Re: Excellent letter

Paul M. Cook formulated the question :
"Joe" <joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:slrngrmdp2.dn1.joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 2009-03-13, Paul M. Cook <pmcook@xxxxxxx> wrote:

"Joe" <joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:slrngrk780.99n.joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 2009-03-13, Paul M. Cook <pmcook@xxxxxxx> wrote:

"Joe" <joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:slrngrjnro.aj6.joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 2009-03-12, Paul M. Cook <pmcook@xxxxxxx> wrote:

"Tony" <tony@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:aDgul.49673$Tp5.35269@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
JJ used his keyboard to write :
Mickey wrote:
This link to an open letter to Chris Matthews was posted in another
forum,
but I had to share.

http://www.businessandmedia.org/commentary/2009/20090303115413.aspx


More importantly, we pay an exorbitant share of the total U.S. tax
burden -
far, far in excess of the difference between our incomes and those
paying
less, little or none, and far in excess of our ratio to the
population
and
our consumption of services.


Not quite true but the rich like to believe it.

Are you aware that the top 10% of earners pay over 70% of all of our
total
taxes? Are you also aware that the bottom 50% of our earners pay less
than 3% of our total taxes?


Myth. It might be true iof youe xcluded the millions of tax loopholes
and
otherwise exclusions they enjoy.

Warren Buffet's secretary pays more taxes on a dollar she earns in
wages
than on a dollar he makes in interest.


Who cares? That has nothing to do with the statement that you are
arguing against. While he may pay less per dollar of income, he pays
far more total. AAMOF, if his secretary tallies up the taxes she pays
for the next 10 years, it still will not come close to what Warren
will pay this year.


I was quoting Buffet himself. So he apparently does not agree with you.
He's just an example. Why should you pay more as a percenbtage of your
income than say a trust fund baby who does nothing? It's the prcentage
that
matters. If it is OK to collect 29% in income taxes from a family of 4
making 30K a year tell me why it is fair for somebody to pay only 15% on
an
income of 10 times that?


The percentage matters, but not to this discussion. When the question
is about who pays the bulk of the taxes, the percentage each
individual pays is unimportant. If Buffet pays just 10%, he'll still
be paying more in one year than you or I will pay in 10.

They pay the most because they make the most. They also have numerous and
generous tax deferral or avoidance options that the common guy does not. My
heart bleeds for them. When you look at their effective rate it is actually
lower than what most people pay at about 22%. If they don't like that,
maybe they should try making 50K a year?


You're still ignoring the point. The rich pay the lion's share of the
taxes. Even if it is a lower percentage of their overall income, the
total amount is still a ton more than you or I...


BIG

DEAL!

What does that matter? They should pay less as a percentage of their income exactly why? Why are they entitled to that and a pot scrubber working the night shift at a hospital doesn't? If it's such a sin to pay more if you make more why do we tax people who make 7 bucks an hour? You want to know what the burden of taxation dos to that person to keep them down? It is WAY more than the trivial burden born by the wealthy. They pay more because they make more. And they get more for their money.

It's simple. The government has set up these arcane tax loopholes to encourage the rich toward some behavior they want them to do. Go ahead and remove the loopholes, and the rich will stop doing that when they were encouraged by the tax code.

The lady scrubbing pots may own a home, the interest of which she gets to deduct which someone who rents doesn't get. Why should she pay less percent of her taxes just because she own a home (or has five kids)?

In the end, in your example (with incorrect numbers, but that's OK),
we'll get $8,700 out of the family of 4 and $45,000 out of the rich
guy making 10x as much. So, then, the question is this: Does that
rich guy use 5x more services than that family of 4? Unlikely.

"Fair" is in the eye of the beholder.

I would say he very much does, yes. It costs a lot of money to provide the
very system that assures his wealth. The common guy pays for that too but
seldom can he take advantage of it. Such as the legal system which the
wealthy make extensive use of but is priced far beyond the means of the rest
of us.

