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.
The most accurate post in the first 2 pages.
Can someone answer this question:
Who actually pays the taxes that 'evil' corporations pay.
Answer: the consumer. So raise taxes all you want. The actual producer won't pay a dime of it.
I started to say more, but found it was just repeating the quoted post for the most part. When you are like me and actually paying taxes you'll realize just how hypocritical the likes of Gates and Buffet really are. There is always something behind the curtain.
I swear -- by my life and my love for it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. Or, from each according to their means, to each according to their needs. One theory works, the other does not.
The "virtue of egoism", hum?
What you tax is not the company altogether, but the dividend that the shareholders are getting. So the consumers are not hit, at all. The ones who are hit are the people who owe the company if the company makes a lot of money (if it doesn't, they don't get that much dividend anyway).
Anyway, Warren Buffet is one of the rare ultra-rich businessmen that I respect. He made his fortune by investing on the long term rather than speculating, he does something somehow useful with it, and he is not a plain egoistic asshole who fight for his class and his personal interest.
How won't the consumers be hit? If the company themselves will be losing money since their investers will have a lower incentive to invest then the company will be lowering their profit margins. How will this not affect the consumer? Prices are inclined to increase.
And then where will the tax money go from there? The government? And then what?
On September 22 2011 01:22 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On September 22 2011 01:13 weekendracer wrote:
On August 17 2011 06:57 Kaitlin wrote:
On August 17 2011 06:49 xXFireandIceXx wrote:
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.
The most accurate post in the first 2 pages.
Can someone answer this question:
Who actually pays the taxes that 'evil' corporations pay.
Answer: the consumer. So raise taxes all you want. The actual producer won't pay a dime of it.
I started to say more, but found it was just repeating the quoted post for the most part. When you are like me and actually paying taxes you'll realize just how hypocritical the likes of Gates and Buffet really are. There is always something behind the curtain.
I swear -- by my life and my love for it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. Or, from each according to their means, to each according to their needs. One theory works, the other does not.
The "virtue of egoism", hum?
What you tax is not the company altogether, but the dividend that the shareholders are getting. So the consumers are not hit, at all. The ones who are hit are the people who owe the company if the company makes a lot of money (if it doesn't, they don't get that much dividend anyway).
Anyway, Warren Buffet is one of the rare ultra-rich businessmen that I respect. He made his fortune by investing on the long term rather than speculating, he does something somehow useful with it, and he is not a plain egoistic asshole who fight for his class and his personal interest.
How won't the consumers be hit? If the company themselves will be losing money since their investers will have a lower incentive to invest then the company will be lowering their profit margins. How will this not affect the consumer? Prices are inclined to increase.
And then where will the tax money go from there? The government? And then what?
How does decreased investment cause companies to lose money? Companies lose money when they charge less for a good than it costs to produce it. A tax on the good can be passed on to consumers, but trying to link personal income tax to company capitalization is stretching it.
If you mean that companies selling shares to fund new product lines are going to get hit by a lack of funds to buy those shares, I suggest that the wealth distribution is already so completely out of whack that if anything, you need increased demand more than increased funding for products that aren't ever going to get sold.
The taxed money goes to fund infrastructure projects, etc. This creates jobs/saves jobs for construction companies, brick makers etc. At the same time, you get better roads and public libraries. Good deal, no?
On September 22 2011 01:22 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On September 22 2011 01:13 weekendracer wrote:
On August 17 2011 06:57 Kaitlin wrote:
On August 17 2011 06:49 xXFireandIceXx wrote:
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.
The most accurate post in the first 2 pages.
Can someone answer this question:
Who actually pays the taxes that 'evil' corporations pay.
Answer: the consumer. So raise taxes all you want. The actual producer won't pay a dime of it.
I started to say more, but found it was just repeating the quoted post for the most part. When you are like me and actually paying taxes you'll realize just how hypocritical the likes of Gates and Buffet really are. There is always something behind the curtain.
I swear -- by my life and my love for it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. Or, from each according to their means, to each according to their needs. One theory works, the other does not.
The "virtue of egoism", hum?
What you tax is not the company altogether, but the dividend that the shareholders are getting. So the consumers are not hit, at all. The ones who are hit are the people who owe the company if the company makes a lot of money (if it doesn't, they don't get that much dividend anyway).
Anyway, Warren Buffet is one of the rare ultra-rich businessmen that I respect. He made his fortune by investing on the long term rather than speculating, he does something somehow useful with it, and he is not a plain egoistic asshole who fight for his class and his personal interest.
How won't the consumers be hit? If the company themselves will be losing money since their investers will have a lower incentive to invest then the company will be lowering their profit margins. How will this not affect the consumer? Prices are inclined to increase.
And then where will the tax money go from there? The government? And then what?
Don't worry, you have a long way to go before your economy get hurt by taxes on big corporations and super rich individuals. Really.
To answer your second question: and then, it will help the country not to have an unsustainable debt that cost you more and more money every year without fucking up all your public services.
Other ideas: you can invest in a good public education, keep reforming your health system so that you don't leave people die like dogs if they don't have the money to pay for very expensive treatments, you can get a decent cultural life so that you have enlightened citizen who stop believing the crap mass medias tell them, you can get working infrastructure since american infrastructures are horribad, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc
But I guess the fact that some businessmen can have one more billion dollar at the end of his career or that Goldman Sachs makes even more money that it's actually doing in order to pay their speculators with a little bit more obscene salaries is much more important.
On August 17 2011 12:12 macil222 wrote: I don't believe anything Warren Buffet says.
The reason is because he is already as rich as he is going to get. He already has the fame and status of being one of the top couple richest people in the world and he may have held that title for a short period of time.
He is a greedy selfish bastard and he doesn't give a damn to give the same to chance to everyone else that he had.
There is a reason the ultra super rich suddenly become "philantropists" Its because they want more and more, and there comes to a point where you have to spend your money in order to acquire more status. You can only buy so many cars, companies, mansions and towers before it stops adding anything new to their status so instead they seek to purchase a legacy with their money.
They've gotten everything that they want out of life and can now afford to spend their money on something even greater...legacy. Warren Buffet does not have a heart, and he is not some folksy nice guy who gives a damn about people. He is a business man who wants to purchase his small place in the history books next to the Carnegie and Rockefeller.
And you have absolutely no idea whether you are right, wrong, or somewhere in between.
For all you know, Buffet could be a old broken man nearing the end of his life, sad and depressed by the fact that he has everything when millions of others have absolutely nothing and wants to make whatever difference he can.
I am absolutely convinced that I am right.
If he felt that way then he would give away his money now, sell his mansion, sell his stake in his company and start living like a regular person. But he is never going to do that. He is going to live like a king until the day his heart gives out.
If he really cares about the poor who have very little then he would not be saying any of this. The system that produces the most wealth for everyone is a system based on free markets. The problem with our system, especially in the United States is not the free markets, its the lack of free markets. Too much regulation, and too much government/corporate collusion.
Look at how many people have gotten rich thanks to warren buffet. Think about all of the stuff those people buy and the jobs that creates. Look at the wealth he created, wealth that would not otherwise exist. Think in terms of his entire lifespan and every dollar that was not taxed. Think about how each of those dollars got multiplied several times over. Higher taxes means less future wealth for everyone. And what would a government a spend that money on? Would they generate more wealth? No they would squander on some phony program to help the poor, which does nothing but hurt the poor by creating dependency. (give a fish vs teach to fish..)
For all the hate the socialists give to capitalism the so called poor in the western world are as well off as the rich were decades ago. In the United States "poor" people with subsidized housing have separate rooms for each child, health care, big televisions in mutliple rooms, broadband, a car for each adult, no lack of appliances and sufficient and often new furniture.
It is so easy to focus on the inequality and cry about it, rather than take the time to realize that if we had forced equality all along then we would simply all be poor, far poorer than the "poor" are today.
Now there are genuine poor in other parts of the world and they need help. Churches do a very good job, there are many charities and organizations such as the peace corp. So encourage pepole to donate and volunteer. Ultimately its up to people in those countries to build a civilization for themselves. If you are talking about a nation taxing its citizens to redistribute wealth to other nations for some sort of global level equality then that is even worse but lets not get into that.
The "poor" you are talking about is called the middle-class. You cannot seriously be as disillusioned to think that the truly poor people can afford those expenses, it's a rediculous statement.
What does anyone do that contributes to society in any way that would justify them making over 5 million a year?
Athletes, Businessmen, expert researchers, intellectuals, etc. None of them seem to justify this opulence in the face of the suffering that goes on in America. Forget the terrible horrors around the globe, we can just look at America. We have people die from toothaches that evolve into seriously fatal infections while the very top of our society owns 80% of the country. The guy was 24 years old. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/insurance-24-year-dies-toothache/story?id=14438171
Some libertarian/Randian, please quote this and let everyone know that this is okay and it is only moral let this happen so we don't coerce individuals.
Anyway, back to the point:
Is there a single person, ever, that has warranted such incredible wealth? Look at the statistics, they're staggering.
