American Politics

[Ocean Traveler]

There is a difference between marginal tax rate and mean collected tax rate. In other words: someone earning a small income may be in the 15% marginal rate but after all their deductions they don’t pay 15%. What they pay is the mean collected tax rate which is more like 3%. The rich may be at a 24% rate but after all their tax planning they end up at 21%. If you compare the mean collected rates you have succeeded in “soaking the rich”.

You may not believe it but ask any successful tax accountant.

The Income Tax numbers are subject to a lot of emotional debate but they are only a small part of the Federal Budget. There are a lot of very educated members out there who could supply the correct number but I will guess 35%. The rest of the budget is all the other forms of taxes such as cigarette, alcohol, fuel, excise, corporate income, franchise, import, communication, gaming, unemployment and other taxes. Haven’t you heard about Tax Freedom Day? It’s around May 1st.

The low earners pay a disproportionate share of taxes as a function of spendable income. Stand in line at a convenience store and watch the poor buying cigarettes, beer and lottery tickets; all very heavily taxed and all voluntary.

Don’t forget Social Security. It is 13% of your paycheck and uses a broken model. The entire system will be bankrupt in 15 years but that’s another emotional “trigger argument” like Granny’s Medicare.

You can bemoan the tax breaks for the rich corporations, as some one did in response to my earlier post, but where are we going to work? Successful, large corporations are the foundations of powerful economies. The same economies that can afford all the benefits you crave.

The rich start businesses that employ people not the poor. The Federal government cut income taxes yet collected more than ever. How can that be? It works every time it’s tried and as the rich get richer the poor get richer too because there is more jobs with better pay. The underlying economic principals are undeniable.

You wonder why jobs flee the USA? A UAW auto worker costs $72 per hour will all the retirement, lifetime medical benefits and other fringes added in. In China a worker cost $42 a month! For what you pay a UAW employee in 1 day you can hire a Chinaman for over a year and he won’t sue you for wrongful discharge, sexual harassment, repetitive motion injuries or want paid Family Medical Leave. I know, I’ve been there.

Last but not least, quality mongering is very expensive. I have been doing it myself for a few years but only recently found this website. Perhaps my future posts can be in a different section with a few pictures.

Unless of course you would like to know why Latin countries are poor and we are not. The answer is quite simple but doesn’t fit with any of the contemporary emotional arguments.

[Prefer Anal]

I actually sent that story suggestion to a major national newspaper......trying to demonstrate that once again, the guardians of our moral values don't hold themselves to the standards they prescribe for the rest of us.

Here is the funny thing. This prefer anal guy is probably a social liberal if he is posting on this board, but ID's with the right wing because of their bullshit about taxes, business, and economics. I actually used to be like this until I became highly educated in those subjects

B9k

I also consider myself highly educated in these subjects, but not elitist....and get my news/facts from a variety of sources. Yes, I could be considered a social liberal, but do not "ID" with the right wing anymore than I do the left. I consider myself more libertarian than anything. I don't consider the "right wing" stance on taxes, business, and economics to be any more/less bullshit than the left's.

[Bart9000]

[QUOTE=hardbarg]

http://www.house.gov/jec/publications/109/rr109-36.pdf

Some examples:

AGI $200,000 and over pay ~$313 Billion
AGI $100,000 to 200,000 pay ~$163 Billion
AGI $20,000 to 30,000 pay ~$9 Billion

The top 1% of tax filers paid 34.27% of federal personal income taxes in 2003.

Bullshit is in the eye of the beholder.

Ok,

Appearently, my quick and dirty analysis was in error. There are a lot of flat out lies and bullshit out there, and I mistakenly assumed that this was something cooked up by some asshole on talk radio (leftists are also guilty of lying like sacks os shit........in the eighties, it got widely reported that there were like 10 Million homeless......it turned out to be a massive exaggeration created out of thin air by an activist named Mitch Snyder) Although I believe myself to be more or less correct about the rates paid, I forgot about the social engineering that is administered through the tax code. Now some parts of that engineering I agree with (mortgage interest deduction-about the only fighting chance that a lot of families have towards decent retirement is complete home ownership), and others I have some issues with (child deductions-pay for your own fucking kids.) Another is the earned income tax credit, which I will have a word or two about:

The purpose of the earned income tax credit is to incentivise a "marginal player", right on the border of not needing social services to work, and hopefully some day earn enough to be fully self sufficient. I'll come back to this in a minute.

