Fixing Inequality through Taxes

You utterly ignored a long, fact-filled post of mine about the reality of the "rich" and "poor" in favor of making a typically asinine and moronic leftist characterization of one of my posts as an appeal to "slave master" thinking. That is disgusting on your part, intellectually dishonest, pea-brained, the exact reason Godwin's Law excoriating "Nazi hollerers" on internet forums exists. The slavery appeal is even worse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

Most of them are not. Most of the people I've seen rallying around a giant rat are either 1) well-paid union operatives, or 2) protesting $30 an hour jobs when they think they are worth $50 an hour. But of course, they are all "blameless, innocent, permanent poor." None of them dropped out of school, had out of wedlock kids they couldn't afford, blew money on drugs, drink, gambling, Black Friday crap, underwater car loans, overborrowed mortgages, they are all just noble victims of circumstance, never ever ever of their own repetitive, perpetual bad choices that no amount of redistributed money will fix.

Bullsht, and right there in the thread for all to see. You bypassed my longer post full of inconvenient FACTS for the "noble poor" trough feeding left-Complex appeal, and instead forwarded a silly, inane, stupid "slavery" argument. Right there, black and white. Why I never have discussions with people like you without a written record of what was said.

I'm all too familiar with leftist, union label Complex cherry-picked, fallacious, doctored graphs from blogs. Everyone who's been around here any amount of time is. Every single one I've looked into was fatally flawed in ways an eighth grader could pick out, and I'm not going to bother with your latest iterations of them since you have not engaged my points in the thread in any honest, direct way.

 

If I 'make' a million dollars, I accumulated money from other people. I'm not actually producing cash, I'm acquiring theirs. Therefore, others have collectively lost a million dollars of purchasing power to me.

These people can't go demand new money just because I have all of their money.

They go broke, I get rich, and income inequality is a thing.





Wealth is a Zero-Sum Game

Conservative damagogues like Limbaugh have been able to convince the public that the huge incomes of the wealthiest Americans are irrelevant to those who make moderate-to-low incomes. They even suggest that the more money the wealthiest Americans make, the more wealth will trickle down to the lower classes.

If you've swallowed this line of conservative garbage, get ready to vomit. As all conservative economists know, and deny to the public that they know, wealth is a zero-sum game. That is true at both the front end—when income is divided up, and the back end—when it is spent.

The Front End of Zero-Sum: Dividing the Loot

There is only so much corporate income in a given year. The more of that income that is used to pay workers, the less profit the corporation makes. The less profit, the less the stock goes up. The less the stock goes up, the less the CEO and the investors make. It’s as simple as that. Profit equals income minus expenses. No more, no less. Subtract the right side of the equation from the left side and the answer is always zero. Hence the term, “zero-sum.”

So, to the extent a corporation can keep from sharing the wealth with workers—the ones who created the wealth to begin with—investors and executives get a bigger slice of the income pie and become richer.


http://www.kellysite.net/Zerosum.html




"It is but equity...that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged."-Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776

 

Non-Partisan Congressional Tax Report Debunks Core Conservative Economic Theory

The conclusion?

Lowering the tax rates on the wealthy and top earners in America do not appear to have any impact on the nation’s economic growth.

This paragraph from the report says it all—

“The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution.”

These three sentences do nothing less than blow apart the central tenet of modern conservative economic theory, confirming that lowering tax rates on the wealthy does nothing to grow the economy while doing a great deal to concentrate more wealth in the pockets of those at the very top of the income chain.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickung...rvative-economic-theory-gop-suppresses-study/



In 1980 the top 1% earned 8.5% of total income. In 2007 they earned 23%.

In 1980 the bottom 90% earned 68% of total income. In 2007 they earned 53%.

http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2012#table3


LET ME GUESS, THE TOP 10% ARE MORE EDUCATED OR WORK HARDER TODAY???


GOV'T POLICY MATTERS !!!