I don't understand how individuals with so little (compared to the top 1%) defend them so adamantly. Middle-class kids telling me they'd die for the opulence of the smallest minority of individuals -- while they would never sacrifice to help that old widow get food on her table, medical treatment she needs... it is absurd.
On September 21 2011 08:06 Kiarip wrote: The defense spendings are huge, but the spendings on the actual military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq don't compare at all in costs to the defense spendings or the social security or medicaid. Kinda makes you wonder how many operations the government may be running without the people knowing about it.
anyways... Ron Paul for example said he would literally immediately withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq... but that won't be enough to cut the deficit. Not even close. Still he would rather cut spending than raise taxes, and that's a good thing imo. The problem with all the taxing that the Left wants to do is that they try to use the money they save on the tax-cuts immediately on their garbage programs. I think it's pretty obvious that the Democrats won't get us out of Debt. That's why they propose these plans to cut "a trillion over 10 years," because then they can spend a whole lot now, while saying that most of the cuts should come later, but the government will not be mandated to make those cuts once they get there, not to mention the fact that a trillion in 10 years is nowhere near enough.
You do know cuts to programs show a direct link to increase in unemployment and slows the econ, take at look at any of the EU nations under heavy austerity measures their growth is often 0%. You want to cut debt but you want jobs and a growing econ? That's apples and oranges.
I have no confidence in the federal government's execution on creating jobs. Look at Solyndra. That's a total loss of more than half a billion dollars in loans on 1000 jobs that lasted less than 2 years and Solyndra only lasted that long because it had other investors that got wiped out, too. Growth rates of 0% is better than creating jobs that require a million dollars of new money to sustain.
OTOH, the Republicans aren't going to get us out of debt either. It's pretty hopeless.
Solyndra was 1 company, also privite venture invested double to what the government did =p so what does that say about private venture?
$38.6 billion loan guarantee program 535? million to Solyndra which didn't work out, 1.3% of that loan guarantee program The expected failure rate was like 5% to 10% of the loans if you're just counting what has been loaned out already thats put it around 3% for the failure of solyndra Tax payer losses i've seen numbers around 525 million clearly a big loss on that investment If the program kept/ gained 65k jobs is hard to say after all it's all speculation to if a job would have been lost if not for the influx of cash etc.
On September 21 2011 09:31 Kiarip wrote:
On September 21 2011 09:02 semantics wrote:
On September 21 2011 07:07 Joedaddy wrote:
On September 21 2011 06:23 Bibdy wrote:
On September 21 2011 06:16 Joedaddy wrote: [quote]
At what point do you stop taking from those that have to give to those who have not? Where does it end?
At what point do you stop taking from those that have nothing to give, to those that do? Where does it end?
Slippery slope arguments go nowhere. Stick to the proposal put before you by Obama, not to some far flung distant future.
The proposal is, that people that are getting away with taxation-murder, are going to have to start paying their fair share. What's wrong with that?
^In response to Obama's proposal.
It can't be the video is dated march 31st it has nothing to do with obama's current proposal http://www.whitehouse.gov/jobsact which is dated sept 8th
1.6 trillion dollars is this years budget short fall you make that up you start to reduce the defect, that video tries to take all that from the 3.8 trillion dollar expenditure for the year, ie it's playing you. It ignored what is already established revenue for the federal government which in large part is income tax and social insurance payments which in large part is payed by both the rich and the not so rich already. It also uses the word profits from previous years which likely wouldn't include what was already taxed away(profits is a broad term).
On September 21 2011 08:06 Kiarip wrote: The defense spendings are huge, but the spendings on the actual military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq don't compare at all in costs to the defense spendings or the social security or medicaid. Kinda makes you wonder how many operations the government may be running without the people knowing about it.
anyways... Ron Paul for example said he would literally immediately withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq... but that won't be enough to cut the deficit. Not even close. Still he would rather cut spending than raise taxes, and that's a good thing imo. The problem with all the taxing that the Left wants to do is that they try to use the money they save on the tax-cuts immediately on their garbage programs. I think it's pretty obvious that the Democrats won't get us out of Debt. That's why they propose these plans to cut "a trillion over 10 years," because then they can spend a whole lot now, while saying that most of the cuts should come later, but the government will not be mandated to make those cuts once they get there, not to mention the fact that a trillion in 10 years is nowhere near enough.
You do know cuts to programs show a direct link to increase in unemployment and slows the econ, take at look at any of the EU nations under heavy austerity measures their growth is often 0%. You want to cut debt but you want jobs and a growing econ? That's apples and oranges.
The spending is preserving jobs that aren't pulling their own weight, and it also makes the economy worse and worse.
Spending needs to be cut, and labor laws need to be removed for the most part so that the cost of labor can decline to a point where there's enough demand for it to give people jobs. It won't happen immediately, but continuously spending money on stimuli that don't create anything but simply allow people to preserve jobs that are not creating any wealth, and are not worth the pay that they receive is a much worse decision.
I don't want jobs and a growing econ. It's IMPOSSIBLE to have a growing econ right now without the recession, and a contraction. at this point I JUST want them to cut debt, because that IS possible... for now, while the interest on our debt is still only 10% of our income.
And what happens when you cut out the 1.6 let's make it 2 trillion of the budget so we have a budget surplus and maybe could start paying off debt how many goverment jobs have just been lost? how many programs for the poor and elderly have you cut causing more job losses. Sense the bottom half of the american population spends shit ton more then they save it means they drive the consumer economy hurting them means stores cannot move products so they have to cut back, cut backs means ppl are less willing to invest as it's a shaky market, hell banks barely loan out as it is. long term it sets the economy to shrink not grow. Short term maybe small growth or just a flat no growth
Of course... because that's how real economy works... the economy NEEDS to shrink, because a lot of the jobs are unsustainable.
First of all government jobs don't create anything they're part of the bureaucracy. So when you cut them (of course in places where the budget needs to get cut anyways like regulation,) you basically just stop giving people a government hand-out of a considerable amount of cash (when compared to a welfare hand-out at least.) for doing work that does nothing positive in the country...
all those government jobs that oversee policies that are responsible for our struggling economy are triple-dipping on the economy hurt... 1) you're paying people money when we're in deficit 2) the people aren't creating anything or providing a service that anyone would actually be willing to pay that amount for, 3) the job is part of government program which hurts the economy... other government jobs that aren't as bad double dip, and some that are somewhat necessarily like police, and etc. only hurts us once (but police is state funded anyways.)
as for people that are gonna come off welfare... well they'll have a better shot at finding jobs once regulations are repealed. are some people going to be working for extremely low wages for a bit just to sustain themselves? probably... But as of right now they're funded by the government with money that's being printed, and is stealing purchasing power from the rest of the people (and it hurts the lower class that has jobs the most) so eventually the whole "living for extremely low wages just to sustain yourself" thing will happen anyways, just to way more people, while there are still some on government welfare.
and as for the consumer... that's the whole problem. We're spending more than we're producing. a lot of people that have jobs now that are protected by the government spending are jobs the services of which people shouldn't be able to afford in the first place, and it only sends either the people or the government into more debt, which of course will either lead to the eventual default and currency reconstruction (which will be pre-phased with hyperinflation) or it will make the recession/contraction a lot worse.
edit:
and the last part.. as for the banks... banks shouldn't be lending. why do you think interest rates are so low? they're to encourage banks to lend. They're artificial rates. all the banks which proceed to lend at these rates will default when the rates go up (and the rates MUST go up in order for savings to ever occur.)
Why do interest rates exist in the first place? They first of all hedge the risk of default by the loaner for the bank, they also reflect the supply - demand interaction for money. Right now rates should go up, once they go up banks will be more willing to loan, but less people will be willing to lend. Instead people will start to try to repay their debt, and then possibly save. Once a lot of people are saving the rates will be able to go back down again, because obviously if no one is lending, and everyone is loaning money to the bank, they're gonna want to lower the rates to pay less interest.
Of course... higher rates will lead to less people wanting to borrow to invest, but that's a good thing, because there's not that many people actually willing to lend in the first place, so every time a bank gives out a loan, most of it comes from the money they get from the FED, which of course has a chance of being no longer guaranteed because a lot of people want to shut it down, so that's why banks are cautious about lending now, even with these low rates.
Let me put this logic in perspective for you. Imagine this scenario:
There's overpopulation and famine creating a food shortage. People are trying their best to spread the food around and make sure nobody dies of starvation. They even discuss longterm plans to correct the food shortage in the long run, but ask for farmers to take a loss in profit and bare some hunger until this passes. You're the guy that busts into a meeting spouting nonsense of "just let some people die, then there'll be more than enough for everybody! We're just overpopulated and letting people die is nature's solution!"
This is retarded.
If there's not enough food to feed all the people than someone WILL die.
See here's the problem with your logic... you think redistributing stuff there's not enough can make up for the shortage... It can't. It's not mathematically possible do you realize that? The sad thing is that in your scenario the liberal economist would probably have the farmers starve, and then they'd die, and when there's no more farmers there's no more food, and then everyone else would die.
