Rich People Don't Create Jobs...

Your hung up on semantics and this is causing you to miss the bigger picture.

The main thing here is that at the end of the day someone has to pay the tax bill. In the 1950's it used to be a 50/50 split.

Now it is worse than a 20/80 split. If you are happy that "The MOB" is forcing you to foot McDonalds portion of that tax bill then be happy about it.

I for one am not happy about it. What is even worse is that the worker is forced to pay the Corporate portion of the tax bill in spite of the fact that wages have declined (relative to inflation- real wages) and profits have increased.

That money differential - rather than going into the pocket of the worker - who will spend the money almost immediately in the local or US economy - is going into the pocket of some nameless faceless shareholder who is not spending almost all the money in the local or US economy.

Consumer spending is the biggest economic driver. That spending is not as robust as it should be because money is being transferred from the pocket of the worker into the pocket of "The Rich" via mechanisms such as:

1) Unfair taxation
2) lack of competition for labor due to anti competitive practices
3) Regulations which stifle the free market causing the cost of goods to increase and keep the little guy from competing.
4) Increased taxation overall due to the Oligopoly infused Bureaucracy
5) Increased costs of services due to the Oligopoly infused Bureaucracy

 

You can also connect this to the idea that "I built this Business" as if there were no other contributing factors.

One should be happy that we do not live in a communist system where folks not even allowed to "own" businesses.

It is also a fact that the Nation State provided a significant contribution to the building of that business - roads, electricity, infrastructure - Police to protect the business owner from others within the society from stealing from stealing that business and national security to keep folks from other countries from invading an destroying or taking that business.

At the same time, "OUR" system of Government is such where the Government is supposed to serve the people and not the reverse. Our Government is not supposed to have unlimited power with respect to a business owner.

What we do task the government with is ensuring free and fair competition in the marketplace. This is part of maintaining "Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness".

When you have large Oligopolies that gain control over massive amounts of resources and means of production this an anathema to free and fair competition.

When you have Oligopolies infused with Bureaucracy and Government you get the ugly monster that now is our current system. The result is that the average worker is relegated into a form of indentured servitude through measures mentioned in my last post #529

 

The comparison is apt. When one enters into a contract (such as in a HOA) one voluntarily commits to an obligation. However, the state unilaterally obliges people without their consent, just as a robber does.

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Clearly possession is not the same as ownership. I may steal your car and be in possession of it, but that doesn't in any way make me the owner. The only way ownership is transferred is by one person giving what he owns to another. This can be very formal and documented, as in the sale of a house, or it can be informal, such as in the case of buying a stick of gum.

 

I assume you are talking about federal taxation. The federal government has a very small set of powers. Many of them can be funded by users, such as operating post offices, minting coins, and operating courts. The only one that may require taxation is operating a navy and, from time to time, and army. The federal tax bill is too high. I am in favor of everyone's federal taxes being reduced by limiting the expenses of the federal government.

 

Not sure what you mean by "creating a thing's value."

 

So do I..(sell my labor and skill) which is why i don't understand your defiance for being those not wanting to be low balled in the offer for there labor/skill...

Walmart sells grocery's, underpays the Grocery side of its company labor,production,stocking,and sales team. underpayed employees qualify for Snap, Tax payer money, Walmart accepts snap.
Walmart, had competition in local community....murdered it, (not a bad thing, competition musta really sucked for walmart to take over). walmart also gets tax benefits for being big employer in town. (also not a bad thing!) Just describing how they directly and indirectly get big tax breaks from being a billion dollar company. It is what it is...adjust or die.

 

And when you voluntarily stay in a first world nation you agree to finance the reason the nation is still first world.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/brianso...s-u-s-citizenship-ahead-of-mega-facebook-ipo/

 

I thought we were talking about the ownership of things. The person owns the shoes because he owned the string and the leather. That's the only reason.

If you owned the string and the leather, and I stole them and crafted them into a pair of shoes, I would not own the shoes. You would.

 

The problem you're having is that you keep saying "you agree." In order for a voluntary contract to exist both parties must say "I agree."

 

You thought correctly. That would be the best case scenario. And reducing federal taxation to only fund a navy and an occasional army would be a giant step in that direction.

 

The investment still comes from the wealthy. If it wasn't for their decisions to start a business, invest capital, higher workers, innovate products and invest in factories and machines then there would be no product to produce. It is really a question of what comes first, do consumers demand a product and producers respond to that, or do producers develop a product and consumers respond to that? Either way the fact that the product is produced at all is still down to the rich investing to make that production possible.

 

You could try to shift the burden of taxation from the poor to the rich, but that won't mean that tax receipts will increase. To quote myself elsewhere on this forum:

That quote was from an article on Forbes. The point is that trying to shift the tax burden might not actually result in the rich paying more and therefore tax receipts will fall.

That's a fair criticism but nothing to do with taxation. The money raised by corporation tax isn't redistributed amongst the poor, they only benefit indirectly through government spending. Here again it's not clear whether increasing corporation tax will actually increase the amount raised, companies can always re-locate lines of production or headquarters to countries where they will receive a better tax deal. That's why the number of companies relocating to Switzerland annually declined once they took a tougher stance on taxation.

