At what level would you support a maximum income?

Koch brothers have more political power?

How many more times does either of the Koch brothers get to vote than the average citizen?

 

What if guys like Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers just retired instead of expanding General Electric and Wright Aviation and trying to find new uses for electricity and airplanes? Those guys were benefitting everyone.

Does the fact that Bill Gates has millions of dollars invested in various things take food out the mouths of anyone? How does it? How does that work?

 

So if you just confiscate all the wealth and earnings of the super rich, how many times do you think you will be able to do that? How often can you continue to confiscate earnings over a certain amount and rich people will just keep putting it in the pile for the benign agents of a caring government to divvy it up?

For instruction, we can look at the recently disappeared Soviet Union. Nobody was allowed to get rich. The government gave you an apartment, clothing, all your needs were met. There WERE about 5 million Nomenklatura who had the nice vacation dachas on the Black Sea, the special stores in which they could buy fine meats and items unavailable to the average citizen (a system which oddly seems to happen in re-distributionist economies) and THEY lived great lives. How did that system work out?

This kind of fuzzy dreaming that taking from the achievers and spreading it around works great in the college dorm bull session. I heard this kind of woolgathering decades ago when I was in college. Doesn't work so well in real life where you have to depend on people capable of doing well to continue to do so even if you confiscate the products of their labor or cap their income and wealth. Or if you have to depend on the people in government to take the wealth and distribute it fairly without raking off some or all of it for their own benefit.

Even Marx realized that a capitalist system had to first create wealth before it can be re-distributed. A re-distributionist economy does not create wealth. Its results are eventually destroyed by entropy.

 

Actually as has happened in almost every country in which such nonsense has been tried it just goes to fatten an already overstuffed bureaucracy, while entrepreneurship, craftsmanship, and innovation go into the toilet.

 

I do not want the government mandating a maximum salary for anyone.

Now, for the raging leftists. What is the maximum level of taxation that you would support?

 

Like they did in the 50's and 60's, when we had a 90% tax over a certain income?

In general, however, I don't support limiting income directly. If the economy is a properly functioning capitalism it should do that itself. Your present plutocrats don't understand that what we have now is NOT a properly functioning capitalism and this is just one indication of that.

 

What we have is a bureaucracy out of control:



How Long is the United StatesTax Code?


Every year about this time—give or take an extension—most of us can look forward to spending some quality time with a pile of tax forms and instructions. If it helps, you could think of your US federal income taxes as being like one of the story problems you may have enjoyed back in high school math class...a particularly long story problem.

If you're not one of the three people in your high school who actually did enjoy story problems, this might not be any great comfort, but either way, it does lead one to wonder, "just how long is it?"

You wouldn't be the only one wondering. The length of the federal income tax code (also known as “Title 26” of the United States Code) has itself been the subject of more than a few political speeches by our own Congressional representatives, theoretically the very people responsible for the illustrious Title 26. They had this to say about the prodigious size of the US Tax Code:


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(Note that all of the following quotes were extracted from the representatives' official press releases and statements as found on www.house.gov)

U.S. Representative John Hostettler (R-IN)

"the Internal Revenue Code and regulations add up to one million words and is nearly seven times the length of the Bible"



U.S. Representative Rob Portman (R-OH)

"The income tax code and its associated regulations contain almost 5.6 million words -- seven times as many words as the Bible. Taxpayers now spend about 5.4 billion hours a year trying to comply with 2,500 pages of tax laws...."



U.S. Representative J.C. Watts, Jr. (R-OK)

"The heart of IRS abuse lies in the existing tax code. Most of the folks who work for the IRS are good people just trying to do their job, but they are caught in a bad, overextended tax system. At 3,458 pages, twice the length of the Bible, it's impossible for the average taxpayer to know, understand, and accurately apply its provisions. The length is twice that of the Bible! Even tax experts cannot do so reliably."



U.S. Representative Spencer Bachus (R-AL)

"With its 6,000 pages and 500 million words, the complexity of our tax code is the prime source of frustration and anger felt by millions of Americans toward their government."



U.S. Representative Bill Archer (R-TX)

"The Internal Revenue Code and regulations now come in at one million words and 9000 pages."



U.S. Representative Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO)

"The Bible, the guide of our lives, is 1,291 pages and contains 774,746 words. But the Tax Code and its regulations which are referred to by some as, 'a person's worst nightmare come true' is 9,471 pages and over 7 million words."



U.S. Representative Vito Fossella (R-NY)

"the tax code runs 17,000 pages and contains a mind-boggling 5.5 million words. By way of comparison, War and Peace is only 1,444 pages and the Bible checks in at 1,291 pages."



U.S. Representative Jim DeMint (R-SC)

"The federal tax code with its 44,000 pages, 5.5 million words, and 721 different forms is a patchwork maze of complexity and a testament to confusion over common sense."



