From: Steve Kinney <admin@pilobilus.net> On 11/21/2016 10:02 AM, Razer wrote:
On 11/20/2016 09:49 PM, jim bell wrote:
Oh! I see you are justifying robbing people based on the mere assertion that they can 'afford' it.
No. I justify it on the fact that they're the criminals and taxes appropriately applied are really a form of restitution. If they don't like it they can hire an army. They can afford it. After all that's how they robbed the rest of us in the first place.
Taxes are payment for services rendered. Collectively (over an entire nation), that may be claimed to be true. But it is definitely NOT true from an individual standpoint.
In the United States, 500 billionaires presently own about 1/2 of the capital assets; Did they obtain them legally or illegally? If illegally, enforce the law. If legally, change the laws if necessary. to retain control of those assets they need a legal system that defines their rights of ownership and enforces them, I thought that personal property is to be considered a "right", rather than a "privilege". I guess you have a different opinion. civil Courts to arbitrate their internal disputes and legitimize abuses of power against outsiders, Again, if there are genuine problems, fix them.
civil infrastructure built and maintained at public expense to support the productivity of their capital assets Numbskull Obama said, "You didn't build that!". A factory-owner may have a road in front of his factory for transportation. But the government didn't pay for that road: The people who paid gasoline taxes (including the factory-owner) paid for that road. Ascribing all this infrastructure to "the government" misleads. , and a propaganda regimen to persuade the rest of us that this is all for the best. Blame the MSM. I do.
Thing is taxes aren't appropriately applied. That 50% tax on the wealthy you speak of doesn't really exist after deductions and writedowns nd donations of high-heeled shoes to the Haiti relief fund. Right? Some wealthy people pay less taxes than that guy living in a box in a field. Actually most wealthy people pay almost nothing percentage-wise after all the bennies their plutocrat friends write into tax codes compared to their UNEARNED (as in they didn't actually work or produce anything useful to society) income.
I was wondering when someone would mention this. Rich people pay avery small fraction of the taxes they whine about and want to see abolished; From: http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data × "The Top 50 Percent of All Taxpayers Paid 97 Percent of All Income Taxes; the Top 5 Percent Paid 57 Percent of All Income Taxes; and the Top 1 Percent Paid 35 Percent of All Income Taxes in 2011" I consider this to be evidence of a very serious problem. Actually, a big set of problems. You won't see it, however.
instead they pay accountants and attorneys to advise them on how to avoid taxation. I see absolutely nothing wrong with this. If a person lost, regularly, 30% of his income to burglary and theft, he'd see nothing wrong with hiring some form of protection to see it reduced or stopped. Naturally, people who don't think it's theft would disagree, and would resent the fact he was trying to reduce that theft. Even more naturally, a person who actually benefits from that theft would really, really hate the fact that the person paying the taxes would even THINK about seeing them reduced, in any way.
Political activists are presently running a "Fight For Fifteen" campaign in the U.S., asking for a de facto 40% pay cut relative to 1968's more or less "living" minimum wage. How fucked up is that? I guess you're confused. After WWII, America became the de-facto manufacturer to the world. Little competition. Wages were (relatively) high. The rest of the world was, relatively, poor. Most families got by with only one breadwinner, usually the man. This continued through most of the 1960s, and even the 1970's. Then Europe and Japan turned on as manufacturers. Then Taiwan, South Korea, Mexico, now China and India. America has a great deal of competition. America's wages needed to be reduced to compete, or at least they couldn't rise as much as they ultimately might have done. That is simple economics. So, when you say, "asking for a de facto 40% pay cut relative to 1968's more or less "living" minimum wage", you are really railing against the fact that America has had to begin to compete with the rest of the world in manufacturing. But either you don'[t realize that, or you are pretending not to. The world has changed, and not for the worse. But if anything, this rise in manufacturing, outside America, has actually resulted in a large increase in the standard of living of the rest of the world. What's wrong with that? If anything, it reduces "income inequality", measured on the entire world. Jim Bell