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Bill Gates on Wealth

ludin said:
yep and raising taxes has nothing to do with that at all.
you can raise taxes 100% and they will still be below the poverty line.

they evidently do not have the skills or knowledge to earn more.
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Yes, precisely, that IS the problem.

Which triggers the question, "OK, so we do what?"

We give them free gratis and for nothing - if they want it - the skills training necessary.

Instead of letting them wallow in the misery of abject poverty.

We can't help everybody - for sure. But, we can at least try- and trying is a LOT BETTER than promising the nation that a PotUS is going to Make It Great again. With what? His billions?

What BS! And the fools swallowed that bunkum hook, line and sinker ...
 
Lafayette said:
Yes, precisely, that IS the problem.
Which triggers the question, "OK, so we do what?"
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taxing people 100% does nothing to solve this.
in fact the rich tax in france failed so badly they rolled it back. in fact it hurt their economy.

We give them free gratis and for nothing - if they want it - the skills training necessary.
Click to expand...

giving someone something free has never worked and never will work. they have to be invested in it before it matters.

Instead of letting them wallow in the misery of abject poverty.
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Or they could take advantage of the numerous opportunities and job training that is available now.
the question is why don't they?

We can't help everybody - for sure. But, we can at least try- and trying is a LOT BETTER than promising the nation that a PotUS is going to Make It Great again. With what? His billions?
What BS! And the fools swallowed that bunkum hook, line and sinker ...
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now you go off the wall on irrelevant nonsense as usual.
 
ludin said:
wow. this has nothing to do with what I said at all.
I do not live in a collective that is your first mistake.

I am an individual. my work is my work not someone else's.
someone else cannot own my work..
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Piffle and drivel.

You haven't the slightest notion of economics, and yet you pretend to want to debate in an economics forum? I have some simple facts for you.

You are tiny, tiny part of a collective market-economy of about 320 million souls that are Consumers. That is one of the larger sizes, and due to a number of advantages - both natural and cultural - you (plural) have created a market-economy that is one of the most successful on the planet.

OK, OK! But, don't let that go to your head.

Like any economy, things can go wrong. And given the fact that we are just exiting the Great Recession, we should not forget the fact that it can happen again!

There is no economy on earth that has a guaranty for perpetual well-being. Recessions happen. There have been 47 recessions in the US since its inception, and we have no reason fundamentally to believe that that history will come to a sudden end!

For your edification: List of recessions in the United States
 
mbig said:
The beginning and middle of the end:
But I hope we can Reverse somewhat the Class Warfare Viciously Waged and won by Ronald Reagan-omics.
Who lowered top marginal income tax rates from 70% in 1980, to 28% in 1988, as evidenced on your chart.
Note app 1986 being the Turning point.
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Interesting, but I must insist on the Piketty-infographic that shows indisputably that the fortunes of today's American Rich were founded in the manipulations of the Ronnie's administration regarding Upper-Income Tax rates that came bounding down from the 70% level as LBJ had left them:
Historical_Marginal_Tax_Rate_for_Highest_and_Lowest_Income_Earners.jpg
 
ludin said:
in fact the rich tax in france failed so badly they rolled it back. in fact it hurt their economy.
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French tax-rates have not changed all that much and certainly not for the reason that you indicate.

For your edification: Barèmes de l'impôt sur le revenu en France - 1998/2015

Since 1997, for upper-incomes, they have come down a whopping 7%!

They remain nonetheless, for the Upper-class Incomes 32% higher than in the US ...
 
Lafayette said:
Interesting, but I must insist on the Piketty-infographic that shows indisputably that the fortunes of today's American Rich were founded in the manipulations of the Ronnie's administration regarding Upper-Income Tax rates that came bounding down from the 70% level as LBJ had left them:
url]
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Um..
Um.. that's what MY post did specifically. You're? "insisting" on what MY post spelled out/elaborated/explained and why?

And I'll up you [a more dramatically illustrative one] one I've been using for Years: nearly SIX. Same as my last here.
ie, a 2011 OP, used multiple times since.
http://www.debatepolitics.com/economics/101932-plutocracy-reborn.html

plutocracy.jpg


I also suggest another of my OPs from 2011.... a THREE-post-OP string: See #3.
http://www.debatepolitics.com/economics/90108-truth-can-afford-pay-taxes.html

Welcome to what is OLD HAT to me.
 
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Lafayette said:
French tax-rates have not changed all that much and certainly not for the reason that you indicate.

