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Human irrationality - an incorrectable cause of income disparity?

Absentglare said:
The rich have absolutely been paying lower income tax rates.

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Lower than you?
 
Absentglare said:
Yes, i pay a higher % tax rate than Romney does, and i make more than two orders of magnitude less money than he does.
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The math doesn't add up, because the highest earners are paying the highest percentage of total income tax. If what you said is true, then the data wouldn't show it.
 
American said:
The math doesn't add up, because the highest earners are paying the highest percentage of total income tax. If what you said is true, then the data wouldn't show it.
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The reason they pay such a big share compared to the rest of us is because they make such a big share of the income.

Further, if you look outside income and payroll taxes, you can see that the overall tax rates are actually surprisingly flat across income :

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This chart basically shows that share of income is about equal to share of taxes, in other words, the tax rate is close to the same across the board. Now poor people do get a little larger share of income, but it's not a big share of our economy.

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Another chart of the same basic set of data.
 
Absentglare said:
If i paid 100% of my income i still wouldn't come close to Romney's ~14%.
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So you admit that Romney pays lots of taxes, even compared to you. Now we're getting somewhere. The top one percent pays a huge percent of the country's taxes. If it weren't for those one percent the feds would rake in very few dollars in taxes.
 
Moderate Right said:
So you admit that Romney pays lots of taxes, even compared to you. Now we're getting somewhere. The top one percent pays a huge percent of the country's taxes. If it weren't for those one percent the feds would rake in very few dollars in taxes.
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Responses like this actually give me the impression that we really aren't getting anywhere.
 
Absentglare said:
The reason they pay such a big share compared to the rest of us is because they make such a big share of the income.

Further, if you look outside income and payroll taxes, you can see that the overall tax rates are actually surprisingly flat across income :

5057685aab3d34c02282f11af6147da8.jpg


This chart basically shows that share of income is about equal to share of taxes, in other words, the tax rate is close to the same across the board. Now poor people do get a little larger share of income, but it's not a big share of our economy.

9ae1f93c33623340b96cbd69663289d8.jpg


Another chart of the same basic set of data.
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You're looking at it all wrong. This isn't communism, and we don't talk about shares. It's about work, and whose doing it. It's about risk, and who's taking it. We're capitalists under capitalism. They deserve the most because they are doing the most, okay? It ain't about shares, get over that. They got educated, they're following dreams, they're taking the big risks, they're working the 80 hour weeks. Stop complaining, they pay the most taxes.
 
Absentglare said:
Responses like this actually give me the impression that we really aren't getting anywhere.
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I agree. Your very own graphs and charts show that the bottom 20% only pay 2.1% of the taxes while just only the top 1% pay 21.6% of the taxes and 43% actually pay ZERO taxes. Isn't this exactly the way you want it?
 
American said:
Dude the tax law requires them to pay a progressive tax. It's true and you know it.
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Your statement was:
"Even the rich have been paying higher income tax rates."

The statement is false regardless of the way you spin it. The rates they have been PAYING (their effective tax rates) have have stayed steady or declined despite a rise in income. The marginal rates are also not anywhere near where they were in the 70s (though if I had my guess, you're going to cherry pick the 6% rise from clintons term).
 
American said:
You're looking at it all wrong. This isn't communism, and we don't talk about shares. It's about work, and whose doing it. It's about risk, and who's taking it. We're capitalists under capitalism. They deserve the most because they are doing the most, okay? It ain't about shares, get over that. They got educated, they're following dreams, they're taking the big risks, they're working the 80 hour weeks. Stop complaining, they pay the most taxes.
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Bolded statements in direct conflict with each other...

Moderate Right said:
I agree. Your very own graphs and charts show that the bottom 20% only pay 2.1% of the taxes while just only the top 1% pay 21.6% of the taxes and 43% actually pay ZERO taxes. Isn't this exactly the way you want it?
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Talk to American, he seems to think this isn't about shares.
 
pdog said:
Bolded statements in direct conflict with each other...



Talk to American, he seems to think this isn't about shares.
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You were discussing shares of wealth. Wealth take effort to build, it's not a right....per communist mindset. I said they pay more taxes. Different item, try to keep up.
 
American said:
You're looking at it all wrong. This isn't communism, and we don't talk about shares. It's about work, and whose doing it. It's about risk, and who's taking it. We're capitalists under capitalism. They deserve the most because they are doing the most, okay? It ain't about shares, get over that. They got educated, they're following dreams, they're taking the big risks, they're working the 80 hour weeks. Stop complaining, they pay the most taxes.
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Money is just a set of tokens for allocating resources.

If you forbid a section of society from being able to mobilize the resources necessary to be productive, then the society will have slower economic growth. That's just a fact.

In our past, during our periods of ridiculously fast growth, our tokens were spread out.

