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That is a famous quote attributed to Margaret Thatcher. But is it true?
If you can find a way to tax the poor without taxing the middle class - i.e. redistribute income upward - isn't that infinitely sustainable, since soaking the poor does not make them disappear?
You can't soak the poor. Most "poor" people simply do not pay enough taxes. They take the standard deduction and get a good chunk of the taxes they paid back.
You can't soak the poor. Most "poor" people simply do not pay enough taxes. They take the standard deduction and get a good chunk of the taxes they paid back.
In Michigan, the school property tax rate on rental property - where the poor generally live - is four times the rate on owner-occupied primary residences. Without the higher tax rate on rental property, school tax rates on owner-occupied homes would more than double. This higher tax rate on the rented homes of the poor produces stable, sustainable, increasing tax revenue, as the poor have not responded by buying homes and thereby slashing their property tax rates.
Wherever did you get the idea that you can't soak the poor? What are the poor going to do about it?
In Michigan, the school property tax rate on rental property - where the poor generally live - is four times the rate on owner-occupied primary residences. Without the higher tax rate on rental property, school tax rates on owner-occupied homes would more than double. This higher tax rate on the rented homes of the poor produces stable, sustainable, increasing tax revenue, as the poor have not responded by buying homes and thereby slashing their property tax rates.
Wherever did you get the idea that you can't soak the poor? What are the poor going to do about it?
You're paying for the use of a property by renting it. That's it. Period
What the LL does with the money isn't your problem. The LL pays his taxes fees etc. he pays those taxes regardless of a renter occupying the property. The LL is going to charge the most he can as long as the market supports the rent amount. He's not going to drop the rent price because all of the sudden taxes got lower
Wherever do you get the idea that the world owes the poor something. You dont want to get soaked renting n .Michigan? Don't be a renter in Michigan
Socialism fails. Period.
It fails when it runs out of other people's money.
It fails when it runs out of other people's children to tax. (Europe's dilemma)
It fails when it relies on money madness - as if redistribution of money brings prosperity.
If money really solved poverty, let's give everyone an equal amount of stupendous wealth in money tokens. Everyone is equally "rich" - no one 'needs' money ever again. So who's going to trade their labor and property for money that they don't need? Who is going to work, manufacture, ship, store, sell, deliver goods and services? Even the starving children are fabulously wealthy.
What about socialism for the rich and spending our kids and grandkids money to protect the status quo today?
Yes, socialism and welfare for the rich, how come no one is concerned about that??? Lower taxes, zero and near zero interest rates for all those years, QE1, QE2, QE3 those are all welfare programs for the rich, socialism for the rich.
All governments will be run by, and for the benefit of, the Rich. Nothing can ever change that.
To stay Rich, they must push the vast majority taxes on the Working Class (since the poor don’t have enough income to pay for a gigantic Big Government). They tell us they are going to “Make the Rich pay more taxes” and the idiot public cheers—not understanding that “the Rich” who will be paying more are Working Class stiffs in their peak earning years, who are trying to get their kids thru college and save for retirement.
The Ruling Class knows that it has to keep a good portion of the population from being angry enough to organize & revolt, and this is why we have these very generous welfare systems—again paid for by the Working Class.
Whenever you hear some filthy rich celebrity like Bill Gates preach that the Rich should pay more taxes, ask yourself: why he doesn’t just SEND some extra money to Washington? Instead, he & his rich cronies set up “charitable” organizations that also pay no taxes, but make them look so very generous. What a joke!
There is ONE answer to getting the best government possible—it is getting the SMALLEST government possible, and starving it of money by severely limiting the ways it can confiscate money. That was America, before the crooks managed to get an income tax on the Working Class.
What about socialism for the rich and spending our kids and grandkids money to protect the status quo today?
Yes, socialism and welfare for the rich, how come no one is concerned about that??? Lower taxes, zero and near zero interest rates for all those years, QE1, QE2, QE3 those are all welfare programs for the rich, socialism for the rich.
Somebody knows economics! And with that saidyou need a mix of capitalism and and socialism both coperate socialism and citizen socialism. Complete Capitalism emplods on its self. The rich keep the money and eventually there is no middle class and no one to consume what the rich produce!
I love all the myths I see about socialism. It's all a load of utter crap.
First, you don't "run out of other people's money." That would only happen if you only taxed everyone ONCE and then never again. What I find extremely entertaining is that this exceedingly biased and uneducated look at socialism is only used to bash the poor. Yet the American military -- which receives more money than the next highest 20 nations combined (including all of our potential adversaries from China to Iran to North Korea) -- is an entirely socialist organization. Even the pay is in line with communism. Everyone receives the same pay regardless of what your career path is. A nuclear physicist who works to keep the boomers and hunter-killers going makes the same amount of money as the guy who washes the dishes in the galley -- if they're the same rank. Of course, in communism, pay scaled with your rank in the party rather than your military rank.
