TheAnvil

ROFLMFAO!!!! That's pretty damned funny. Steel - he got you pretty good. You need to become a libertarian dude. For your own good. Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

No I am not. I am stating that the upper earning portion of the populace pays a disproportionate amount of taxes. I DO want a flat tax - but only in conjunction with a national retail sales tax (exempting gasoline and groceries; BillVon HATES my gasoline exemption idea, but I like it). Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

Hmmm...... I own rental property, have no car payment, invest heavily in stocks&bonds, have neither kids nor spouse, and currently rent. I hope that's what you were looking for dude. Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

And when will you be satisfied? When the bottom 50% of wage earners pay no taxes? Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

No what is absurd is 1% of the populace carrying over 20% of the tax burden. Expand that to the top 5% or 10% and it really is disgusting. Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

If that person is paid for the hours they work - yes, they will be taxed on it. As far as the taxation of investment income produced as a source of this labor, I do not like that at all.

I thought you said you weren't jealous. Hmmmm.... Keep their working hours sometime and get back to me if you have a problem with a CEO/CFO. I don't think your remarks will be as acrid after doing so. Having 30% of the wealth doesn't equate to having 30% of the income for any given year. Are you proposing a wealth tax in lieu of an income tax? Absurd.

And that's not their fair share? I think you did some rounding but that's in the ballpark. Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

And the top 1% of the population pays what percent of the taxes? You neglected to mention that in your diatribe against them.

Quite easy, actually. One of my college room-mates is a financier so I know quite a few of them. Being an Appalachian farm-boy turned engineer I know a lot of manual laborers too - many of them my relatives. Your assertion that the financier did no work is utterly incorrect. The research these guys do is enormous and extremely time consuming. I don't know of any that work less than 10 hour days - and 12-14 hour days are common. The financier more than likely applied himself oh, let's be conservative and say 10 or 20 times moreso than the bricklayer while going through school. No work? Try tackling some of my old room-mate's PDE's or financial optimization mathematics he was doing at graduate school. It's not easy stuff and I've got all the coursework for a PhD in engineering! No work? Pshaw. That's an absurd statement by any measure. Your tactic is one the left uses frequently. The rich don't work. They sit in offices all day and make $$. Publicly exhorting a position is an easy method to get cheers from uneducated masses but impossible to defend when placed under scrutiny. I challenge you to try keeping a CEO/CFO's working hours. Try studying an equivalent amount of hours as they do for their CFA certification - or reading an equivalent amount of books. Do that and then call it no work......hehehehe....most people wouldn't last a week. Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

I know perfectly well how it works. You work and get a paycheck, which is subject to taxation. After the tax comes out, if you invest this money and make a profit, that profit is again taxed. And as I said - I do not like it. Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

Gasoline is about the only commodity that has had its price not really indexed to inflation. Odd, eh? Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

The AMT was put in place to satisfy some idiots who were angered because some people had managed to avoid paying any income tax. It's an abomination. So you want to tax interest, eh? Capital gains tax, perhaps? Taxing folks on profits they make from investing money they've earned (and already been taxed on). I don't like it. The US$10 million you refer to in your example - how do you think it got there? Being as only about 1-2% of millionaires inherit their wealth, the only logical assumption is that the money was more than likely EARNED. EARNED means TAXED. I don't care if Joe Shmoe millionaire lets it set there - he's free to do so. How many people do you know that have that kind of cash in the bank don't do work of any sort? For that matter, how many people are in such situation? Not many people with that kind of capital keep it in a savings or a checking account. Your use of this example indicates an animosity towards such people, usually due to jealosy of some sort. I share no such animosity and am glad for them. Always remember that under the current system, the rich pay the most taxes - by a long, long shot.

So they wouldn't spend any money on retail goods? Laughable. They WOULD pay NRST. And for those with US$10 mil in the bank right now, what sort of income taxes are they paying under the current system if they don't work? Rethink, my friend. Your position is untenable.

Discretionary spending on non-military stuff? Hmm.....I'd think that such would be unconstitutional. It would seem that the legislative branch would be ceding its power to spend to the executive branch. Odd. I CAN see a use for that in the current foreign policy paradigm - like it or not how we got here. It could be a useful tool for the President and Mr. Bremer to use in the Iraqi reconstruction, but that seems like an AWFUL lot of $$ for such. Foreign aid perhaps? Senor Senator Ted 'The Bottle' Kennedy has that bogged down in the Senate with a couple of stupid ammendments that Frist doesn't want to bring to the floor until after the '04 election. Calls for some reading...

