OT: Tax the rich???

Do *NOT* confuse me with the facts!

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I live in the Neterhlands, and nobody starves here either.

My comments were ironic. Poor people in the US notoriously do a lot worrse than poor people in Europe (or at least the advanced industrial countries of Western Europe, where the social security system works pretty well).

What aspect of European life strikes Les Cargill as comparable with the life of the European poor escapes me - he's probably thinking in terms of population density, which is a lot higher in Europe than it is in most of the US. He's probably never been to New York, and doesn't know the difference between a tenement and an apartment building.

The UK diet in WW2 was monitored to make sure that it was nutritionally complete and more or less balanced. The Scots do worse than the English, basicaly because the Scots don't eat much in the way of vegetables.

In fact the public health indices in the UK are better than those in the US because the poor get better medical care - the National Health Service works remarkably well, particularly when you consider how little it costs, and the UK social security system provides a rather higher level of support for the desperately poor than the US equivalents.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

OK, draw a graph of tax revenue versus tax rate. If you don't accept the Laffer concept, you must believe that the curve trends ever upward, past 90%, past 250%, past 9000%.

I'm sure glad you don't design electronics.

Short term, sure. Long term, probably not. Things like time-varying effects confuse leftists who never actually got comfortable with arithmetic, much less algebra. Class envy is all they need to make economic policy.

There are way too many brain-damaged leftists who do exactly that.

John

Investopedia begs to differ:

"What Does Subsidy Mean? A benefit given by the government to groups or individuals usually in the form of a cash payment or tax reduction."

The link I posted had this: "The conceptual argument against tax breaks being subsidies is that tax breaks let you keep your money, but subsidies are government handouts. But is there really much difference between the government saying ?Give us $X, or $X-500 if you own a dog? and the goverment saying ?Give us $X. If you own a dog, we?ll give you $500 back??"

That's all I meant. Net-net, works out the same.

I see your point, though. In practice, tax credits are often used as subsidies. The Cato link down this post bluntly says "depends on the intent."

I would agree about the child tax deduction ( but deductions are not credits).

Oil companies don't get subsidies or credits that other industrial or mining entities don't also get. *That* is what rings false about the stories we get about oil company subsidies. I was speaking more in general (and should have said as much).

But some folks think there's more to it than that:

Well, I would not have made that ... deduction :)

-- Les Cargill

Skis can steer!

Except an entire planet.

John

Like I keep trying to tell you, that's what the parachute is for. And if you're not totally brain-locked, it's not that difficult to pack a 'chute properly. And you always have a spare if you were really really drunk when you packed yours.

But I'll stop trying to convince you, like you said, I'm insane.

It was interesting in training, the instructor straps you into the harness, you step off the platform, and the instructor drills you. When he says "malfunction," if you look at him, he'll say, "Don't look at me! The only one up there with you is God, and he don't talk to skydivers; he thinks we're crazy."

Maybe that's the attraction - there's nobody up there to save me but me.

I guess it feels kinda like Freedom. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

You stupid twit. You think the 35% is the ONLY tax they pay? Then there is state tax (10+% in California), social security tax (13%), medicare tax (1.4%), property tax, sales tax (9.75% in LA) excise tax on liquor, tires, jewelry, gasoline. Every time you turn around they want more, So stop with your sanctimonious preaching and stop telling us what YOU think WE should pay. I'm sure glad you're on the other side of the pond.

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The Stones didn't so much leave as change their official place of residence for tax purposes. They still kept large houses in the UK and lived in them for at least part of the year.

Ronald Regan is a great story of a dim actor playing at being president. Whoever puled his strings made sure that he gave speeches that appealed to his electorate. They were less careful about what they did with the country, which started running a massive balance of trade deficit back then which nobody since has been able to reverse.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Why must I believe that? This is a fatuous straw man, and even you should have enough sense to realise ji=3Dust how fatuous it is.

The real problem with the Laffer curve is that there is a different one for every business. Obviously, if you tax any activity sufficiently heavily you will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, but in as far as anybody has dug into it the peak often seems to lie at around a 70% tax take, which is way higher than you pay on anything in the US.