I can see where someone would be profoundly offended at the appeareant unfairness of the situation of "being Atlas", and carrying the weight of society on your shoulders.

However, I have to say a few things....first of all....who gives a fuck about the aggregate-the world isn't composed of two people, one rich and paying for 96% of public services, the other poor, and getting a free ride. Each person only files one personal tax return, and the amounts paid don't look too much like sodomy to me.....without looking again, the group between 100-200K pays on average about 18,000.....just pulling out a number of say 119,000, that is about 15%.........SCANDALOUS....the aggregate numbers quoted say more about the wealth and success of a good portion of our county than they do imply any unfairness in the amount of "load" being carried.

Let me lay something out here. It is a little more complex, and less easy to come to than a conclusion of "I'm the workhorse carrying a bunch of deadbeats"

First of all, were you to increase the tax burden on the low end, you would likely knock the people receiving the earned income credit out of the workforce and into being recipients of social services......then you might actually have something to cry about with the new number people on welfare/food stamps/section 8 housing.....currently the percentage spent on those programs is minimal (I don't have any exact figures handy)

Furthermore, there is more interdependence between high income earners and low than most people realize. People who earn high incomes do so because ultimately, they, or someone they work for sells something. Low income earners BUY THINGS......and do so at much higher percentages (and incidently generally buy things that are much more profitable to the seller) than do the more affluent (this is known in econ as the marginal propensity to save/marginal propensity to consume). . This spending of theirs (which gets repeated inciently as the same dollar gets spent time and again by low wage workers, being paid by the wealthy as demand for products and services continues-refered to as the multiplier effect) is what is ultimately putting the fat paycheck into the high earners pocket. Just pulling some numbers out of the air, someone could make 1 million a year at a 34% bracket, or (due to a reduction in economic activity) $500,000 at 17% basically a wash.........although the real life interaction is obviously more complex than this, I think I made my point.

B9k

PS Regarding Ken Lay's death, I would like to have the corpse DNA tested, with the process overseen by Michael Moore, Al Franken, Senator Joseph Biden, and about a half dozen pissed off investors.

[Beavis]

I totally agree. I have never served in the armed forces and nobody in my family ever has either so I am not at all biased by this. I was merely trying to demonstrate how our leaders could do a better job of establishing their priorities. The sad part is the future doesn't look any brighter. The amnesty is only a foundation for undermining the integrity of leadership. To put it in nautical terms the ship is sailing "not under command", which means by some unusual circumstances they are unable to comply with the rules.

Since there is a good level of intellect involved in this thread:

Who actually believes that Ken Lay is dead? His death was awful convienient at a prominent time? He was cremated so his ashes could be left over from the party they had before he left the country. I say B.S.but have only theory.

Anyway enough of that. Since we haven't got the alligators in place yet:

http://www.resist.com/other/border_patrol.swf

It won't be too much longer you will find me near some large mountains sipping a cold Aguila.

[MJG Dogs]

Does this mean that we need to help every homeless person who ever served in the armed forces ? No it doesn't but, these people served their country and should rank higher on the help list than illegal aliens.

Bravo Beavis...

And veterans who served this country should not be demonized by the leftist in this country either and should not be cheated out of benefits, education and healthcare by the far right....

It is disgraceful to see veterans treated so shamefully......

[Hardbarg]

[QUOTE=Prefer Anal]

"Almost everyone here seems to be missing the point.
Wake up people! The top 1/4 of 1% have received 75% of the tax cuts."