Beg for help? How about offer others a chance to get involved. Take your pick on how you want to personally describe it. The fact remains that the US will set its own course when it comes to directing its foreign policy and will never surrender its soveriegnity in any manner to that glorified forum of discussion. As far as money goes, if you have the answer in total get ready for a Nobel in economics. My own economic policy would include the following: - repeal the SECOND Bush tax cut; that pissed me off - the US is the only industrialized nation (to my knowledge) to tax US based corporations on profits earned abroad; END THIS IMMEDIATELY (inconjunction with the above) - no marriage tax penalty - start us on an incremental drive to a flat income tax of about 17% in conjunction with a National Retail Sales Tax of about 4-8% - Farm Subsidies - there's so much damned waste there it's not even funny; some serious restructuring needs to be done here - repeal the protectionist steel tarriffs Bush put in place - demand a repayment plan for the airline bailout; that really pissed me the hell off too; thanks to their unionized work force, how many of those airlines turn a profit? There's way too many other points to list here (or in a 100 page document for that manner), but that's a good starter. Historical trends actually show a revenue increase in conjunction with tax cuts, if I'm not mistaken.

Bill, you should watch O'Reilly more often. When interviewing that Republican congressman - Tancredo - concerning the Mexican border he was accusing the Bush administration of not doing its job. When interviewing some FL social worker about that kid who diappeared into thin air, he was accusing Gov. Jeb Bush of not doing his job to protect Florida's children. Neither of those statements endears him to the GOP, I assure you. Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

Ahhhh....feel the anti-Bush hatred here..... Spending on education is the highest it has ever been. Your correlation of higher education spending with education quality is completely ludicrous. Try again. Last time I looked the US had not surrendered sovereignity to the UN (much to the chagrin of the Clintonistas) and also had signed no treaty mandating all foreign policy decisions be cleared by that body. Why the hell should we? To please the French? Spending causes deficits - not tax cuts. I don't like the second tax cut, but the first was right on - a nice way to curb the effects of the Clinton-Gore recession. Congress controls the purse strings - and they are spending like mad-men. If you're faulting GWB for not using his veto to curb this spending, I'd agree with you. If the left had garnered an intelligent debate during the tax cut discussion, perhaps things would have been different. Instead of doing so, they fled to their old mantra of 'tax cuts for the rich' and continuously forgot to mention that the rich pay most of the taxes. Read the Constitution and get back to us. The Electoral College has only been in existence since the Constitution's ratification. Gore did not win Florida by any means of counting the votes. Curbing global terror isn't important to you? Granted, the methodology is questionable, but one wonders at such a statement.... Bush has angered me as a conservative (I'm libertarian actually) but he in no way deserves all of this hatred from the left. Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

Remember Steel, lefties have Ted Kennedy at the head of their fight help the NEA remain powerful....er...improve the nation's schools. Their definition of moron is different than ours. Bwaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahhaaaaa! Como estas, senor Kennedy? Que tal con la senorita Kopechne ahora mismo? Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

Have fun on your trip! TheAnvil: 0:4:3 in Hollister. Great time both days. Skypup and I got lost on the way to the San Jose IMAX, where most of the H-town crew was there (we refused to miss the sunset load). Pop, Hookit, Skydivexxl, and several others were there. Beers to all, Vinny the Anvil Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

Snopes was vitriolic in his rant about M. Moore, but this apology doesn't change the fact that Moore is a buffoon. He should publicly apologize to Lockheed Martin and the bank whose gun policy he misrepresented in his documentary[sic] Bowling for Columbine - among other people for a variety of other things. Moore, Franken, et al are going to be used extensively here in the next year to drum up support against the republicans in '04. Unfortunately, the new republican party seems to be whiskey bent and hell-bound on spending like mad-men, causing some of us to wonder if there is any room for conservatives in the new republican big tent. Though we're pissed off about it, the left is so absurd in their argument that those of us ticked off at the current direction of the GOP would rather castrate ourselves with spoons than vote for a leftie for national office. Ooops! Typed more than I intended. Blah blah blah. Beers to all, Vinny the Anvil Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

I believe the Sudanese offer is actually what he's talking about here.....the one El Jefe Clintonista/Maddy Albright turned down.....

Yes! BillVon and wmw999 because I argue with them so much on here - I figure if I meet them in person they might not think I'm a total jackass.

Sad. I thought of the tomato fight in Bolon, Spain when I saw the thread title. When does that take place? Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

GWB ran against El Jefe Clintonista? When did this happen? In some parallel universe where CNN is unbiased perhaps? Or was it the parallel universe where AlGore's daddy DID vote FOR the Civil Rights Act of '64? The link doesn't display a pic for me. I don't know what pic you're talking about here. Please resend - I'd like to see it. Vinny the Anvil Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL JACKASS POWER!!!!!!