The value of the dollar is a lot more for someone who is poor than for someone who is rich. This is what we refer to when someone says "because the rich can afford it." 10% to someone making $10,000 is $1,000. That leaves them with $9,000 to spend on food, housing, etc.
To someone making $1,000,000, 10% is just $100,000. Sure, that's 100x what the poor person is paying, but the rich person has a whopping 900,000 to spend for the
same exact things the poor man has $9,000 to spend. This is why flat taxes do not and can not work. It disadvantages the poor and working class, because costs
do not scale.
What? I didn't hear you over the sound of
facts.
What is this thing you refer to that has "stood us in good stead."
First, the wealth distribution is sickening in this country. We are a third-world country, the wealth should be falling from the top and to the bottom,
as Reagan promised.
With that, the wealthy still aren't paying their share of taxes, and neither is the upper class. It's all burdened on the poor and middle class.
Third.
How am I supposed to "get a clue" if you can't actually articulate how you think this is a free-ride for people. While you're at it, define a "free-ride."
I reject your claims without evidence. Statistics from both the Census bureau and show that these programs
do work.
The 2011 Statistical Abstract: Social Insurance & Human Services
I'll have to find the testimony, but some research that was done into the effectiveness a program found two interesting results. One was that the vast majority of people that had ever used AFDC were on it for a period of a few months (which was essentially people falling on hard times). The
vast majority of them. Welfare ate them up and spit them out pretty quickly.
The other finding was seemingly contradictory. It found that at any given time, 70% of the people on welfare had been using it for two years. When taken as a single snapshot, welfare looks abused, because 70% of the people that were on AFDC at that given time were on it for a long period. But that group of people was over-represented, because it didn't account for the
millions that passed through, on welfare for a period of a few months. Find the abusers and stop them, but don't throw the baby out with the bath-water.
You are but a small part of a larger society. The total health of the society is considered as well as the health of individuals. It is your responsibility to be a functional member of society. For those that have trouble being functional members, we
aid them to do so--which evidence shows to work. If you don't need the help--don't take it, no one is forcing you. But for those that do need it, we have it. That's the purpose of welfare.
Because they contain the greatest wealth, and the value of a dollar is less to them than to us, as I've mentioned over a dozen times, is because costs
do not scale to your income or your wealth. A $5 sandwich is $5 to me and $5 to Bill Gates. The difference is, I have significantly less wealth proportionally after having bought that sandwich that Bill Gates does. As a result, my money is more valuable per dollar.
Combine that with the economy functioning from demand-side economics, and if 80-90% of your population
can't afford to spend money, you don't have an economy. The tax burden is there because they can afford it.
Because the greatest wealth is concentrated in the smallest hands. The poor may be great in number, but not in power or money. You can't run a country on 35 pence.
A republic protects against the tyranny of a singular democratic majority. It is there to protect minorities from destruction by a majority. However, a tremendously wealthy power-elite don't need protection if they are causing the harm in the first place.
Of the poor and middle-class, of 80 to 90 percent of the populace.
If your market is over taxed and has no money to spend, you have no demand for the goods you produce. You can create supply all you want, but that isn't going to create a demand for those products. The easiest way to explain the failure of trickle-down economics.
We grind to a halt because the market has no wealth and is over-taxed. Reducing taxes on the poor and middle class, and moving it back to the wealthy--who've always paid higher taxes (as described above) will free up middle-class to accrue wealth. With wealth comes demand, with demand comes an economy.
Which practices?
Which regulations?
The benefits of social programs far outweigh the costs. It widens the tax base and improves the nation's GDP, everything a budging conservative wants.
Clever, but backwards. The rich control a variety of politicians, particularly ones disinteRested in the common good. These politicians that aren't interested in the common good, are interested in among other things, the lining of their own pockets.
The poor, despite your disillusioned beliefs, don't actually want to be poor. Which is why the majority of them end up
not on welfare. Those "handouts" like police departments, public schools, and national parks,
benefit this nation in positive ways that could not be accomplished or trusted in private hands. Ethics is disinterested in war for profit.
This isn't a class war. It's reality we're trying to deal with. A section of this country is tremendously wealthy, and they aren't paying their dues. Some are more than willing to do so (read: Soros, Gates, Buffet, etc.) Some Aren't. (Read: Murdoch).
In what way?
Name one it doesn't have Authority to commence.
Explain how.
I've already shown explicitly how damaging flat-taxes, no matter how ancient you want to go, are dangerous. Flat-taxes destroy the poor and concentrate wealth, just as we have now, in the upper classes.
Maybe this is why it was abandoned for a progressive income tax?
They were found to be direct taxes, which had to be apportioned via constitution. Subsequent precedences and laws found that taxation of income is an indirect tax--which it is as a result of being a transfer of labor to currency, and not property to currency--and as such liable to being taxed without apportion to the states.
That is to say, so that wealthy people couldn't get away with very few taxes for the wealth they began to accuulate. The apportionment of direct taxes was devised so that property owners--in this case the Southerns, who had large tracts of land and lots of slave property, didn't have to pay gargantuan taxes on their property which didn't actually provide much income.
So, you were going to say something else?
Except this isn't the case at all! Indirect taxes existed before the 16th amendment, income was never oridingally taxed, however. When income was taxed directly, it was found unconstitutional. Only by defining it as an
indirect tax was congress able to tax income. And you know what? They were right, because congress expressed concern over the increase in wealth of the top classes of people, because their incomes far exceeded the working poor of that time.
Where else are we experiencing this?
What are we overspending on? There is a correct answer, let's see if you get it right.
Except as consistently demonstrated, flat taxes
don't share the burden.