For your edification: Barèmes de l'impôt sur le revenu en France

Since 1997, for upper-incomes, they have come down a whopping 7% ... !
Click to expand...

this is where it helps to be informed of what you are talking about.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france-drops-75percent-supertax

in 2012 the new French government enacted exactly the thing you are talking about. it is a soak the rich tax of 75%.
it backfired badly and ended up hurting the economy.
 
Lafayette said:
Enhancing society is rare. Inventions do it. Even the evolution of public sentiment. (Women can get abortions without the fear of death nowadays.)

You one and only yardstick is muney, muney, muney. As if that was the end-all and be-all of life in a market-economy. It isn't.

Most of us are not Bill Gates - we have families and we eke out a living as best we can. Still others rise to the top and "think" they have the right to massive Income just because Reckless Ronnie reduced upper income taxation in the 1980s.

One of the worst calamities to have ever occurred in the nation - because it convinced people like you that "the sky is the limit".

It aint, not with 40 million* men, women and children living below the Poverty Threshold on less than $24K a year ...

*Btw, that's the population of the states of California and Idaho combined ...
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That is a very bold assumption on your part.

My yardstick is my family. And I've been poor. We spent myself my wife and our four children spent six months living out of my truck.

Now we run a thriving and growing business that will hopefully continue on in my family long after I'm gone.

Still have that truck. Drove it to the shop today actually.

Again I'll say. Most of yall have no clue what it takes to be successful.
 
Gonzo Rodeo said:
We keep trying to take from the rich legally, but they keep moving! Those darn, sneaky rich!
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It didn't happen when our top tax rate was 92%.

Seems that the rich like to make huge profits, and what country other than the US produces the most Billionaires? They won't move because they won't be as rich in any other country.

CEO'S in Europe make about 10% of what they do in the US. Celebrities world wide make less than celebrities do in the US. And in no other country would a rich man find the great healthcare that we have in the US and protection against people who wish to do him evil.
 
imagep said:
It didn't happen when our top tax rate was 92%.

Seems that the rich like to make huge profits, and what country other than the US produces the most Billionaires? They won't move because they won't be as rich in any other country.

CEO'S in Europe make about 10% of what they do in the US. Celebrities world wide make less than celebrities do in the US. And in no other country would a rich man find the great healthcare that we have in the US and protection against people who wish to do him evil.
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The effective rate was never 92%, or anywhere close to it.
 
ocean515 said:
California has a policy of taxing the rich at higher levels than I believe any other state. This is a direct result of "income disparity" arguments.

The result is, California derives 30% of it's income tax revenue from only 5,600 people, out of a total population of almost 39 million people.

What happens when these 5,600 people die? What happens if they chose to leave? What happens if a large portion of them don't have big incomes over a period of years?
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There are always replacement rich people.
 
AliHajiSheik said:
...

We don't need taxes because we can print all the money we want without any negative effects like inflation. Now that is a special kind of magic....
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Who made that claim?

People who understand MMT understand that inflation is the limiting factor in the production of new money. Maybe you should study MMT a bit and learn something.
 
LessBiased? said:
It's true that the top 0.1% pay a lower average tax rate than the rest of the top 1%, due to various ways to avoid taxes and reduce tax rates which are only feasible for the top 0.1%. However, if you do the math, you'll find that even greatly increasing the tax rate on top 0.1% would have only a modest benefit for everyone else, in terms of redistribution of wealth...
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Likewise, a higher tax rate isn't likely to harm the standard of living of the uber rich.

I'l take a modest benefit any day of the week, especially when it does no one any harm.

If anything, if I had more disposable income, I would buy more stuff, which would result in business expansion, more business profits, and more wealth being created. Isn't "more wealth" what we are trying to achieve as a society?
 
TurtleDude said:
unfair taxation-being charged more for your citizenship benefits than others pay. that means if you pay more than the average tax payer, you are being treated unfairly. Progressive taxation is clearly unfair. Even a flat tax is unfair.
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Sure. That's why we shouldn't use the term "fair" in economics. Economic policy shouldn't ever be about "fair", it should be about maximizing the size of the pie so that we can all have larger slices.
 
LessBiased? said:
Any discussion of taxation which lumps the top 1% into one category is flawed. The income needed to reach the bottom of the top 1% is roughly $500K, which only qualifies someone as affluent rather than rich, whereas the income at the top of the top 1% can reach $1 billion or more. So the income and wealth inequality within the top 1% is far wider (more than three orders of magnitude) than the income and wealth inequality across the other 99% (less than three orders of magnitude).
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Absolutely. It's not the 1% that we should be complaining about, it's the top tenth of the top 1%.
 
