Thread: "Class Warfare"

Originally Posted by haymarket

The agenda being to build a just and sustainable society for over 300 million people.

And your idea of "just" is the 99% looting the 1%? I always thought that justice in that regard meant meant securing to each that which is rightfully his own.

Originally Posted by haymarket

You are confusing single events with a firm policy endorsed by every Congress and budget for the past century over and over and over again no matter who was president, no matter who controlled Congress, and no matter what party was in power and no matter what the economic conditions were at any given point in time. A firm policy passed by the rigorous method of constitutional amendment approved by at least 2/3 of both houses of Congress plus the legislatures of at least 3/4 of the states. That is a huge difference.

Why not submit things like Obamacare to that sort of process?

Originally Posted by TurtleDude

I get the fact that you want more and more government and you labour under the delusion that one has to want more government to be intelligent.

Who do you think you're fooling? You don't get any of this. You have to make up stuff to have anything you'll even attempt to rebut. All it takes to be intelligent meanwhile is intelligence. The right-wing rarely displays any.

Originally Posted by TurtleDude

YOU also make up lies that most of government helps wealthy people

Really? Why won't you tell us what income group you think benefits most from defense? We've seen the yellow stripe several times already as you've walked away from that question. And all this diplomacy creating trade agreements and protecting American commercial interests abroad? Who benefits from those do you think? I could go on, but I don't expect there will be any need to, as you'll run away from answering even this much.

Originally Posted by haymarket

nor are you suppose to. This is not a retail shopping experience.

Quite so. The purpose of tax policy is to distribute the costs of government across society in a manner that does not crush operational incentives while approximating an equitable allocation of the burden imposed by tax collection. Right-wing clowns pretend not to understand marginal utility theory or try to dismiss it as some cockamamie liberal invention, yet Jesus telling the Parable of the Widow's Mites shows only too clearly that the principle was perfectly well understood two thousand years ago. Guess the right-wing is a little behind the times.

Originally Posted by TurtleDude

not relevant-the person I was responding to tries to justify taxing the rich more by claiming they use more

No, he simply points out the grievous sins of omission in your own insipid claims to the contrary. All you see is food stamps and unemployment benefits. When you start out by defining benefits as stuff that is received by the poor, it's no wonder that your accounting reveals a short-changing of the rich. In any honest accounting, of course, a much different picture emerges. You don't want to look at that picture. Honesty is your enemy.

Originally Posted by Fletch

Is it your argument that tax receipts are 15% of GDP because of the Bush tax cuts?

Yes. Tax cuts always act to reduce revenues. The Tax Cuts for the Rich in effect shifted the revenue curve to the right by about four years, meaning we didn't get the revenues we shoiuld have gotten in 2002 until 2006. Meanwhile, Bush was piling on the entire cost of two botched wars and an industry-enriching Medicare prescription drug plan. He didn't even pay for NCLB.

Originally Posted by Fletch

According to non binary thinking democrats, repealing the (big time) Bush tax cuts for the rich would bring in about $70 per year. That would not make a dent in the trillion dollar annual Obama deficits. But it makes for good political rhetoric, which explains why you use it.

LOL. The $70 billion is a ten-year average and it all comes from one person out of every fifty who was covered by the original tax cuts. There is nothing for anyone in the 90-98% income bracket to cough up at all for instance, and nothing anywhere below that either. Meanwhile, where is it written that a proposal must erase the entire deficit in one fell swoop in order to be considered? Are you enough of a partisan loopster to believe that this is really any sort of test?

Originally Posted by TurtleDude

and claiming the rich should pay more is not something you can justify through facts-its based on an agenda or an opinion

No, it's based on marginal utility theory, something you don't and don't want to understand.

Originally Posted by Cardinal Fang

Yes. Tax cuts always act to reduce revenues. The Tax Cuts for the Rich in effect shifted the revenue curve to the right by about four years, meaning we didn't get the revenues we shoiuld have gotten in 2002 until 2006. Meanwhile, Bush was piling on the entire cost of two botched wars and an industry-enriching Medicare prescription drug plan. He didn't even pay for NCLB.

Yes, but these actions were so eloquently justified, ‘right and proper’, by Haymarket:

Originally Posted by haymarket

Our system of government pronounces it as right and proper. And our system of government is government of the people, by the people and for the people. So it is the people who declare it right and proper.

Originally Posted by Fletch

Do you actually read what you write? Or are you too busy trying to score points via insult? If a rich person pays $20 and a poor person pays $20, they both pay the same.

No, they don't. The poor person is paying much more. This should be intuitively obvious, but if it's not, you can go join what's-his-name in studying up on marginal utility theory.

Originally Posted by Fletch

Do you take this same nonsensical approach when it comes to paying for things like food? Why should a gallon of milk be $4 for everyone? Why not have the rich pay $7 and the poor pay $1?

Dairy price supports have long rigged the price of milk against the interests of consumers, and we do shield the poor against such things via food stamps that when combined with 30% of a recipient's income assure that he or she can afford adequate nutrition each month. More discrimination against the rich, I guess.

Originally Posted by Fletch

The intellectually bankrupt argument is yours. Plus you are just dishonest. You want the rich to pay more because that is the only way you can fund your leftist kleptocracy.

Sure, dude.

Originally Posted by Fletch

You want the state to redistribute wealth.

Bulletin: Risk-sharing and the redistribution of wealth are among the fundamental purposes of every society. These things come with the package. The only questions are those of degree and direction. If you don't want redistribution of wealth, don't become a member of a society.

Originally Posted by gmeyers1944

This shows that the top 1% ( the ultra rich ) pay 39% of all tax moneys paid into the treasury.

404-error on your Limbaugh link, and if that's what it said, it was well out of date. Taxes paid by the top 1% fell by more than $130 billion (about 30%) between 2007 and 2009 as all those capital gains they so depend on were battered by equity market declines. They'll fare much better though when the full numbers for 2010 and 2011 come out. All we have right now is prelim data from 2010. They show that AGI increased by 5.2% over 2009 and that taxable income rose by 6.7%. We know the rich will be snagging the lion's share of that as reported wage income increased by just 2.1% while capital gains were up by 33.1%.