What "incentive" is there to buying votes that didn't exist prior? Those flat taxes only existed for property. And indirect taxes were subject to the taxation, as I believe you put it, "whims" of congress. That included capital and transfer taxes. The direct tax appropriations were
specifically limited to individuals and their property, and only because the south had
lots of property that didn't earn them much income.
What claim that they don't care?
To mandate people pay higher taxes to be more in proportion with their accumulated wealth? How is this against a free society? Nobody is forced to pay their taxes, but they'll suffer consequenes for doing it. These things called "laws" pretty much govern every action we do. I guess that means no one is totally free because we have to drive on the right side of the road?
My goodness, where did all this straw come from.
Yes, we do. And even still, people are attacking education like crazy.
No, demand does. Education creates competent workers, who can
fill jobs.
25% of the populace has
some college. That leaves 75% of the people with nothing. They are left with little more than high-school educations or worse. Our economy and workforce
needs to be smarter, especially considering the number of positions we have open that no one is filling because
no one has the skills for them. Welfare needs to include some kind of post-secondary education as well, to get people into jobs. With the way welfare works now, it isn't give us our best bang for the buck. I covered this previously in this thread.
Ambiguous phrasing. It takes many people to build a bridge, including architects, engineers, and scientists.
In what way?
The "achievements" which destroy our quality of life are not achievements. There is no travesty in the regulation of nuclear waste, not atrocity in limits on pollution in our air.
Don't bring that **** here.
Money is power, and the rich have all of it.
The recent Wal-Mart case was a travesty, where millions of poor, working-class women were
denied their legal rights because the Supreme Court felt that the case was too diverse? That each women now had to take on Wal-Mart by themselves, their $200 a month extra for a lawyer against the 200 a month Lawyer's Wal-Mart had in their army.
It's a simple fact. The peon doesn't have wealth, and doesn't have power. In aggregate, we get it--which is why we have Unions and special interest groups. As a collective, we have power. As a single person, the poor don't. The wealthy have
tremendous power as individuals, so take your sycophant bull**** elsewhere.
"More taxes" does not equal "more government."
More government doesn't give wealthy people any more power than it gives to the poor, because the government, in terms of this republic,
is the power. The government denatures power from the wealthy and from the poor, and brokers it. The problem is that the wealthy through the corrupting influence of wealth have empowered themselves with government, not the other way around.
People see any laws that protect
anyone as "more government." What they don't see as "more government" is the explosion of the Defense Department's budget, which has continued to go up and up and up. What they don't see is the continued funding of redundant agencies. What they do see is funding of
beneficial programs. Their minds are warped by conservative malinformation.
Meanwhile, poor people are still poor and conservatives have no solutions that work to help.
Social Security was something endorsed by the founding fathers. I'm pretty sure you've tried repeatedly to use this line of argument on me in order to abolish taxes, why wouldn't work to keep them?
That's not actually how Social Security works. $10 a paycheck, 26 paychecks...$260 a year?
This doesn't actually help at all, because it doesn't actually help people that can't help themselves, which is one of the purposes of welfare in the first place. When people are spending every penny they earn on goods and services because they don't make a living wage, they can't save anything. Your argument fails. I've addressed that above as well. "Promoting" isn't just about talk--talk is cheap. It's about enacting programs that
promote general welfare of society as well, just as anti-
biotics promote good health.
I'll suggest something equally radical from the "left" side of the camp. Let's nationalize all of the Oil industry.
Instead of cutting taxes which are actually used for good, how about we shift the tax burden from the poor and middle-class, who are over-paying, to the wealthy, who are under-paying. That way, we free up 90% of the country's spending power, and get the country moving again. Social Security and Medicare are beans compared to what we could save by cutting taxes in half for the middle-class and working poor, and increasing it by 10 to 15 percent on the wealthy, back to where they would be paying their fair share.
Bases.
Actually a good idea with exceptions. One of the reasons we have bases is to provide global outreach of power if needed. We don't need a hundred over-sea bases, but half that would probably suffice. In the meantime, we should be cutting corporate welfare for defense industry contractors as well who haven't actually provided a product in
years.
Here is where we disagree. Roughly 25% of the budget goes to defense, Medicair, and Social Security. As I stated, one of those is paid for by its own tax.
Everything else falls under the other 25%. I see no reason to cut "as much as possible." A lot of things we enjoy today would not exist without government spending, subsidizing, and the like. For example, lasers. Our "pet projects" benefit us in unseen ways.
I don't see the reason why polluting our water, or following this lie of supply-side economics would do anything of value. You can't create an economy by taking regulations and taxes of corporations. We can't compete with the power of China's manufacturing base. They pay their employees beans. We can't simply isolate the U.S. from the global economy, because we can't pay
our people in beans.
If you want to move this economy, you have to get money back to the 90% market, which means shifting the tax burden from everyone else to the wealthy, who have less value for each dollar. You require demand before you even think about supply. If there is no demand for a product, no amount of tax cuts or deregulation will create demand.
Flat-tax
doesn't work. You'll cripple the spending power of the majority who's contributions even now are about 18% of the revenue. Jacking that up might bring more wealthy into the government, but it'll completely destroy the spending power because people will have
even less to spend than they already do. If you want to increase revenues,
you must take it from someone who already has wealth. Or, alternatively, rebalance the tax-burdens so that people can go off and buy things, which builds the economy and now we can talk about paying off the debt. We need to close the deficit, and you aren't going to get there by raising taxes or lowering the spending power on the middle-class and working poor.
"reduce government" in what way? Throwing out social safety nets which keep people solvent? Killing the poor and elderly? Lowering our standards of living? Nothing you've really offered, with the exception of cutting defense spending, has actually been of any use.
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