Winston said:
Every time we've tried supply side Reaganomics it's failed us utterly. Conservatives need to accept that our budget crisis developed from Bush cutting taxes, starting two wars, and growing a housing bubble that propped up his economy. Then they need to accept that Obama wasn't a horrible guy who hated America in a turban. They need to accept that the deficit has decreased every single year since Bush's last budget so we can all get on with our lives.

What we need right now is a progressive overhaul of our tax code. Enough tweaking of the tax code to catch some of the lost revenue without scaring rich people off. Here are a few ideas that would improve our economy.

  • Tax capital gains at 40%
  • Raise the cap on taxable income
  • Increase the velocity of money for the middle class by 1T
  • Cut defense
  • Invest in education; an educated workforce can fill robust revenue generating positions in an economy
  • Expand SSC benefits; seniors spend their SSC checks
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I like it.

I'd probably also tweak your plan a little. I would tax all income, regardless of source (earned, gift, inheritence, capital gains, even corporate taxes), up to $500,000 per income earner, at a flat rate of 15%, all inclusive of medicare/ss tax, with no upper cap. Then I would have an additional "excess income tax" on all income, regardless of source, exceeding $500k/yr per income earner (so a family of two high income earners would have up to a $1,000,000 exemption). No other exemptions, special deductions, tax credits, etc.
 
ttwtt78640 said:
What is unfair about taxing all income above a reasonable and truly standard deduction at a single rate?
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Nothing at all. Let's just make that single rate all inclusive of social security and medicare.

IMHO, a fair income tax system would have only two numbers: a truly standard deduction (of say $30K) and a single tax rate (of say 20%) applied to income from all sources above that amount. The idea that how, or upon who, that income is later spent makes taxation fair is ridiculous as is the idea that taxation rates should vary based upon how one's income was obtained.
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We aren't that far apart on this. It's just a matter of negotiating the exact numbers, and agreeing to save SS/Medicare (or alternatively eventually having a UGI/BIG and universal health insurance as a substitute for SS/Medicare/unemployment/welfare/etc).

Heck, if we replaced SS/disability and most forms of welfare with UGI/BIG, that would be more or less the equivalent to the "prebate" section of the Fair Tax proposal, and it would eliminate the need to have a standard deduction (just like under the fair tax the prebate offsets the additional tax burden that lower income earners would pay due to the big sales tax). It could also eliminate the need for a minimum wage.
 
imagep said:
Who made that claim?

People who understand MMT understand that inflation is the limiting factor in the production of new money. Maybe you should study MMT a bit and learn something.
Click to expand...

Which part of the claim are you asking about? Pronoun reference is important.
 
OUTSIDE THE BOX

Thumper said:
My yardstick is my family. And I've been poor. We spent myself my wife and our four children spent six months living out of my truck.

Now we run a thriving and growing business that will hopefully continue on in my family long after I'm gone.
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What can I say. Enlarge your horizons.

You are not all alone - neither in your community, neither in your city, neither in your state, neither in the nation.

That part of life that allows you to make a living in a market-economy has never been nor ever will be just about "you and yours". Your business depends upon the Demand for goods or services that comes from the community around you, or even further afield.

But the Great Recession has obliged us to look beyond just our own communities. We must now confront the reality that "our well-being" was never just about me, me, me and mine, mine, mine.

It's about where we are all going as a nation.

Start thinking "outside the box" ...
 
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ludin said:
this is where it helps to be informed of what you are talking about.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france-drops-75percent-supertax

in 2012 the new French government enacted exactly the thing you are talking about. it is a soak the rich tax of 75%.
it backfired badly and ended up hurting the economy.
Click to expand...

What hurt the French economy, like all others in the EU, was the Great Recession.

Period - you are looking for economic ghosts that are not there ...
 
ludin said:
taxing people 100% does nothing to solve this.
Click to expand...

You could not be more wrong.

Taxation is the rudder on any economic boat. What people inevitably want in life is "money in the pocket" - or bank.

And some will employ extreme measures (including artifice and crime) to obtain it - which is what the SubPrime Mess was all about. America's little economic world fell apart at the seams from the onset of the SubPrime Mortgage Crisis - see visually here:
350px-Subprime_mortgage_originations,_1996-2008.GIF


You need an Economic History book ...
 
ludin said:
yep and raising taxes has nothing to do with that at all. they evidently do not have the skills or knowledge to earn more.
Click to expand...

And that is just my point.

By raising taxes at the upper-levels (to near confiscatory proportions) we achieve these two goals:
*Not only avoid the impulse to take idiotic risk amongst banksters who want to make a quick buck (aka the Great SubPrime Mess), but,
*We spend the additional revenues on the Sanders proposition of free tertiary schooling (like at present secondary schooling) that allows our children (and some older people who need retraining) to obtain the skills necessary that this Brand New Century clearly shows we need in order to survive economically.

