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You already have over 50% that pay no Federal Income Tax; they get back what they've paid in and sometimes more.
People working min wage will not have more money to spend as long as the cost of living is high.
Yet, so many conservatives believe the minimum wage should be abolished. If that was done, I wonder how far pay would decline and how many, many more people would become eligible to go on welfare, like food stamps?
So it's important to grasp that it's absolute rubbish to think that President Obama didn't need massive help from society on his way to being president?
A good reminder that sometimes when people get "massive help" or use massive resources to get where they are, they might not deserve to be there, or they might just screw it up and cause more damage and take away the opportunity for that "massive help" to be redistributed to others.
Yet, so many conservatives believe the minimum wage should be abolished. If that was done, I wonder how far pay would decline and how many, many more people would become eligible to go on welfare, like food stamps?
Well big business has gone to DC about that. They don't think we need a min wage law. And these are the very companies that have already offshored so what do they really have to lose ?
Globalism is already eating away at our labor structure so why worry about min wage ? Other countries are producing what we used to at a fraction of the labor cost and there is not a damn thing we can do about it.
Interestingly, I never saw anyone else up with me at 2:00 am when I was starting my small business. Well occassionally my husband. I remember one horrible week we spent holding 2 babies with RSV on our laps in the middle of the night while pulling all nighters to get work done. Because if you want to stay in business, then the buck stops with you, the owner.
And I don't remember any one else throwing money at me when I was putting all the profits back into the business so we could open a store.
When I'm on vacation and still have to check in several times a day to make sure things are running smoothly. When I have put out any fires that arise and miss vacation time to do it- where's all this massive amount of help??
This is what irritates me about ths mindset. I worked my butt off for years, reinvesting pretty much every penny, risking my money, and dealing with the learning curve of starting a business. We had our best year ever last year. How crazy to think it's appropriate to kill the risk takers when they finally make it.
I already give back more than the average person and not just in income tax- the sales taxes from my purchases help fund the city, county, and state governments. I give thousands to charity in cash and new merchandise. And guess what else I do, I keep people employed. Business don't just keep their local employees in business, they also help keep their suppliers in business. When I order $70,000 from a company in VA, that company has to have employees to handle my order. And UPS & Fed Ex have to deliver those daily shipments, so they need employees.
It's easy to sit on your sofa after your 9-5 job and think about how to tax the evil business owners. After all, you don't have to worry about late night calls, orders getting stuck somewhere because of a volcano erruption, or how much money you need to keep your business running. I can promise you one thing, I won't continue to take a risk if I lose more of the reward. My family doesn't need the money to survive. But if I close, that doesn't just hurt me and the local people, it will also hurt every business that counts on us for orders.
brilliant post!! keep telling it like it is girl, and i hope for the best for your business.
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Originally Posted by Interlude
rbohm do you seriously believe that raising taxes a bit is going to remove the incentive to create? We're not talking about a 99% tax bracket here. Restoring tax levels to the Clinton era would solve a lot of our current problems. The highest tax brackets in the post-WW2 era were staggeringly high by comparison today, when they are at their lowest in 50 years. Taxes during the Reagan area were dramatically higher than today. Did creation stop?
what part of "raising taxes means fewer jobs" do you not understand? lets take brentwoodgirls business for instance. lets raise her taxes by 10%. now that sounds like an innocent amount right? but lets now look at a few numbers shall we? if her pretax income is lets say $1 million, and at 35% her after tax income drops to $650,000, and she employes X number of employees. now we raise her taxes 10%, lets round the rate to 40% to make the math easier, so now her after tax income is $600,000. now she reinvests her after tax profits back into her business, which means she now has $50,000 LESS to reinvest and support HER family. so what does she do? well she can;
1: raise prices
2: cut employees
3: cut back on the amount of stuff she sells at a particular price
4: a combination of all of the above.
so if she raises prices, what happens? she loses sales, thus she loses money.
if she cuts the size of the product she sells, she again loses sales, and thus loses money.
if she cuts the number of employees she has, the tax base shrinks, and the unemployment rate goes UP.
in the end, raising taxes on the very people like brentwoodgirl is a bad idea and hurts the economy, and hurt tax collections because the tax base shrinks. so tell me again how raising taxes is a good thing?
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Divorce yourself from policy and think about the reality of what you're saying for a moment. Understand what marginal utility is. The first twenty thousand dollars you make are the most important, because you'd starve without them. They're not taxed at all. The next twenty thousand are taxed a little bit, because they're very useful but not absolutely necessary. And so on.
divorce myself from policy and think about reality? understand that i have training and REAL WORLD experience in how taxes and regulations affect business. when you tax people at progressively higher rates, you hurt incentive, and that hurts the economy.
lets take another example shall we? the hotels in the national parks for the most part are geared towards the middle class traveler. when the park service changes their regulations, or the amount that vendors have to pay to operate in the parks, it generally raises prices in those hotels. room rates, food prices, alcohol prices, gift shop prices, etc. and what happens? people stop coming to the parks, or just visit for the day and head to town outside the parks. the result is that the businesses in the parks LOSE money, and so does the park itself. so what happens then? the park service raises the rates to enter the parks, and that reduces the number of people going to the parks even more.
again a case of raising taxes, and regulations is clearly NOT better for ANYONE.
