Paying a "fair share"

I've explained the reasons for my view several times, including the post you just responded to. If that is not satisfactory to you so sorry. I would never expect you to agree with any fact or argument that does not involve the richest getting more and more of the nation's income and wealth.

Because for some, or many, more is never enough.

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Why should the valedictorian be taxed more?

 

Your view seems to center on the idea that the people of this nation ought to give less of their money to the rich. You haven't yet demonstrated that you have any legitimate right to tell people to whom they ought to give their money.

 

No, as I've stated, my views center on the idea that the bottom 90% of hard working Americans ought to share in the growth and prosperity they help produce for this nation, and that virtually all the gains should not go just to the richest, as they have since the Reagan "trickle down" revolution.

I never claimed I had the right to tell people to whom they ought to give their money.

 

So your gripe is with the people of this nation who have been choosing to give more and more income to the rich. You think they are doing the wrong thing.

 

No, as I've stated, my views center on the idea that the bottom 90% of hard working Americans ought to share in the growth and prosperity they help produce for this nation, and that virtually all the gains should not go just to the richest, as they have since the Reagan "trickle down" revolution.

Persistent and intentional mis-characterization of another's position is intellectually dishonest and the sign of someone who cannot fairly defend their own positions.

 

And from whom do the lower 90% of Americans receive their income? From the nation, which is to say people of the nation. And your gripe is that the people of the nation are not giving to the lower 90% of Americans the income you think they ought to be receiving.

 

No, as I've stated, my views center on the idea that the bottom 90% of hard working Americans ought to share in the growth and prosperity they help produce for this nation, and that virtually all the gains should not go just to the richest, as they have since the Reagan "trickle down" revolution.

Persistent and intentional mis-characterization of another's position is intellectually dishonest and the sign of someone who cannot fairly defend their own positions.

 

I'm sorry, but I'm not mis-characterizing your position. You have said that you want less of the nation's income to go to the top 10% and more of the nation's income to go to the bottom 90%. We have also agreed that income is not taken but is rather given, given by the nation, which is to say given by the people of the nation. So you are dissatisfied with the way the people of the nation are giving incomes. You would prefer they gave less to the top 10% and that they gave more to the bottom 90%.

Unfortunately for you, that is not your call to make. It's the people of the nation's to make.

 

It's the same thing, and you know it. Indicting the 1% or your favorite "1% apologists" is the exact same thing as telling people how to spend their money because those 1% or super-wealthy .001% could never get there without a MASSIVE VOLUME of regular joes like us spending MASSIVE AMOUNTS of $$, that they should be happy giving it to wasteful, grafty government instead of voluntary markets that create millionaires and billionaires. You'll be right back to "taking X% of the nation's income" in the next thread with aplomb, and we all know that as well. The proper phrasing for any income earned in the US by anyone is "X individual EARNED Y$$ in income in year Z." You aren't fooling anyone other than the lowest information targets and the union label Complex with the repetitive, fallacious "taking X% of the nation's income."

Trying to create "static wealth" propaganda from raw "financial wealth" numbers at a fixed point in time is fallacious, ignores that other than 10-20% of people whose bad choices no amount of redistribution will fix, the rich and the poor are the exact same people, just at different points in time. No "income/wealth" inequality appeals or statistics are valid without accounting in the fact that in more cases than not, today's 17 y.o. "poor" burger flipper is tomorrow's middle class store manager earning 60k, or doctor earning 300k, or realtor earning 100k, or electrician earning 80k, or nurse earning 100k, or tech billionaire, or crack smoking govt dependent..

The important facts are that

1. More people than ever before value holding dollars LESS THAN whatever it is are bought with them, are willing to trade $$, an abstraction with no intrinsic worth, for real innovation, goods and services, concrete "wealth" in the form of pleasure (baseball tickets, cable television, big tvs, etc.), convenience (Email, word processing, internet, software, etc.), investments in the future (houses, tuition, etc.) than during times of PRIVATION such as your precious post Depression "equality." This high level of consumer confidence demonstrates rather clearly that our voluntary markets are working very well in consumer eyes. More people have more dollars to trade allowing our TALK SHOW HOSTS to make $70 million a year, GAME SHOW HOSTS to make $10 million, best-selling authors, athletes, musicians, movie producers, and the millions of earners who support them to make millions and millions of dollars. Whole industries that hardly existed 50 years ago, such as casual dining and shopping malls, have sprung up that COULD NOT EXIST if wealth and income were as unfairly stratified as you and the other "fixed pie in time" propaganda fallacy-peddlers claim.