No, Paul, he does not. Not even close. And the legal system has no
"price". Private lawyers do. He pays his taxes AND his lawyers...

Are you kidding? What pays for all the judges, public defenders, courthouses, all the support employees such as secretaries, paralegals, sheriff's deputies? It is TAXES. You pay for that system and it is EXTREMELY expensive. Can you use it? Theoretically, yes. In practice, not really.

They don't work for him, they work for everybody. I'd be interested in seeing what percentage of legal system resources the rich consume as opposed to say... an army of gang bangers.

Who do you think gets to take advantage of the lion's share of
services?
10% or 50%?

Just try being rich in a banana republic. Who pays for the systems
that
enable wealth in the first place?

No one has said that the Rich use NO public services. But they use
far less than their contribution to them. The Rich do not use public
schools. They do not use public transportation. They do not even use
municipal police in many cases. Of course they need the roads
maintained, and the grid up and running, but the poor consume a far
greater portion of public services than do the rich, while paying far
less for those services...

They benefit from every one of those servics. Where do they get their
emplyees from if they don't have a pool of educated people? They benefit
greatly from them both directly and indirectly. Public transportation
allows them to locate in places where cars are not practical. You do not
have to use a resource to benefit from it in other ways. They don't live
in
neighborhoods where cops are especially needed but they sure benefit from
having cops around when they need them and also out there proecting their
assets.

As usual, you are missing the point. You're probably doing it
intentionally, but you already know that the rich guy does not benefit
from those services at a rate anywhere near what he pays for them.
For the most part, everyone's OK with that, for the good of "society"
and all, but when you start getting greedy and trying to suck as much
cash out of them as you can, don't be surprised when they decide to
stop participating, take their cash, and go home. Then where will
those "poor" be?

No you are missing the point. It is *not* about shear numbers. It is about
fair distribution. That is a progressive tax system. When they do I will
believe it. They never have cut and run and never will. Part of something
is better than all of nothing. To even suggest it is just foolish. Bill
Gates started M$ in 1978 when taxes were much higher than now. I doubt he
even considered it.

No, Paul. The discussion was about who pays the taxes, not about
distribution. The rich pay for the vast majority of the taxes. That
was the whole point.

And that matters why? Why does that matter? In a progressive tax system they always will pay more. And I am no bleeding heart for the rich, I know plenty of them - some of them STINKING rich and the last problem they have is their taxes. They have a sweet deal as it is and they don't need to put that burden on the shoulders of the poor.

No, they already do that with tobacco taxes and lotteries (which unfairly target the poor).

As for Bill Gates starting M$, the taxes on the "rich" were
inconsequential, since he wasn't one of them...

He still had to pay a lot of them and it didn't stop him from starting his company and growing like a weed. And he was worth 250 million bucks in 1980. 2 years after he started M$. Pretty weak attempt at deflecting a point you cannot contest.

Gates may not have bailed since he had an effective monopoly, but scores of small businesses (where over 80% of the jobs reside) may decide that it just isn't worth it.

I don't feel too bad for them, but at some point you force people to
start finding more creative ways to avoid the taxes, or to just close
up shop and stop participating. Obama just might make that happen for
a lot of them...

I will never be convinced that a person will give up the game just
because
they have to pay taxes. It's ridiculous to speculate that you'd not
work
towards a goal of a million a year salary simply because you'd have to
pay
more taxes. Utter baloney.

Depends on how much those taxes are. If the rate is 90%, then the guy
making a million only gets 100k of it, before any other taxes. What's
the point of trying?

Moot point. Taxes are not nor ever will be that high. We have an
incredibly favorable tax system for the creation and maintenance of wealth
in this country compared to the rest of the world. They got rich under the
old rules, they'll stay rich when those rules are restored. The dot com
bubble was not hindered by any tax rate whatsoever for example..