You and other hocus-pocus Austrian Economists would gladly throw people under a bus for "mistakes" nobody made or could not be easily avoided. You're the guys who would still be using unsanitary tools for medical surgery and blame infections on the natural course. The 21st century gives us an enormous toolbox to fix the economy (along with other things), and your advice is "let's just level it and start over:"
WTF? what toolbox? You're just in denial. There's no fix for the economy. There's no decision that will directly lead to prosperity in the short run at all. There's 2 options... continue shuffling the constantly decreasing amount of limited resources while continuing to struggle the economy until the point when the government will just shrug its shoulders and say... "I'm sorry you guys are just not producing enough, there's nothing we can do to save you." which will inevitably happen... Or STOP inflating our currency, start repaying our debts at the cost of accepting a lower standard of living... start saving and rebuilt our economy for real... So there's no good answer to the problem... but there's a RIGHT answer.
If you really believe that we can fix this with one of our "21st century solutions" naively optimistic...
The US Federal debt right now is around 14 trillion... do you know what else is around 14 trillion?
Our GDP... that's right our GDP, the majority of which is consumption in the first place is 14 trillion dollars, pretty much as big as our debt. This means that if the government confiscated EVERYTHING that americans produce for an entire year, sold it to non-americans, cut all government spending only then would we be able to pay off our national debt. and that's actually not even true, because like I said a huge portion of our GDP are services which don't create any wealth in the first place.
But yeah... I'm sure your 21st century solutions have the wonderful power of ignoring mathematics.
Well the current situation is more like there is way more than enough food to feed everyone, but a tiny fraction of the population has way more food than they could ever eat, and don't want to share any with people who are starving.
Just curious, why isn't Somalia evolving into a utopia?
... just how much money do you think these few people have? In the end when the economy actually starts to improve and they see real opportunities they're the ones who are going to help grow this economy. Meanwhile all those people and corporations combined don't have enough money to pay off just the government national debt... which is 14 trillion...
what about the entire debt of our country including the peoples' debts which totals to 55 trillion?
Let me remind you that wealth distribution, government sponsored consumption, and heavy regulation of our industry is how we GOT here... it's not gonna get us out. If you think it's the rich that's hogging up all the money... you're wrong (you're right if you're talking about companies that the government protects because of their lobbyist groups, but even they don't have so much,) the rich used to have even more money, and the middle class used to have more money, and the poor used to have more money (by money i mean purchasing power, because the money supply is fucked anyways.) and the government took all of that and spent it on things that make it difficult for people to make more money, and now that the middle-class barely exists anymore, and the poorer class is broke, they want to try to redistribute the money of the rich, so they can take it all over again.
as for Somalia. First of all they don't have a constitution that's protected by anything, so there's no one protecting property rights. Even so property exists there. To some extent the foreign aid makes the situation a lot worse actually, because it hedges the risks of the militarists (of starving,) while destroying opportunity for the producers, which results in an overly militaristic society. Still... I think that Somalia may one day pull it out, but who knows.
On September 22 2011 01:22 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On September 22 2011 01:13 weekendracer wrote:
On August 17 2011 06:57 Kaitlin wrote:
On August 17 2011 06:49 xXFireandIceXx wrote:
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.
The most accurate post in the first 2 pages.
Can someone answer this question:
Who actually pays the taxes that 'evil' corporations pay.
Answer: the consumer. So raise taxes all you want. The actual producer won't pay a dime of it.
I started to say more, but found it was just repeating the quoted post for the most part. When you are like me and actually paying taxes you'll realize just how hypocritical the likes of Gates and Buffet really are. There is always something behind the curtain.
I swear -- by my life and my love for it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. Or, from each according to their means, to each according to their needs. One theory works, the other does not.
The "virtue of egoism", hum?
What you tax is not the company altogether, but the dividend that the shareholders are getting. So the consumers are not hit, at all. The ones who are hit are the people who owe the company if the company makes a lot of money (if it doesn't, they don't get that much dividend anyway).
Anyway, Warren Buffet is one of the rare ultra-rich businessmen that I respect. He made his fortune by investing on the long term rather than speculating, he does something somehow useful with it, and he is not a plain egoistic asshole who fight for his class and his personal interest.
How won't the consumers be hit? If the company themselves will be losing money since their investers will have a lower incentive to invest then the company will be lowering their profit margins. How will this not affect the consumer? Prices are inclined to increase.
And then where will the tax money go from there? The government? And then what?
How does decreased investment cause companies to lose money? Companies lose money when they charge less for a good than it costs to produce it. A tax on the good can be passed on to consumers, but trying to link personal income tax to company capitalization is stretching it.
If you mean that companies selling shares to fund new product lines are going to get hit by a lack of funds to buy those shares, I suggest that the wealth distribution is already so completely out of whack that if anything, you need increased demand more than increased funding for products that aren't ever going to get sold.
The taxed money goes to fund infrastructure projects, etc. This creates jobs/saves jobs for construction companies, brick makers etc. At the same time, you get better roads and public libraries. Good deal, no?
You're almost right. Investing in companies so they make new products isn't gonna help right now. But raising the taxes on dividends isn't the way to do this. The way to do this is to let the interest rates naturally rise, which they will by a significant amount if the end is ever put to the FED's constant efforts to destroy our currency. The problem is then if you tax the dividends, and the rates go up, then people will try to withdraw even from businesses that are sound to put money into savings accounts. Of course maybe they won't because some banks will start to rightfully crash.
Still when the finally go up, a profitable partial ownership of a company will become a rare thing, and I don't see why you would want to make it even rarer. This tax will fuck EVERYONE really hard if it goes through when the economy goes into recession.
On September 22 2011 03:02 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On September 22 2011 01:22 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On September 22 2011 01:13 weekendracer wrote:
On August 17 2011 06:57 Kaitlin wrote:
On August 17 2011 06:49 xXFireandIceXx wrote:
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.
The most accurate post in the first 2 pages.
Can someone answer this question:
Who actually pays the taxes that 'evil' corporations pay.
Answer: the consumer. So raise taxes all you want. The actual producer won't pay a dime of it.
I started to say more, but found it was just repeating the quoted post for the most part. When you are like me and actually paying taxes you'll realize just how hypocritical the likes of Gates and Buffet really are. There is always something behind the curtain.
I swear -- by my life and my love for it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. Or, from each according to their means, to each according to their needs. One theory works, the other does not.
The "virtue of egoism", hum?
What you tax is not the company altogether, but the dividend that the shareholders are getting. So the consumers are not hit, at all. The ones who are hit are the people who owe the company if the company makes a lot of money (if it doesn't, they don't get that much dividend anyway).
Anyway, Warren Buffet is one of the rare ultra-rich businessmen that I respect. He made his fortune by investing on the long term rather than speculating, he does something somehow useful with it, and he is not a plain egoistic asshole who fight for his class and his personal interest.
How won't the consumers be hit? If the company themselves will be losing money since their investers will have a lower incentive to invest then the company will be lowering their profit margins. How will this not affect the consumer? Prices are inclined to increase.
And then where will the tax money go from there? The government? And then what?
Don't worry, you have a long way to go before your economy get hurt by taxes on big corporations and super rich individuals. Really.
To answer your second question: and then, it will help the country not to have an unsustainable debt that cost you more and more money every year without fucking up all your public services.
Other ideas: you can invest in a good public education, keep reforming your health system so that you don't leave people die like dogs if they don't have the money to pay for very expensive treatments, you can get a decent cultural life so that you have enlightened citizen who stop believing the crap mass medias tell them, you can get working infrastructure since american infrastructures are horribad, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc
But I guess the fact that some businessmen can have one more billion dollar at the end of his career or that Goldman Sachs makes even more money that it's actually doing in order to pay their speculators with a little bit more obscene salaries is much more important.
Good job, you've said the absolute opposite of what is true.
First of all, we're not a long way from hurting the economy by taxing dividends and investor income. Sure everyone is super eager to make mal-investments now, because of the super high inflation and low interest rates provided by the FED, but the moment that's gone investment will be so rare, and this tax will be the difference between many things being almost/barely profitable, and completely non-profitable.
#2. Like I said earlier... if you take all the money from the rich corporations and individuals you still won't pay off our 14 trillion debt... you won't, it's not the rich that are hogging up all the money, there just isn't that much money the government needs to spend less on things including public services.
your other ideas: public education doesn't give you any products, and if by invest you mean government should put money into it... you're so wrong, education is almost the last thing government needs to spend money on. The difference between good highschool education and bad high school education is a difference of like no jobs, it almost doesn't matter. and as for college education we already have an abundance of people with college degrees... that's why it's so hard to get hired, and all these people coming out of college have a ton of debt.
Healthcare? all you gotta do is uplift some liability from the doctor and get rid of the lobbyists and the price of healthcare will go down drastically. Public healthcare makes it more expensive and exploitable. We don't need to reform public healthcare we need to cut it heavily and minimize it.
but I guess you don't understand how the economy works, and just like to spout socialist bullshit.
