monetarily. In some cases I might judge those people to be lazy bums... but in others I might judge them to be legitimately down on their luck and/or truly unable to contribute to society in a way that monetarily would be above break-even. Until I know their individual situation, I'm not going to be too bothered that they *might* be abusing the system.

I believe the rule of thumb is that because, if you do manage to make it to at least $1M/year, you're then going in the other direction, able to keep more and more of it again? :-)

I guess for myself -- and I think this applies to a lot of people -- if I'm performing some menial jobs like laying bricks, yeah, I won't be encouraged to work more and more. But I have a good job, one that's fun and challenging, and I don't even think about the money on a regular basis -- what motivates me to work more is finding new and interesting puzzles to solve, not so much the prospect of making more money. In fact, being salaried, I directly cut into my own hourly rate by working overtime, right? This does little to deter me, though. :-)

The flaw in your logic, I think, is believing that money is primarily what motivates people. For an awful lot of people, IMO that's only a small part of it; it's not untrue to say that many people will gladly work for less money if they can obtain a more interesting job or more interesting people to work with.

He won't hire new people... although he might actually have the exact same number of employees (or more!) as if you hadn't taken the money from him: If the $30k went to some educational campaign, there might be more worked trained to do what he needs and hence the cost to hire such workers will now be cheaper... or the $30k goes into road improvements or city revitalization programs that makes the town more attractive for people to move into and thereby also makes labor cheaper... etc.

The overall effect is often very difficult to discern.

I'm not going to stand here and claim that taxes don't hurt -- certainly at some level they do, and it does harm the economy -- but I also don't think an analysis as simplistic as "you either take $30k from the company or not, and everything else remains static" is realistic either.

That all being said, I do sometimes think Larkin is correct in promoting no corporate taxes, just personal taxes.

Long-term they might start many businesses and hence hire many people. It's a bit of a gamble -- you can't run your society based only on short-term outcomes. (If you did, you'd never have public schools -- those take upwards of a couple decades to produce anything useful! :-) )

If you're nice about it they might apologize once you point out there error? :-) On behalf of the rest of society here, I'm sorry that they made a mistake.

It's not 100% college graduates, but they do produce some as well as manage to get some people employed when they otherwise wouldn't be, which is good.

Well, as I say, I suspect a lot of those people are violating the rules of the entitlement programs they're enrolled in. I fully support your turning those people in, as doing so is not only unfair to you and me, but to all the people who do play by the rules while on those programs.

---Joel

I linked you one when we were discussing who paid how much tax. You didn't understand it, mixed everything up.

--=20 Cheers, James Arthur

lows him to prohibit Catholic beliefs.

Compelling people to do things against their religion is a flat-out violation of the First Amendment. Obama will lose 9-0 in the Supreme Court, but that'll take three years. That gives him three years to crush the Catholics' spirit, so to speak.

What a stupid argument. The church pays its employees. They get something in exchange for their services. We call it "money." You can trade "money" for stuff you want. It's really cool. That's why people work. To get "money."

All they have to do is buy it themselves. Anything they want. Or do you say the church is depriving people of toilet paper, since the church doesn't hand that out free? And chewing gum? Shoes? Are mosques depriving their employees of ham sandwiches? =20

Ignorant. It is exactly the reason for the requirement that all parties reasonably agree. Obama's thwarted that, illegally appointing extremists specifically to thwart the Constitution.

Obama says so in the law, if you RTM. And he says he can compel it BECAUSE it's commerce.

--=20 Cheers, James Arthur