Why Are We Afraid to Tax the Super-Rich?

[kallend 2,150]

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Reagan's policies tripled the National Debt.

and Obama's policies make Reagan look like a fiscal conservative.

And what would YOU have done differently? We know Bush threw borrowed money at the problem once he came out of denial, and most likely McCain would have done the same. The 2009 deficit turned out to be almost exactly where it was predicted to be while Bush was in office, so blaming Obama is like blaming a rape victim.

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The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[dreamdancer 0]

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and what are the super rich going to do to tell us to 'fuck off'?

They'll retire to a beachfront villa with their 2.5mil. Since you're taking away any further earnings, they have no reason to work 10x7 or more to earn money. Instead, they'll shutter the company. No Microsoft, Oracle, Bershire. No technological innovation - even the open source stuff will badly falter as most of those guys do the 'free' work on the side after getting paid at a commercial entity.

fine, let them retire - in the meantime the economy gets a huge boost from those smart students who get to spend what they earn rather than having to pay the money to the super rich

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[CanuckInUSA 0]

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And what would YOU have done differently?

How about not spending so much (yes this includes the military).
How about reduce the size of government?

no that will never happen ...

Spend spend spend ... when the largest job growth demographics are public sector jobs, you know you are on the road to something that can not be sustained.

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over

[dreamdancer 0]

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And what would YOU have done differently?

How about not spending so much (yes this includes the military).
How about reduce the size of government?

no that will never happen ...

Spend spend spend ... when the largest job growth demographics are public sector jobs, you know you are on the road to something that can not be sustained.

the super rich getting richer and richer cannot be sustained - in the meantime we're expected to pay off the national debt they've left us.

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[DJL 235]

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I nominate this thread as being the biggest bag of hot air on the internet.

and i nominate.....you

Actually, the DB Cooper thread probably takes the cake followed by the 9/11 threads. This one is just being divided by zero by the people actually qualified to talk about economics on a national/international scale.

"I encourage all awesome dangerous behavior." - Jeffro Fincher

[Amazon 7]

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In 2006 the top 20 percent of income earners paid almost 70 percent of all federal taxes.
In addition, it is the "super-rich" who higher and pay people so if you want people to have jobs, (which equals more people to tax and more goods being exchanged and more taxes on goods ect, then you should tax the rich less. If you tax the rich more then they have to let people go and raise prices and there are less people to buy the good meaning less people to tax and less taxes on goods and more people on welfare and unemployement putting the government into further debt because the "super-rich" can't higher more people becuase the government taxes them so much.

trickle down economics has been a failure. it has meant the rich getting exponentially richer and leaving the government (us) in huge debt.

(remember it was the rich who invented taxation in the first place - time to use their own weapon against them)

Just think of all the right winger supposed fiscal conservatives who really dig being trickled down on..... they are some kinky mothrfuckers I tell ya. Too bad there isn't any real gold in those goldens showers they seem to love so much.

[CanuckInUSA 0]

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the super rich getting richer and richer cannot be sustained - in the meantime we're expected to pay off the national debt they've left us.

Not counting the military spending, the "Super-Rich" are not creating the massive debt. This massive debt exists because the lemmings unwilling to support themselves want the government to create all sorts of special interest social engineering programs for them. Society has turned into politically correct wussy chimp whiners who demand this and that special interest government programs. Look back at how large government has grown these last 50 years and it is no wonder how the debt has grown with the massive government bureaucracy.

For someone who can afford to skydive you clearly need some more cheese to go with your whine. Why are you so obsessed with these "Super-Rich" people? You have no idea how good you have it. The majority of the world can not afford to skydive. Maybe you need to be paying more tax to pay for this massive government bureaucracy you keep demanding.

Once again comrade, this is not the line for food. It is the line for shoes. You need to queue up on the next block where you can whine about your daily food rations. Long live Soviet Amerika.

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over

[dreamdancer 0]

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the super rich getting richer and richer cannot be sustained - in the meantime we're expected to pay off the national debt they've left us.

Not counting the military spending, the "Super-Rich" are not creating the massive debt.

yes they are - by not paying enough tax
(instead they want us to pay it for them)

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[nanook 1]

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the ten thousand year old 'money wave' is peaking

That makes sense to why you believe what you do. Hold on a bit. I'll have to get back to you to why the money value and use is highly misunderstood.

_____________________________

"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they are genuine" - Abraham Lincoln

[CanuckInUSA 0]

The majority of Americas are not communists (yet) and do not share your vision where wealth is confiscated.

But we know the up and coming generations are being indoctrinated into the "United Nation's Agenda 21 under the guise of Economic Sustainability in order to control Climate Change". So your dream of communism where everyone is equal (equally screwed) is just around the corner in the coming decades once the next generation of brain washed nanny state dependent lemmings come off of the production lines.

