On August 18 2011 02:01 leveller wrote: So there are people out there who think its a bad idea to make multi-gabillionaires pay a little more taxes to help out everyone? I dont see why americans hate their governement, where is your compassion for your fellow man? Some people act like they would rather let poor people starve to death in a ditch than each chip in and help out. Look at yourselves monsters.
If someone is poor, it's his very own problem, not somebody else's. You get what you earn, that's the only fair and sustainable condition.
Rich people deserve to be rich because they worked for it, (even if they were born that way). Poor people deserve to be poor because they didn't work to rise above it, (regardless of the environment, community, or school district into which they were born.)
The CEO of verizon makes roughly $55,000 per *day*. And he's throwing a hissy fit because his workers, (who make roughly that every year) are refusing to give up their health benefits. Does he really deserve that much goddamn money?
[QUOTE]On August 18 2011 02:23 Iodem wrote: [QUOTE]On August 18 2011 02:01 leveller wrote: So there are people out there who think its a bad idea to make multi-gabillionaires pay a little more taxes to help out everyone? I dont see why americans hate their governement, where is your compassion for your fellow man? Some people act like they would rather let poor people starve to death in a ditch than each chip in and help out. Look at yourselves monsters.[/QUOTE]
In the US, there's a bit of a belief that people deserve to keep what they have earned.
[url=http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?Docid=2435&DocTypeID=2]The top 1% already pay 22% of all federal taxes,[/url] so the argument is somewhat to related to how much 'their fair share' should be.
But the other issue is that some corporations game the system through regulations in the tax code and pay little to nothing in taxes. So in some cases, increasing tax rates really won't do much. The US Tax code needs to be reformed if you want a significant revenue increase.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the 1% that pay 22% of the taxes also own 90% of the wealth right? So I would say there fair share is much higher than 22% no?
On August 17 2011 23:49 Rassy wrote: and full agree on the comment about silly people who dont trust the government but do trust big international cooperations (who in the end run the government) to do "the right thing" LOL
You think large unions and pension funds don't bribe the government?
Where do you think the democratic party gets most of their funding from?
Definitely not the rich corporations.
Government is bribed by both sides.
I've read the debate you are having with Haemalicous and can't help but agree with him.
Your thinking strikes me as absolute. "Revenues aren't the problem, spending is!"
That isn't really the debate. Debate Warren Buffets statement and what he says is pretty undeniable and common sense.
The "governement wastes money" is a seperate topic. I agree that the government is wasteful and that things need to improve there. When the problem is as big as the defecit you need to tackle it from all angles. Improving government revenue by increasing the tax burden on the rich will help for sure. There is no "one shot" magic bullet to kill the defecit, it's going to be 100's or 1000's of smaller initiatives that eventually whittle it away.
I'll gladly chuck more money in tax revenue.
I want more spending cuts.
That means medicare / social security need to be completely reworked.
No choice really, those 2 programs alone will bankrupt the country if nothing is done about them.
If the government is unwilling to do anything about these programs (plus the insane military spending), I'm unwilling to give them any more money.
On August 18 2011 02:49 Tien wrote: I can see the communist manifesto taking on more and more popularity.
The problem of economic disparity in the United States is not as simple as capitalism versus communism.
You cannot have a civilization, by definition, without social organization, what we call government. In essence all society is socialism. Similarly government cannot exist without an economy to sustain it. These are not systems that should be in conflict.
For any system to be sustainable it must have balance of power and shared responsibility. Somehow that seems to have gone missing in the world of U.S. business and government.
On August 17 2011 23:53 BlackFlag wrote: In companies there's just as much waste going on, but it's just not even semi-transparent. You just see the waste in government more, because they owe you acountability.
Nice assertion. The difference is that when a company wastes to much it goes out of a business and new entrepeneurs take over the capital. When a government wastes too much it just raises taxes or prints the difference.
