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On July 17 2012 07:27 Omnipresent wrote:I want to put this out there because I haven't seen this perspective in this thread yet. This past weekend, on MSNBC's weenend morning show "Up with Chris Hayes," Ed Conard, a former Bain partner, explained the discrepency between Romney's stated departure date and the now famous SEC filings. He states that Romney was only the CEO legally (Romney's account agrees), and that Bain was being run by a management comittee during the time in question. Romney was officially the CEO, but only because he and Bain were negotiating the terms of his departure. This took such a long time because a) Romney was legitimately swamped with work for the Olympics and therefore unable to participate in negotiations and b) Romney was the first high ranking member of Bain to leave, and the deal he negotiated would set precident for future departures from other Bain executives. SourceI'm not sure this story is completely satisfying, but it's certainly the most convincing account to come from anyone on Romney's side. If this is true, it's still politically damaging for Romney. Most voters won't understand how someone can draw a 6 figure+ salary with benefits and other compensation while not being an active member of a company. That said, it looks a lot better than either owning any questionable or politically toxic activities of Bain during that time or trying to dodge the issue altogether. As a complete side note: + Show Spoiler +I can't reccommend "Up with Chris Hayes" enough. It's easily the smartest show on any of the 24 hour news networks in any time slot, and is miles ahead of the other Sunday shows. The discussions are really open and engaging, and they rarely have active politicians or strategists on the show (meaning most guests don't have an incentive to lie, dodge, or spin).
This.
The Democrats have really put Romney in an interesting situation. He may very well been not involved in the company at all. The most likely situation was that Romney wasn't sure what he wanted to do after the Olympics, and he was hedging his bets.
Even if he was simply the CEO on paper, it makes him look bad for collecting a salary, or misreporting to SEC.
At the very least, it's another brick in the narrative that the Obama campaign has built for him, as a flip-flopping fancy boy that lives in a separate universe of rich people that fudge the rules.
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The top 20% of wage earners pay 70% of the income tax.
The bottom 20% of wage earners pay .003% of income tax.
When will those greedy, awful rich folk start paying their fair share?
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On July 17 2012 08:43 Zaqwert wrote:
The top 20% of wage earners pay 70% of the income tax.
The bottom 20% of wage earners pay .003% of income tax.
When will those greedy, awful rich folk start paying their fair share?
Now how much do the top 20% make pre and post-taxes compared to the bottom 20% pre and post-taxes?
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On July 17 2012 08:49 Adila wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2012 08:43 Zaqwert wrote:
The top 20% of wage earners pay 70% of the income tax.
The bottom 20% of wage earners pay .003% of income tax.
When will those greedy, awful rich folk start paying their fair share? Now how much do the top 20% make pre and post-taxes compared to the bottom 20% pre and post-taxes?
Thats the good think with %, you don't get any important numbers out of them.
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On July 17 2012 08:43 Zaqwert wrote:
The top 20% of wage earners pay 70% of the income tax.
The bottom 20% of wage earners pay .003% of income tax.
When will those greedy, awful rich folk start paying their fair share?
Such a crazy troll post. Why do the people that have all the disposable income have to pay all the taxes!?! After all, 50 dollars to a poor person is the same as 50 dollars to a rich person.
The rich pay most of the taxes because they have ALL the money. If you subtract the average cost of basic survival (transportation, housing, utilities, healthcare, food) from everybody's income it paints a much clearer picture of how desperate the situation is for a huge percentage of Americans.
It is more telling that the rich have SO much money and the disparity between rich and poor is SO huge that they can rig the system and still pay so much.
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It's just hillarious to hear people who PAY NOTHING and are a net drain on society claim someone else isn't paying their fair share.
The vast majority of rich people are rich because they have earned it through hard and intelligent work and the vast majority of poor people are poor because they deserve to be.
I'm not rich, I'm squarely middle class, but Mitt Romney paid more money in taxes last year than I will my entire life, I find it hard to get upset about how much he's paying.
The government is broke and we are majorly in debt because we are spending too much, not because we aren't taxing enough.
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On July 17 2012 08:54 Velocirapture wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2012 08:43 Zaqwert wrote:
The top 20% of wage earners pay 70% of the income tax.
The bottom 20% of wage earners pay .003% of income tax.