They deserve the tax cuts:

People with incomes $200,000 and over pay 42.7% of the taxes, $377 Billion.
People with incomes $100,000 to 200,000 pay 24.1% of the taxes, $213 Billion.

People with incomes $75,000 to 100,000 pay 12.8% of the taxes, $113 Billion.

People with incomes 50,000 to 75,000 pay 12.9% of the taxes $114 Billion.

People with incomes of $40,000 to 50,000 pay 4.4% of the taxes, or $39 Billion, and

people with incomes of$30,000 to 40,000 pay only 3.4% of the taxes, or $30 Billion!

Finally, people with incomes of only $20,000 to 30,000 pay only 1.1% of the taxes, or $10 Billion!

More info: the TOP 1% of income earners pay 33.6% of all the taxes!

Can you document the sources on any of your tax figures. I've seen the right wing media figures use some pretty creative math to make their cases.....or just outright lie with math.....most of their followers don't have advanced degrees in quantitative subjects...I'm calling bullshit.

http://www.house.gov/jec/publications/109/rr109-36.pdf

Some examples:

AGI $200,000 and over pay ~$313 Billion
AGI $100,000 to 200,000 pay ~$163 Billion
AGI $20,000 to 30,000 pay ~$9 Billion

The top 1% of tax filers paid 34.27% of federal personal income taxes in 2003.

Bullshit is in the eye of the beholder.

[Bart9000]

I know I should keep my mouth shut but here goes.

The average illegal alien costs $87,000 more than they will ever produce and that's before Social Security is added in. The average family of 4 in California costs the taxpayers $57,000 per year!

It does't save the US economy money. If it did, why do the states with the largest illegal populations have massive budget problems? It is cost shifting; so one person gets thier lawn cut cheaper but we all subsidize it through taxes.

Military spending as a percentage of the overall budget is historically and for a time of war it is unheard of.

Over 65% of the Federal Budget is entitlements: Medicaid, Medicare, Welfare, Food Stamps, etc. All programs started since WWII and dramatically expanded under Johnson during the War of Poverty. We have spent trillions on that war with very little sign of success. When do we "redeploy" on subsidizing failure?

Why pay billions for illegal aliens on one hand and pay billions in welfare subsidizing unemployment and failure on the other? Call me crazy but somethings wrong with this picture.

Ok, quote your sources, and substantiate it....this sounds like more Rush Limbaugh or clone therof type bullshit.....now there may be a grain of truth to this-what I have been maybe somewhat erroneously referring to as social spending is welfare, subsidized housing, and food stamps, which don't amount to much in the grand scheme of things....if you throw in subsidized student loans, medicaid and medicare, school lunches, and whatever, it may get to be a decent sized chunk..........I have to ask this however.....do you REALLY want to get rid of say Medicaid/Medicare? I have an 86 year old Grandmother who is in the hospital about every 3-4 months, plus takes all kinds of expensive pills etc. Do you have ny idea what health insurance for her would cost? If you could even get a private insurer to write her a policy, it would probably cost between $1000-2000 a month. The government at least has the ability to dictate terms and regulations to health care providers, and is consequently at an advantage for purchasing healthcare for senior citizens. Same thing with student loans and other education entitlements.....are you aware that a large segment of African Americans have come up from generally lesser means and become upper middle class/lower upper class ("blackistocracy")......alot of this was because education entitlements helped get them educated, into non-menial jobs, and eventually a great success. If they didn't have those, many would probably, well frankly still poor and would be getting maligned by you for getting social benefits for that....talk about damned if you do, damned if you don't........

By the way do you have any idea what we give to scummy corporations in the form of tax breaks?

B9k

[Beavis]

Regardless of the # of vets, it was simply an example that we have plenty of problems here we should address before we try to fix everybody elses. The immigration bill is a joke but then again, what has this adminstration did that wasn't a joke? Just my opinion but, my mnd is made up I am out of here ASAP prediction 06/01/09. By then we should have plenty of homeless Mexicans so we will see how they get treated. I could give a Rat's ass, lol.