Accounting standards in the developed world are very stringent, and if governments had to conform to the same accounting that publicly traded companys do they would be in default.
And to say that public companys owe you no accountability is nonsense. If they dont want to be delisted they need to provide continuous externally audited financial statements, of which analysist will be combing over looking for mistakes so they can short your stock.
Furthermore if the shareholders dont like the management they can actually give them the boot.
Public companys have 10x the accountability as government does.
Public companies are accountable to its stock holders, and only really the larger of them since you and me wouldn't be having any say (practically) in their shareholder meeting. A government is accountable via the media, where every blunder is measured out large and where everyone big enough with an agenda, is out to get a piece of attention. Like human rights violations for example.
An interesting article from an investor who works with the top 1%. Basically his thoughts on all the economic issues we're facing. Pretty interesting.
Interesting article. I think there's a natural inability to visualize the scale of the money involved. The arguments tend to involve the top 1%. Trouble is, 90-95% of them are honest, hard-working people, too. They're just highly educated, worked hard for many years and are trying to build up their own retirement plans to live on a fairly reasonable retirement plan of $50-100k a year after a long life of hard-work. These are the people that tend to be scapegoated while the real criminals continue to get away with murder.
The exploitative bastards are a tiny fraction of the top 1%, that tend to work in, or areas related to, the investment or banking businesses, and those are the ones we should be targeting.
I think it's high-time people realized, not even the most successful, fiscally-tightfisted, morally-reprehensible douchebag business-owners, lawyers and surgeons that you've seen in the movies can enter this exclusive club that is destroying the wealth equality in the country.
On August 18 2011 02:32 Bibdy wrote: I always see pictures taken of how the average person's salary has remained static, or gone down, over the last 30-some-odd years and I don't see how one can fix that without improving the demand or the quality of one's skillset. Taxing the rich isn't going to increase your salary up to what one believes it 'should be'. It's simple supply and demand. If there's a lot of people with the same skillset as you, you're going to have to work for less. The skillsets of the bottom 20%, even 80%, haven't improved and there's now more competition for the same jobs. Worse still, the jobs are being replaced by automation or taken overseas due to globalization since people on the other end of the world are willing to do the simplest, most mundane jobs for much less than western society will.
At the end of the day, I don't see how that's the rich's fault. That's the fault of our people not being educated/skilled enough to fulfill the jobs that are being created in the West. Should we just force people to create businesses in the US and incur the heavy costs of maintaining such a business here (benefits, much higher wages than they could get overseas)?
Hmm I don't necessarily agree. Executive compensation has skyrocketed in the last 30 years. Which means that corporations are not passing profits on to workers, they're exclusively being funneled to executives and shareholders (obvious overlap there). Of course shareholders need to be pleased, but I find it a little curious that we as a society have decided that CEOs are worth 10x more today than they were in the early 80's. It's just a huge circle jerk. Board of directors get chummy with CEOs and give them huge salaries, perks, bonuses, and stock options even when there's relatively little competition for their services.
Some people would argue that it's just the market at work, but if that's the case, it's an extremely inefficient market because even the idiots dragging their companies under with reckless abandon are getting huge salaries and golden parachutes. There seems to be very little correlation between long term performance and pay.
On August 18 2011 02:32 Bibdy wrote: I always see pictures taken of how the average person's salary has remained static, or gone down, over the last 30-some-odd years and I don't see how one can fix that without improving the demand or the quality of one's skillset. Taxing the rich isn't going to increase your salary up to what one believes it 'should be'. It's simple supply and demand. If there's a lot of people with the same skillset as you, you're going to have to work for less. The skillsets of the bottom 20%, even 80%, haven't improved and there's now more competition for the same jobs. Worse still, the jobs are being replaced by automation or taken overseas due to globalization since people on the other end of the world are willing to do the simplest, most mundane jobs for much less than western society will.