When will those greedy, awful rich folk start paying their fair share? Such a crazy troll post. Why do the people that have all the disposable income have to pay all the taxes!?! After all, 50 dollars to a poor person is the same as 50 dollars to a rich person. The rich pay most of the taxes because they have ALL the money. If you subtract the average cost of basic survival (transportation, housing, utilities, healthcare, food) from everybody's income it paints a much clearer picture of how desperate the situation is for a huge percentage of Americans. It is more telling that the rich have SO much money and the disparity between rich and poor is SO huge that they can rig the system and still pay so much.
Most of this post is categorically untrue. The rich pay most of the income tax because the US has a progressive tax structure so they pay more. But what you should point out is that the poor pay the broad majority of the second biggest tax item, which is Social Security.
Whether or not you think the rich pay their "fair share" is a debate we can have. That's the heart of the tax/economic debate, whether the rich should be forced to pay more and whether the government can efficiently use those increased taxes. I think we can all agree that what we definitely do not want is a government that forces people to pay too much in taxes and then pisses the money away. At the same time, we definitely do not want a government that allows the rich to abuse their wealth and can't afford to mitigate the suffering of the poor. But it's finding the optimal place in the middle that is tricky to find.
I will add a caveat that the US government has probably 3-4 years to actually do this before the pension bomb blows up. If the next president fails, he will burden our generation with decades of misery as it is our future earnings that get taken away to pay for these mistakes.
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On July 17 2012 09:02 Zaqwert wrote:
The vast majority of rich people are rich because they have earned it through hard and intelligent work and the vast majority of poor people are poor because they deserve to be.
This is one of the most hilarious things I've read in a while.
On July 17 2012 09:05 coverpunch wrote:
Most of this post is categorically untrue. The rich pay most of the income tax because the US has a progressive tax structure so they pay more. But what you should point out is that the poor pay the broad majority of the second biggest tax item, which is Social Security.
Whether or not you think the rich pay their "fair share" is a debate we can have. That's the heart of the tax/economic debate, whether the rich should be forced to pay more and whether the government can efficiently use those increased taxes. I think we can all agree that what we definitely do not want is a government that forces people to pay too much in taxes and then pisses the money away. At the same time, we definitely do not want a government that allows the rich to abuse their wealth and can't afford to mitigate the suffering of the poor. But it's finding the optimal place in the middle that is tricky to find.
I will add a caveat that the US government has probably 3-4 years to actually do this before the pension bomb blows up. If the next president fails, he will burden our generation with decades of misery as it is our future earnings that get taken away to pay for these mistakes.
He pretty much described the reasoning behind a progressive tax system, he just didn't outright call it that. Also, what is your reasoning behind saying that the US government only having 3-4 years before everything blows up?
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On July 17 2012 09:02 Zaqwert wrote:
The vast majority of rich people are rich because they have earned it through hard and intelligent work and the vast majority of poor people are poor because they deserve to be.
I'm not rich, I'm squarely middle class, but Mitt Romney paid more money in taxes last year than I will my entire life, I find it hard to get upset about how much he's paying.
you're just that much lazier than Mitt
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Some people are born into rich families, so be it. It's not my job and not your job to take their money away from them, just cuz we're jealous they have so much and we don't.
If the guy next door has 5 high def tv's and I don't have any, I don't have anthe right to go take one just because he has so many and taking one won't hurt him.
The whole left wing notion of wealth redistribution can basically just be boiled down to envy and theft.
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There are plenty of rich people like Buffet who realize dynastic wealth leads to massive social problems. It does not matter how much someone like Usain Bolt trains and how hard he works. I'll still beat him to the finish line if he has to run 100m and I only have to run 50m. The thing that makes it even worse is the rich in America have an even bigger advantage in life than I would have in my race.
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On July 17 2012 08:43 Zaqwert wrote:
The top 20% of wage earners pay 70% of the income tax.
The bottom 20% of wage earners pay .003% of income tax.
When will those greedy, awful rich folk start paying their fair share?
the top 20% of wage earners earn 49% of all income in the US.
the bottom 20% of wage earners earn 3.3% of all income in the US.
the top 5% of wage earners earn 21% of all income in the US.