[Bart9000]

The 300,000 was a figure that my mother (a private high school teacher) got from some source but here is what I found:

According to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (“VA”), nearly 33% of the nation’s adult homeless population served in the United States Armed Services. The VA further states that on any given day, as many as 200,000 male and female veterans are living on the streets or in shelters, and perhaps twice as many experience homelessness at some point during the course of a year. As if to underscore the seriousness of the problem of homeless military veterans throughout the nation, the VA characterizes the predicament another way: currently, the number of homeless male and female Vietnam era veterans is greater than the number of service persons who died during the Vietnam War.


VIVA LA MIGRA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A couple things real quick...

Are you sure that there is a disproportionate percentage of the general populace that are homeless vets. What percentage of the overall populace currently living did serve in the Vietnam war......I don't know for sure, but it is possible that there is simply a representative cross sample and you (with encouragement) are focusing on the vets.

Homelessness itself is a complex issue (correlates highly with mental illness and substance abuse), and it cannot necessarily be solved by simply writing a check. This is a wild ass guess, but I strongly suspect that even if we were to give every homeless vet 4 months rent free in a decent apartment, $1500, and a decent job that would more than pay his rent and living expenses, he would still be back on the street in a short time. It might astound you to know (this is something I've heard, but don't have a source)for example that when it gets to be -15 to -20 in Chicago, the police round up the homeless guys to make them go to a shelter.....and a good number of them have to be dragged, kicking and screaming all the way there.

Service to country is awfully abstract, and hard to quantify(for recompense).....you are basically saying that our Vietnam vets got a raw deal....you won't get an argument from me about that, although military service (assuming you don't get killed doing it) is like anything else you get out of it what you put into it. My father volunteered for Vietnam (though he was going to get drafted anyways), got out after 5 years, and then served another 17 in reserve, a good portion of that time as n E-8, getting nice fat paychecks for a part time career...now when he retires in 18 months, he is going to get big fat pension, on top of his big fat pension from work (he went to college free on the GI bill by the way-I owe 52K myself), Social Security, and healthy personal savings.


I hear you about the hassles in bringing your wife here legally....my take on this however isn't that everyone should have to suffer like you did.....but that NO ONE should.
B9k


Adding on: I realized what was bothering me about the situation....the problems aren't the least bit interrelated in my opinion. In my estimation, you could line a National Guardsman every 10 feet along the border with orders to shoot to kill, round up all the others, and ship them back, and you would still have your veteran problems....on the other hand, you could open the borders and let every Juan, Julio and Sergio in Mexico (yes I'm ignoring illegals from other parts of the world) come up here to work if they feel like it.....and still have your vet problems.

I was going to bring up some stat mumbo jumbo about skewed samples, and the tail wagging the dog, but I don't think it's necessary in light of the preceding.

[Beavis]

Does this mean that we need to help every homeless person who ever served in the armed forces ? No it doesn't but, these people served their country and should rank higher on the help list than illegal aliens.

[Beavis]

The 300,000 was a figure that my mother (a private high school teacher) got from some source but here is what I found:

According to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (“VA”), nearly 33% of the nation’s adult homeless population served in the United States Armed Services. The VA further states that on any given day, as many as 200,000 male and female veterans are living on the streets or in shelters, and perhaps twice as many experience homelessness at some point during the course of a year. As if to underscore the seriousness of the problem of homeless military veterans throughout the nation, the VA characterizes the predicament another way: currently, the number of homeless male and female Vietnam era veterans is greater than the number of service persons who died during the Vietnam War.


VIVA LA MIGRA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Beavis]

Of course the poor buy more than the rich as they are an overwhelmingly larger group of people. If the aliens come here to just work they aren't hurting the economy but, when the majority of them are sending every dime they can out of the country, how is this helping the economy?

Once they become citizens they are going to change drastically. Just watch and see, perhaps you work with some of them but, I have lived and worked in their country for many years and have a son there. Once you have witnessed the average level of class and living standards you won't want 50 million of them living in your country. Yes there are some good people there but not many of them swim the river.