On September 21 2011 08:06 Kiarip wrote: The defense spendings are huge, but the spendings on the actual military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq don't compare at all in costs to the defense spendings or the social security or medicaid. Kinda makes you wonder how many operations the government may be running without the people knowing about it.
anyways... Ron Paul for example said he would literally immediately withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq... but that won't be enough to cut the deficit. Not even close. Still he would rather cut spending than raise taxes, and that's a good thing imo. The problem with all the taxing that the Left wants to do is that they try to use the money they save on the tax-cuts immediately on their garbage programs. I think it's pretty obvious that the Democrats won't get us out of Debt. That's why they propose these plans to cut "a trillion over 10 years," because then they can spend a whole lot now, while saying that most of the cuts should come later, but the government will not be mandated to make those cuts once they get there, not to mention the fact that a trillion in 10 years is nowhere near enough.
You do know cuts to programs show a direct link to increase in unemployment and slows the econ, take at look at any of the EU nations under heavy austerity measures their growth is often 0%. You want to cut debt but you want jobs and a growing econ? That's apples and oranges.
I have no confidence in the federal government's execution on creating jobs. Look at Solyndra. That's a total loss of more than half a billion dollars in loans on 1000 jobs that lasted less than 2 years and Solyndra only lasted that long because it had other investors that got wiped out, too. Growth rates of 0% is better than creating jobs that require a million dollars of new money to sustain.
OTOH, the Republicans aren't going to get us out of debt either. It's pretty hopeless.
Solyndra was 1 company, also privite venture invested double to what the government did =p so what does that say about private venture?
$38.6 billion loan guarantee program 535? million to Solyndra which didn't work out, 1.3% of that loan guarantee program The expected failure rate was like 5% to 10% of the loans if you're just counting what has been loaned out already thats put it around 3% for the failure of solyndra Tax payer losses i've seen numbers around 525 million clearly a big loss on that investment If the program kept/ gained 65k jobs is hard to say after all it's all speculation to if a job would have been lost if not for the influx of cash etc.
On September 21 2011 09:31 Kiarip wrote:
On September 21 2011 09:02 semantics wrote:
On September 21 2011 07:07 Joedaddy wrote:
On September 21 2011 06:23 Bibdy wrote: [quote]
At what point do you stop taking from those that have nothing to give, to those that do? Where does it end?
Slippery slope arguments go nowhere. Stick to the proposal put before you by Obama, not to some far flung distant future.
The proposal is, that people that are getting away with taxation-murder, are going to have to start paying their fair share. What's wrong with that?
It can't be the video is dated march 31st it has nothing to do with obama's current proposal http://www.whitehouse.gov/jobsact which is dated sept 8th
1.6 trillion dollars is this years budget short fall you make that up you start to reduce the defect, that video tries to take all that from the 3.8 trillion dollar expenditure for the year, ie it's playing you. It ignored what is already established revenue for the federal government which in large part is income tax and social insurance payments which in large part is payed by both the rich and the not so rich already. It also uses the word profits from previous years which likely wouldn't include what was already taxed away(profits is a broad term).
On September 21 2011 08:06 Kiarip wrote: The defense spendings are huge, but the spendings on the actual military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq don't compare at all in costs to the defense spendings or the social security or medicaid. Kinda makes you wonder how many operations the government may be running without the people knowing about it.
anyways... Ron Paul for example said he would literally immediately withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq... but that won't be enough to cut the deficit. Not even close. Still he would rather cut spending than raise taxes, and that's a good thing imo. The problem with all the taxing that the Left wants to do is that they try to use the money they save on the tax-cuts immediately on their garbage programs. I think it's pretty obvious that the Democrats won't get us out of Debt. That's why they propose these plans to cut "a trillion over 10 years," because then they can spend a whole lot now, while saying that most of the cuts should come later, but the government will not be mandated to make those cuts once they get there, not to mention the fact that a trillion in 10 years is nowhere near enough.
You do know cuts to programs show a direct link to increase in unemployment and slows the econ, take at look at any of the EU nations under heavy austerity measures their growth is often 0%. You want to cut debt but you want jobs and a growing econ? That's apples and oranges.
The spending is preserving jobs that aren't pulling their own weight, and it also makes the economy worse and worse.
Spending needs to be cut, and labor laws need to be removed for the most part so that the cost of labor can decline to a point where there's enough demand for it to give people jobs. It won't happen immediately, but continuously spending money on stimuli that don't create anything but simply allow people to preserve jobs that are not creating any wealth, and are not worth the pay that they receive is a much worse decision.
I don't want jobs and a growing econ. It's IMPOSSIBLE to have a growing econ right now without the recession, and a contraction. at this point I JUST want them to cut debt, because that IS possible... for now, while the interest on our debt is still only 10% of our income.
And what happens when you cut out the 1.6 let's make it 2 trillion of the budget so we have a budget surplus and maybe could start paying off debt how many goverment jobs have just been lost? how many programs for the poor and elderly have you cut causing more job losses. Sense the bottom half of the american population spends shit ton more then they save it means they drive the consumer economy hurting them means stores cannot move products so they have to cut back, cut backs means ppl are less willing to invest as it's a shaky market, hell banks barely loan out as it is. long term it sets the economy to shrink not grow. Short term maybe small growth or just a flat no growth
Of course... because that's how real economy works... the economy NEEDS to shrink, because a lot of the jobs are unsustainable.
First of all government jobs don't create anything they're part of the bureaucracy. So when you cut them (of course in places where the budget needs to get cut anyways like regulation,) you basically just stop giving people a government hand-out of a considerable amount of cash (when compared to a welfare hand-out at least.) for doing work that does nothing positive in the country...
all those government jobs that oversee policies that are responsible for our struggling economy are triple-dipping on the economy hurt... 1) you're paying people money when we're in deficit 2) the people aren't creating anything or providing a service that anyone would actually be willing to pay that amount for, 3) the job is part of government program which hurts the economy... other government jobs that aren't as bad double dip, and some that are somewhat necessarily like police, and etc. only hurts us once (but police is state funded anyways.)
as for people that are gonna come off welfare... well they'll have a better shot at finding jobs once regulations are repealed. are some people going to be working for extremely low wages for a bit just to sustain themselves? probably... But as of right now they're funded by the government with money that's being printed, and is stealing purchasing power from the rest of the people (and it hurts the lower class that has jobs the most) so eventually the whole "living for extremely low wages just to sustain yourself" thing will happen anyways, just to way more people, while there are still some on government welfare.
and as for the consumer... that's the whole problem. We're spending more than we're producing. a lot of people that have jobs now that are protected by the government spending are jobs the services of which people shouldn't be able to afford in the first place, and it only sends either the people or the government into more debt, which of course will either lead to the eventual default and currency reconstruction (which will be pre-phased with hyperinflation) or it will make the recession/contraction a lot worse.
edit:
and the last part.. as for the banks... banks shouldn't be lending. why do you think interest rates are so low? they're to encourage banks to lend. They're artificial rates. all the banks which proceed to lend at these rates will default when the rates go up (and the rates MUST go up in order for savings to ever occur.)
Why do interest rates exist in the first place? They first of all hedge the risk of default by the loaner for the bank, they also reflect the supply - demand interaction for money. Right now rates should go up, once they go up banks will be more willing to loan, but less people will be willing to lend. Instead people will start to try to repay their debt, and then possibly save. Once a lot of people are saving the rates will be able to go back down again, because obviously if no one is lending, and everyone is loaning money to the bank, they're gonna want to lower the rates to pay less interest.
Of course... higher rates will lead to less people wanting to borrow to invest, but that's a good thing, because there's not that many people actually willing to lend in the first place, so every time a bank gives out a loan, most of it comes from the money they get from the FED, which of course has a chance of being no longer guaranteed because a lot of people want to shut it down, so that's why banks are cautious about lending now, even with these low rates.
Let me put this logic in perspective for you. Imagine this scenario:
There's overpopulation and famine creating a food shortage. People are trying their best to spread the food around and make sure nobody dies of starvation. They even discuss longterm plans to correct the food shortage in the long run, but ask for farmers to take a loss in profit and bare some hunger until this passes. You're the guy that busts into a meeting spouting nonsense of "just let some people die, then there'll be more than enough for everybody! We're just overpopulated and letting people die is nature's solution!"
This is retarded.
If there's not enough food to feed all the people than someone WILL die.
See here's the problem with your logic... you think redistributing stuff there's not enough can make up for the shortage... It can't. It's not mathematically possible do you realize that? The sad thing is that in your scenario the liberal economist would probably have the farmers starve, and then they'd die, and when there's no more farmers there's no more food, and then everyone else would die.
You and other hocus-pocus Austrian Economists would gladly throw people under a bus for "mistakes" nobody made or could not be easily avoided. You're the guys who would still be using unsanitary tools for medical surgery and blame infections on the natural course. The 21st century gives us an enormous toolbox to fix the economy (along with other things), and your advice is "let's just level it and start over:"
WTF? what toolbox? You're just in denial. There's no fix for the economy. There's no decision that will directly lead to prosperity in the short run at all. There's 2 options... continue shuffling the constantly decreasing amount of limited resources while continuing to struggle the economy until the point when the government will just shrug its shoulders and say... "I'm sorry you guys are just not producing enough, there's nothing we can do to save you." which will inevitably happen... Or STOP inflating our currency, start repaying our debts at the cost of accepting a lower standard of living... start saving and rebuilt our economy for real... So there's no good answer to the problem... but there's a RIGHT answer.