U.S. Representative Walter Jones (R-NC)

"The IRS tax code is 44,000 pages and growing"


U.S. Representative Bobby Jindal (R-LA)

"The current tax code is almost 60,000 pages, longer than the Bible"


U.S. Representative Dave Hobson (R-OH)

"the current tax code, which at 1.3 million pages is twice the length of Tolstoy's War and Peace"


U.S. Representative Nick Smith (R-MI)

"the federal tax code has about four times as many words as the bible. Accompanying the law are a staggering two-and-a-half million pages of regulations"



...and President George W. Bush (courtesy of Professor Paul Caron of the TaxProf Blog)

"The tax code is a complicated mess. You realize, it's a million pages long."


So, depending on whom you ask, our elected representatives are of the opinion that this particular section of the United States Code is somewhere between 2,500 and 2,500,000 pages long.


By the way, if you go to the US Government Printing Office ( www.gpo.gov ), you can order a complete set of Title 26 of the US Code of Federal Regulations (that's the part written by the IRS), all twenty volumes of it, at the bargain price of $974, shipping included.

According to the US Government Printing Office, it's 13,458 pages in total. The full text of Title 26 of the United States Code (the part written by Congress--available for an additional $179) is a mere 3,387 printed pages, bringing the adjusted gross page count to 16,845.

The number of words has been left as an exercise for the student.

(Note: The Tax Code is now only available on line, and the page count varies according to font size chosen.)

 

Well, market values, for one thing. If a thing is worth what someone will pay for it, then wealth disparity hugely affects everyone. And maybe that's not such a big deal on luxury items, but when it comes to health care it's literally a matter of life or death.

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As for the OP, I wouldn't support an income maximum. Progressive taxation is fine.

 

Wait, in Italy it's the state to finance political parties. When a very rich person [Berlusconi] decided to create his own party and run for the government of the country ... guess ... he won. But now he is ending his punishment after a condemnation and the Prime Minister is the former mayor of Florence.

This to say that democracy works ...

Then: Berlusconi has got an income of billions of euros and he pays a mountain of tax, but all that money collected by the state [and Italy is still quite socialist in imposing high taxation to rich persons] doesn't seem to create jobs or to improve the life of the poor families.

 

Yea, shrimp on treadmills is helping me a lot...and there are many more.....http://cagw.org/sites/default/files/pdf/Pig Book 14.pdf

 

And in 1950 only about four people made that much money and three of them moved and the other one bought a (*)(*)(*)(*) load of real estate so effectively not one single person paid that 90% tax rate. So, effectively the government got far less money off that ninety percent tax rate than had they charge a much lower tax rate and none of those people moved. Something beats the hell out of nothing every time.

 

I have a feeling their answer is the same. Why dictate a max?

 

The stability of a political system as history has repeatedly demonstrated.

 

What you do not understand is that voting is not the issue. What the big money determines is who the candidates are that the rest of us get to choose from.

 

No, the business of government is the business of the wealthy. Remove the influence of money on the political process and watch the changes occur.

 

So what you're saying is that because rich people can pay more for something, the prices will rise so that only rich people can afford them? If that was true, there'd be only luxury food avaible, and only luxurious mansions, only expensive cars and so on. Clearly, your assumption is not true, as there is cheap food, cars, housing and such avaible. It's actually quite simple: You can pay more and get more, and pay less and get less. Just as there being rich people doesn't make all food become super expensive, it will not make all healthcare super expensive. It just doesn't work like that.

 

I fundamentally oppose the entire prospect.

 

another "I'm jealous that someone else has more than I do" thread.

Funny that everyone loves to bash the conservative rich... but ignore the Steve Job's of the US.

you can only apparently have too much money if you vote Republican.... and that max number goes down if you vote, *gasp* tea-party....

 

If what you say is true, then how ironic that the economy really took off after they left the country. A chart of the stock market shows that getting rid of even a few parasites can really help the economy out of stagnation.

http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/historical/djia19401960.html

Not collecting taxes on those privileged parasites was a small price to pay to get them out of the country … as you can see, we did much better without them.

 

Last time I checked, you could still write in a vote on the ballot.

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I agree but the answer is not wealth redistribution.

 

yes, but it will only count if that person is pre-approved. You can't elect Batman, even though he is written in all the time, even if he got all the votes. Same with if you put my name in the blank spot.... even if I won, I wouldn't get the votes cast in my state because I'm not on the preapproved list

wealth distribution is only the answer for those who are jealous of what others have. They forget, people are looking at what they have and are jealous of what they have, and would use the same redistrubution arguments against them if given the chance

 

While I agree there is income inequality, I don't support a Maximum wage. You will never get rid of income inequality, especially with investors.

 

No problem if someone is serious then do what needs to be done to get on the ballot.

I agree.

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Why is it unequal? Was it somehow stolen from the individuals who have less?

 

It's inequality by its very definition. Inequality is simply one person having more than another. I never said that we need to rid ourselves of inequality.

 

I understand the definition, but I don't care for the term income inequality, it suggests something that needs to be made equal in the context that it is being used.