The difference is fucking huge. That's a 14 times difference between the bottom 20% and the top 20%. This is just INCOME. Not including assets. Of course the top 20% are going to pay a buttload more taxes.
Also, where the fuck are you getting your numbers? According to my source, the bottom 20% pay 2% of income tax, not 0.003%. And depending on who you cite, the top 1% pay around 20% of all income tax, when they control roughly over 20% of all income in the US.
Source:
+ Show Spoiler +
On July 17 2012 10:06 Zaqwert wrote:
Some people are born into rich families, so be it. It's not my job and not your job to take their money away from them, just cuz we're jealous they have so much and we don't.
If the guy next door has 5 high def tv's and I don't have any, I don't have anthe right to go take one just because he has so many and taking one won't hurt him.
The whole left wing notion of wealth redistribution can basically just be boiled down to envy and theft.
Very few people genuinely want to redistribute wealth the way the GOP portrays the Democrats. Rather, what the Democrats want to do, especially Obama, is to stop giving tax cuts to the wealthy. There's a BIG difference.
As it is now, the wealthy have many many ways to lower their tax rates. It's possible for the very rich to pay very little income tax by manipulating and using the system to their benefit. On top of that, the GOP wants to lower their tax rates even MORE. How is it fair that 80% of Americans, who are only making at most 50% of all the income in the US, have to pay a higher effective tax rate (after all deductions and manipulations) than the 20% of Americans who control at least 50% of all the income in the US? This is coming from someone who easily sits in the top 90th percentile of income owners in the US.
You're absolutely right in that redistribution of wealth the way you described is wrong. But that's not the real issue here. The real issue is the rich paying disproportionately low taxes considering how much of the wealth they control.
You should read this: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/business/economy/the-case-for-raising-top-tax-rates.html
You should also not post shit without doing basic fact checking; seeing how your numbers are off by an order of several hundred times.
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This could possibly be relevant. There might be a few points to nitpick about it but you could most likely nitpick both ways.
![[image loading]](http://ctj.org/images/taxday2012table.jpg)
Edit: There's only a real problem once you get to the top 1%. If anyone can find the same stats for other OECD countries let me know! I'm have in problem finding numbers that include VAT.
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Obama's remarks in Virginia
"If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." ~ Obama, Roanoke Virginia last Friday
Bet he wishes he could withdraw that pull-quote! Nat'l Federation of Independent Business already fired back (Reponses, NFIB, Chamber of Commerce) since he downplays the personal risk and effort involved in business creation. In context he mentions initiative, and goes towards the argument that these successful, wealthy people have received very much from government and deserve to have their taxes raised to help others. Businesses received from education, their work force, aka he posits that they were helped by government and now much shoulder more burden for the expense of social programs.
Small businesses are like ... we create jobs and spur economic growth in SPITE of government rather than massively helped by it. More and more rhetorical divide here. Is the collective more responsible for business growth or the individuals heading the business from hard work and smart decisions? We've seen Obama's view on this (You've benefited, I think I've cut what I could, now its your time to pay more!), guess we'll see how much the country agrees with this. Hope we see a gallup poll on how much the country thinks government spending is responsible for job creation, or agrees with the platform view that the rich need to pay more than they're currently paying in taxes.
IDK about those trillion dollars of cuts he made that he mentions. Considering how much he has increased the federal budget right now, sounds like pure rhetoric. I don't even know if baseline budgeting (Projected growth 100$ million, so making it grow by only 75$ million is listed as cutting its budget by 75$ mil) can account for this. Doing some research into it.
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I took one look at my first paycheck today and was like "nope."
Guess I'm the kind of person (young, hard working, ^no dependents) who should be shouldering most of the tax burden, though. If the tax burden gets too high and the corporate/capital gains taxes aren't increased accordingly, someone like me might just quit and go start a business instead ^~^
On July 17 2012 10:06 Zaqwert wrote:
Some people are born into rich families, so be it. It's not my job and not your job to take their money away from them, just cuz we're jealous they have so much and we don't.
If the guy next door has 5 high def tv's and I don't have any, I don't have anthe right to go take one just because he has so many and taking one won't hurt him.
The whole left wing notion of wealth redistribution can basically just be boiled down to envy and theft.
Iono. I consider myself fiscally conservative, but I think your argument is faulty.