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over

[DrewEckhardt 0]

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The majority of Americas are not communists (yet) and do not share your vision where wealth is confiscated.

The majority of Americans are quite into wealth confiscation.

43.4% of American workers (up from 38% when Obama took office) pay no Federal income tax or have a negative tax rate due to refundable credits. The bottom earning 50% of the population leave 97% of the country's expenses to the rest of us.

America has the most (with the top earning decile having the highest tax share) or second most (ratio of tax percentage to income share in the top decile) progressive tax system out of the OECD 20. We're ahead of allegedly socialist places like Ireland, Italy, Australia, the UK, New Zealand, Canada, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Germany, Finland, the Slovak Republic, Luxembouorg, Belgium, Austria, Korea, Poland, Japan, Norway, France, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and Switzerland.

Although I don't earn enough to buy a home where I live, after I've saved for retirement and paid for insurance (like a lot of those countries would cover) I get to take home just 56 cents out of every dollar I earn.

Since I've opted to save for a comfortable retirement instead of blowing money on consumer junk, assuming no inflation or tax changes before I die the government will take 41% of what's left over. Personally, I'd rather my heirs have that money so they can have homes and education which government policies have priced out of people's reach.

Fortunately things aren't too bad yet - only a small percentage of Americans are relinquishing their citizenship (the US is unique in taxing citizen's earnings regardless of where they live).

[pirana 0]

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they're allowed to keep 100 million. the money will be used for a trust fund to pay for the education of all college students
(as already explained in this thread)

So your economic model is to create a ceiling of $100 million as the most a person can earn without giving up 100% of any excess to taxes? What is the incentive for anybody to put forth the effort to make any more than that?

Are you aware of how much that would stifle the economy? Don't you see how that would actually shrink the tax base?

I'm curious, have you studied economics? That is not a putdown; I'd really like to know, because although your ideas are elegant in their simplicity, they don't hold any water either in modeling or in reality.

yes i have studied economics - extensively for many years
(what is money i ask you)

Very good then. So tell me what the threshold is in your model for how much you tax those with the ability to pay?

What do your tax brackets look like?

You must be familiar with the idea of diminishing returns. How does your model address that?

If you just go down the take-everything-they-make path, or even the take-everything-over-a-set-amount path (effectively taxing people at 100% on some margin); then you can not be serious about having studied much economics.

Are there any taxing authorities (worldwide) that tax at 100% at some certain margin.

" . . . the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

[dreamdancer 0]

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they're allowed to keep 100 million. the money will be used for a trust fund to pay for the education of all college students
(as already explained in this thread)

So your economic model is to create a ceiling of $100 million as the most a person can earn without giving up 100% of any excess to taxes? What is the incentive for anybody to put forth the effort to make any more than that?

Are you aware of how much that would stifle the economy? Don't you see how that would actually shrink the tax base?

I'm curious, have you studied economics? That is not a putdown; I'd really like to know, because although your ideas are elegant in their simplicity, they don't hold any water either in modeling or in reality.

yes i have studied economics - extensively for many years
(what is money i ask you)

Very good then. So tell me what the threshold is in your model for how much you tax those with the ability to pay?

What do your tax brackets look like?

You must be familiar with the idea of diminishing returns. How does your model address that?

If you just go down the take-everything-they-make path, or even the take-everything-over-a-set-amount path (effectively taxing people at 100% on some margin); then you can not be serious about having studied much economics.

Are there any taxing authorities (worldwide) that tax at 100% at some certain margin.

first - what is money?

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[Channman 2]

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time to tax them more then

95% Tax on the Super Rich...they can afford it.

But to be fair, I think dreamdancer should be taxed at 46%, it's less than 50% and I think he can afford it.

[kallend 2,150]

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And what would YOU have done differently?

How about not spending so much (yes this includes the military).
How about reduce the size of government?

.

Ok, some SPECIFIC numbers, please.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[kallend 2,150]

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the super rich getting richer and richer cannot be sustained - in the meantime we're expected to pay off the national debt they've left us.

Not counting the military spending, the "Super-Rich" are not creating the massive debt.

Really? How about those billionaires who ran their banks into the ground yet walked away with more $millions of taxpayer money in in undeserved bonuses?

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The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[CanuckInUSA 0]

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How about those billionaires who ran their banks into the ground yet walked away with more $millions of taxpayer money in in undeserved bonuses?

LOL ... and you think I was in favor of governments bailing out the bankers and the auto industry? Wherever did you get that impression? I just called for smaller government in a previous post and now you criticize me because governments (not myself) decided to get into the banking and auto industries? Too funny ...