If you really believe that we can fix this with one of our "21st century solutions" naively optimistic...
The US Federal debt right now is around 14 trillion... do you know what else is around 14 trillion?
Our GDP... that's right our GDP, the majority of which is consumption in the first place is 14 trillion dollars, pretty much as big as our debt. This means that if the government confiscated EVERYTHING that americans produce for an entire year, sold it to non-americans, cut all government spending only then would we be able to pay off our national debt. and that's actually not even true, because like I said a huge portion of our GDP are services which don't create any wealth in the first place.
But yeah... I'm sure your 21st century solutions have the wonderful power of ignoring mathematics.
Well the current situation is more like there is way more than enough food to feed everyone, but a tiny fraction of the population has way more food than they could ever eat, and don't want to share any with people who are starving.
Just curious, why isn't Somalia evolving into a utopia?
... just how much money do you think these few people have?.
A lot. From wikipedia in the US "10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth". Now that doesn't tell the whole picture, but I think we can agree on a lot.
And what regulation are you talking about getting rid of? EPA? FDA? OSHA? Sounds like a bad idea to me.
Compared to most countries our debt vs GDP isn't that bad, though I agree it is a growing problem we have to do something about. And I think that something includes not just spending cuts, but increasing taxes on the richest. And no I don't buy that that will strangle the economy. Look at the tax rates under Clinton or even in the 1950s vs now...
On September 22 2011 01:22 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On September 22 2011 01:13 weekendracer wrote:
On August 17 2011 06:57 Kaitlin wrote:
On August 17 2011 06:49 xXFireandIceXx wrote:
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.
The most accurate post in the first 2 pages.
Can someone answer this question:
Who actually pays the taxes that 'evil' corporations pay.
Answer: the consumer. So raise taxes all you want. The actual producer won't pay a dime of it.
I started to say more, but found it was just repeating the quoted post for the most part. When you are like me and actually paying taxes you'll realize just how hypocritical the likes of Gates and Buffet really are. There is always something behind the curtain.
I swear -- by my life and my love for it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. Or, from each according to their means, to each according to their needs. One theory works, the other does not.
The "virtue of egoism", hum?
What you tax is not the company altogether, but the dividend that the shareholders are getting. So the consumers are not hit, at all. The ones who are hit are the people who owe the company if the company makes a lot of money (if it doesn't, they don't get that much dividend anyway).
Anyway, Warren Buffet is one of the rare ultra-rich businessmen that I respect. He made his fortune by investing on the long term rather than speculating, he does something somehow useful with it, and he is not a plain egoistic asshole who fight for his class and his personal interest.
How won't the consumers be hit? If the company themselves will be losing money since their investers will have a lower incentive to invest then the company will be lowering their profit margins. How will this not affect the consumer? Prices are inclined to increase.
And then where will the tax money go from there? The government? And then what?
Don't worry, you have a long way to go before your economy get hurt by taxes on big corporations and super rich individuals. Really.
To answer your second question: and then, it will help the country not to have an unsustainable debt that cost you more and more money every year without fucking up all your public services.
Other ideas: you can invest in a good public education, keep reforming your health system so that you don't leave people die like dogs if they don't have the money to pay for very expensive treatments, you can get a decent cultural life so that you have enlightened citizen who stop believing the crap mass medias tell them, you can get working infrastructure since american infrastructures are horribad, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc
But I guess the fact that some businessmen can have one more billion dollar at the end of his career or that Goldman Sachs makes even more money that it's actually doing in order to pay their speculators with a little bit more obscene salaries is much more important.
Just because two members of the super-rich say they don't mind being taxed more, do you think these views represent the views of all of them? Why don't you think some will believe that the incentive to invest while being in the US is lowered?
Also, do you honestly think that governments will do any of those following ideas? The original point you had I can reason with but the others...
Take for example the NHS that I have access to. When it got taken over by the government, competition was essentially nulliefied, with private demand falling dramatically. The government, over the 12 years of control build..... 0 hospitals (This was 60 years ago where there wasn't full coverage). As well as that, the number of beds was REDUCED, with queue times increasing.
On September 21 2011 08:06 Kiarip wrote: The defense spendings are huge, but the spendings on the actual military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq don't compare at all in costs to the defense spendings or the social security or medicaid. Kinda makes you wonder how many operations the government may be running without the people knowing about it.
anyways... Ron Paul for example said he would literally immediately withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq... but that won't be enough to cut the deficit. Not even close. Still he would rather cut spending than raise taxes, and that's a good thing imo. The problem with all the taxing that the Left wants to do is that they try to use the money they save on the tax-cuts immediately on their garbage programs. I think it's pretty obvious that the Democrats won't get us out of Debt. That's why they propose these plans to cut "a trillion over 10 years," because then they can spend a whole lot now, while saying that most of the cuts should come later, but the government will not be mandated to make those cuts once they get there, not to mention the fact that a trillion in 10 years is nowhere near enough.
You do know cuts to programs show a direct link to increase in unemployment and slows the econ, take at look at any of the EU nations under heavy austerity measures their growth is often 0%. You want to cut debt but you want jobs and a growing econ? That's apples and oranges.
I have no confidence in the federal government's execution on creating jobs. Look at Solyndra. That's a total loss of more than half a billion dollars in loans on 1000 jobs that lasted less than 2 years and Solyndra only lasted that long because it had other investors that got wiped out, too. Growth rates of 0% is better than creating jobs that require a million dollars of new money to sustain.
OTOH, the Republicans aren't going to get us out of debt either. It's pretty hopeless.
Solyndra was 1 company, also privite venture invested double to what the government did =p so what does that say about private venture?
$38.6 billion loan guarantee program 535? million to Solyndra which didn't work out, 1.3% of that loan guarantee program The expected failure rate was like 5% to 10% of the loans if you're just counting what has been loaned out already thats put it around 3% for the failure of solyndra Tax payer losses i've seen numbers around 525 million clearly a big loss on that investment If the program kept/ gained 65k jobs is hard to say after all it's all speculation to if a job would have been lost if not for the influx of cash etc.
On September 21 2011 09:31 Kiarip wrote:
On September 21 2011 09:02 semantics wrote:
On September 21 2011 07:07 Joedaddy wrote:
On September 21 2011 06:23 Bibdy wrote: [quote]
At what point do you stop taking from those that have nothing to give, to those that do? Where does it end?
Slippery slope arguments go nowhere. Stick to the proposal put before you by Obama, not to some far flung distant future.
The proposal is, that people that are getting away with taxation-murder, are going to have to start paying their fair share. What's wrong with that?
It can't be the video is dated march 31st it has nothing to do with obama's current proposal http://www.whitehouse.gov/jobsact which is dated sept 8th
1.6 trillion dollars is this years budget short fall you make that up you start to reduce the defect, that video tries to take all that from the 3.8 trillion dollar expenditure for the year, ie it's playing you. It ignored what is already established revenue for the federal government which in large part is income tax and social insurance payments which in large part is payed by both the rich and the not so rich already. It also uses the word profits from previous years which likely wouldn't include what was already taxed away(profits is a broad term).
On September 21 2011 08:06 Kiarip wrote: The defense spendings are huge, but the spendings on the actual military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq don't compare at all in costs to the defense spendings or the social security or medicaid. Kinda makes you wonder how many operations the government may be running without the people knowing about it.
anyways... Ron Paul for example said he would literally immediately withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq... but that won't be enough to cut the deficit. Not even close. Still he would rather cut spending than raise taxes, and that's a good thing imo. The problem with all the taxing that the Left wants to do is that they try to use the money they save on the tax-cuts immediately on their garbage programs. I think it's pretty obvious that the Democrats won't get us out of Debt. That's why they propose these plans to cut "a trillion over 10 years," because then they can spend a whole lot now, while saying that most of the cuts should come later, but the government will not be mandated to make those cuts once they get there, not to mention the fact that a trillion in 10 years is nowhere near enough.
You do know cuts to programs show a direct link to increase in unemployment and slows the econ, take at look at any of the EU nations under heavy austerity measures their growth is often 0%. You want to cut debt but you want jobs and a growing econ? That's apples and oranges.
The spending is preserving jobs that aren't pulling their own weight, and it also makes the economy worse and worse.
Spending needs to be cut, and labor laws need to be removed for the most part so that the cost of labor can decline to a point where there's enough demand for it to give people jobs. It won't happen immediately, but continuously spending money on stimuli that don't create anything but simply allow people to preserve jobs that are not creating any wealth, and are not worth the pay that they receive is a much worse decision.
I don't want jobs and a growing econ. It's IMPOSSIBLE to have a growing econ right now without the recession, and a contraction. at this point I JUST want them to cut debt, because that IS possible... for now, while the interest on our debt is still only 10% of our income.
And what happens when you cut out the 1.6 let's make it 2 trillion of the budget so we have a budget surplus and maybe could start paying off debt how many goverment jobs have just been lost? how many programs for the poor and elderly have you cut causing more job losses. Sense the bottom half of the american population spends shit ton more then they save it means they drive the consumer economy hurting them means stores cannot move products so they have to cut back, cut backs means ppl are less willing to invest as it's a shaky market, hell banks barely loan out as it is. long term it sets the economy to shrink not grow. Short term maybe small growth or just a flat no growth
Of course... because that's how real economy works... the economy NEEDS to shrink, because a lot of the jobs are unsustainable.