Economists know that the consolidation of wealth slows down the economy. If you worship super rich people so much that you would rather make us a less prosperous, less productive, less happy, and less wealthy society just so that we can bend over backwards to give even more ridiculous affluence to the super rich, then i applaud your ability to honestly endorse your position.

Without tokens, you can't go to school or start a business. You're stuck going to some dead end job, like at Walmart, working for some super rich asshole like an indentured servant in practice, barely able to buy yourself food and a place to ****.

Allowing for some redistribution for the sake of prosperity is a good thing. We did it, in our history, what's wrong with our history ? You're basically equivocating the system we already have with communism.

There are two polar extremes, we can imagine, of socialism and capitalism, on the end of socialism, the government owns everything, and on the end of capitalism, the government doesn't even exist. We're not on either endpoint, nobody ever has been. We've always been somewhere in the middle. So don't just equivocate with communism, it's dishonest, ridiculous, and fallacious.
 
Moderate Right said:
I agree. Your very own graphs and charts show that the bottom 20% only pay 2.1% of the taxes while just only the top 1% pay 21.6% of the taxes and 43% actually pay ZERO taxes. Isn't this exactly the way you want it?
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I don't think you read the charts i posted.
 
Absentglare said:
Money is just a set of tokens for allocating resources.

If you forbid a section of society from being able to mobilize the resources necessary to be productive, then the society will have slower economic growth. That's just a fact.

In our past, during our periods of ridiculously fast growth, our tokens were spread out.

Economists know that the consolidation of wealth slows down the economy. If you worship super rich people so much that you would rather make us a less prosperous, less productive, less happy, and less wealthy society just so that we can bend over backwards to give even more ridiculous affluence to the super rich, then i applaud your ability to honestly endorse your position.

Without tokens, you can't go to school or start a business. You're stuck going to some dead end job, like at Walmart, working for some super rich asshole like an indentured servant in practice, barely able to buy yourself food and a place to ****.

Allowing for some redistribution for the sake of prosperity is a good thing. We did it, in our history, what's wrong with our history ? You're basically equivocating the system we already have with communism.

There are two polar extremes, we can imagine, of socialism and capitalism, on the end of socialism, the government owns everything, and on the end of capitalism, the government doesn't even exist. We're not on either endpoint, nobody ever has been. We've always been somewhere in the middle. So don't just equivocate with communism, it's dishonest, ridiculous, and fallacious.
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You don't fix income inequality by punishing those who achieve. You change the laws and regulations necessary to encourage higher wage growth where it's needed. The problem with leftwing economics is that they pass most of the tax laws, and then complain about the results, then punish those who achieved. The leftwingers who passed those laws should be punished for their stupidity, not the moneymakers.
 
American said:
You don't fix income inequality by punishing those who achieve. You change the laws and regulations necessary to encourage higher wage growth where it's needed. The problem with leftwing economics is that they pass most of the tax laws, and then complain about the results, then punish those who achieved. The leftwingers who passed those laws should be punished for their stupidity, not the moneymakers.
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No one is trying punish success, that's what you don't seem to get.

Those rich people wouldn't be rich without all those poor people. Spread some back around to those poor people, forcibly if necessary, because it's better for society as a whole.
 
Absentglare said:
No one is trying punish success, that's what you don't seem to get.

Those rich people wouldn't be rich without all those poor people. Spread some back around to those poor people, forcibly if necessary, because it's better for society as a whole.
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And those poor people wouldn't have jobs without those rich people. Lots of the rich, started out poor.
 
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Absentglare said:
I don't think you read the charts i posted.
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Are you saying that those 43% who pay zero federal income tax actually do pay federal income taxes? Are you saying that the bottom 20% don't pay 2.1% of the taxes while only the top 1% pay pay 21.6%?
 
The number one cause of increasing American, income disparity since 2001, imo?

The Federal Reserve.

Number Two?

The federal government...both parties.
 
American said:
And those poor people wouldn't have jobs without those rich people. Lots of the rich, started out poor.
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That's just not true. Rich people need the poor people in order to be rich. The poor people don't need the rich people.

What they do need are tokens that they can exchange for resources. That way they can deploy resources to produce their own goods and services. They don't need rich people for that.
 
Moderate Right said:
Are you saying that those 43% who pay zero federal income tax actually do pay federal income taxes? Are you saying that the bottom 20% don't pay 2.1% of the taxes while only the top 1% pay pay 21.6%?
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I'm saying that your 43% number wasn't from the charts i posted.
 
Absentglare said:
That's just not true. Rich people need the poor people in order to be rich. The poor people don't need the rich people.

What they do need are tokens that they can exchange for resources. That way they can deploy resources to produce their own goods and services. They don't need rich people for that.
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Tokens from where?
 
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