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FWIW, people at very low incomes have an easier time fudging their taxable income than those at very high incomes.
Like how many of them have side hustles going on that generate unreported (and easy to hide) income? I recall one author whose research more than a decade before welfare reform suggested that the vast majority of welfare recipients had unreported income and couldn't make ends meet on what welfare alone provided.
Of course, few of these property owners actually lose their property
More now than ever before. And, of course, the banksters reap additional profits...
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The report noted that many individual tax sale purchases and investment companies such as Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase have used the tax sale process as a profit center. Tax liens can yield a rate of return as high as 50 percent, and many state laws permit lien purchasers to charge homeowners high interest rates and fees to redeem their property.
Yep. We have "tax sales" here in the Chicago area ALL THE TIME. Confiscated homes/properties are sold to the highest bidder.
Your beef was with people who have paid off homes losing their homes because they don't pay taxes.
People who own properties in a municipality and don't pay taxes are leeches on municipal services.
In Florida, a person has a right of redemption on a tax sale, but at an interest rate highly favorable to investors. Again, it takes a REALLY absentee owner to lose their home over what is often a couple thousand bucks.
Nope. The U.S. was at its middle class golden era heydey because the U.S. had no industrial or agricultural competitors. Already discussed, here: //www.city-data.com/forum/27183298-post629.html
Currently, the U.S. middle class is suffering from global wage arbitrage. Free trade agreements exacerbate the problem: NAFTA, Obama's version of NAFTA (the TPP), etc.
"Free markets" are touted by the wealthy and monied classes. You know, the ones you apparently get paid to shill for. The monied classes have no loyalty to country, only to money.
Again, for all your griping about the rich paying too much, you don't see how they RUN THINGS in the government!
Also, you don't believe government had ANYTHING to do with the 1950s prosperity? I wonder how many families current generational wealth can be traced back to a grandfather who "got straight" in the military, and then used a GI Bill when they got home to get an education?
FWIW, people at very low incomes have an easier time fudging their taxable income than those at very high incomes.
Indeed. That's what many of us have been trying to tell liberals on this forum.
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Like how many of them have side hustles going on that generate unreported (and easy to hide) income? I recall one author whose research more than a decade before welfare reform suggested that the vast majority of welfare recipients had unreported income and couldn't make ends meet on what welfare alone provided.
There was a famous bank robber who finally got caught, and thrown in jail. When he was asked why he had kept robbing bank after bank, he replied frankly, "Because that's where the money is!"
Today's liberals have the same reason for wanting to tax the wealthier Americans. Not because they deserve to lose more than other Americans, but because "that's where the money is". Some of the more fanatical liberals actually try to pretend that if you can make a law saying it's legal, that somehow makes it moral.
The only real differences between that bank robber and today's liberals, are:
1.) The bank robber never tried to claim the banks were eeevil for having the money;
2.) The bank robber never pretended it was moral for him to take the money;
3.) The bank robber never claimed that his taking the money, would benefit anybody beside himself.
In some ways, that bank robber was far more honest than today's liberals.
Obama wants to tax the rich for no other reason then to give him more of our money to spend. He said "you didn't build that" to give him an excuse to then claim "You don't need that." The "voting is the best revenge" crowd voted to punish the rich, they want their pound of flesh, it's all about envy and hate with the left.
Yep. The government incentivizes the highest birth rate among those receiving public assistance. Their birth rate is 3 times higher than that of those who don't receive public assistance.
If owning a business meant that one didn't have to pay federal income tax, they would be the group that pays no federal income tax whatsoever. The reality is that the group that pays no federal income tax whatsoever consists of the low-income to middle class.
Rental income = gross receipts - direct expenses - "depreciation" = often zero. (Who knew an appreciating asset could be "depreciated" for tax purposes?)
When your rental property starts to generate taxable income (as it will over time, as rents rise), a common strategy is to sell it and "1031 exchange" by buying a different rental property.
Repeat as necessary.
And certainly owning a business (usually) generates positive taxable income, but it is a good and popular way to mitigate your taxes.
Obama wants to tax the rich for no other reason then to give him more of our money to spend. He said "you didn't build that" to give him an excuse to then claim "You don't need that." The "voting is the best revenge" crowd voted to punish the rich, they want their pound of flesh, it's all about envy and hate with the left.
A discussion about whether the federal income tax should be 35% or 39.5%, or whether the capital gains tax should be 25% or 35% -- or zero -- is a debate worth having and one where reasonable arguments exist on both sides.