2. The people who become obscenely wealthy as a result of "1" above, are in fact turning around and GIVING THE MONEY BACK INTO THE ECONOMY as quickly as possible, into charities, investments, new ventures, and doing a FAR BETTER JOB OF CREATING MORE WEALTH than the union label Complex every would. THAT'S how the rich get richer, by offering things more and more people are willing to trade their $$ for. There is no "fiat" in the private sector. Face it, most of the obscene wealth that the top tiny percentage of wealthy possess is due to creating more and more wealth, not skimming off some imaginary static pie. As I've linked over and over, 10,000 millionaires in MSFT alone, not even including stock speculators and 401k holders.

3. Finally, I've never ever seen here or anywhere all the Pikketyesque wealth and income inequality claims validly substantiated. You've certainly never done it, preferring to plunk down union label conclusory graphs that ASSUME lots of hidden, and IME specious methodologies. Every single accounting of such wealth inequality I've ever looked into was hideously flawed as to methodology, often in how "financial wealth" is defined, often in other ways. No foundational reasoning is EVER OFFERED as to why "financial wealth," that utterly ignores trillions in real estate and expensive personal property like cars, should be the proper focus. I have a strong suspicion that all the "X% get Y% of income wealth" is cooked at the start, in the methodology, using raw government numbers as a launching pad to unfounded definitional legerdemain in service of gov-edu-union-contractor-grantee-lawyer-MSM Complex agendas of trough building we are all well aware of and have mountains of reason to doubt and distrust. BUT TO BE CLEAR, it's not my or anyone else's job to debunk or disprove such until they are adequately founded to begin with, and they NEVER EVER ARE, revealing them to be the pure RESENTMENT-BASED ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN that they in fact are, and not any kind of reasonable claim.

 

1) the 1% is not the same as 1% apologist. Not all people in the 1% think the 1% should be getting more and more of the nation's income and wealth.

2) It's not telling people how to spend their money at all. There are numerous factors aside from spending money that determine how income is distributed in this country. Not the least of which are "trickle down" policies that increased taxes on the working people and slashed them for the richest, while decimating unions that leverage better wages for working people and policies that maximize corporate profit at the expense of wages for workers that would allow them to share in the nation's growth and prosperity.

As the 1% are getting more of the nation's income (and wealth) by policies that suppress the wages of working people, "taking" is a fair word to use IMO.

Except the 1% aren't just getting richer, they are taking more and more of the pie.

I'm sure things are working great to you 1% apologists.

Unlike the middle classes, the richest spend only a fraction of their income where it produces demand, jobs, and higher wages. The rest is put into offshore accounts and stock markets and other investments.

The graphs I've posted don't purport to show wealth.

 

Then feel free to quote me where I said that my "gripe is with the people of this nation who have been choosing to give more and more income to the rich."

You have said that you want less of the nation's income to go to the top 10% and more of the nation's income to go to the bottom 90%. We have also agreed that income is not taken but is rather given, given by the nation, which is to say given by the people of the nation.[/quote]

Please quote where I agreed to that.

No, as I've stated, my views center on the idea that the bottom 90% of hard working Americans ought to share in the growth and prosperity they help produce for this nation, and that virtually all the gains should not go just to the richest, as they have since the Reagan "trickle down" revolution.

Persistent and intentional mis-characterization of another's position is intellectually dishonest and the sign of someone who cannot fairly defend their own positions.

That's for sharing your opinion. I'm equally at liberty to express mine.

 

No it doesn't. People receive a salary or other forms of payment in return for their labor or services. There is no "share" that "goes" to anyone.

Except that income doesn't work that way.

Semantics are important. If they weren't, you wouldn't be using sophistry to mask logical inconsistencies in order to draw a conclusion that rest on false, but good sounding, assumptions.

 

The income the bottom 90% get can be expressed as a share of the nation's income, or gross personal income.

That share has dropped from about 65% in the decades before the Reagan "trickle down" revolution to about 50% today.

The share the 1% gets has increased from about 10% to about 20%.

How so?

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's not, just arguing over definitions..

 

You do know that tenpercent of a hundred thousand is more than ten percent of ten thousand right?

 

I'd go even further, and ask why it's moral for 100 people to pay a gardener $100 to do their garden work, but immoral for 1 million people to pay to see a ball player exercise his talents.

It would be understandable to be concerned about the effects of crony capitalism, and, in particular, the use of the central bank to enrich the bankers, but I don't think that Iriemon is going to talk about that as it's caused by government and government can't be at fault.

 

You think wrong.

I definitely blame Govt policies as a principle reason for why the share of the nation's income going to the 1% skyrocketed starting in 1981.