And as a nation, we are better off for both the above ...
 
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Thumper said:
That is a very bold assumption on your part.

My yardstick is my family. And I've been poor. We spent myself my wife and our four children spent six months living out of my truck. Now we run a thriving and growing business that will hopefully continue on in my family long after I'm gone. Again I'll say. Most of yall have no clue what it takes to be successful.
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Wrong, take your blinders off. We are not ALL so dumb as you paint us. Your problem is that you are in an Economics Forum, and really out of your depth.

You cannot imagine - when the "fit hits the shan" economically - that the nation must be prepared to restore the economy by tried and true economic measures.

And yet, consider these historic facts (what actually happened in our economy as of 2008):
*After Dubya had gifted Obama the Great Recession, Obama stopped-dead an exploding unemployment rate at 10% by means of stimulus-spending (called the ARRA-bill). See that economic miracle as it happened in this Bureau of Labor Statistics infographic here!)
*However, to recognize what he had accomplished, the American voters collectively showed our appreciation in the 2010-midterms by voting the HofR into the hands of the Replicant Party, which steadfastly refused any further spending because they proposed "Austerity Budgeting" - which could not be more dumb, dumb, dumb.
*The US repeated historically the same error Roosevelt had made at the inception of the Great Depression in the early 1930s,
*Until he was persuaded by John Maynard Keynes (one of the more brilliant economists at the time) that the cure was Government Spending, which Roosevelt finally embarked upon in the remainder of that decade.
*But the real Spending that stopped cold the Great Recession was that of WW2!

We seem still to not have learned that lesson as a nation. Because the Replicants refused to vote more Government Spending from 2010 onward in the HofR! Which is why it took four-more-years (from 2010 to 2014) than was necessary for the economy to start creating jobs.

See that fact substantiated here by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
latest_numbers_LNS12300000_2007_2017_all_period_M01_data.gif


Economic history is a fascinating subject, and it does explain some historical phenomena that the general public finds mysterious. Nonetheless, statistics aside, economic failure is typically a man-made historical event. Yes, we have nobody else but our selfish-selves to blame ...
 
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OUR PRISONS OF POVERTY

Gonzo Rodeo said:
We keep trying to take from the rich legally, but they keep moving! Those darn, sneaky rich!
Click to expand...

Taxation is not only "taking", it is also "contributing" to the budget of the country that performs certain necessary services for the general public.

People with blinders on look only at the "take, take, take" side of the equation, and never at the "give, give, give" side. And both are required to run the governance of a nation equitably, fairly, impartially.

Too many of us have yet to exit the "stone-age of political thinking" because 40 million fellow American men, women and children are incarcerated below the Poverty Threshold ($24K for a family of four) - and nobody gives a damn.

For your collective edification, "Number in Poverty & Poverty Rate, Census Bureau",
600px-Number_in_Poverty_and_Poverty_Rate_1959_to_2011._United_States..PNG


THE HARD FACTS

Factually, most prison inmates issue from a group of extremely-to-very poor people. This study demonstrates the who and from where (level of remuneration previous to incarceration):
Excerpt (July, 2015): Prisons of Poverty:
Uncovering the pre-incarceration incomes of the imprisoned

Correctional experts of all political persuasions have long understood that releasing incarcerated people to the streets without job training, an education, or money is the perfect formula for recidivism and re-incarceration. While the fact that people released from prison have difficulties finding employment is well-documented, there is much less information on the role that poverty and opportunity play in who ends up behind bars in the first place.

Using an underutilized data set from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, this report provides hard numbers on the low incomes of incarcerated men and women from before they were locked up.

Findings

The findings are as predictable as they are disturbing. The American prison system is bursting at the seams with people who have been shut out of the economy and who had neither a quality education nor access to good jobs. We found that, in 2014 dollars, incarcerated people had a median annual income of $19,185 prior to their incarceration, which is 41% less than non-incarcerated people of similar ages.

The gap in income is not solely the product of the well-documented disproportionate incarceration of Blacks and Hispanics, who generally earn less than Whites. We found that incarcerated people in all gender, race, and ethnicity groups earned substantially less prior to their incarceration than their non-incarcerated counterparts of similar ages:
Click to expand...

Wage levels are in separate infographics linked above, but not linkable separately. Nonetheless, from the above linked article:
Incarcerated people, Income
.........Prior to incarceration......Non-incarcerated, working
.........Men..........Women.........Men...........Women
........$19,650......$13,890........$41,250......$23,745
Click to expand...

If those numbers don't get the main-point across, then nothing will ...
 
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