The extremes are there to prove, or disprove, the rule. Tax rates are
arbitrary. If making them higher is a good thing, in your mind, then
how high is too high?

I dunno. We had a 96% tax rate at one time. The country was doing great and we had more millionaires than any country on earth. Clearly that wasn't an obstacle then either. High taxes kept the poor poor. That is what they do. They never made the rich poor nor prevented them from getting richer every year.

And John Kennedy cut that marginal rate and the economy took off. Every time the marginal rate is cut the economy takes off. You would thing Democrats would catch on. But war is peace, ignorance is strength...

And make no mistake, the argument is all capital gains taxes because most
people making significant money can elect not to even pay income taxes
above
the AMT. And lower capital gains taxes have an insignificant benefit for
the 95% of us not living off dividends. When the rich bitch about taxes
they mean the ones they pay, not you.

We all benefit from lower capital gains taxes, though not as much as
someone with significantly more capital to gain from. If I sell my
house, I benefit from lower capital gains taxes. If I sell my stocks,
same thing. If you'd just listen to people like me, and simplify the
tax code, you'd not have this problem in the first place. Tax all
income at the same rate. I don't care what the source is. Capital
Gains, Income, Insurance payouts, whatever. Flat rate, no more than
standard deductions. The tax receipts will skyrocket, and the paper
trail becomes simple to follow.

We've been down the flat tax rate before and been shown how it is an
incredibly unfair tax system that places the vast majority of the burden on
lower income workers.


No, it has never been shown to be an unfair system, nor that it places
ANY burden on the lower income workers, as it's just plain NOT true.
In every "flat tax" system that has been proposed, the low income
worker would pay little to no income taxes. Your family of 4 above,
for instance, on the Forbes or Armey flat-tax plans, would pay $0 in
income taxes. Not one red cent. Now HOW does that amount to more
burden than the rich guy making 5 million and paying 17% of that, with
no deductions?

The flat tax does not work. Simply look to the few countries that tried it. We have discussed it before and that is that. I'll just say it has to do with the fact that a poor person has an effective taxation rate of 100%. Every dime they need to survice is taxed. A rich person only really has an effective rate to the point at which they no longer need the money to survive.

Are you talking about a consumption tax? With the fair tax, poor people below a certain level pay *no* tax. Seems to me that you really have no understanding on how the fair tax works. You could go to fairtax.org, but I don't expect that to happen. You really don't aggressively pursue viewpoints that don't fit your narrow, socialist, worldview.

You can do the rest of the research yourself. I'm not your Google monkey. Plus it will be explained to you by people far better able to explain it.

You don't even have to google it. I'm telling you exactly where to find the info.

--
The Cigar Diary
http://www.cigardiary.com


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Fairtax: how does this math work out?
    ... the poor would pay less than they do now in taxes. ... > it duplicated in the tax code. ... > they're taxing income, doesn't make it true. ...
    (misc.taxes)
  • Re: Mike Huckabee for President!
    ... their income is currently unreported, ... tax there would be no way for them to avoid paying more taxes. ... "criminals will pay all the missing taxes theory". ...
    (alt.vacation.las-vegas)
  • Re: Excellent letter
    ... Are you aware that the top 10% of earners pay over 70% of all of our ... than 3% of our total taxes? ... While he may pay less per dollar of income, ... generous tax deferral or avoidance options that the common guy does not. ...
    (alt.smokers.cigars)
  • Re: Excellent letter
    ... Are you aware that the top 10% of earners pay over 70% of all of our ... than 3% of our total taxes? ... It might be true iof youe xcluded the millions of tax ... While he may pay less per dollar of income, ...
    (alt.smokers.cigars)
  • Re: Fairtax: how does this math work out?
    ... >> raise the sales tax on items to 23%. ... They argue that low income, medium income, and high ... If he doesn't pay that income tax, ... we see that this family owes about 20.8k in income taxes. ...
    (misc.taxes)