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Having another tax bracket or adjusting the income brackets does not "punish" anyone anymore than it "punishes" those who make enough to fall in the 15% bracket.
We are all taxed THE SAME. If i make 20k, my 20k is taxed the same as someone making 400k. It's called a "graduated income tax."
The brackets if i remember correctly are 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33% and 39%. Why is it only the highest earners who have income in the 33 and 39% (ie, the "one percent") complaining about our system? Those in the 15-28% brackets have just as much right for outrage. But they don't complain because our *earned income* tax brackets are generally fair and we all pay the same percentages.
Since this comes up so often, I can only conclude that the 1% is misinformed and/or extremely entitled.
For the love of God, if you don't know that we are all taxed st the same percentages, please educate yourself.
No, it's a deliberate policy. When you are the largest economy on the planet, you have both global needs and interests of your own and global responsibilities to attend to with regard to others. This is why we do foreign aid (though not at the level we ought to), emergency aid, and carry a trade deficit. These things come with the territory.
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Originally Posted by rruff
The real purpose was to make a few people insanely wealthy. The other incidental byproduct was depressed wages, escalated debt, lower investment, and a huge increase in wealth and income disparity in the US. Did you vote for that?
This is merely your paranoia talking. We meanwhile vote for individual candidates, not individual policies. I don't know how that simple fact could have slipped past anyone.
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Originally Posted by rruff
No matter how much you like the idea of of underdeveloped countries developing, you wouldn't choose this, the oligarchy's method. There is a better way, if we actually had a choice in the matter.
The oligarchy again? You are becoming something of a one-trick pony. Meanwhile, who is we? As this forum so consistently demonstrates, most people don't know the first thing about anything at all. The rest of us can only rejoice over the founders' cleverness in so thoroughly excluding the masses from the actual processes of government.
[quote=rruff;39530769]
Is China "small and struggling"?
Not any more, which is why they so consistently get beat up at G-20 meetings. They want to be treated like big boys but don't want to behave like one. They are coming around however. These things take time. Sometimes, you simply have to wait for the Old Guard to die off.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rruff
We've been drained of capital for the last 40 years and replaced it with debt.
LOL! Chicken Little is not a good role model. Pick a different one.
If you eliminate the gross ability to buy the government, you eliminate a large portion of the incentive for politicians to direct money to those who can afford to do the buying.
Eliminate "campaign contributions" (bribes) and eliminate "lobbying" (more bribes) and the whole scheme of funding taxpayer programs with the (tax) revenues of the great unwashed, to the benefit of the already rich, will in large part cease to exist.
I have no problem with hard workers/bright people making themselves wealthy, but when people (like the Koch Brothers, who will spend nearly a BILLION DOLLARS in bribes during the 2015 campaign season--an "off" year) buy their wealth by buying politicians, that seems to me to be unreasonable to the little guy who foots the bill. Remember, the folks who implement these government programs (the rich) make a LOT more from them than do the people who receive the benefits from government program spending.
Preferential treatment =/= redress of grievances.
Lobbyists are there to gain an edge for their client(s).
How cartoon-like. If you have ever written a letter to your Congressperson, you are in fact a lobbyist. You however only represented yourself. Other lobbyists represent significant numbers of people who have similar views on an issue or set of issues. These people could of course all come to Washington and march in the streets to demand change, and sometimes they do that. But the more common practice is simply to hire a representative in DC to plead your case for you. There are as the result lobbyists for the pro and con sides of nearly every actual issue and for all sorts of shades of gray in between. Lobbyists are an important source of support and information for law- and policy-makers. Your failure to understand lobbying as an important, integral, and protected part of American democracy is kind of disheartening.
Most of the spelling errors look more like typos to me. But a good way to give the pendulum a start back in the right direction would be to stop voting for Republicans and other economic nitwits.
If people stopped responding to them too, we could have more intelligent conversations.
We are all taxed THE SAME. If i make 20k, my 20k is taxed the same as someone making 400k. It's called a "graduated income tax."
Gold star. A very significant fraction of your fellow citizens has no idea of this at all.
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