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Brentwood, did you read the rest of my post where I explained how your business is helped by society or just stop at that phrase? The taxes you pay help take care of your employees, provide you with a stable and educated labor pool, and do the same for your customers. If they're broke, they can't buy whatever it is that you sell.
again though what YOU are not understanding is that if you raise her taxes, you hurt the tax base, which means less tax revenue to support the schools, and that means MORE people that cant afford to frequent her business, which means again LESS tax revenue.
and i know you want to look back at the clinton administration and show that as an example of raising taxes being successful, but what you are forgetting is that clinton got lucky in that the dotcom bubble was growing, the republicans took over congress in 1995, and forced a number of changes, and the housing bubble started growing during that time also. and then there was the savings and loan buyouts that brought a lot of money into the government coffers as well. one more advantage was that the federal reserve had been LOWERING the prime lending rate for two years BEFORE clinton got into office. on top of that the economy actually DID slow right after clinton raised taxes, and even though it started to recover before the 94 elections, it wasnt enough to help the democrats.
when looking back at what happened, dont just look at the surface and pick and choose, look deeper and see what was going on behind the scenes before you decide that somehow raising taxes helped. also remember that reagan LOWERED taxes from the carter years, so while they may have been higher than today, they were LOWER than the years before.
the other thing is STOP TALKING ABOUT TAXES ALONE. we have to deal with onerous regulations as well. the more regulations you pile on business, the more expensive it is to run a business, and that means the business owner needs to cut costs, which usually means laying off employees.
You say these things but the real world is not following your example. Our taxes have been cut and cut and cut again since the Reagan era (really since Johnson actually who was the first to lower the top bracket from the 90-someodd percent it was after WW2), yet wages haven't risen. Unemployment is sky high. Businesses are sitting on piles of cash right now (Apple has $75 billion in the bank) and not hiring.
Supply side economics is a proven failure and I'm astounded at the number of people who still think that there is a liquidity issue in the markets and that's why the economy is screwed.
10 years ago we cut taxes, primarily on the rich (though the rest of us got a $300 bone, too). Even before the bubble, hiring did not increase. Investment in public infrastructure was cut. Almost all of the returned tax revenue was used to pump the housing bubble and went to other similarly worthless and gimicky investments.
In the last 20 years, no single decrease in the tax "burden" has resulted in an improved economy. The surplus years and booming economy of the 90s was really the result of paper-concept bubble economics, not actual investment in production. Instead it led to a steady decline of government protection of personal freedoms, environmental protection, safety regulations, or combating the fraud that led to a complete seizure of the markets (yes, fraud on the part of investors, lenders, and borrowers).
Think back to the corporate tax holidays of the past, when businesses swore up and down if they could repatriate profits it would let them hire and expand domestic operations...yeh most of that money went to buying back stock, taking over competitors, issuing dividends, lobbying Congress, and marketing more products that the public couldn't buy.
It hasn't helped since 2008 either. The banks have received trillions of dollars and they're sitting on it. Corporate profits are through the roof and they aren't hiring. So instead of having that money sit there and do effectively nothing for the economy, it'll go into the government so we don't end up cutting hundreds of billions of dollars of essential social services.
oh good, lets just mix things together and claim that capitalism doesnt work. when bush cut taxes early in his tenure, hiring DID go up. in fact we had 52 straight months of job growth under bush, that ended late in 2007 AFTER the democrats had taken over congress and stared piling on the regulations on business.
as i have said many times before, IT ISNT JUST ABOUT TAXES!!!!!!! please get that through your thick skull. regulations cost money, union work rules cost money. take obamacare for instance, shortly after it was signed into law, the regulations started piling up. doctors were forced to change over to computers, and get rid of the old paper files. they had MORE things they had to send to the government, and all of it costs money. and soon there will be a huge increase in taxes on the medical field thanks to obamacare.
and when obama took office in 2009 what was the first thing he started doing? thats right excoriating business, and threatening to raise taxes on those very people that create the jobs. and behind the scenes, obamas regulatory people started piling on the regulations as well. for instance the EPA ahs decided that farmers need to do more to control dust. CO2 has been declared a pollutant and thus gets more regulation. then he pushed for increasing the fuel economy standards for automobiles sold in this country, and that will raise the cost of autos sold in this country.