I feel like I could write a paper refuting your claim, but let's just tackle a few pieces in this post.
First, your Kantian logic of "wealth distribution can basically just be boiled down to envy and theft" is not very meaningful in economic terms. If you draw a tree of actions where each parent action requires the completion of its child actions, then Kantian logic essentially says that if a single action in the entire tree of actions is boolean "wrong" then the entire tree is "wrong." Such a model is too simplistic and, in fact is absurd as far as economic/incentive discussions are concerned. Build a large enough tree and, with real people at least one "wrong" will show up. This is trivially true if you model actions as a hidden markov model of underlying intent, and model morality as a function mapping from actions to the set {Right, Wrong}. As long as a given action that maps to "wrong" is reachable, the entire tree is wrong.
So let's try instead a weak utilitarian model, instead, that instead of summing up social utility and maximizing, tries to raise a given sum in revenue via taxes given some initial conditions (existing tax rates, if you will) so as to minimize overall utility impact. Let's define utility more narrowly as "expected loss in GDP growth."
There are other models such as the "hold taxes steady, but eliminate services" model, but the themes are similar and this is easier so let's start here.
Let's use a local minimization approach to come up with a first-order approximation of a solution: We need to raise N dollars. For the first dollar, we pick the tax bracket that will feel the least collective pain (lost GDP growth) from the extraction of that dollar. If we wanted a true discrete local minimization, then we update the brackets and repeat the process N times until $N is raised. We're only looking for first-order approximations, however, so let's just look at a hand-waving "gradient" of the ratio of GDP loss to revenue raised. This gradient will have M components, one for each of M different tax brackets.
So from this approach, intuitively, we should never tax the highest income bracket, since they have the highest proclivity to make the long-term investments that are necessary for economic growth. This component of the gradient is severely negative. Also severely negative is the component for the tax brackets around the poverty line. If taxes cut into your ability to sustain yourself, they will also cut into your ability to be innovative/contribute to the workforce/start a business/etc...
So who does that leave? The working middle class.
Middle class investment proclivity is typically not distorted by small changes in tax levels, since its primary source of income is from employment. So you should tax the middle class. So the highest and lowest earning members of society don't pay "their fair share." But what is fair?
Now let's try to get a little bit closer to Kantian logic and discuss stability, a game theoretic notion for "fairness." The Shapley value might be an interesting alternative way to quantify fairness, which essentially (in the context of cost sharing) says broadly that each person pays for a service the amount they use it. This is a heavily regressive tax, and is nowhere near socially optimal, since while poor people will tend to rely more on government services, to either eliminate these services or increase the price poor people must pay for these services would severely impact their contribution to GDP. Many people become significantly less productive as a result of malnutrition which is just really bad for society. Even if you don't believe that healthcare is a right, it's at least expensive and inconvenient to clean up dead/diseased people from the streets. Mom and Pop pizza parlors will have a hard time keeping their doors open with dead bums lining the streets to their restaurant and scaring off customers.
So far we haven't rigorously proven but should be able to convince ourselves that:
1.) The "right" solution is neither fair nor optimal.
2.) The socially optimal solution is not fair or "right."
3.) The fair solution is not optimal.
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On July 17 2012 10:49 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
This could possibly be relevant. There might be a few points to nitpick about it but you could most likely nitpick both ways.
Edit: There's only a real problem once you get to the top 1%. If anyone can find the same stats for other OECD countries let me know! I'm have in problem finding numbers that include VAT.
The problem is the that there are plenty of rich people, like Romney, that don't pay close to 30%. They find loopholes, like reporting income as capital gains.
I believe the Ryan budget proposed the 25% figure based on what most people actually pay, and rationalized it by proposing the closing of loopholes in the tax system. The problem with the Ryan budget is that it's incomplete -- it defers what loopholes should be closed to a third-party committee, so there's no way to know if it's viable.
Romney I believe he has already stated he wouldn't raise taxes on capital gains (of course).
That's my rudimentary understanding of the dilemma anyways.
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On July 17 2012 11:29 Defacer wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2012 10:49 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
This could possibly be relevant. There might be a few points to nitpick about it but you could most likely nitpick both ways.