Those are also debates Republicans and the rich might lose. So, following Reagan, Republicans have decided it is far better to invent "welfare queens" who drive Cadillacs on the taxpayer's dime so as to change the subject away from stale fiscal policy and toward morality tales about lazy Democrats using the confiscatory powers of tyrannical government to rob the virtuous in order to reward the venal.
Republicans, in other words, have traded governing for story-telling where the translation of our political disputes into fairy tales is now ubiquitous on the right.
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Think Progress was able to document how the businesses singled out by Romney did not make it on their own but were instead given a helping hand from government in the form of a grant, subsidy or contract -- sometimes a massive one.
There was Ball Office Products, which was featured at a Romney event in Richmond, Virginia. It got a $635,000 loan through the Small Business Administration in 2012 and later a $52,525 contract with the General Services Administration.
There was Midwest Tapes of Holland, Ohio that received stimulus funds under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. There was Cranston Material Handling Equipment Corporation that got $61,729 in contracts with the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. There was Home Instead Senior Care of Roanoke, Virginia that receives 75% of its funding from Medicare and Medicaid. And on and on it goes.
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The decision of Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party to deliberately use tax and de-regulatory policy to favor finance capital over labor and manufacturing beginning in 1980 has had its predictable results.
Since Reagan's election, we've seen the steady concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands along with the accompanying rise in inequality. We've seen the weakening of the state and the rise of a financial plutocracy that understandably wants to dominate the political sphere in exactly the same way they control the economic. Hence the attacks on public sector unions, the disenfranchisement of Democratic-leaning voters even in defiance of Department of Justice injunctions and a Republican Supreme Court willing to overturn a century of settled law so that the rich can let their money do the talking.
Obscuring this harsh new reality with celebrations of a mutant American capitalism that invokes memories of a free market that no longer exists (if it ever really did) is a priority for today's plutocrats who are desperate to find a legitimizing narrative that will help explain and rationalize their outsized wealth and power.
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The Republican talking point that Obama's stimulus didn't reduce unemployment is wrong they say - in fact 92% of economists agree it did create jobs. On the question of bank bailouts, no economist disputes that the bailouts lowered unemployment. Market factors rather than energy policy were responsible for gas price hikes, unlike GOP claims, say the experts. The oft-cited Republican claim that tax cuts will boost the economy and pay for themselves may have been true when the tax rate was 91% -- but today with taxes at 60-year lows it's pure "fantasy."
The debate in Washington, the experts agree, "has become completely unmoored from this consensus, and in a particular direction: Angry Republicans have pushed their representatives to adopt positions that are at odds with the best of modern economic thinking. That may be good politics, but it's terrible policy."
I know, I know, "experts" are always liberals and therefore "biased." There's even a scientific consensus on climate change, as well, despite what we all know about global warming being a hoax.
But with the facts and the experts all lining up against them, the only real card Republicans have left to play, as Sargent says, is to somehow fool a frightened public with wild conspiracy theories that President Obama "demeans success," harbors "active ill will toward private business owners and entrepreneurs" - and that this irrational animosity is all that stands in the way of a real economic recovery.
Geez! What are you smoking? Everyone pays the same at the grocery store, Costco, etc. What bunk.
And...anyone who would put stock in whatever some of those "expert" college professors come up with also need to understand most of those do not live in the real world and never have. Thus, their input is so invalid it is unbelievable.
Poor people often don't have as much access to supermarkets and Costco as the middle class and the rich. Surely you have heard of "food deserts"? These are neighborhoods without supermarkets, and usually have small neighborhood stores with exorbitant prices, crummy selection, and negligible fresh produce. If you don't have a reasonable way to get to a reasonably priced supermarket you might spend an arm and a leg at these neighborhood stores.
Years ago when I drove a cab, I remember one customer who would buy her groceries at a supermarket and take them home in a cab (dunno how she got to the supermarket) and that seemed pretty expensive but I think she calculated that it was cheaper to pay for a cab than to shop the corner store.
But the biggest gripe I have is with taxing rent. First I have to pay a steep premium for the inability to buy a home, then you want to tax it (while the homeowner next door enjoys tax-free consumption)?
My home already has $1,500 extra property tax because it is a rental - and you want an expenditure tax on top of that???
Rental income = gross receipts - direct expenses - "depreciation" = often zero.
Sometimes zero. Usually not. And there are additional limitations on deductions as income rises.
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When your rental property starts to generate taxable income (as it will over time, as rents rise), a common strategy is to sell it and "1031 exchange" by buying a different rental property.
Which entails risk.
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And certainly owning a business (usually) generates positive taxable income, but it is a good and popular way to mitigate your taxes.
Yeah, too bad a business'semployees' salaries are deductible as a business expense, huh?
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