Actually, I suspect you'd find that Hyundais are produced largely by robot labor, and relatively swiftly. Whereas a Rolls Royce has a huge number of hours of skilled hand labor involved in the production.Originally Posted by Spartana
Actually, I suspect you'd find that Hyundais are produced largely by robot labor, and relatively swiftly. Whereas a Rolls Royce has a huge number of hours of skilled hand labor involved in the production.
If you are married, have several kids, write offs for home mortages, and for 401Ks or Trad IRAs even a middle income earner can get down to the zero % tax bracket.
Standard deductions alone are pretty high for many people with kids, and itemizing means even more write offs for most.
Standard Deductions:
2012 2011 2010 2009
Single $5,950 $5,800 $5,700 $5,700
Married filing jointly $11,900 $11,600 $11,400 $11,400
Married filing separately $5,950 $5,800 $5,700 $5,700
Head of household $8,700 $8,500 $8.400 $8,350
Personal exemption $3,800 $3,750 $3,650 $3,650
A dependent child can increase the standard deduction by $950 or the amount of earned income plus $300, whichever is greater. That increase has a maximum of $5,700.[/I][/B]
In addition there are many people who are retired who live off already taxed income from things like savings, Roth IRA, non or partially taxable Soc. Sec. benefits, etc... many have middle income levels but low or even zero % taxes. I am in this catagory in that I am in the zero % tax bracket this year (same as last year). Have a government pension that is only partially taxable (some of it was paid by me out of previously taxed income when working), a non-taxed disability pension from the VA, and previously taxed savings and bonds. So even though I have a income that would normally put me in a much higher tax brackett, I am able to pay no taxes at all (heck, didn't even have to file) because my write offs, combined with my standard deduction and personal exemption amount, meant I was below the taxable amount for both fed and state income taxes.
Last edited by Spartana; 4-18-12 at 1:32pm.
It is a bit of an election year ploy. I have doubts it could get passed as well, though with a Dem congress maybe (yes I know at one point they had a Dem congress with this president). With a Rep congress and this president continuing the Bush cuts was signed off on, they just should have let those expire and we wouldn't even be debating this. But that said I don't think increased taxes on wealthier people are a bad idea, and no I don't think a 30% rate is extortionary, not even.no. But a more balanced approach is in order. Not the smoke and mirrors of proposing ideas to get votes, especially when you know there is no chance they will get passed.
Are there really very many easy spending cuts? Well unless you go after the disaster that is the war on terror. Post 9-11 policy is a giant cluster, no doubt about it.Increasing taxes for the rich may not be a bad idea, however doing that and not reducing spending is.
The postal service problems are an issue of their own. HOWEVER the postal service is not taxpayer funded so are there any real expenditures savings there? Anyway from the postal service side (and I haven't heard anything to refute it) they are going bankrupt because they are forced to fund 90 years worth of future employee medical services in 10 years. NO business operates under this, none of them. Do you think Fed Ex and UPS are under those obligations? No way the post office is being um I better lay off the term strategically, but yea deliberately bankrupted it seems. But again it's not a taxpayer issue one way or other.The postal service is holding rallies now to protest stopping Saturday delivery. That would be a good idea as they operate at a deficit. Raising rates for junk mail to help the postal service.
If the issue is just government waste, and really true waste, then eliminate it. Really who is against that, well actually every little fiefdom benefitting from it is against it but ...what about duplicate services. " The GAO says the government might save tens of billions of dollars simply by eliminating duplicate and overlapping federal programs."
I really truly don't think there is enough "waste" to bring the budget into better balance by just eliminating waste (unless you start considering most of our military budget waste, which frankly yes, but really EVEN THEN ...).
Trees don't grow on money
It looks like you answered your own question, flowers everywhere. Sorry. I should have said ten years, which would make this "insignificant" amount only about 4.7 billion per year which still makes it maybe fifteen times the amount those same people said was a "huge" amount of money when they talked about PP. I am sorry. I read it wrong, but regardless, money is money so hard to believe that the same folks seem to value dollars differently depending on what they are talking about. No wonder our heads can't stop spinning.
My own question isn't so much regarding how much the Buffett Rule would generate as it is...
1. Is the means for generating that additional revenue a fair and moral way to do so? (Trying to be sure it is not a case of the end, or perhaps some even darker rationale, being used to justify the means.)
2. If revenue is increased will that lead to an equal or greater increase in spending?
A "NO" answer in either case will cause me to be in opposition to this "rule".
Gregg: Please realize I totally undersand your logic. I just don't agree with it.
Yes, you would be paying more of your income toward income taxes but you would but you wouldn't be paying exponentially more. For it to be exponentially more your percentage of income paid would have to increase at an exponential rate--as I understand math. Right? With your flat tax system, you'd be paying the same percentage as me, not exponentially more. And with my system, you'd only be paying exponentially more if the marginal tax brackets were set up in an exponential manner. We're not talking that here, we're talking just a few percentage points higher.
I was going to agree with you and say, "yes, I'd grumble and complain because nobody likes to pay more taxes, right? But I'd pay it because I'd believe the system would be set up fairly." But the more I think about it, I know I don't actually feel that way. Actually, I have no problem paying taxes because I like the benefits I (and all other Americans and our country in general) get from the government by paying taxes. I'm ok with it and I would be ok paying more taxes even knowing that the benefit wouldn't only be enjoyed by me personally.