Edit: There's only a real problem once you get to the top 1%. If anyone can find the same stats for other OECD countries let me know! I'm have in problem finding numbers that include VAT. The problem is the that there are plenty of rich people, like Romney, that don't pay close to 30%. They find loopholes, like reporting income as capital gains. I believe the Ryan budget proposed the 25% figure based on what most people actually pay, and rationalized it by proposing the closing of loopholes in the tax system. The problem with the Ryan budget is that it's incomplete -- it defers what loopholes should be closed to a third-party committee, so there's no way to know if it's viable. Romney I believe he has already stated he wouldn't raise taxes on capital gains (of course). That's my rudimentary understanding of the dilemma anyways.
Do you at least understand the policy reasoning behind the lower tax rates on capital gains?
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On July 17 2012 11:29 Defacer wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2012 10:49 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
This could possibly be relevant. There might be a few points to nitpick about it but you could most likely nitpick both ways.
Edit: There's only a real problem once you get to the top 1%. If anyone can find the same stats for other OECD countries let me know! I'm have in problem finding numbers that include VAT. The problem is the that there are plenty of rich people, like Romney, that don't pay close to 30%. They find loopholes, like reporting income as capital gains. I believe the Ryan budget proposed the 25% figure based on what most people actually pay, and rationalized it by proposing the closing of loopholes in the tax system. The problem with the Ryan budget is that it's incomplete -- it defers what loopholes should be closed to a third-party committee, so there's no way to know if it's viable. Romney I believe he has already stated he wouldn't raise taxes on capital gains (of course). That's my rudimentary understanding of the dilemma anyways.
Just to drive this point home.
Washington Post Article
Romney paid an effective tax rate of 13.9% in 2010. I don't know how to tackle the problem but I think it is pretty clear this should be impossible.
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On July 17 2012 11:45 Velocirapture wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2012 11:29 Defacer wrote:On July 17 2012 10:49 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
This could possibly be relevant. There might be a few points to nitpick about it but you could most likely nitpick both ways.
Edit: There's only a real problem once you get to the top 1%. If anyone can find the same stats for other OECD countries let me know! I'm have in problem finding numbers that include VAT. The problem is the that there are plenty of rich people, like Romney, that don't pay close to 30%. They find loopholes, like reporting income as capital gains. I believe the Ryan budget proposed the 25% figure based on what most people actually pay, and rationalized it by proposing the closing of loopholes in the tax system. The problem with the Ryan budget is that it's incomplete -- it defers what loopholes should be closed to a third-party committee, so there's no way to know if it's viable. Romney I believe he has already stated he wouldn't raise taxes on capital gains (of course). That's my rudimentary understanding of the dilemma anyways. Just to drive this point home. Washington Post ArticleRomney paid an effective tax rate of 13.9% in 2010. I don't know how to tackle the problem but I think it is pretty clear this should be impossible.
When you consider the policies behind the low capital gains tax rate, it becomes pretty clear why it should be possible.
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On July 17 2012 11:55 xDaunt wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2012 11:45 Velocirapture wrote:On July 17 2012 11:29 Defacer wrote:On July 17 2012 10:49 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
This could possibly be relevant. There might be a few points to nitpick about it but you could most likely nitpick both ways.
Edit: There's only a real problem once you get to the top 1%. If anyone can find the same stats for other OECD countries let me know! I'm have in problem finding numbers that include VAT. The problem is the that there are plenty of rich people, like Romney, that don't pay close to 30%. They find loopholes, like reporting income as capital gains. I believe the Ryan budget proposed the 25% figure based on what most people actually pay, and rationalized it by proposing the closing of loopholes in the tax system. The problem with the Ryan budget is that it's incomplete -- it defers what loopholes should be closed to a third-party committee, so there's no way to know if it's viable. Romney I believe he has already stated he wouldn't raise taxes on capital gains (of course). That's my rudimentary understanding of the dilemma anyways. Just to drive this point home. Washington Post ArticleRomney paid an effective tax rate of 13.9% in 2010. I don't know how to tackle the problem but I think it is pretty clear this should be impossible. When you consider the policies behind the low capital gains tax rate, it becomes pretty clear why it should be possible.
When you consider the effects of the policies behind the low capital gains tax rate, it becomes pretty clear why it should be impossible.
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EPT
