"Others are poor if they're billionaires."
For that kind of poor folk,I'm afraid the rest of us really can't help by cutting their taxes. So John McCain is just going to have to endorse the Obama proposal: cut taxes for everyone making up to about $125,000 a year, and let the billionaires cope.
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yeah that's another direct punch
August 21, 2008 7:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
As former U. S. Senator Eugene McCarthy truly said: "You can't soak the rich. You can't even dampen them." The plutocrat corporate oligarchy that has so abused America can take care of itself. The rest of us don't need to keep subsidizing their luxurious larceny. Time, indeed, to restore the progressive income tax that helped create the middle class in the first place.
August 21, 2008 8:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh golly, I have to ask. What makes you think income tax isn't progressive these days, and exactly how would that produce a middle class?
August 21, 2008 8:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
If you don't understand how (1) public education, (2) Social Security, (3) trade union collective bargaining, and (4) the progressive income tax produced America's formerly robust middle class, then explaining anything economically and politically factual to you would only confuse matters.
Golly, but just think back to eight years ago when more progressive taxation -- i.e., higher rates for higher incomes -- produced a balanced budget, a healthier economy, and a middle class so satisfied that it would stupidly elect republicans to vanquish queer weddings and scared pregnant girls while letting the thieves in to loot the treasurey and wipe out much of the middle class. And to think that we've still got the queer weddings and scared pregnant girls even though we've got much less of a middle class to show for all the Seizure Class Subsidies and Wall Street Welfare.
Restoring the progressive income tax -- currently as regressive as I've ever seen it in my sixty years of life -- to levels current at the end of the Clinton Administration will do for starters. Then, of course, cutting the bloated defense budget by at least 25% annually for the next four years and channelling the fiscal savings into American jobs and infrastructure should do quite a bit of the rest. Call it Peace Dividend II. Only this time after the collapse of the American Empire instead of the Soviet one.
Not a difficult-to-understand program, really. But ... Golly Gosh All Fishhooks, Batman ... if you just can't grasp the lasting historical significance of FDR and the New Deal, then I've really just wasted a few keyboard keystrokes trying to enlighten you. Golly, but that word "golly" even sounds republican to me. How utterly 1950s, expletive wise.
August 22, 2008 3:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Drat, see reply at bottom of thread.
August 22, 2008 7:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
Up until Nixon took office, the US tax system was very progressive.
The nominal tax rate on incomes over $300K was around 91%. That taxation gave America the longest periods of sustained growth during the post-war years with next to no national debt.
It wasn't until Kennedy was assassinated that the tax rates on the rich started dropping and our national debt started rising. Neocon "taxation" has just about killed this country over the last 40 years.
You really need use Google more often.
August 22, 2008 6:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
So let's see, in today's dollars from 1963, that would be an income of $2 million. Yep that ought to catch a couple scofflaws like Tiger Woods, and Kobe Bryant.
The interesting part though is the insistence that we can tax our way into prosperity. I'm always amused by people that think taking away resources from the most productive citizens, and giving them to the least productive, will benefit the rest of us. But hey, I understand this isn't about rationality, it's about retribution.
So you're absolutely positive it had nothing to do with the "Great Society" or Vietnam War brought to us by our friendly neighborhood Democrats? Heh.
August 22, 2008 7:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
The interesting part though is the insistence that we can tax our way into prosperity.
I would have said that the interesting part is the insistence that we can borrow our way into prosperity, and sell our foreign policy to the Communist Chinese. That's just me, though.
August 22, 2008 8:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
Jeez I thought only Republicans find pleasure in endlessly twisting and distorting words. Now I know it's Republicans and Reed Hundt.
August 21, 2008 10:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Lalo,
watch that Reed Hunt guy, he wants to get in your pocket and take all your hard earned money!
August 22, 2008 10:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
Watch out Reed...
People who propose stuff like that get accused of being 'communists'. We have been told...errrrr, propagandized...that any efforts to levy additional taxes on the already overtaxed and unduly burdened billionaires, who are struggling just to get by, are patently unfair, grossly unjust and therefore un-American.
August 21, 2008 11:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think what you meant to say, was that you want higher taxes on the rich, without sounding like a populist yahoo, yes?
I do understand, and note that we still have all those things. Obviously, if you think there is a problem, it lies elsewhere.
While FDR is indeed the patron saint of liberalism, the Depression didn't actually cease until WW2 and the bombing of all our manufacturing rivals to smithereens. I can also understand your frustration around Wall Street Welfare. It would be much better to let most of the major banks go under.
Interestingly, it's the Democrats that have raised pork to a fine art. Nobody even has to go on record voting for it. It's doled out in conference to hide behind other subjects.
I also second the reduction of the defense budget, but you don't go far enough. We have 700 overseas bases. Shut them all down, and we can pay off all debt, endure no more casualties, and the world will love us for not meddling in stuff like the Russian invasion of Georgia.
But lastly, noting that you are old and crotchety, beware the temptation to soak the rich. These days the rich can can just wire their money to friendlier climes and thumb their noses at you from afar. Like it or not, we need rich people. They provide jobs and capital, and especially taxes. Be nice.
August 22, 2008 7:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Gosh, the income tax setup IS progressive. That is to say the more one makes the larger the percentage one pays.
Nicely documented.
August 22, 2008 7:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
August 22, 2008 8:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well, the smug tone is a bit hard to take, especially when it's linked to what might generously be called half-truths, but I'll do you the honor of replying anyway. Once.
More than a few successful business men started with borrowed money
Facile and ridiculous. Banks don't lend money to businesses that clearly won't be able to repay for several generations, and which continue to borrow at an unsustainable pace for fifty years.
Ask, and ye shall recieve.
It is kind of you not only to provide a link, but one that supports my case. Note that there are only six tax brackets and that the highest one is well below a half-million. Note that the table in question does not include payroll taxes which are actually regressive and which are normally more burdensome than the income tax itself on lower-income families. Note that the tables do not illustrate the difference between income tax and capital gains taxes, where only the well-to-do normally earn a significant portion of their revenue and where the tax rate is the same as the income tax rate for a couple earning $20,000.
That is to say, steeply regressive.
Sell foreign policy? can you expand that a bit?
Of course I can. And so can you, if you just expand your reading beyond Rush's talking points.
August 22, 2008 9:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Tankard says;
Tankard, "half truths" is the coin of the realm for the right wing. When they try to sell their gift wrapped tax cut packages for the wealthy they mention that Mom and Pop grocery store in Americana Iowa, not Wal-Mart. They mention that family owned gas station on Patriot Street, they don't mention EXXON.
What they say is true, but it isn't the WHOLE truth, so its all a big lie.
Christian Ralph Reed was a guest on C-SPAN today and its a miracle that a bolt of lightening from above didnt come down and strike him where he sat.
August 22, 2008 10:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
What they say is true
Only as a last resort.
Christian Ralph Reed was a guest on C-SPAN today and its a miracle that a bolt of lightening from above didnt come down
Both Zeus and Thor gave up on miracles long before Buddha was born.
August 22, 2008 1:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
August 22, 2008 12:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
A gracious concession, but a fact might have made it even better.
August 22, 2008 1:03 PM | Reply | Permalink