First of all government jobs don't create anything they're part of the bureaucracy. So when you cut them (of course in places where the budget needs to get cut anyways like regulation,) you basically just stop giving people a government hand-out of a considerable amount of cash (when compared to a welfare hand-out at least.) for doing work that does nothing positive in the country...
all those government jobs that oversee policies that are responsible for our struggling economy are triple-dipping on the economy hurt... 1) you're paying people money when we're in deficit 2) the people aren't creating anything or providing a service that anyone would actually be willing to pay that amount for, 3) the job is part of government program which hurts the economy... other government jobs that aren't as bad double dip, and some that are somewhat necessarily like police, and etc. only hurts us once (but police is state funded anyways.)
as for people that are gonna come off welfare... well they'll have a better shot at finding jobs once regulations are repealed. are some people going to be working for extremely low wages for a bit just to sustain themselves? probably... But as of right now they're funded by the government with money that's being printed, and is stealing purchasing power from the rest of the people (and it hurts the lower class that has jobs the most) so eventually the whole "living for extremely low wages just to sustain yourself" thing will happen anyways, just to way more people, while there are still some on government welfare.
and as for the consumer... that's the whole problem. We're spending more than we're producing. a lot of people that have jobs now that are protected by the government spending are jobs the services of which people shouldn't be able to afford in the first place, and it only sends either the people or the government into more debt, which of course will either lead to the eventual default and currency reconstruction (which will be pre-phased with hyperinflation) or it will make the recession/contraction a lot worse.
edit:
and the last part.. as for the banks... banks shouldn't be lending. why do you think interest rates are so low? they're to encourage banks to lend. They're artificial rates. all the banks which proceed to lend at these rates will default when the rates go up (and the rates MUST go up in order for savings to ever occur.)
Why do interest rates exist in the first place? They first of all hedge the risk of default by the loaner for the bank, they also reflect the supply - demand interaction for money. Right now rates should go up, once they go up banks will be more willing to loan, but less people will be willing to lend. Instead people will start to try to repay their debt, and then possibly save. Once a lot of people are saving the rates will be able to go back down again, because obviously if no one is lending, and everyone is loaning money to the bank, they're gonna want to lower the rates to pay less interest.
Of course... higher rates will lead to less people wanting to borrow to invest, but that's a good thing, because there's not that many people actually willing to lend in the first place, so every time a bank gives out a loan, most of it comes from the money they get from the FED, which of course has a chance of being no longer guaranteed because a lot of people want to shut it down, so that's why banks are cautious about lending now, even with these low rates.
Let me put this logic in perspective for you. Imagine this scenario:
There's overpopulation and famine creating a food shortage. People are trying their best to spread the food around and make sure nobody dies of starvation. They even discuss longterm plans to correct the food shortage in the long run, but ask for farmers to take a loss in profit and bare some hunger until this passes. You're the guy that busts into a meeting spouting nonsense of "just let some people die, then there'll be more than enough for everybody! We're just overpopulated and letting people die is nature's solution!"
This is retarded.
If there's not enough food to feed all the people than someone WILL die.
See here's the problem with your logic... you think redistributing stuff there's not enough can make up for the shortage... It can't. It's not mathematically possible do you realize that? The sad thing is that in your scenario the liberal economist would probably have the farmers starve, and then they'd die, and when there's no more farmers there's no more food, and then everyone else would die.
You and other hocus-pocus Austrian Economists would gladly throw people under a bus for "mistakes" nobody made or could not be easily avoided. You're the guys who would still be using unsanitary tools for medical surgery and blame infections on the natural course. The 21st century gives us an enormous toolbox to fix the economy (along with other things), and your advice is "let's just level it and start over:"
WTF? what toolbox? You're just in denial. There's no fix for the economy. There's no decision that will directly lead to prosperity in the short run at all. There's 2 options... continue shuffling the constantly decreasing amount of limited resources while continuing to struggle the economy until the point when the government will just shrug its shoulders and say... "I'm sorry you guys are just not producing enough, there's nothing we can do to save you." which will inevitably happen... Or STOP inflating our currency, start repaying our debts at the cost of accepting a lower standard of living... start saving and rebuilt our economy for real... So there's no good answer to the problem... but there's a RIGHT answer.
If you really believe that we can fix this with one of our "21st century solutions" naively optimistic...
The US Federal debt right now is around 14 trillion... do you know what else is around 14 trillion?
Our GDP... that's right our GDP, the majority of which is consumption in the first place is 14 trillion dollars, pretty much as big as our debt. This means that if the government confiscated EVERYTHING that americans produce for an entire year, sold it to non-americans, cut all government spending only then would we be able to pay off our national debt. and that's actually not even true, because like I said a huge portion of our GDP are services which don't create any wealth in the first place.
But yeah... I'm sure your 21st century solutions have the wonderful power of ignoring mathematics.
Well the current situation is more like there is way more than enough food to feed everyone, but a tiny fraction of the population has way more food than they could ever eat, and don't want to share any with people who are starving.
Just curious, why isn't Somalia evolving into a utopia?
... just how much money do you think these few people have? In the end when the economy actually starts to improve and they see real opportunities they're the ones who are going to help grow this economy. Meanwhile all those people and corporations combined don't have enough money to pay off just the government national debt... which is 14 trillion...
what about the entire debt of our country including the peoples' debts which totals to 55 trillion?
Let me remind you that wealth distribution, government sponsored consumption, and heavy regulation of our industry is how we GOT here... it's not gonna get us out. If you think it's the rich that's hogging up all the money... you're wrong (you're right if you're talking about companies that the government protects because of their lobbyist groups, but even they don't have so much,) the rich used to have even more money, and the middle class used to have more money, and the poor used to have more money (by money i mean purchasing power, because the money supply is fucked anyways.) and the government took all of that and spent it on things that make it difficult for people to make more money, and now that the middle-class barely exists anymore, and the poorer class is broke, they want to try to redistribute the money of the rich, so they can take it all over again.
as for Somalia. First of all they don't have a constitution that's protected by anything, so there's no one protecting property rights. Even so property exists there. To some extent the foreign aid makes the situation a lot worse actually, because it hedges the risks of the militarists (of starving,) while destroying opportunity for the producers, which results in an overly militaristic society. Still... I think that Somalia may one day pull it out, but who knows.
Just how much money do these people have? Well, 1% of your population control roughly 1/3 of your net worth, so... if they were going to help grow your economy, they had better do it soon. Or maybe they need to take another third before they start growing your economy?
Wealth redistribution didn't "get you there". The article by Warren Buffett is a direct counter to your assertions, the more disposable income you have to invest, the lower the effective tax rate that you pay. If anything, it demonstrates that concentrating all that wealth into that few hands didn't do crap for your competitiveness, not to mention all the nasty side effects of having such crazy power differentials.
How is it possible that in the past, the rich had more money, the middle had more money, the poor had more money, and yet between then and now, inequality has risen, prices have risen? You surely don't mean dollar amounts, so you must be talking about purchasing power, yet when adjusted for inflation, the superrich have been making out like bandits while the others, not so much, if at all.
On September 22 2011 03:02 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On September 22 2011 02:49 wakefield wrote:
On September 22 2011 01:22 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On September 22 2011 01:13 weekendracer wrote:
On August 17 2011 06:57 Kaitlin wrote:
On August 17 2011 06:49 xXFireandIceXx wrote:
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.
The most accurate post in the first 2 pages.
Can someone answer this question:
Who actually pays the taxes that 'evil' corporations pay.
Answer: the consumer. So raise taxes all you want. The actual producer won't pay a dime of it.
I started to say more, but found it was just repeating the quoted post for the most part. When you are like me and actually paying taxes you'll realize just how hypocritical the likes of Gates and Buffet really are. There is always something behind the curtain.
I swear -- by my life and my love for it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. Or, from each according to their means, to each according to their needs. One theory works, the other does not.
The "virtue of egoism", hum?
What you tax is not the company altogether, but the dividend that the shareholders are getting. So the consumers are not hit, at all. The ones who are hit are the people who owe the company if the company makes a lot of money (if it doesn't, they don't get that much dividend anyway).
Anyway, Warren Buffet is one of the rare ultra-rich businessmen that I respect. He made his fortune by investing on the long term rather than speculating, he does something somehow useful with it, and he is not a plain egoistic asshole who fight for his class and his personal interest.
How won't the consumers be hit? If the company themselves will be losing money since their investers will have a lower incentive to invest then the company will be lowering their profit margins. How will this not affect the consumer? Prices are inclined to increase.
And then where will the tax money go from there? The government? And then what?
Don't worry, you have a long way to go before your economy get hurt by taxes on big corporations and super rich individuals. Really.
To answer your second question: and then, it will help the country not to have an unsustainable debt that cost you more and more money every year without fucking up all your public services.