 

Successful Americans didn't make their money themselves. They conducted business in an ordered society with roads and laws and a military that defends it from foreign invaders and they hired people. Nobody wants YOUR money, they want the share they contributed to it



In 1980 the top 1% earned 8.5% of total income. In 2007 they earned 23%.

In 1980 the bottom 90% earned 68% of total income. In 2007 they earned 53%.

http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2012#table3

GOV'T POLICY MATTERS !!!

 

History has proven through the centuries that the type of wealth/power consolidation we are seeing is rarely a good thing.


Warren Buffet said it perfectly when he said "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

And when he said "there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won."

And when he said "if this is a war – I wouldn’t call it a war, I’d call it a struggle – but, if this is a war, my side has had the nuclear bomb. We’ve got K-Street, we’ve got lobbyists, we’ve got money on our side".

Warren Buffet is very smart and observant.

 

This Is How Income Inequality Destroys Societies

The basic thesis is that social ills, like crime and teen pregnancy, that have long been associated with poverty, actually have a stronger correlation with income inequality.

Worst of all, income inequality eats away at social mobility. In Wilkinson's own words: "If Americans want to live the American dream, they should go to Denmark."

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-negative-effects-of-income-inequality-on-society-2011-11


How Income Inequality Is Damaging the U.S


New research indicates that growing income inequality isn’t just unpleasant; it is seriously hurting the U.S. economy. And economists are figuring out just how the damage is done, according to a fascinating new article by the journalist Jonathan Rauch in National Journal. This challenges a long-standing consensus that, as Rauch puts it, “inequality is the price America pays for a dynamic, efficient economy. . . . As long as the bottom and the middle are moving up, there is no reason to mind if the top is moving up faster.”

He begins by pointing out that we have learned in recent years that a rising tide does not necessarily lift all ships. The Congressional Budget Office recently reported that between 1979 and 2007 the top 1% of households doubled their share of pretax income while the share of the bottom 80% fell.


Then came the great recession. Economists including David Moss of the Harvard Business School noticed that “the last time inequality rose to its current heights was in the late 1920s, just before a financial meltdown. . . . In 2010, Moss plotted inequality and bank failures since 1864 on the same graph; he found an eerily close fit.”

But does that imply a cause-and-effect relationship? It looks that way, Rauch writes. Economists have been tracing the following chain of causality. Those who make the least consume the most of their income; those who make the most tend to save a great deal, and for that reason, according to the economist Christopher Brown, at Arkansas State, “income inequality can exert a significant drag on effective demand.”



http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/10/02/how-income-inequality-is-damaging-the-u-s/


NEVER PLAYED MONOPOLY HUH???

 

No one is pushing that, except in the rights false premises



80% of the population owns 5% of the wealth.

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

The middle class has been eviscerated.


Neo-Liberalism/Conservatives is/has destroyed the American Economy in favor of the so called "Job Creator"... In reality are "Job Exporters"...

 

Non-Partisan Congressional Tax Report Debunks Core Conservative Economic Theory


The conclusion?

Lowering the tax rates on the wealthy and top earners in America do not appear to have any impact on the nation’s economic growth.

This paragraph from the report says it all—

“The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution.”

These three sentences do nothing less than blow apart the central tenet of modern conservative economic theory, confirming that lowering tax rates on the wealthy does nothing to grow the economy while doing a great deal to concentrate more wealth in the pockets of those at the very top of the income chain.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickung...rvative-economic-theory-gop-suppresses-study/



Capital Gains Tax Cuts ‘By Far’ The Biggest Contributor To Growth In Income Inequality, Study Finds


By far, the largest contributor to this increase was changes in income from capital gains and dividends. Changes in wages had an equalizing effect over this period as did changes in taxes. Most of the equalizing effect of taxes took place after the 1993 tax hike; most of the equalizing effect, however, was reversed after the 2001 and 2003 Bush-era tax cuts. […]

The large increase in the contribution of capital gains and dividends to the Gini coefficient, however, is due to the large increase in the share of after-tax income from capital gains and dividends, and to the increase in the correlation of this income source with after-tax income.