YET for SOME bizarre reason, you don't see everyone who joins the military lining up to be dish washers.
No one seems to care when we spend lavishly on a socialist/communist system like the military, but when it comes to the sick, the poor, the disabled, suddenly socialism is an abject failure. Strange how it seems to work for the military ... you don't see it collapsing into chaos. How come we haven't run out of other people's money to fund warfare?
Hmm ... strange how that works, isn't it ... ?
Obviously, bashing socialism isn't about objective truth at all but the same tired whine about using taxation to help our nation's most vulnerable. Just think how much extra business the Cayman Islands would get if we just said "to hell with the poor" and let businesses and the wealthy keep the money they pay in taxes to fund social programs -- because that's where the money would go, not back into the economy.
Businesses don't create jobs because they care about you and want you to have a nice, comfy life. No. They only create jobs when demand exceeds their ability to provide for it. Meaning you can lower their taxes down to literally nothing and they still won't create even a single job unless they have to. All of that extra money would just go to CEO and board member bonuses and offshore tax havens like the Caymans.
Meanwhile, the poor would be rising up in numbers exceeding a hundred million.
Yeah, it's easy to say they should get a job, but keep in mind that jobs available for the bottom half of the IQ pool are disappearing as fast as snow melts in July. Even now, some 7 million low-paying jobs are expected to disappear within the next few years due to advances in automation. In fact 600 of those 800 jobs Trump supposedly saved at Carrier disappeared due to automation.
Not everyone -- in fact, very few -- have both the aptitude and the intelligence to go to college at all, much less to become an engineer, a computer programmer, or other high tech vocation.
Eventually, the only jobs available for these people will be a handful of those vocations whereby people want to deal with a human being and not a machine. Yet even those vocations risk being automated; if all companies do it, consumers won't have a choice but to deal with machines whether they like it or not. A good example: electronic phone trees. ("Press 1 for English ...")
As for socialism de-incentivizing people to want to succeed -- or work at all -- is just bogus. You're thinking of communism where everyone receives essentially the same salary no matter how difficult the job. That's not what socialism does.
Despite that, however, capitalism as it stands now is completely unsustainable. Those nations that have adopted socialistic policies are actually doing the best in just about every measurable way, from literacy rates to life expectancy to crime to happiness quotients. America, which used to have the best standard of living in the world -- is now ranked in 11th place. Odd how those nations with a good dose of socialism hold the 1st through 10th place slots.
I'm not saying that socialism is the answer to poverty, either, but without it, those who ARE impoverished would simply become homeless and hungry -- including a lot of people who actually work.
As I said, that quotation attributed to Thatcher is both factually and fundamentally wrong -- it's a stupid meme invented in the 80's during the Cold War when we were still battling the evil, "Godless" socialists in the Soviet Union. Six decades of that has made a lot of people heavily biased against anything involving socialism -- and no matter how many times one tries to point out the many and varied successes of socialism, people in this country would rather stick their heads in the sand and scream, "I'm not listening!"
Unless we come up with an alternative to the standard economic model of getting a job, earning a paycheck, and using the paycheck to survive, we will end up regressing back to a feudalistic state with a tiny group of super-rich folks constituting royalty, a slightly larger group that Citibank called the "managerial aristocracy" and hundreds of millions of impoverished peasants, many of whom will be literally starving and living on the streets.
I know dire warnings like this are rarely ever heeded, but think about it -- with jobs disappearing while the human species adds another billion people to this planet every 11 years, where else do you think we'll end up?
Finally -- if socialism is such an abject failure, why is it that America is the ONLY nation in the world that does not have a universal (socialist) health care system? We're also the only society that, when diagnosed with a life threatening illness, worries more about how they'll afford the treatment rather than whether or not they'll DIE or if it will keep them from doing the things they love. What a flagrant cruelty that a person in this country is more afraid of their illness wiping them out financially and destroying the lives of his family than he is of actually dying of his illness. It's a burden someone who is seriously ill shouldn't have to contemplate.
In any event, the rest of the world -- I literally mean every nation -- wouldn't have moved in that direction if it didn't have merits; if it always fails.
People need to stop spreading myths and using anti-socialist rhetoric when it becomes convenient in a topic about the poor. It's funny how, when socialism suits them (such as a taxpayer funded police force) it's perfectly fine. But when socialism helps someone ELSE, it's a total failure and should be eliminated.98
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