For thousands of years the elite have controlled the masses. Whatever gave people the impression that this was ever going to change? Life is too short for myself to be obsessing about the ultra rich. As long as I still have some personal sovereignty remaining (we know the UN is working towards taking this away), I will value the choices I get to make in life and not waste my time worrying about something I have no control over. But if you people want to oust the rich and take their assets away from them, what are you waiting for? Whining on the internet is not helping your cause. Why are you not knocking down the doors of the rich telling them you are there to take their assets from them?

Who needs some cheese to go along with their whine?

Try not to worry about the things you have no control over

[nanook 1]

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first - what is money?

money is an instrument used in trade. It's percieved value is used for exchanging of a liquidated portion of your assets to gain another asset. It came in place when trading of geese for wagons or hay got too complicated. For money to work, people have to be on the same page to its percieved value. In early days, certain stones, metals and such was commonly used. That's because they believed in its value. Today, its govt currency. And in truth, there's no difference between currency and gold as they both are valued by its want; a problem that "gold bugs" can't seem to comprehend. Money is valued by its want.

Now you tell me where you are going with this, or what you think money is.

_____________________________

"The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they are genuine" - Abraham Lincoln

[billvon 3,119]

>time to tax them more then

We already do tax them more than anyone else. Next!

[nigel99 618]

The problem with the truly "super-rich" in the UK is that they can afford to spend a fair amount of money legally avoiding taxes and exploiting loop-holes. This means that at a certain point the wealthy pay virtually no tax (in the UK). I don't know of any online references for this but Robert Peston wrote a book on "Who is running Britain" that expanded on this.

BUT as a person who runs a business I would say that what employees call "rich" is largely disconnected from what business owners see as rich. Most of my friends run business's with turnovers ranging from £0.5M to about £5M and with very few exceptions we would be better off being employed once you account for the risks and amount of time that is put in. It makes me laugh when I get in to work at 4am and you send an email and get a reply within 10 minutes - what the hell are we working for!

The average employee doesn't take a 10th the risk that many small business owners take. I have very little experience with people getting rich through large corporates so it might be less "fair" when you get rich through someone else's business.

It is all so very relative - I am pretty sure that every contributer to this thread is "rich" but global standards so would you like your 50-100k salary being taxed 90% or capped at 10k to make it fairer for someone in Uganda?

Lastly if you are specifically talking about bankers who got rich through incompetence and are still taking huge bonuses after effectively being bailed out by the government then it is not a matter of taxation but in my view criminal negligence. Any other business would go bust and the directors could have faced criminal prosecution - it is wrong that the senior bankers have not been sanctioned.

Experienced jumper - someone who has made mistakes more often than I have and lived.

[champu 1]

A few comments, things to consider... Sorry for the long post, this thread is fairly spastic and a few things came up I wanted to comment on.

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400 people who do so well on tax day have a combined net worth of nearly $1.37 trillion. (According to Forbes Magazine their wealth has gone up on average by more than 16 percent over the past year — the worst economic year since the Great Depression during which 29 million Americans are without work or forced into part-time jobs.

If they're talking about average net worth increase from roughly the beginning of 2009 to the present I'm shocked it only went up 16%. You'd be seething if I told you how much my net worth increased between February 2009 and today, but I would hope you'd settle down if I extended the start date back another year.

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we’d have enough money to set up a trust fund whose interest could provide tuition-free higher education for students at every public college and university in perpetuity. Imagine that. Our kids could actually leave college without carrying tens of thousands of dollars of debt on their backs.

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That's a utopian dream, let's hear the Michale Jordan story one more time. And we'll pretend it's representative of reality.

First off, this interest earned from the trust fund... where does it come from? Is interest just "magic money" in this example? Who is managing the fund and making sure it earns efficiently? What is their fee? I'll come back to this in a second.

I find it interesting that in the same thread there's talk about working hard and getting ahead being a fairy tale and also a desire to send everyone through college for free. If everyone went to college what percentage of people would end up with useful (economically) degrees? And I don't mean that as an argument that some degrees are always useless, I mean to say that some degrees are more popular than others, and some will saturate the market faster than others. How far ahead do you really think such a move would get us, and at what cost?

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the super rich don't 'labour' - you're thinking of some other people

(do bankers 'labour' - i think not)

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trickle down economics has been a failure. it has meant the rich getting exponentially richer and leaving the government (us) in huge debt.