Hungerford’s findings are similar to a study he produced for the Congressional Research Service in 2011, which found that while income grew 25 percent from 1996 to 2006 for all Americans, it grew 74 percent for the top 1 percent and 96 percent for the top 0.1 percent. That study also found that tax cuts on capital gains were the biggest driver of the disparity.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/20...r-to-growth-in-income-inequality-study-finds/






In 1980 the top 1% earned 8.5% of total income. In 2007 they earned 23%.

In 1980 the bottom 90% earned 68% of total income. In 2007 they earned 53%.

http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2012#table3

GOV'T POLICY MATTERS !!!


YOU KNOW CONSERVATIVE ECONOMIC THEORY IS A FAILURE WHEN THEY START COMPARING US TO THIRD WORLD NATIONS!!!

 

You mean when Ronnie increased taxes on the working man (YOU KNOW MAINLY THE SS TAX INCREASE THAT BROUGHT IN $2.7+ TRILLION IN MORE REVENUES THAT WAS SPENT TO HIDE THE COSTS OF RONNIE'S TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH)AS he gutted it for the rich? It's been "about 19%" EXCEPT when Dubya's tax cuts took it to 15% of GDP? Clinton got US back to where Carter had US, near 20% of GDP BTW


Non-Partisan Congressional Tax Report Debunks Core Conservative Economic Theory



he conclusion?

Lowering the tax rates on the wealthy and top earners in America do not appear to have any impact on the nation’s economic growth.

This paragraph from the report says it all—

“The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution.”


http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickung...rvative-economic-theory-gop-suppresses-study/


NOTE THE EFFECTIVE TAX RATES OF THE TOP 1/10TH OF 1% AND 1/100TH OF 1% HAS DROPPED? LOL





"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." - Louis D. Brandeis



"The only orthodox object of the institution of government is to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it." Thomas Jefferson

 

James Madison, the Constitution's main author, described inequality as an evil, saying government should prevent "an immoderate, and especially unmerited, accumulation of riches." He favored "the silent operation of laws which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigents towards a state of comfort."

- - - Updated - - -

Libertarians are frauds and parasites but unfortunately have been successful in hiding their dangerous disease under war hating, and freedom loving. Sadly their freedom isn't freedom, it is chaos and opens the door to a real loss of democracy.

They unwittingly use the protections, benefits and accomplishments government has to offer to create their fortunes, while pompously declaring they did it all on their own.

 

Spewing hate is his main dish on this forum. He'll never win an argument while that monkey stays on his back.

 

His own anger and hatred speak for his own failing argument. He lives in one universe, totally oblivious to the other one. In his mind opportunity abounds. Lol! Talk about can't be farther from the truth. If that were true we'd all be employed working up towards the next level. Spoiler alert; for every available job out there, many being minimum wage, there are two needing that job. He along with the rest of the bubble brigade need to get a grip on reality. Our socio-economic culture will not let a great portion of the population move forward with opportunity because the opportunity does not exist. And this has been achieved by design. It is a physical impossibility for a man or a woman to move forward with a job, when the job never existed in the first place. And hating other people, will never change that fact.

 

Oh, so you must work for the government, because only the government "acquires" cash involuntarily from others via fiat as opposed to TRADING VALUE FOR IT. "Acquiring their cash," LMFAO, it's amusing to see the way leftists contort and distort language around a simple, voluntary market exchange concept a child could understand as if they are fooling anyone with all their "divvying up a pie," "the few -take- most of the wealth" semantic nullities.

Leftists are like kids in this respect who have spent their allowance and then rationalize all around that fact when asking Dad for more and more money. "But Daddy, the candy store TOOK my money!!" with Twizzler goo all stuck in their teeth. This kind of dishonesty is excusable in children. In adults, though, it's plain, nasty cultural narcissism.