At the end of the day, I don't see how that's the rich's fault. That's the fault of our people not being educated/skilled enough to fulfill the jobs that are being created in the West. Should we just force people to create businesses in the US and incur the heavy costs of maintaining such a business here (benefits, much higher wages than they could get overseas)?
Hmm I don't necessarily agree. Executive compensation has skyrocketed in the last 30 years. Which means that corporations are not passing profits on to workers, they're exclusively being funneled to executives and shareholders (obvious overlap there). Of course shareholders need to be pleased, but I find it a little curious that we as a society have decided that CEOs are worth 10x more today than they were in the early 80's. It's just a huge circle jerk. Board of directors get chummy with CEOs and give them huge salaries, perks, bonuses, and stock options even when there's relatively little competition for their services.
Some people would argue that it's just the market at work, but if that's the case, it's an extremely inefficient market because even the idiots dragging their companies under with reckless abandon are getting huge salaries and golden parachutes, there seems to be very little correlation between performance and pay.
While true, and while I realize its the guy and his buddies circle-jerking to decide how much he's worth, I still don't see how it affects the guy at the bottom. If your skills are in high demand, you'd be paid more. If you absolutely needed someone to keep the building clean, and very few people had the skills to do that job, they'd put up an add for a ton of money to find that person. But, over-time, if there are more people clamoring for that job, alongside a bunch of jobs disappearing as a result of automation and globalization, the amount of money they'd be paying you for the same job would go down since there's more supply and less demand, which is what we're seeing for the guys at the bottom.
I think, ultimately, they're different problems. On the one hand, people at the bottom/middle need better and less costly education in order to keep up with the demands of the future, and on the other hand, there are people in the investment/banking businesses making a shitload of money for doing virtually nothing for the world, but moving money around, fucking the whole country over. These same people have a lot of power and political clout in order to keep their precious laws and loopholes in effect and a vested interest in neither revealing themselves, nor changing the way things currently work.
Until people can distinguish the difference between a guy living in a big house in California and owns a couple of fancy cars, and a guy with a fucking metric, unimaginable amount of money, we're going to keep going around in circles and scapegoat the legitimate rich, and ignore the super-rich.
I'm all for an increased tax bracket for the super rich, but I would define "super rich" as those with an annual income exceeding something like $3 million. If you're annual income is $1 million, yeah you're loaded/rich, but not "super rich" to the point you can light $100 bills to light your cigars.
On August 17 2011 06:46 FoeHamr wrote: don't richest people in this country pay the most taxes already?
Number wise yes, but not percentage wise. I think he mentions it in his article. He pays around 17% while his coworkers pay around 30? HE did mention it.
What a crock of crap. I don't mean you, as I know Buffett said it, but first, his tax records are not public, so he can claim whatever the fuck he wants and nobody can verify it. Not even the IRS can come out and call him a liar, as they are bound by disclosure laws. Second, payroll taxes are capped at a certain amount, so his fellow employees pay payroll taxes on their entire income where he does not. He pays the same taxes as they do, and more, up to the cap that applies to social security taxes. Third, he said a lot of his income is from capital gains, which when compared to the wages his employees are making, it's apples and oranges. Fourth, he most certainly has dividend income, which is taxed at a lower rate these days, but that income is being double taxed anyways, as the corporation paying the dividend has already paid tax on that, a rate that you can be sure Mr. Buffett is not including in his 17% calcuation. Fifth, I'm sure Mr. Buffett has plenty of private foundations in his name that he contributes to annually, which he determines how the money is to be spent in charitable ways. These contributions are deducted from his income before calculating his taxes, even though he dictates how the money is spent, instead of the government. Sixth, it's safe to say that his 17% number is based on his total income before all these deductions that he is taking and not based on his taxable income, whereas his "coworkers" do not have deductions to that extent.
Misleading at best.