 

Utterly irrelevant to my point, but OK, those 1% are either consuming just like everyone else because 180k of 330k gross after taxes at all levels doesn't allow for much cigar lighting with $100 bills with housing, tuition and consumption costs today. A vast majority of the 1% are spending almost all their money just like everyone else, just on higher level things. Turning to the tiny % of billionaires, they are in fact giving money away hand over fist or reinvesting it into new ventures, certainly not burying it. And as you yourself admit above, lots of that investment and charity is of a leftist bent. Face it, you and the rest of the union label Complex just want to fill more Complex troughs, and that's where all the fallacious inequality propaganda originates, mostly out of municipal union PR offices. The "rich" are already doing a far better job of growing wealth than the government does... as if.

Yes, as a matter of clear fact you are, claiming that some tiny % "takes" more and gets very rich, in a non fiat, voluntary market, requires lots of people to GIVE more $$ to them... voluntarily, BEFORE any tax policy even comes into play. Walmart stock owners don't get filthy rich, or even a little rich, if MILLIONS and MILLIONS of people don't want to BUY what WMT is SELLING. So unless you can attribute almost ALL their increased wealth to tax policy, which would be completely moronic in our current Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama tax regime (stuff the Reagan trickle down BS once and for all, that wore out decades ago), then resentment appeals to the rich "taking" are equivalent of suggesting that money spent by the rest of us is being spent improperly... necessarily indicting consumer spending choices, squirm around all you like. It is an inescapable corollary of any "rich taker-static pie" claims.

Yes, -now- you want to bring in context, trivial context. Consumer spending makes people rich, the rest is of marginal import. Or even if Ellen DeGeneres was taxed 10% more on her $70 million annual salary, do explain how she wouldn't remain stinking rich due to consumers spending BILLIONS on wares advertised on her show. While you are at it, do something you NEVER EVER DO and QUANTIFY exactly HOW MUCH extra taxation should result on these .01%, and more importantly, HOW MUCH REVENUE WOULD IT RAISE. That you won't do this proves the nature of union label wealth resentment propaganda as mere ADVERTISEMENTS, not any reasoned policy appeal. Just the same rotten social-cultural poison unions and the Complex have been spouting for 100 years now, not one bit different.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hphgHi6FD8k

It's EARNED INCOME by an individual (or company) in a given tax year, not "income taken from the nation over years" as a matter of legal and academic FACT. Every other phrasing is just obvious propaganda advertisement.

Completely unresponsive to the claim that other than 10-20% of incorrigibles, the poor and rich in the US are the exact same people, just at different points in time.

I would prefer living in a country where the mass of people are so fabulously wealthy that a woman who does nothing other than look pretty and spin letters on a game show can earn $10 million a year than not. Perhaps you would like to live in a country where there is no casual dining industry serving $15 a head meals to THE MASSES on every corner, no shopping malls selling $30 lipstick to THE MASSES, no elderly actors on Fox News banging on about "my gold" encouraging THE MASSES to buy gold coins. I prefer living in an obviously obscenely wealthy, fortunate country where THE MASSES have so much money that people who design candy games for cellphones can become decamillionaires overnight by selling those games to THE MASSES who have lots of discretionary $$ to trade for GAMES. It only takes opening one's eyes and having lived in this country for 40+ years to see how ridiculously erroneous all the wealth stratification resentment ads the LW sewer pipe pumps out 24-7 are. Our MASSES are far more wealthy than they were in 1981 or else Applebee's isn't the behemoth it wasn't then and Jay Z isn't worth half a billion dollars.

BS, in fact, the opposite is the case. Money put into banks is leveraged and multiplied into greater economic stimulus than redistributed money. Money put into municipal bonds is leveraged into immediate stimulus far more impactful than plain redistribution. Same for PE and VC ventures the rich invest in, where money is SPENT building the next wave of WEALTH. Same for the stock market at large. The only "rich money" that doesn't go right back into the economy is money burnt, buried or used as toilet paper, and the people who create wealth, unlike the Complex, don't do a whole lot of that. I trust the Gates Foundation FAR MORE than I trust the Federal Graft Foundation. It's not hard at all to see the municipal union hall origin of all the wealth resentment claptrap.

Doesn't matter, wealth, income, they are still unfounded, fallacious, and based on unsupported correlations devoid of any CAUSAL FACTS. The fact that your favorite inequality curve chart has PATCO on it tells us all we need to know about credibility. You really should consider removing that nonevent in US history, because it identifies for all to see exactly where your union label toast is buttered.

 

Yep, much more to the point than my ranting. On the one hand, they will make "scientific" appeals to statistics and "government numbers" which result in the most unfounded, shaky correlations, and on the other to the most distorted, contorted semantics, showing what they are doing as advertising to an ignorant audience, not any rational policy appeals.