... <snort>

Who cited Rush Limbaugh? Who EVER cites Rush Limbaugh here other than addled leftists? Not many folks I see. I cited a Pew survey on which viewers of what were more politically informed in a table on Limbaugh's page... once, because it presented ALL the context, not just expected leftist cherry-picks. So straw man much? As far as the old demon, "trickle down," so you DON'T have a large cheap TV with 300 channels that someone got rich selling you? You DON'T have a small cheap cellphone that someone got rich selling you? You DON'T have 5 years of extra lifespan headed your way due to medical advances and pharma someone got rich selling you? You DON'T have Email that someone got rich... and so on and so on.

Inane, but fun. At least you aren't cut-pasting from your multifont desktop folder yet and are actually trying to string your own thoughts together. Bravo! No exchange of value in a voluntary market can ever be "zero sum" if bargained for value is in fact received and not fraudulently denied. Trading labor for wages can -never- be zero sum... by definition. Poker is zero sum, one guy ends up with all the chips. Stock market speculation is zero sum in the sense that one side of the trade will lose, but not in the sense that value is denied. If you are paid to do some work, you walk away with bargained for wages and the other side walks away with the product... not zero sum, which doesn't mean what you (and whatever idiot blog you got this from) very obviously think it does. Go find some cut-pastes to prove me wrong. I'll wait. Can only imagine the fruitless googling that is about to take place.

 

I never though I'd see the day where I'd develop a distrust of graphs and the shiny pictures.

Thanks liberals, for showing your dirty rotten tricksw.

 

1. I did no such thing. ROFLMAO at underlining "use the exact same reasoning -against- the poor" as if that will make your LIE, and inane, inept, inapt comparison somehow legit. 2. You lost ALL credibility in trying to drag slavery into a debate on taxation in the modern US... right here in the thread for all to see (reasonable people anyway, leftists won't have any problem with that kind of empty-headed unargument), squirm around and waffle all you like.

Read that before I linked it, had a hunch you might try to squirm with that passage. I'm not a leftist after all and do actually read my links before posting. Just because it says that doesn't redeem your hopelessly pea-brained attempt to draw a comparison between my arguments re: modern US tax policy and slavery as a -discussion foreclosure- attempt. It's not like we don't see this same crap here from you lefties day in and day out. You couldn't even come up with a strained way to imply I was a racist, so you went for the next best thing, a boneheaded BS slavery appeal.

Oh, it wasn't -me- who introduced the "noble poor protestor" anecdote, that was -you-.

...and here you are bypassing the very inconvenient and unanswerable -facts- in my long post for a THIRD time in favor of clinging to your slavery-baiting nonsense. yeehaa.

What was the source of those graphs again, Larry's union blog? You haven't even begun to found or argue any kind of cohesive conclusion about tax policy from those graphs, just plopped them down as if they MEAN anything or lead to any conclusion (we don't see that a hundred times a day here from you and yours, god only knows what dadofcutpaste will come up with soon from his googling session or desktop folder), nor have you bothered to address or refute anything substantive I've posted to the thread, slavery-bait. Until you do, you're nothing but Reverend Al... for all to see.

 

Any meat on that hot air sandwich? Apparently not. There never is with your posts. Do you ever actually -say- anything here on PF? or just chime in with windbaggery? Care to address specifically any of the claims or facts I've posted in my prior posts, or is that above your paygrade?

Here are some: "Other than an irremediable 10-20%, the poor and rich in the US are the exact same people, just at different points in their careers." (See Thomas Sowell video linked twice and totally ignored).

"Without fabulous wealth among our middle and lower classes, our economy could never support our obscenely compensated celebrity culture in the way it does."

"Our poor have more than Europe's middle class." (from the always ignored whittle video link, have posted it dozens of times, never a comment... it's THAT damning. Why should I even bother addressing your ilk union label graphs?)

"Our children have more purchasing power than 3/4 of the world's countries have GDP." (about $200 billion a year)

"Technological boom unparalleled in human history creates GOOD wealth inequality for which we should all be grateful because of all the benefits ALL of us receive for a pittance." (MSDOS invented in the same year Reagan took office, Microsoft millionaire link, all 10,000 of them and their mostly LEFTIST charities. Their very unelite start based on the picture in the link).