Granting your enthusiasm for jumping to ill-supported, no to say downright nonsensical conclusions, it's a miracle that you company designs anything that works - you must have hired some rational subordinates before your brains turned to mush.

The sort of fatuous claim that may go over well around the Republican cocktail party circuit. The Fabian Society made its mark by collecting and publicising statistical evidence about the way society actually worked - not a habit that has ever caught on in right-wing circles, who are fonder of unsupported but superficially attractive hypotheses

- like the Laffer Curve - that can be laid out on a paper napkin during a liquid lunch.

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Actually, you are the stupid twit. The entire discussion is about income tax - not sales tax, medicare tax, social security tax, excise tax or whatever. That how Rich Grise framed the question in his original post, and that's what we are talking about.

We all know that income tax isn't the only tax, but the others aren't under discussion here, and only nit-wit with a passion for introducing irrelevancies would have tried to introduce them.

Not - I must point out - to make any kind of relevant or useful point, but merely as an excuse for introducing an element of personal abuse.

Happily, this makes it crystal clear that you are the stupid twit here.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

found:

No, then pay your 6.5% SS and 1.4% Medicare, now you have

42.9%. So with the 57.1% you have left you pay sales tax, meaning the real rate is higher 9.75% / .571 = 17% and that goes on for all the rest of the excise taxes. It's worse than you think. And why is there ever any comparison with other countries rates. If someone likes higher tax rates, let them move. Mikek

Both capped, so additional tax is 0% above a relatively low income level (equivalent of 70-80k Euros, IIRC), no?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

I didn't say you were insane. I said skydiving is insane. The death rate is appalling, even for "experts."

I've tried it. It felt mostly like boredom, since you spend about 99% of the day not doing it.

John

Here are some timely examples...

1) raise the cigarette tax in New York =3D=3D> revenues dive. OMdhjTn5Brkz9iZGNqL

2) Millionaires who pay no tax, explained (CNN)

"At a time of record deficits, it's not unreasonable to say the rich should pay more, when the law allows even 1% of millionaires to owe nothing in federal income tax."

Absurd, of course. It's not like all that massive deficit overspending is doing anything useful. Most ranges from either useless to flat-out harmful.

All we have to do is spend less. Spend less. There, that wasn't so hard, was it?

Even CNN ends with this startling confession: "But keep in mind that boosting taxes on the rich by itself won't come close to solving the country's fiscal problems for a number of reasons. Most notably, there simply aren't enough of them."

True dat. The deficit's $1,645 billion a year. President Obama's "rich" tax only raises $35 billion.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Oh, that silliness again... ;-)

But, what is Wealth? Do you mean possessions? Or savings? Or stocks and bonds? or only real property? What ever you choose, you are wrong! 8-)

Charlie

Taxing wealth destroys it, obviously. And eliminates the desire to pursue or create it. Everyone loses.

If my neighbor works hard and builds something valuable, how does that hurt me? It doesn't. I'm glad for him, not jealous. If anything, it shows me what's possible, inspires me to do more. But that's me...

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Wouldn't it be fairer to say that, "taxing wealth tends to *devalue* it, and

*decreases* the desire to pursue or create it?"

It *might* have hurt you if, in the process of building something valuable, he polluted the air, water, EM spectrum, or any other shared resource you have with him.

Heck, even independent of shared resource considerations, it's very possible that your neighbor's technological innovations might put you out of business (see, e.g., buggy manufacturers...). That fact shouldn't in any way be used to try to discourage innovation -- as, unfortunately, trade groups often try to do -- but it does suggest that a decent use of government dollars may be to pay for some educational assitance programs so that people are retrained... and re-training is a lot cheaper than welfare.

---Joel

found:

capability.

Believe in natural selection. The bad investors lose their money. The good ones make more and re-invest that. Out of a large population, the best investors wind up investing the most.

There is no natural selection working to improve the quality of governmant spending. Usually failure of a program leads to more spending on it, not less.

I have never seen an Exxon propaganda ad. I can't recall a single Exxon ad of any sort. I never watch commercial TV.

John