Other ideas: you can invest in a good public education, keep reforming your health system so that you don't leave people die like dogs if they don't have the money to pay for very expensive treatments, you can get a decent cultural life so that you have enlightened citizen who stop believing the crap mass medias tell them, you can get working infrastructure since american infrastructures are horribad, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc
But I guess the fact that some businessmen can have one more billion dollar at the end of his career or that Goldman Sachs makes even more money that it's actually doing in order to pay their speculators with a little bit more obscene salaries is much more important.
Just because two members of the super-rich say they don't mind being taxed more, do you think these views represent the views of all of them? Why don't you think some will believe that the incentive to invest while being in the US is lowered?
Also, do you honestly think that governments will do any of those following ideas? The original point you had I can reason with but the others...
Take for example the NHS that I have access to. When it got taken over by the government, competition was essentially nulliefied, with private demand falling dramatically. The government, over the 12 years of control build..... 0 hospitals (This was 60 years ago where there wasn't full coverage). As well as that, the number of beds was REDUCED, with queue times increasing.
Do you have a clue of what was the state of both education and health services in your country when Tony Blair came into office?
A friend of mine was working in a public school, she said they had leaks from the roof, and that it was basically raining in the classroom.
NHS sucks. It sucks because when you destroy a service like that the way Tatcher and Major have, it's nearly impossible to fix it. Now, the quality of NHS is a zillion times better than what you get inn the US if you can't afford a private health insurance.
Now, your first point: I am sure the super rich don't want to get taxed. And what? You think if you tax them they will get all their money and put it under a pillow and stop investing? Seriously.
"Let me remind you that wealth distribution, government sponsored consumption, and heavy regulation of our industry is how we GOT here"
Wealth distribution? What? You mean that the top of 1% of the U.S. owns an incredible amount of wealth, while those at the bottom get to hope for their scraps? And regulation? What? Glass-Steagal was repealed (largely because lobbying by major banks) and the deregulation following definitely played a role in getting. So if you mean a lack of regulation, sure. And of course, there are excessive regulations in some areas of the economy, but regulating banks in this way was not one of them. Additionally, there have been other roll backs in regulation.
As above, what do you want to deregulate here? FDA? EPA? OSHA? They all serve important roles, I don't think you can really deny that...
Govn't Sponsored Consumption? Okay, that played a significant role.
On September 21 2011 08:06 Kiarip wrote: The defense spendings are huge, but the spendings on the actual military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq don't compare at all in costs to the defense spendings or the social security or medicaid. Kinda makes you wonder how many operations the government may be running without the people knowing about it.
anyways... Ron Paul for example said he would literally immediately withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq... but that won't be enough to cut the deficit. Not even close. Still he would rather cut spending than raise taxes, and that's a good thing imo. The problem with all the taxing that the Left wants to do is that they try to use the money they save on the tax-cuts immediately on their garbage programs. I think it's pretty obvious that the Democrats won't get us out of Debt. That's why they propose these plans to cut "a trillion over 10 years," because then they can spend a whole lot now, while saying that most of the cuts should come later, but the government will not be mandated to make those cuts once they get there, not to mention the fact that a trillion in 10 years is nowhere near enough.
You do know cuts to programs show a direct link to increase in unemployment and slows the econ, take at look at any of the EU nations under heavy austerity measures their growth is often 0%. You want to cut debt but you want jobs and a growing econ? That's apples and oranges.
I have no confidence in the federal government's execution on creating jobs. Look at Solyndra. That's a total loss of more than half a billion dollars in loans on 1000 jobs that lasted less than 2 years and Solyndra only lasted that long because it had other investors that got wiped out, too. Growth rates of 0% is better than creating jobs that require a million dollars of new money to sustain.
OTOH, the Republicans aren't going to get us out of debt either. It's pretty hopeless.
Solyndra was 1 company, also privite venture invested double to what the government did =p so what does that say about private venture?
$38.6 billion loan guarantee program 535? million to Solyndra which didn't work out, 1.3% of that loan guarantee program The expected failure rate was like 5% to 10% of the loans if you're just counting what has been loaned out already thats put it around 3% for the failure of solyndra Tax payer losses i've seen numbers around 525 million clearly a big loss on that investment If the program kept/ gained 65k jobs is hard to say after all it's all speculation to if a job would have been lost if not for the influx of cash etc.
On September 21 2011 09:31 Kiarip wrote:
On September 21 2011 09:02 semantics wrote:
On September 21 2011 07:07 Joedaddy wrote: [quote]
It can't be the video is dated march 31st it has nothing to do with obama's current proposal http://www.whitehouse.gov/jobsact which is dated sept 8th
1.6 trillion dollars is this years budget short fall you make that up you start to reduce the defect, that video tries to take all that from the 3.8 trillion dollar expenditure for the year, ie it's playing you. It ignored what is already established revenue for the federal government which in large part is income tax and social insurance payments which in large part is payed by both the rich and the not so rich already. It also uses the word profits from previous years which likely wouldn't include what was already taxed away(profits is a broad term).
On September 21 2011 08:06 Kiarip wrote: The defense spendings are huge, but the spendings on the actual military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq don't compare at all in costs to the defense spendings or the social security or medicaid. Kinda makes you wonder how many operations the government may be running without the people knowing about it.
anyways... Ron Paul for example said he would literally immediately withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq... but that won't be enough to cut the deficit. Not even close. Still he would rather cut spending than raise taxes, and that's a good thing imo. The problem with all the taxing that the Left wants to do is that they try to use the money they save on the tax-cuts immediately on their garbage programs. I think it's pretty obvious that the Democrats won't get us out of Debt. That's why they propose these plans to cut "a trillion over 10 years," because then they can spend a whole lot now, while saying that most of the cuts should come later, but the government will not be mandated to make those cuts once they get there, not to mention the fact that a trillion in 10 years is nowhere near enough.
You do know cuts to programs show a direct link to increase in unemployment and slows the econ, take at look at any of the EU nations under heavy austerity measures their growth is often 0%. You want to cut debt but you want jobs and a growing econ? That's apples and oranges.
The spending is preserving jobs that aren't pulling their own weight, and it also makes the economy worse and worse.
Spending needs to be cut, and labor laws need to be removed for the most part so that the cost of labor can decline to a point where there's enough demand for it to give people jobs. It won't happen immediately, but continuously spending money on stimuli that don't create anything but simply allow people to preserve jobs that are not creating any wealth, and are not worth the pay that they receive is a much worse decision.
I don't want jobs and a growing econ. It's IMPOSSIBLE to have a growing econ right now without the recession, and a contraction. at this point I JUST want them to cut debt, because that IS possible... for now, while the interest on our debt is still only 10% of our income.
And what happens when you cut out the 1.6 let's make it 2 trillion of the budget so we have a budget surplus and maybe could start paying off debt how many goverment jobs have just been lost? how many programs for the poor and elderly have you cut causing more job losses. Sense the bottom half of the american population spends shit ton more then they save it means they drive the consumer economy hurting them means stores cannot move products so they have to cut back, cut backs means ppl are less willing to invest as it's a shaky market, hell banks barely loan out as it is. long term it sets the economy to shrink not grow. Short term maybe small growth or just a flat no growth
Of course... because that's how real economy works... the economy NEEDS to shrink, because a lot of the jobs are unsustainable.
First of all government jobs don't create anything they're part of the bureaucracy. So when you cut them (of course in places where the budget needs to get cut anyways like regulation,) you basically just stop giving people a government hand-out of a considerable amount of cash (when compared to a welfare hand-out at least.) for doing work that does nothing positive in the country...
all those government jobs that oversee policies that are responsible for our struggling economy are triple-dipping on the economy hurt... 1) you're paying people money when we're in deficit 2) the people aren't creating anything or providing a service that anyone would actually be willing to pay that amount for, 3) the job is part of government program which hurts the economy... other government jobs that aren't as bad double dip, and some that are somewhat necessarily like police, and etc. only hurts us once (but police is state funded anyways.)
as for people that are gonna come off welfare... well they'll have a better shot at finding jobs once regulations are repealed. are some people going to be working for extremely low wages for a bit just to sustain themselves? probably... But as of right now they're funded by the government with money that's being printed, and is stealing purchasing power from the rest of the people (and it hurts the lower class that has jobs the most) so eventually the whole "living for extremely low wages just to sustain yourself" thing will happen anyways, just to way more people, while there are still some on government welfare.
and as for the consumer... that's the whole problem. We're spending more than we're producing. a lot of people that have jobs now that are protected by the government spending are jobs the services of which people shouldn't be able to afford in the first place, and it only sends either the people or the government into more debt, which of course will either lead to the eventual default and currency reconstruction (which will be pre-phased with hyperinflation) or it will make the recession/contraction a lot worse.
edit:
and the last part.. as for the banks... banks shouldn't be lending. why do you think interest rates are so low? they're to encourage banks to lend. They're artificial rates. all the banks which proceed to lend at these rates will default when the rates go up (and the rates MUST go up in order for savings to ever occur.)
Why do interest rates exist in the first place? They first of all hedge the risk of default by the loaner for the bank, they also reflect the supply - demand interaction for money. Right now rates should go up, once they go up banks will be more willing to loan, but less people will be willing to lend. Instead people will start to try to repay their debt, and then possibly save. Once a lot of people are saving the rates will be able to go back down again, because obviously if no one is lending, and everyone is loaning money to the bank, they're gonna want to lower the rates to pay less interest.