also obama, rather than let the housing market fully collapse like it should to get rid of the toxicity in the market, has done everything he can to prop up the market and keep people in their homes, but the reality is that the majority of those that have or are close to default do so again after their mortgages have been modified. and then there was cash for clunkers, which while it did increase car sales, most were imports, and it took good usable used cars off the market and destroyed them, and for what? nothing good in the economy thats what. all it really did was move cars sales that would have taken place in the fall to the summer, and hurt fall car sales. and it also hurt the used car market as well.
and how about that $800 billion stimulus package, you know the one that was for "shovel ready" projects? the one where we were promised that if it was passed the unemployment rate would not go above 8%? what happened? well it was in fact payoffs for obama supporters. lengthening a runway at an airport that is barely used to begin with, and has had NO increase in traffic through the airport. or the railway station that had been closed down for years that was remodeled, and STILL is not in use.
or how about the accelerated depreciation rules that were part of the stimulus package, you know the ones that obama wants to rescind now? until obama is gone from office, and we get someone who knows how business works, and how jobs are created, this economy is not going to improve regardless of what obama says or does, unless he suddenly decides to use sound business principles to get the economy going again(not hardly squanto, obama is a marxist).
You overlook a lot of influences on someone's level of acheivement in life and a lot of other facts in order to link success to the government or society. Rather than go through the entire post, let's just take the education.
"Let's take public school as an example. It's provided free at point of service and that doctor making 6 figures a year has certainly needed it to be able to make those 6 figures. Ok, but didn't that retail worker making 20K a year get the same free public schooling? Well, maybe, but we can clearly see that the doctor benefitted much more from it, so it's only fair she should pay more. But what if the doctor went to private school? Well then how about roads?
If they "get the same free public schooling," then the difference in achievement is not based on that public schooling, which their parents' tax dollars funded - if both student's parents pay taxes. If they got the same education, then the difference may fall in the fact that one went to class, did homework, studied for exams, didn't act out in class, decided to continue their education for many year after the mandatory schooling. Those many years came at the cost of the doctor and are the years that really make a difference which is why many of those doctors today have 200k in student loans.
Regarding the roads in the case of private school, those would have been funded by the parents as well. Secondly, the person that doesn't achieve high levels uses the same roads, so why should one pay more than the other?
A quick point on the retail chain owner. Yes, his employees use the roads as well. However, the employees' income is also based onthe road. The part you left out is that the employee benefits from the financial risk and investment as well as the business knowledge of the owner. Regarding the supplier - the supplier is using the road because the owner put his money on the table to supply the store. If the store goers under, the employee fills out another application at the next store in the mall. The employer has lost a lot.
These are a couple of the many flaws in your post that you make by leaving out volumes of information.
You overlook a lot of influences on someone's level of acheivement in life and a lot of other facts in order to link success to the government or society. Rather than go through the entire post, let's just take the education.
"Let's take public school as an example. It's provided free at point of service and that doctor making 6 figures a year has certainly needed it to be able to make those 6 figures. Ok, but didn't that retail worker making 20K a year get the same free public schooling? Well, maybe, but we can clearly see that the doctor benefitted much more from it, so it's only fair she should pay more. But what if the doctor went to private school? Well then how about roads?
If they "get the same free public schooling," then the difference in achievement is not based on that public schooling, which their parents' tax dollars funded - if both student's parents pay taxes. If they got the same education, then the difference may fall in the fact that one went to class, did homework, studied for exams, didn't act out in class, decided to continue their education for many year after the mandatory schooling. Those many years came at the cost of the doctor and are the years that really make a difference which is why many of those doctors today have 200k in student loans.
Regarding the roads in the case of private school, those would have been funded by the parents as well. Secondly, the person that doesn't achieve high levels uses the same roads, so why should one pay more than the other?
A quick point on the retail chain owner. Yes, his employees use the roads as well. However, the employees' income is also based onthe road. The part you left out is that the employee benefits from the financial risk and investment as well as the business knowledge of the owner. Regarding the supplier - the supplier is using the road because the owner put his money on the table to supply the store. If the store goers under, the employee fills out another application at the next store in the mall. The employer has lost a lot.
These are a couple of the many flaws in your post that you make by leaving out volumes of information.
........10 years ago we cut taxes, primarily on the rich (though the rest of us got a $300 bone, too).......
What you don't know about "the Bush tax cuts" would fill a book.
Millions of people at the bottom were relieved of taxes entirely, the lowest bracket was cut by one-third, and the child tax credit was put in. MOST of the dollars of benefit went to middle-income and lower income people.
But you sure have the left-wing propaganda about the Bush tax cuts down pat.
I wish they would let ALL of the Bush tax cuts expire so you could learn exactly how much they helped people in the middle and lower income levels.
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