"Reagan tax policy was designed to be revenue neutral and has PROVEN to be revenue positive."

Care to tackle any of that? Or again, above your mental paygrade?

 

Here's the whole context, slavery-baiter, which will leave no doubt as to what you did here. As far as "civility?" That ship sailed when you made an inane, inapt, inappropriate and insulting wholly gratuitious slavery reference instead of engaging anything I ACTUALLY POSTED. That's NOT OK among reasonable people, it's not OK to blithely accuse people of some kind of slavemaster mentality merely because you don't have the wherewithal or are too lazy to address their actual substantive arguments, intellectually dishonest to boot, and so YOU sank the civility ship and have continued to sink it by clinging to your obnoxious, fallacious stinker over and over.

Clearly NOT any kind of "attack on the poor," didn't say WORD ONE about ANY poor, but rather was clearly talking about THE COMPLEX that I have ranted about in thousands of posts to this forum and in this very thread, in posts full of facts ignored -for the fourth time- by you. What addlepated brain could possibly link the above exchange to -slavery- or anything even close to slavery? So, it must have been intentional on your part to post the following as opposed to any kind of reasonable reply.

W...T...F???

Now... there it is, your egregious slave-baiting BS in high relief, black and white, for all to see. Keep squirming or just admit it was a typically leftist discussion avoidance shutdown attempt... holler racist, sexist, <insert label here>, and if that won't quite fit, make some absurd slavery comparison. Transparent for all to see. PF "Advisor?" what do you "advise?" exactly, how to make BS inapt comparisons as opposed to engaging what people actually post in any reasonable way?

And keep on clinging to it, elevating the above to a purposeful lie. When did I post ANYTHING resembling ANY of the above? We both know I didn't. Is anyone who uses the "bite the hand that feeds you" cliche' advocating that slaves were more fortunate enslaved? LMFAO at the ridiculousness and retardation of that. BTW, nice try at just linking my post as opposed to QUOTING it so your lie above wouldn't be as transparent, no one saw right through that.

...so tell us again why you just linked the post instead of quoting it in context? Mhmmm. yeah

OK, fine, will do the first one just to make a crystal clear point and help lurkers and others on the forum understand why you can never trust any kind of graph a leftist creates or produces.

1. The graph was NOT produced by Pew, but by a left-wing blogger... "based on" Pew data. Big difference. So there's distortion/misrepresentation #1. When you go to the actual Pew link in the left-hack's blog, you will find no such graph and not even an actual survey, study or any data. Hmmm. Already smelling fishy. So why is this important? What you WILL find at the actual Pew discussion is interesting data that the hack curiously omits from his blog, for instance that 80% or so of young people of ALL strata end up outearning their parents. Now readers, isn't THAT an interesting fact from this survey you would like to know? It is to me. Will you be told that by the hack-blogger? OF COURSE NOT. What else about this survey are we NOT being told, and what was selectively graphed? That's more digging than I'm willing to do on this point, but the precedent is not good. Hey, just look at the links yourself, doesn't take a genius to see a cherry-pick job.

2. Now let's turn to methodology. Where is it on the hack-bloggers page? NOWHERE. Where is it on his Pew link? NOWHERE. Hack blogger (oh and btw he's a self-described far leftist, just read the "about" part, "the poor" issues are his bread and butter, he says so himself. Sound objective to you? <snort>) Took all that time to create the graph himself, yet doesn't have time to describe the methodology AT ALL? How many were surveyed, where? how? when? All this stuff MATTERS.

How, exactly, could a survey study estimate people being "stuck" permanently in a low or high income quintile? Answer, gentle readers, it CAN'T. It can only SURVEY people's STATEMENTS about their positions at a POINT IN TIME, which makes that point in time CRUCIALLY important. Were the "adults" they were surveying straight out of college? 30? 40? 50? Doctors don't start getting ahead until their mid late 30s, and maybe not then. Businesspeople much later. I didn't start outearning my middle class father's salary until I was nearly 40. Are they able to even -reach- busy successful people? or are they mostly polling 20 somethings still living at home and working at the Gap? HUGE FACTOR in such a survey.