It's not misleading at all, so stop trying to mislead us because you have an obvious agenda/vendetta against this man and his words. He can indeed claim whatever he wants, but for a cause such as this, why would he lie? The payroll tax cap is one of the issues, I'm not sure why you would bring that up against him. The rich should be taxed by their entire income, they can afford it. Capital gains at his tax bracket are probably the only thing on which he is currently taxed more than his workers, but after 2012 short term capital will be taxed at the income tax rate of the individual and long term capital gains will be capped at 20%. You only need to own something for 12 months before selling it to qualify as a long term capital gain, do you see any problems yet? Double taxing such large dividends is fine, it should be taxed more quite frankly. Do you really think there's an issue with Buffett giving money to charities as he pleases? To say he's denying the government it's share is a straw man, it's simply what he wanted to do because he didn't want to coddle his children and family with wealth by passing it down to them. Regardless of what you say about his deductions, the fact is the tax rate on the rich is quite low in the US even when compared against previous decades and the money they save isn't being reinvested back into workers, production, or even R&D. A look back at history when we had similar policies and chain of events should bring up the Great Depression as a result. Take your straw man to the Tea Party where they'll believe it.
On August 18 2011 03:15 Tien wrote: Capitalists aren't the ones bankrupting this country.
True socialism is founded off the back of capitalism.
Wealth disparity is not what is destroying America.
Our government levels of waste and spending is.
Capitalists aren't all the ones bankrupting this country, rich capitalists who believe in neoclassical economics are. True socialism isn't not founded off the back of capitalism. Wealth disparity indeed isn't just destroying America, it's the source of the rot at the core of Western capitalist society today.
Government spending and the defense budget is like the water supply in the American west and the Los Angeles metropolitan area: Take out LA and it's fine.
On August 17 2011 06:46 FoeHamr wrote: don't richest people in this country pay the most taxes already?
Number wise yes, but not percentage wise. I think he mentions it in his article. He pays around 17% while his coworkers pay around 30? HE did mention it.
What a crock of crap. I don't mean you, as I know Buffett said it, but first, his tax records are not public, so he can claim whatever the fuck he wants and nobody can verify it. Not even the IRS can come out and call him a liar, as they are bound by disclosure laws. Second, payroll taxes are capped at a certain amount, so his fellow employees pay payroll taxes on their entire income where he does not. He pays the same taxes as they do, and more, up to the cap that applies to social security taxes. Third, he said a lot of his income is from capital gains, which when compared to the wages his employees are making, it's apples and oranges. Fourth, he most certainly has dividend income, which is taxed at a lower rate these days, but that income is being double taxed anyways, as the corporation paying the dividend has already paid tax on that, a rate that you can be sure Mr. Buffett is not including in his 17% calcuation. Fifth, I'm sure Mr. Buffett has plenty of private foundations in his name that he contributes to annually, which he determines how the money is to be spent in charitable ways. These contributions are deducted from his income before calculating his taxes, even though he dictates how the money is spent, instead of the government. Sixth, it's safe to say that his 17% number is based on his total income before all these deductions that he is taking and not based on his taxable income, whereas his "coworkers" do not have deductions to that extent.
Misleading at best.
It's not misleading at all, so stop trying to mislead us because you have an obvious agenda/vendetta against this man and his words. He can indeed claim whatever he wants, but for a cause such as this, why would he lie? The payroll tax cap is one of the issues, I'm not sure why you would bring that up against him. The rich should be taxed by their entire income, they can afford it. Capital gains at his tax bracket are probably the only thing on which he is currently taxed more than his workers, but after 2012 short term capital will be taxed at the income tax rate of the individual and long term capital gains will be capped at 20%. You only need to own something for 12 months before selling it to qualify as a long term capital gain, do you see any problems yet? Double taxing such large dividends is fine, it should be taxed more quite frankly. Do you really think there's an issue with Buffett giving money to charities as he pleases? To say he's denying the government it's share is a straw man, it's simply what he wanted to do because he didn't want to coddle his children and family with wealth by passing it down to them. Regardless of what you say about his deductions, the fact is the tax rate on the rich is quite low in the US even when compared against previous decades and the money they save isn't being reinvested back into workers, production, or even R&D. A look back at history when we had similar policies and chain of events should bring up the Great Depression as a result. Take your straw man to the Tea Party where they'll believe it.