 

Its not a "max tax rate", its a capital gains tax rate.

 

False. The 1% do not spend like "everyone else". While the middle classes tend spend almost all their income, the richest 1% tend to spend only a fraction of theirs.

The average American saves about 5% of his or her income; among the wealthiest, the savings rate exceeds 50%.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesl.../22/the-hidden-taxation-of-wealthy-americans/

The top 1 percent of families now save about 35 percent of their income, and the bottom 90 percent save nothing, according to research from economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.
http://www.cbsnews.com/media/10-reasons-americans-are-down-on-the-economy/7/

According to research from American Express Publishing and Harrison Group, the savings rate of the wealthiest 1 percent soared to 37 percent in the second quarter. That's up from 34 percent in the second quarter of 2012—and more than three times their savings rate in 2007.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100935856

The richest 1% are now getting proportionately about $1.5 trillion more of the nation's income (instead of it going to the middle classes) than in 1980.

If you figure they do not spend about 35% of that , that is over $1/2 trillion less spending in the economy. Every year.

It's like losing two stimuli. Every year.

No, it is mostly done by suppressing the wages of workers and increasing corporate profit at their expense. That is not them "giving" to the richest.

I of course have never argued that inequality should be addressed solely with taxes. We need to stop pampering and redistributing the nation's income to the 1% and back to the 90%. That can be done by reversing the policies of the Reagan "trickle down" revolution, thing like a combination of tax increases on the richest, tax cuts for the middle class, goverment spending to create more good paying jobs for middle class workers, empowering unions to represent more workers to leverage better salaries, higher minimum wage, and broadening the scope and enforcement of fair labor standards laws.

But if you want the rough numbers, the richest 1% get about 20% of the nation's income, which would be about $3 trillion of gross personal income of about $15 trillion. Raise their taxes an effective 10 percentage points and that is $300 billion more revenue.

I've never written: "income taken from the nation over years."

Deliberate misquoting is intellectually dishonest and the sign of someone who cannot defend their position on the merits.

That also is untrue. Most of the very richest started out from wealthier families. But it's irrelevant.

Good for you. I couldn't care less what you prefer.

Not when the economy is struggling for lack of demand and there are trillions sitting around not being invested because there isn't enough demand to justify it.

To the contrary, I've provided numerous facts from multiple sources documenting the fact of the growth of inequality since the Reagan "trickle down" revolution..

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It is the maximum tax rate paid on investment returns held for more than one year.

And even at 20%, it is less about half the rates paid on earned income, which include FICA taxes as well as income taxes.

Jeez, it is any surprise we've had two huge speculative bubbles when our tax policies so greatly favor speculative investing over work and earning?

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As opposed to the baseless, unsupported illogical blather we get from you?

 

You do know that tenpercent of a hundred thousand is going to be felt less than ten percent of ten thousand right?

 

Wrong. You have to compare effective tax rates not marginal rates. A person pays 20% on capital gains, period. On earned income, a person has deductions and credits to offset the tax burden, that's why the effective tax rate on people is so low, much lower than 20%.

From http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=456 the effective tax rates in 2011 were:
-7.5% for bottom 20% income earners
-1.3% second quintile
2.4% third quintile
5.8%fourth quintile
14.2% top 20% of income earners

The top earners get more income from investments and have to pay capital gains and their effective tax rate reflects the capital gains rate.

Note that the bottom 80% has a quite low effective tax rate. Its a myth that the top earners pay a low tax rate compared to everyone else.

 

That is not accurate. You still get deductions and exemptions on capital gains. Plus a $37,500 flat exemption on gross income. So a single filer with just cap gains wouldn't pay a dime in taxes until about $50,000 in income.

Like I said, it's especially sweet to be rich in American these days.

Why are you just looking at income tax?

It reflects income from various sources, and taxes paid by corporations are included in the taxes paid by top income families in that data, even though they don't actually pay the tax.

The chart includes cash transfers as income for low income folks and attributes corporate taxes to high income folks, so its not an actual tax paid based on actual income.

But I've never claimed that all rich folks pay lower tax rates. And they certainly should pay higher tax rates. When you get into the rarified stratosphere of guys like Romney who get almost all their income form investments, they are the ones who benefit the most from the privileged lower cap gains tax rates.

 

And I'm dealing with a tap dancing lefty that still hasn't answered the question. Typical though.

 

I was discussing that first families do have to pay for their ordinary expenses like food and dry cleaning. I don't care what he pays now, just so we can soak Obama when he is doing million dollar speeches.