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Arrogant Rich People: Taxation, Income Disparity, and the Shrinking Middle Class
Posts
Government contractors are a special case- they love government and expenditures of tax dollars. But, the CEO of Halliburton isn't rich because his tax dollars are somehow giving him a high return. He's rich because his company is able to tap into the spigot of tax money that government doles out to people for various reasons.
Rigorous Scholarship
The government is providing economic benefit to someone who doesn't have to do any work to earn it. That sounds like welfare and tax cuts to me. How do you "earn" a tax cut?
Except that the wealthy benefit more because they have the most to lose. Yes, it is protection money, because France, Russia, Cuba, etc have shown that you can't crush the poor under your boot for too long before they cut off your foot. It's funny that rich people and their apologists never seem to remember that.
The wealthy person gets an education from our schools system, same as the poor person. Wealthy people aren't hatched fully-grown.
Rigorous Scholarship
They did the work initially to earn it, the government is just taking less from them in the first place. That's not a handout.
It's a lopsided way of seeing it. It presumes a state of anarchy and disarray and uses that threat as justification of high taxation and expansive government. That argument can easily be extended to justify any number of horrible things.
I wasn't directing that to you.
I'm not arguing here against a progressive tax system on the whole, but to equate a tax cut to a handout presupposes government ownership of private capital.
whats the bonuses for your average CEO of a TARP bailout bank?
Through no work of their own, the government is relieving the recipient of a tax cut of some of their legally required tax burden. That's a handout.
It's the reality of the world. History shows that what I'm saying is right, and we were damn close to a similar situation at least once in our history (hey there Great Depression). Anyone who doesn't think that using tax revenue for social safety net programs is a means to avoid that sort of social conflict is fooling themselves.
I know, but I felt like it needed to be reiterated.
And your way of saying it sounds like the old "all taxes are theft" supposition.
goes both ways man
giving massive tax cuts to the rich promotes class warfare as much as asking for more welfare for the poor.
That interpretation says more about your position than mine.
Tax cuts are not handouts, that's all I'm saying.
Anyone who doesn't care about social justice scares me.
Or something.
Ok then have a flat tax
I assume this is directed at rich people.
it is directed at anyone who promotes class warfare. A country divided against itself will fall apart.
which would either tax the poor into literal starvation or force taxes so low the government would fall apart
The problem is that you're wrong.
No, you're wrong.
We actually spend more on medicare/medicaide than we do on military defense.
Rigorous Scholarship
how is a tax cut a hand out, if you steal $20 from me, and give me back 10 you think I should be grateful like you just did sumthing for me...?
then stop pretending people in the bottom tax brackets are the only ones who "get anything out of" welfare.
If I'm your landlord who keeps your office standing for the cost of 10 dollars a month yes you fucking damn well should be grateful.
who else does, just curious, because if people not in lower income brackets are making out from wellfare that pisses me off, because it means people who really do not need it are stealing tax dollars.
that is scary thinking, I should remind you we live in a democracy where the government is SUPPOSED to be the servant of the people not the master. So I think your metaphor would be better if we lived in a totalitarian state or a monarchy.
No, seriously, you're objectively incorrect.
Stealing isn't exactly the right analogy.
Taxes aren't theft, unless you think rent is also theft.
This is going to go nowhere, because I think you're way off base and have done diddly-shit to prove otherwise.
I fail to see how a fiscally unnecessary irresponsible tax break is functionally any different than giving money away for free.
A billionaire would lose billions of dollars.
Not hard to see who is losing more. Not that we wouldn't both be fucked, but one of us would have much farther to fall.
Government is the perpetuation of current society. The more you have in a current society, the more value you have in the perpetuation of that society.
I'm struggling to take you seriously at this point because you're displaying almost a parody of naive libertarian ideology. Oh, and you also don't seem to grasp taxation.
mrdobalina: I've done more to prove my point than you have. A tax break is a gift from the government. A gift is a handout, ergo a tax break is a handout.
A democracy, just like any other form of government, needs money to function. Taxes are not a characteristic of unjust systems of government, they are a characteristic of systems of government.
Edit: I usually tend to disagree with you Mrdobalina, but I'm glad nobody has managed to run you away from this forum. It feels a lot like an echo chamber at times.
I think that there's more of a Utilitarian argument that we would have less people living in poverty if the top 1% of wealth were to be redistributed.
And I, frankly, don't care if they "worked for it", the unemployed construction worker works just as hard.
Progressive taxation is a combination of economic logic, risk aversion, tax value and economic justice. I don't think you can boil the idea of progressive taxation into "well, this is solely about X" when the concept is based on a mishmash of all sorts of ideologies and economic concepts.
Underlying theories of justice is certainly part of it, just not the only part.