I think your "wherewithal" point pretty much sums up the difference between our positions on this issue and illustrates my point about how useless it is for us to try to convince the other side that our respective position is the correct one. You believe people who don't make $100M per year only do so because they don't have the wherewithal to buckle down and pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get to work. I believe that's a small part of the reason people do well. I also KNOW the playing field is absolutely unequal and that it's naive and actually kind of a cop out to claim it is. The reality is that some people have many more advantages (intelligence, stable childhood, education, contacts) that pretty much set them up for success. From the very beginning some are set up for success and so because the likelihood they're going to succeed is greater, the should pay a higher percentage of their income.
Bunnys, I know we probably won't agree on this and I appreciate you understanding my logic. Truthfully, I'm trying hard to understand yours. Nothing you have said raised any hackles on me... until the paragraph above. Allow me to make a couple comments regarding that...
1. Please don't tell me what I believe. I will be happy to share that on my own.
2. The "wherewithal" to succeed includes a lot of things beyond just money. In fact money is well down the list of what it takes to succeed (if it makes the list at all). Sure, in some cases people use family money to get a head start. So? If my family would have had any I would have used it. In far more cases the ones who succeed have a drive and a willingness to keep going.
Success at all levels is usually the result of more than one star aligning, some you can control, some you can't. Being at the right place at the right time is not something that is handed out to the wealthy and withheld from the poor. If you take the time to talk to people you know who YOU consider successful I bet you will hear a lot more about their ambition and how they stuck it out than you will about privileged backgrounds. I bet a lot of them will tell you they got to the right place and hung on for the right time.
3. This whole concept of a level playing field is kind of absurd and completely unattainable. No two people are alike. No two people's situation is alike. No two people's parents, schools, neighborhoods, mentors, heroes, opportunities, incomes, expenses, bodies, taste buds, fingerprints, snowflakes, whatever. The playing field will NEVER be even. It makes no difference at all what your goal is, there will ALWAYS be someone who starts off closer to the target, and someone who starts farther away, than you did. There's no use wringing your hands about that because it will always be the case.
I won't even begin to say I understand the "from the very beginning" aspect of your comments as it relates to taxation, but I would certainly appreciate it if you would clarify that for me. As it reads now it almost sounds like you are proposing a caste system or a sperm tax or ??? I don't think that's really what you meant.
An example: I had dinner with two guys the other night. The first was from a moderately privileged background. Educated, professional parents, good schools all the way through, very upper-middle class. Compared to me and my farm raised, no college degree, very lower-middle class background this guy had the world on a string. The other guy, who we were both there to meet, is from the Republic of Namibia and was raised in the Namib Desert there. Let me tell you, I came out of the womb with life completely dialed in compared to this guy. So who was better off and who needed help?
The privileged fellow is a sales rep for a solar manufacturer. I started the company that's looking to help develop solar energy in Africa. The fellow from Namibia is the parallel there to the Secretary of Energy here. Each of us were presented with different opportunities starting at birth and we each chose radically different paths that happened to cross at dinner. I'm pretty sure none of our parents looked at us as toddlers and saw where we would be as adults. You just can't predict or control such things. Had we all started off at the same point I have no way of guessing where we would be now, but I'm pretty sure that really cool dinner would have never taken place.
Communism is the largest scale attempt to level the playing field. It doesn't work and it never will. I'm not saying you're a communist bunnys, I'm saying that trying to get everyone to the same starting line isn't the answer. What we need to do is find a way to make sure anyone with a desire is not hindered by the government and we need to be able to provide a safe, secure, comfortable environment for everyone else. We need to foster an environment that provides opportunity for everyone, but it doesn't always have to be the same opportunity in every single case. Even in Namibia, which makes rural Mississippi look like a Four Seasons, its all about opportunities. We need to provide them, but you have to remember that you can't control what people do with them. That's what the old saying about leading a horse to water is all about.
Last edited by Gregg; 4-19-12 at 9:55am.
I think it's incoherent to begin arguments on the basis of who had more advantages (not to deny that some have more advantages, I use the term priviledge at times, but I mean it narrowly (like just economically for instance). To figure this out in all realms would take omniscience! That a life of abject poverty is unlikely to be one with many advantages, yes we can go that far). It's as incoherent as thinking the marketplace is some grand reward machine perfectly metering out justice. Is that really a very scientific or economic view of the marketplace? (even a perfect marketplace which of course we dont' have). Figuring out whether wealth in general, in the abstract, was somehow deserved or not on some basis of justice just breaks down into incoherence. We've heard of laudable rich people, we've heard of scumbag rich people, we've heard of meh rich people, and anyway wealth only rewards a very narrow realm of human virtue even in the ocassional cases that the two coincide anyway!
It is best to argue for a welfare state on the basis of it benefitting many people (and generally the vast working majority), on the basis of even the poorest deserving to have *something* (in many realms) in this life (well why don't they?), on the basis of benefitting the larger society, on the basis of those who truly are downtrodden, on the basis of values beyond just the work ethic, on the basis if you are radical of all the deliberate advantages (and not some murky non-levelness) the rich have (we bailed the bankster rich, didn't we?), in some cases on the basis of all other retirement schemes failing (for the most part they probably will for most). Not on the phantom chasing of perfect justice somehow acheived by the welfare state OR the marketplace. That you will never have.
Trees don't grow on money
How does one distill this unfair advantage (as it must be "unfair" if it is "fair" to take away the proceeds) from personal effort and an appropriate level of reward for success?
Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen.
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