Re: The poor rich work harder

On Jul 11, 4:48 am, Rita <R...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 09:13:34 -0400, Alan Lichtenstein <a...@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:



al Guacamole wrote:
On Jul 9, 11:30 am, Alan Lichtenstein <a...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

al Guacamole wrote:

On Jul 7, 4:46 am, allan.san...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

On Jul 6, 6:15 pm, Alan Lichtenstein <a...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Except when it comes to costing you more in taxes.

You assume my proposal will cost me less and that is my motivation?
If that is the basis for your criticism, you need to get a new line of
argument. My proposal is intended to eliminate the ability of anyone
to take advantage of the tax code to engineer social reform or benefit
individuals without complete transparency and accountability. It has
nothing to do with how much it costs me or you. I already pay far
more than the average and I'm fine with that - except I want my
government held accountable for the money and I want each and every
American to pay a fair share for the government.

I've done a little trimming for readability on this long discussion in
order to add my two cents. I understand your disappointment in the
"system", but I understand that this happens because of our campaign
spending laws where special interests always want benefits for
themselves.

Unfortunately, that's one of the disadvantages of democratic
representative government. You may never stop that with regard to pork
barreling, earmarks, and other such deals, but you can at least revise
the tax code so those special interests aren't given special
consideration when those interests don't really affect our economy or
fairness between payers.

I don't like the corporate structure that makes Executive officers and
their staff rich by overpaying them.

Neither do I. And it's not up to my government to tell corporations how
to spend their money; that's up to the stock holders.

I would prefer that there be more

democracy in corporate affairs by making the executive staff more
accountable to shareholders.

so do I, and I vote accordingly every year. Some of my companies have
even grudgingly given in to nonbinding shareholder approval of executive
compensation, as well as separating the offices of CEO from board
membership. That at least will keep boards of directors honest, somewhat.

But still, that has nothing to do with this discussion.

If workers want a greater say in

corporate governance then they should have the right to have a person
on the Board only if they are willing to invest a suitable amount in
the company to have a stake in it's future.

A good many unions which are in that set of circumstances already have
achieved that goal. And it's reasonable; if they( the workers ) have a
stake in the corporation as investors, they have two motivating reasons
to keep the company solvent. First, their own continuing jobs, and
second, securing their monetary investment.

I don't like nasty proxy

fights but it seems to me that a board position is the best place to
set policies on how much of a share of the profits workers as well as
management should have.

Proxy fights are fact of nature. Not having them is like saying that it
isn't necessary for us to have elections for our leaders.

They are all workers after all. In my opinion,

I see this problem and many economic problems of our economy solved by
reforms in corporate governance rather than the tax code.

Wrong. Corporations are only interested in their bottom line. The
taxcode is interested in providing the funds to pay the cost of
government, one job of which is to insure a healthy and stable ecnonomy.

I would prefer the conservative method of having a somewhat more
narrow tax rate spread like what we have now with no tax loopholes.

Unfortunately, that's impossible, as any reasonable person knows. All
the taxpaying enties have differing needs, because they have different
incomes, and different objectives, such as the differences between
individuals and businesses. The tax code has to cover all the
taxpayers. Given that a fair code would have to take those differences
into consideration, but level the playing field to the extent possible,
making the tax code fair, or at least, fairer than it is.

In

place of welfare and a lot of social and farm welfare programs, I
would prefer a much broader (available to a wide range of tax payers)
and higher refundable tax credit. At the same time, the entitlements
important to a floor level of survival should be kept. In my opinion,
these are SS, Medicare and new ones like Health insurance, and long
term care insurance. In my opinion, there should be a scaled back
program to control the floor price on farm goods so that we can
maintain our farmlands for small farmers. But not so munificent that
we have to dump excess crop production to the detriment of foreign
farmers. More is not always better.

What you propose has merit, but you must realize that in doing so, and
taking care of individual needs, you're going to have to treat people
somewhat differently. You make the same error that most proponents of
differing schemes make: You're trying to equalize everything. But you
can't, because the things you're trying to equalize aren't equal, and
never will be. The worst you can do is screw everything up by trying to
make them equal with one size fits all, such as your proposal for a
uniform refundable tax credit, such that no one really gets their needs
fully addressed, and the program doesn't work. Better to recognize
those differing interests and deal with them in a manner that's fairest
to all.

I mistakenly hit the send button. Of course there is no one amount
that will do everything. And I propose a variety of means. Also just
because I propose a tax credit does mean that I propose a "uniform"
amount. There will be no program that is "fairest to all". There can
only be a compromise that does the best job. True solutions are
systemic ones. Ie in order to have a fair tax system, we need not to
have tax loopholes. We really need a way to keep special interests
from influencing votes too greatly. And that means campaign finance
reform. There is no fair tax system because special interests will
soon make it unfair. There is only a best compromise with the public's
interests being foremost.

I'm not so sure as what you mean by your use of the term 'tax
loopholes.' If what you mean by a 'loophole' is the NECESSARY treatment
of the needs of certain taxpayers as compared to others, when those
needs are crucial to our economy or society as a whole, then I believe
you are wrong, because you're proposing a 'one size fits all' solution,
which is, IMHO, inappropriate. If what you mean be a 'loophole' is a
solution specifically designed for a unique taxpayer, such as the recent
Senate action proposing exemption of Capital One Bank from the
postponement of the foreign tax credit, then I'd agree. You need to
define your terms more fully.

As to your second assertion that true solutions are systemic, I would
agree to a point. That point being that the 'system' in certain aspects
requires differing treatment of groups of taxpayers in order to maintain
the 'system.' Given that, the objective would be to make most
'systemic' changes fair to all.

Regarding your plaint that special interests have too much influence,
unfortunately, our capitalist system is based on money, and the more you
have, the more you can buy. Witness, even in liberal NYC, its current
mayor effectively used his billions to purchase the mayor's office.
There's no way you can diminish that unless you change the Constitution,
and I'm not in favor of that. The great leveler should be an informed
and an intelligent public, who can critically evaluate things as they
are, but the public has demonstrated time and time again that they
refuse to look any further than the here and now, and unless you're
going to propose an intelligence and current events test for voting,
you're not going to change that any time soon either.

The mistake is to believe that if only we limited candidates to
spending exactly the same amount in any election that it follows
the best and the brightest would emerge the victor. There is no
way I know to make the electorate study the issues and the candidates
from a non-partisan perspective. And there is always the charisma
factor which can't be ruled out or controlled.

I agree. I think that it's OK for a candidate to use as much of his
own money that he wants to spend. You can't make all things equal. And
legislators do screwball and silly things to insist that it be so. In
public financing, in my opinion, I would be for any amount that the
average potential candidate would feel would be the minimum that he
would need to enter the field of candidates. It's more important to
have competition that to insist the competition is equal. In the
special case of the presidential election, we always have more than
enough candidates, so I think that it's important the competition be
somewhat leveled by mandating that public debates include all the
general election candidates and (yes if you think that my opinion only
makes sense if I include Nader) also that they poll at least at 0.4%.
.

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