His argument, however "invalid" you may deem it, wasn't a straw man, so it's quite annoying to see you present it as one. I don't understand how you think it wasn't misleading either. Sure, you may think it's justified regardless, but that's completely different than misleading...
On August 17 2011 06:46 FoeHamr wrote: don't richest people in this country pay the most taxes already?
Number wise yes, but not percentage wise. I think he mentions it in his article. He pays around 17% while his coworkers pay around 30? HE did mention it.
What a crock of crap. I don't mean you, as I know Buffett said it, but first, his tax records are not public, so he can claim whatever the fuck he wants and nobody can verify it. Not even the IRS can come out and call him a liar, as they are bound by disclosure laws. Second, payroll taxes are capped at a certain amount, so his fellow employees pay payroll taxes on their entire income where he does not. He pays the same taxes as they do, and more, up to the cap that applies to social security taxes. Third, he said a lot of his income is from capital gains, which when compared to the wages his employees are making, it's apples and oranges. Fourth, he most certainly has dividend income, which is taxed at a lower rate these days, but that income is being double taxed anyways, as the corporation paying the dividend has already paid tax on that, a rate that you can be sure Mr. Buffett is not including in his 17% calcuation. Fifth, I'm sure Mr. Buffett has plenty of private foundations in his name that he contributes to annually, which he determines how the money is to be spent in charitable ways. These contributions are deducted from his income before calculating his taxes, even though he dictates how the money is spent, instead of the government. Sixth, it's safe to say that his 17% number is based on his total income before all these deductions that he is taking and not based on his taxable income, whereas his "coworkers" do not have deductions to that extent.
Misleading at best.
It's not misleading at all, so stop trying to mislead us because you have an obvious agenda/vendetta against this man and his words. He can indeed claim whatever he wants, but for a cause such as this, why would he lie? The payroll tax cap is one of the issues, I'm not sure why you would bring that up against him. The rich should be taxed by their entire income, they can afford it. Capital gains at his tax bracket are probably the only thing on which he is currently taxed more than his workers, but after 2012 short term capital will be taxed at the income tax rate of the individual and long term capital gains will be capped at 20%. You only need to own something for 12 months before selling it to qualify as a long term capital gain, do you see any problems yet? Double taxing such large dividends is fine, it should be taxed more quite frankly. Do you really think there's an issue with Buffett giving money to charities as he pleases? To say he's denying the government it's share is a straw man, it's simply what he wanted to do because he didn't want to coddle his children and family with wealth by passing it down to them. Regardless of what you say about his deductions, the fact is the tax rate on the rich is quite low in the US even when compared against previous decades and the money they save isn't being reinvested back into workers, production, or even R&D. A look back at history when we had similar policies and chain of events should bring up the Great Depression as a result. Take your straw man to the Tea Party where they'll believe it.
His argument, however "invalid" you may deem it, wasn't a straw man, so it's quite annoying to see you present it as one. I don't understand how you think it wasn't misleading either. Sure, you may think it's justified regardless, but that's completely different than misleading...
It was a straw man because it chose to misrepresent Buffett's statements without making note of something very obvious. Granted, the numbers are vague at best, but Buffett doesn't mislead us at all - his income breakdown and gifts to charity have many similarities with other rich or super-rich people, resulting in similar (or in the ballpark) overall tax rates that are indeed lower than their secretaries'. Has nobody here seen this obvious connection?
*edit* I suppose I forgot to mention the issue of Buffett giving virtually all of his money to charity. If a middle-class couple with no children did the same with say, 500k they saved up over time, nobody would say a damn thing, but if Warren Buffett does it, it's suddenly denying the government money?
EPT