(remember it was the rich who invented taxation in the first place - time to use their own weapon against them)

So the rich make money in a few different ways, and I separate them out because they need to be considered seperately 1) they provide organization/IP to groups of workers resulting in a product that is worth more than the sum of its parts. 2) they take money from not-as-rich people on mutually agreed to terms, attempt to make money with it, and return a portion of the gain to the not-as-rich person (see trust fund comment above) and 3) by virtue of being at the top of a hierarchy, they take advantage of excess productivity generated by hard workers that go above and beyond their pay rate. This hard work may be compensated through raises/bonuses, but generally the boss pockets a lot of it.

It's hard to argue against 1) and 2) when you separate them out. These are the "labors" of the rich, and they are things they justly deserve to be compensated for. But now let's look at 3). 3) is the one that gets people's goat. 3) is how the rich "stand on the backs of the workers." And if you could quantify 3), it would be a fantastic way to figure out what the government might give back to the people once you taxed it from the rich. But this isn't the basis of social programs people propose. You're just making a list up as you go along. "Free college for everyone! that sounds great! put that on the list!" And before you complain that "The Jones' next door have socialized blah blah blah" keep in mind that the Jones' probably also have a different culture that makes the size of 3) different. You can legislate socialized blah blah blah, but you can't legislate culture and a discrepancy here will result in disaster.

In the recent financial mess, some CEOs walked away with vast sums of money while investors got the shaft. This comes from people gaming 2) to get ahead, and generates a lot of resentment for rich people in general. I would agree that regulations should be employed to prevent that from happening again, but that is a wholly separate issue from determining a sustainable level of social programs we can achieve in our culture.

[idrankwhat 0]

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The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing. The fifth would pay $1. The sixth would pay $3. The seventh would pay $7. The eighth would pay $12. The ninth would pay $18. The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

You forgot to mention that the ninth and tenth would be able to write off the expense on their taxes reducing the cost to "0". And the tenth was able to secure a federal subsidy to cover the "loss" (effectively reducing his tax to less than zero) along with his choice of either a cost-plus no-bid contract, an earmark steering all future similar "losses" be covered by the taxpayer (yet remain deductible) or the award of ownership of a sports complex as facilitated by the seizure of land through imminent domain with construction being paid for by a local tax increase.

[dreamdancer 0]

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first - what is money?

money is an instrument used in trade. It's percieved value is used for exchanging of a liquidated portion of your assets to gain another asset. It came in place when trading of geese for wagons or hay got too complicated. For money to work, people have to be on the same page to its percieved value. In early days, certain stones, metals and such was commonly used. That's because they believed in its value. Today, its govt currency. And in truth, there's no difference between currency and gold as they both are valued by its want; a problem that "gold bugs" can't seem to comprehend. Money is valued by its want.

Now you tell me where you are going with this, or what you think money is.

before there was 'money' we lived for hundreds of thousands of years in hunter gatherer groups. in these groups 'fairness' is crucial. everyone needs to do their bit and get treated fairly in return - or the group will just fall apart. not only this - but because the group is so small - everyone is watching each others' backs, so it is easy to work out if you are being treated 'fairly' or not.

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[futuredivot 0]

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Just think of all the right winger supposed fiscal conservatives who really dig being trickled down on..... they are some kinky mothrfuckers I tell ya. Too bad there isn't any real gold in those goldens showers they seem to love so much.

Are you going to hide a point in the rambling somewhere? All that I know for certain is that the sunglasses I wore to work cost more than I made a week in 1987. My position has steadily improved. I'm really glad that the "super rich" that have employed me weren't taxed out of business. They wanted to make more money and have been willing to pay me more money to help them do it. It works. Honestly, if you're not making what you want, maybe you're just not worth it. Start being more valuable. (universal 'you' here)
This is where someone's going to start tossing out "There's more important things to me than money or possessions". Well fucking good for you-quit bitching about what other people have then.

You are only as strong as the prey you devour

[Amazon 7]

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first - what is money?

money is an instrument used in trade. It's percieved value is used for exchanging of a liquidated portion of your assets to gain another asset. It came in place when trading of geese for wagons or hay got too complicated. For money to work, people have to be on the same page to its percieved value. In early days, certain stones, metals and such was commonly used. That's because they believed in its value. Today, its govt currency. And in truth, there's no difference between currency and gold as they both are valued by its want; a problem that "gold bugs" can't seem to comprehend. Money is valued by its want.

Now you tell me where you are going with this, or what you think money is.

before there was 'money' we lived for hundreds of thousands of years in hunter gatherer groups. in these groups 'fairness' is crucial. everyone needs to do their bit and get treated fairly in return - or the group will just fall apart. not only this - but because the group is so small - everyone is watching each others' backs, so it is easy to work out if you are being treated 'fairly' or not.

WOW that is some bizarre idealized conjectural nonsence

AS in places where warlords rule... those who rule by force and their favorites tend to get the best... and the leftovers go to the weak members of the group.