This is a good case for cutting taxes, not raising them. It's true that the poor have a higher marginal propensity to spend and its also true that VAT takes up a larger share of their income than of the wealthy. If VAT is reduced then the poor can buy more goods and therefore consumption increases. Raising taxes on the rich won't help.

This sounds a lot like the politics of envy, what we're looking for is a practical solution. Taxing people out of spite might be fairer, but if it reduces tax receipts, forces government to cut spending and hurts the poor then what's the point?

You'll have to explain what you mean here.

Regulations often have little to do with rising costs of goods-in the sense that they don't really have in impact on inflation. If the prices of goods keep rising, but consumption doesn't fall then surely small businesses benefit? What might be a problem is things like the minimum wage which are fine for larger companies, but pose problems for small to medium sized businesses.

 

Because, like wealthy investors creating jobs, this is a myth propagated by right-wing think tanks that guides Republican economic policy that is extremely harmful to the nation.

A minimum wage worker pays 7.65% of gross income in federal FICA taxes that are also matched by the same 7.65% payroll tax imposed on the employer. Basically they're generating 15.3% in federal tax revenues for every single hour they work. At the same time an investor with up to $70,000 in net annual income (140% of median gross household income in the US) from long term investments pays 0% in federal income taxes and 0% in FICA/Payroll/Self-employment taxes or ZERO PERCENT OF INCOME to the federal government.

The low income household also pays a far greater amount of taxes relative to income at the state level where taxation is often regressive. A few years ago a study was done on the regressive taxation by the states and WA was the most regressive state in the country. A low income worker in WA had 14-times the tax burden relative to income when compared to the high income households in the state. Property taxes, sales taxes, and numerous other forms of taxation impose far more of a tax burden on low and middle income households than they do to the wealthy.

We can also note that the "worker" requires a significant percentage of their income just to be employed. A federal minimum wage worker may require a car just to get to and from the job (lacking public transportation) and the cost of car insurance alone, required by state law, can easily be $6,000/yr and that one expenditure is almost 40% of their gross income of $15,080. They can typically only afford this if they have a working spouse but even then, if both are earning federal minimum wage, it's still 20% of their gross household income and this is just one single expense. The investor that's sitting on the beach in Maui spending their $70,000 in annual income from long term capital gains, that they pay no federal taxes on, has zero expenses related to a employment because they don't have a job to worry about. That investor doesn't even need an alarm clock because they don't have to get up and be to work on time five days a week, 52 weeks a year.

Even the idea that investors invest in corporations providing "capitalization" for the corporation is a myth. I few months back I did a review of the investment dollars tracked by the SEC for a month and compared that to the dollars invested that month in corporate stock offering (where the money goes to a corporation). Even I was someone shocked by what I learned. Less than 0.00005% of the transactions, in dollars, went to corporations so that the corporations could fund capital investments. If we rounded off to 1/1000 of 1% the result would be ZERO dollars funding corporate growth. I had previously assumed that less than 1% actually went to corporations but less than 0.00005% was really an eye-opener.

 

I'm very skeptical that even if you added another "modest tax increase" on most American businesses or companies that you would ever really get any extra revenue. Why? Because the same corrupt U. S. Tax Code that is so full of loopholes and shelters would still be in force. In other words, the way the Tax Code is written, you could raise a new tax so that the total is 99% -- BUT, if an army of the company's tax attorneys and tax accountants take advantage of all the numerous ways NOT to pay, then the "big rich" go right on paying little or nothing.

This is the central thing about taxes that nobody gets -- and both "Limousine Liberal" Democrats AND "Fat Cat" Republicans like everything exactly the way it is, with them paying little or nothing, and with the American Middle-Class (what's left of it) paying for everything else!

 

You are confusing government labor costs with corporate in an attempt to dodge the fact that you have no evidence that corporate labor costs are at an all time high. Nice try though.

 

Corporations don't decide what they can afford to pay for a certain job. The job exists and corporations will pay the minimum it takes to fill the job. And corporations have been gradually shifting the cost of health care to the employees for at least a decade.

 

I'm not sure why you keep sticking the word value in these explanations of yours. It would have been much clearer had you just said that a person can come to own a thing by making it from things he already owns. But now I understand you mean by "initial ownership can also be obtained by being the person(s) who created a thing/it's value." And I agree. If you own the raw materials, and you make something from them, then you own the resulting product.

If there is a thing that no one owns, then the person could, by using it, become its first owner.

I think the answer would depend upon whether or not he was one of the co-owners. If he wasn't then he would be stealing from the rightful owners. If he was one of the co-owners, I think it would depend upon his contract with the other co-owners.

Right now I have a $5 bill and three $1 bills in my wallet. Are you saying that the government can only tax me $8? If so, I think I'm okay with that.

 

You argue a distinction without a difference. And every corporation I've worked for including some fairly small ones is still paying 70-80% of their employees health care costs.

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You don't know what you are talking about.

 

I wouldn't justify it, because it's unjustified.

But the statists insist it's necessary, and as I said, if they only collected federal taxes to fund a navy that would be a giant step in the right direction.

 

It is an inarguable fact that the ratio of earnings between those at the very top and the average worker has skyrocketed in the United States during the past decades. My personal belief is that this is due to a surplus of labor caused by population growth, women joining the workforce, automation, and the globalization of production.

None of these trends are going to change anytime soon.