Survey studies are generally bunkum anyway. People lie, a true cross-section is not surveyable or reachable, even the Census is very limited. Do you think Pew spends very much on all these surveys? They don't. The ONLY reason I ever cited to one here is in response to leftists... as usual... cherrypicking and distorting a study about Fox News viewers being uninformed. Of course that's not at all what the actual survey said... I mean, hey, they are leftists after all their picture is by the word "distortion" in the dictionary. I don't put much stock in survey studies one way or the other, you shouldn't either. They are fraught with problems and prone to all manner of curve fitting and manipulation. That's why you will rarely see legitimate scientific research based on polls and surveys. Please get a copy of the good old easy to read, short book "How to Lie with Statistics" and inoculate yourself against bogus statistical appeals.

3. The stench really starts to waft in the graph itself. Rule of thumb, when relatively simple, straightforward data such as "do you outearn your parents?" and "how much do your parents make?" is graphed in the nightmarishly complex way the hack-blogger graphs it, I don't care who or where it comes from, something's up. In all likelihood you are being fed what I call a "highly formatted" graph. Note the difference between hack-blogger's graph and the heritage data in the whittle video. Here's how many rich have refrigerators, here's how many poor. Here's how much living space our poor have, here's how much they have in Europe. Here's how many of our kids show physical signs of malnourishment, here's how many theirs do. Straightforward stuff. So why the complexity in hack-blogger's graph?

He wants to mislead you to the conclusion that 43% of the poor are "stuck" a term Pew never used that I could find, that 40% of the rich are equally, but favorably stuck. Awww... poor poor, lucky rich. As if his formatting didn't make that deceptive intent clear enough, he INSERTS 43% on one side and a similar number on the other. He really, really wants you to believe that 43% of "the poor" are immobile. But wait, what's 43% of the bottom quintile? 43% of 20%? Well it's 9% or so. So in actuality, about 9% of the population doesn't outearn their parents (which concealed though it is, is all the survey measured so why weren't we presented with the simply phrased claim, "x% of y quintile earn more/less than their parents?" BECAUSE IT DOESN'T CARRY THE PARTISAN HACK APPEAL THAT THE TERM "STUCK" DOES... starting to sink in how this works? thought so), and about 9% on the top end are "lucky stuck." HMMMMM. Does that mean that about 91% of the population are either relatively/somewhat mobile or "lucky stuck?" Why yes it does. Do 60% of even the bottom quintile manage to earn more than their parents? Yes. Just look at the first comment... of TWO comments (LOL) to left-hack's graph. Were you fooled by his insertion of the ominous 43% number? Eh, it's OK, I was fooled by them most of my adult life.

Now, finally, who's been saying all along in the thread that there is about 10-20% of repetitive bad choosers in our country that no amount of redistribution or tax policy will cure? That'd be me. Does anything in the partisan blogger's graph contradict that? No, not at all.

OK, here's one, why did you utterly ignore my long substance-laden post for the fourth or fifth time now in favor of making, and then clinging to, a transparently inane slavery derail?

Incidentally, this isn't a "you sit back and field questions" forum... why do I detect the waft of pedantic HS teacher in the air from somewhere?

 

duplicate 6790

 

Upon review, I can't tell if the hack-blogger created the graph himself, or if someone else did, and not even sure I read it correctly, it's that distorted and convoluted. The link to the actual Pew survey is dead. In the event that Pew actually did create that atrociously bad graph, rest assured it was one among many, that hack blogger picked out the most favorable graph to his ideology, ignored the rest entirely, and in all likelihood added the 43% number himself. Keep in mind that the graph doesn't lead to ANY kind of reasonable conclusion about social mobility in the US.

But sure, just plop some more linkdead graphs from extreme partisan blogs in here, that's real helpful and par for the course in these parts it appears.

 

I don't trust graphs anymore.

Sigh.