Of course... higher rates will lead to less people wanting to borrow to invest, but that's a good thing, because there's not that many people actually willing to lend in the first place, so every time a bank gives out a loan, most of it comes from the money they get from the FED, which of course has a chance of being no longer guaranteed because a lot of people want to shut it down, so that's why banks are cautious about lending now, even with these low rates.
Let me put this logic in perspective for you. Imagine this scenario:
There's overpopulation and famine creating a food shortage. People are trying their best to spread the food around and make sure nobody dies of starvation. They even discuss longterm plans to correct the food shortage in the long run, but ask for farmers to take a loss in profit and bare some hunger until this passes. You're the guy that busts into a meeting spouting nonsense of "just let some people die, then there'll be more than enough for everybody! We're just overpopulated and letting people die is nature's solution!"
This is retarded.
If there's not enough food to feed all the people than someone WILL die.
See here's the problem with your logic... you think redistributing stuff there's not enough can make up for the shortage... It can't. It's not mathematically possible do you realize that? The sad thing is that in your scenario the liberal economist would probably have the farmers starve, and then they'd die, and when there's no more farmers there's no more food, and then everyone else would die.
You and other hocus-pocus Austrian Economists would gladly throw people under a bus for "mistakes" nobody made or could not be easily avoided. You're the guys who would still be using unsanitary tools for medical surgery and blame infections on the natural course. The 21st century gives us an enormous toolbox to fix the economy (along with other things), and your advice is "let's just level it and start over:"
WTF? what toolbox? You're just in denial. There's no fix for the economy. There's no decision that will directly lead to prosperity in the short run at all. There's 2 options... continue shuffling the constantly decreasing amount of limited resources while continuing to struggle the economy until the point when the government will just shrug its shoulders and say... "I'm sorry you guys are just not producing enough, there's nothing we can do to save you." which will inevitably happen... Or STOP inflating our currency, start repaying our debts at the cost of accepting a lower standard of living... start saving and rebuilt our economy for real... So there's no good answer to the problem... but there's a RIGHT answer.
If you really believe that we can fix this with one of our "21st century solutions" naively optimistic...
The US Federal debt right now is around 14 trillion... do you know what else is around 14 trillion?
Our GDP... that's right our GDP, the majority of which is consumption in the first place is 14 trillion dollars, pretty much as big as our debt. This means that if the government confiscated EVERYTHING that americans produce for an entire year, sold it to non-americans, cut all government spending only then would we be able to pay off our national debt. and that's actually not even true, because like I said a huge portion of our GDP are services which don't create any wealth in the first place.
But yeah... I'm sure your 21st century solutions have the wonderful power of ignoring mathematics.
Well the current situation is more like there is way more than enough food to feed everyone, but a tiny fraction of the population has way more food than they could ever eat, and don't want to share any with people who are starving.
Just curious, why isn't Somalia evolving into a utopia?
... just how much money do you think these few people have?.
A lot. From wikipedia in the US "10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth". Now that doesn't tell the whole picture, but I think we can agree on a lot.
From wikipedia, all of american households total right now own about 55 trillion dollars... ironically it's just enough to pay off our entire government and personal debt...
Sounds like a good idea right? Just let the government take it all.
And what regulation are you talking about getting rid of? EPA? FDA? OSHA? Sounds like a bad idea to me.
a lot of them. we have 15 % unemployment... obviously labor is too expensive, so get rid of a lot of the labor laws.
Our healthcare is way too expensive, get rid of a lot of FDA regulation. Our industry isn't competitive enough... a lot of the epa needs to go as well.
How is it a bad idea. everything that those organizations do is heavily influenced by lobbyists, and could be easily negotiable between the customer and the producer.
Constitutional property rights can protect us from a lot of the pollution, don't pick winners and losers by creating regulations on what technology a company needs to use to decrease their pollution, allowing the providers of that technology to inflate their prices... etc etc.
all these things either make labor or manufactoring more expensive. Now we're in a situation where so many people don't have jobs, I think we're protecting the the employees too much if all the employers are scared to hire them.
Compared to most countries our debt vs GDP isn't that bad, though I agree it is a growing problem we have to do something about. And I think that something includes not just spending cuts, but increasing taxes on the richest. And no I don't buy that that will strangle the economy. Look at the tax rates under Clinton or even in the 1950s vs now...
The tax rate now is higher. What NEEDS to be removed is all the subsidies and the loopholes. The loopholes are created by the regulations by the way of tax credits, and etcs. for all types of bullshit. Have a flat corporate tax, and don't tax returns on investment (the interest rates will do that on their own when they go up.)
Maybe even get rid of income tax in favor of just a bigger sales tax... tax people when they're spending money not saving it, but I'm not sure about this.
I think that some corporates are simply being under-taxed through their cheating the system, and this needs to be fixed imo. But I don't necessarily think that you need to higher taxes. First you need to cut the shit out of military, some defense, a lot of entitlements, departments that destroy our economy (the ones you've mentioned,) and etc.
On September 22 2011 03:50 hummingbird23 wrote: How, how in the world is this sort of brainwashing propaganda this effective? The sheer force of "government only wastes money" is overpowering.
Just watch three minutes of Fox News, read a little bit about Rupert Murdoch and you have your answer. The medias are bombarding people with ideas that benefit the people who owe them. The game is rigged, and if the most powerful and rich people want everybody to believe things that don't make any sense but that serve their interest, they really do have the power and the tools to do so.
So yeah, the richest rich people are, the best (even if everybody else and the State is getting way poorer), taxes are evil, regulation is evil, every public service is evil and the government is your enemy and wants to control you.
On September 22 2011 01:18 cydial wrote: You don't make the weak strong by taking strength from those that already have it.
You mean that if by taxing the richest you can afford a universal healthcare and free education so that the poorer category of your population can go to hospital if they break a leg or have a decent education for their children, it doesn't make their life better?
That's what we are talking about. Either cutting American already minimalist social system or raising taxes for people who have an obscene amount of money.
More like having to register with the state to get their leg fixed, and having their children go through over a decade of state propaganda. That way they can identify who disagree's with the regime, and then shove them in an oven.
On September 22 2011 01:37 Biff The Understudy wrote:
On September 22 2011 01:18 cydial wrote: You don't make the weak strong by taking strength from those that already have it.
You mean that if by taxing the richest you can afford a universal healthcare and free education so that the poorer category of your population can go to hospital if they break a leg or have a decent education for their children, it doesn't make their life better?
That's what we are talking about. Either cutting American already minimalist social system or raising taxes for people who have an obscene amount of money.
More like having to register with the state to get their leg fixed, and having their children go through over a decade of state propaganda. That way they can identify who disagree's with the regime, and then shove them in an oven.
You know that before the FDA was set up, people were selling snake oil all over the place right? That was why it was even set up. If you think civil lawsuits will take their place, remember, lawyers cost a lot of money and you don't have anywhere near as much as the corporation that's going to screw you over.
Why are you in such a race to get to third world working conditions? If you want to, you can always move to China. There's no effective regulations there, you can sell your labour for as much as you can manage to get for it, and you can freely choose to accept or not accept the working conditions offered.
On September 22 2011 03:52 MeLlamoSatan wrote: "Let me remind you that wealth distribution, government sponsored consumption, and heavy regulation of our industry is how we GOT here"
Wealth distribution? What? You mean that the top of 1% of the U.S. owns an incredible amount of wealth, while those at the bottom get to hope for their scraps?
Exactly.
Thanks to US federal government spending, the net wealth redistribution favors certain well-connected wealthy members of the political class. Grants, loans for businesses, sweetheart deals, bailouts, subsidies, tax credit subsidies, plump defense contracts, and insider knowledge (it's not insider trading when politicians do it!).
Those social programs for the poor are just scraps for the masses.
On September 22 2011 03:50 hummingbird23 wrote: How, how in the world is this sort of brainwashing propaganda this effective? The sheer force of "government only wastes money" is overpowering.
Just watch three minutes of Fox News, read a little bit about Rupert Murdoch and you have your answer. The medias are bombarding people with ideas that benefit the people who owe them. The game is rigged, and if the most powerful and rich people want everybody to believe things that don't make any sense but that serve their interest, they really do have the power and the tools to do so.
So yeah, the richest rich people are, the best (even if everybody else and the State is getting way poorer), taxes are evil, regulation is evil, every public service is evil and the government is your enemy and wants to control you.
It was a rhetorical question, but it had me thinking of Chinese propaganda. Family member got infected.
On September 22 2011 03:58 smokeyhoodoo wrote: More like having to register with the state to get their leg fixed, and having their children go through over a decade of state propaganda. That way they can identify who disagree's with the regime, and then shove them in an oven.
*Facepalm.*
Please tell me you are being sarcastic.
Under the horrors of totalitarian rule, public school are the perfect propaganda centers. A bit of hyperbole, but for US the reason why so many Americans are so blinded by American Exceptional-ism is precisely because of the public school system.
EPT