The point is why must be bend over backwards to help these illegal aliens when we have plenty of U.S. citizens who should be helped first. This is indeed going to add heavily to an already ridiculous debt we have, and the only way it will ever be paid back is by increasing taxes. My wife is from Colombia and I spent over 10,000 USD and almost 2 years to get her here. Then these assholes want to allow the illegals to stay without any punishment and be granted amnesty? Yes I have a big problem with this.

If this goes through then they should refund every dollar spent on immigration and filing fees to each and every person who ever brought an alien here as a spouse. Also, an immigrant coming in on a K1 or any other immigrant visa must have extensive health checks, bloodwork, and medical reviews performed prior to entry. Upon entry, before their status can be adjusted these procedures must be done again in the U.S. Who is going to examine these people. I won't count on that happening but it isn't going to matter to me. If Bush doesn't get us blown off of the map before he gets out of office I will soon be residing outside of the United States. It will take me about 3 years to make this happen but I refuse to have my tax dollars spent on paying for a war a I never supported or feeding some illegal alien's kid.

Hillary or McCain in 2008? Makes one shudder at the thought.

[Ocean Traveler]

I know I should keep my mouth shut but here goes.

The average illegal alien costs $87,000 more than they will ever produce and that's before Social Security is added in. The average family of 4 in California costs the taxpayers $57,000 per year!

It does't save the US economy money. If it did, why do the states with the largest illegal populations have massive budget problems? It is cost shifting; so one person gets thier lawn cut cheaper but we all subsidize it through taxes.

Military spending as a percentage of the overall budget is historically and for a time of war it is unheard of.

Over 65% of the Federal Budget is entitlements: Medicaid, Medicare, Welfare, Food Stamps, etc. All programs started since WWII and dramatically expanded under Johnson during the War of Poverty. We have spent trillions on that war with very little sign of success. When do we "redeploy" on subsidizing failure?

Why pay billions for illegal aliens on one hand and pay billions in welfare subsidizing unemployment and failure on the other? Call me crazy but somethings wrong with this picture.

[Bart9000]

OK

You are on the right track here, so I won't berate you



Social spending is a pittance relative to what is kicked over to the military industrial complex, and other corporations usually in the form of tax breaks. I't's basically a non issue that the right uses to drum up business......it's easy to do because it's a visible issue, and on the surface reeks of unfairness, and paritism of people who are different from you....it is human nature to be resentful given that level of information about a subject. If it werent' there, there would be people starving (and killing and stealing) in the streets (yes, I know, some of them put themselves in the situation through stupidity and irresponsibility), and we as a relatively wealthy nation find this to be unseemly enough to throw a little money at it

I don't know a lot about the situation with the veterans......you should check your stats however....as I proved below, a lot of people just flat out lie when they are trying to get funding and political support.

The big complaint with imigrants is that they are taking jobs.. Here is the thing. I work with a lot of these guys....in my estimation, they mostly have a sixth grade education, and know maybe 100 words in English. Now even if they are willing to work harder for less money, do you know anyone who can't compete successfully with someone like this......if in fact you do, they are probably going to be at the bottom of the heap anyways.

Also, increasing the population of working poor is good for the economy.......THEY BUY THINGS (on a percentage basis much more than wealthy people-I can put you to sleep with econ talk if you want me to), which creates profit, and spurs additional demand.....increases the demand for labor, which increases wages across the board.

B9k

[Beavis]

Yes and just how are we going to pay for this senseless war. The one that we are borrowing money to pay for. Then on top of that Dumbo and Cheney are sucking up to their corporate buddies to give amnesty to the unknown number of illegal aliens. Each and every one of them are going to have 3-10 children that are also going to need amnesty, welfare, food stamps, government housing, free health care, ect.

We have 300,000 homeless veterans in this country who went to war for us but instead of helping them we have to roll out the red carpet for a bunch of fucking wetbacks. The terrorists we need to worry about are U.S, Citizens who reside in Washington, D.C. I for one am very proud to say that I did not vote for him.