Obama's team whines too muchFollow

sorry no they don't

Sorry, yes they do. Boy this is fun. Poor people don't have "nothing" you simpleton, they're just poor. If your definition is people who get more from the government than they pay then you're "poor" as well.

Do you live in Alaska?

I'm arguing that taxing them just because they have enough to be taxed is a backasswards way of doing things.

Smash believes in collective ownership. That means that if anyone has more than someone else, that person has "taken" some of the other person's fair share.

False. The political philosophy that most closely resembles what I believe is anarcho syndicalism. I've mentioned this before. You could just look it up, I'm sure there's a wiki page.

The political philosophy that most closely resembles what I believe is anarcho syndicalism.


Interesting. I just read about half of a page, would have read more, but I'm at work.

First off, let me say that you're correct Smash. I did have to look up that particular position. Um... That *can't* be the entirety of your political ideology. It looks more like something you dug up because it's obscure and contains some things you agree with.

Yeah, that seems likely. Not that I'd find affinity with a complex ideology I"d researched, but that I'd make up the fact arbitrarily to make you look silly.

Bang on, Cap.


Just based on a brief read, it appears to be more of a mechanism for collecting labor together, not so much a complete ideology about what to do once it's been collected.

You don't understand it. It's well within the realm of possibility that you're incapable of ever understanding it. Not my problem, frankly.



I'll also point out that nothing in that ideology actually opposes my statement that you believe that all wealth is collective wealth. Heck. That appears to be the founding assumption of anarcho syndicalism in the first place

Let me reiterate your lack of analytical ability here.


(or at least it's goal). Whatever. You say it's what you believe in, that's fine. I'd like to see you argue your gun control position in the context of that ideology though... ;)


You've never seen me argue anything but.


I've already said this at least once in this thread, maybe twice. Provide an absolute minimum service to the poor. Just enough so that they wont starve to death. Nothing more. Leave as much of the money as possible in the economy so that those same people have the best chance possible of getting themselves out of poverty.

Poor people spend ALL of their money. It's literally IMPOSSIBLE for the money to be any more "in the economy" then it is when distributed to poor people. We now enter your infant like understanding of economics, however, so I'll go no further. Perhaps, someday, you'll gain an understanding of market forced beyond that of a child with a lemonade stand.

Which is vastly more likely to happen if the company is taxed more than if it's taxed less. Just a thought.



Ever consider that if we didn't tax as much out of the top end of the economy, that you might not have lost your job and even if still lost might not have spent 5 months finding another one?

Just another thought.



Yes. They do. It is a core component of their ideology that the poor should be provided with a minimum standard of living regardless of their own contribution. The difference in that standard varies, but that's the basic starting assumption. It's inherent in the ideology. You can't get away from it.


If their ideology was that everyone should benefit economically in exact proportion to the contribution their labor generates, they'd all be Conservatives. Because that's what conservatives believe. You see the difference, right?

The entire concept of redistribution of wealth assumes that wealth should be spread without concern for natural economic mechanisms for said distribution. It assumes that the process of being paid for your labor based on the value of your labor in the market isn't sufficient and that therefore some government body must step in an "fix" the broken system. The problem is that the market is incredibly accurate at setting the value of something. While not perfect, it's the least imperfect methodology of determining somethings value.




First off, I highly doubt that anyone working 60-80 hours a week is poor, unless you're using a really strange definition of poor. Secondly, the Republican answer to that is that we should be encouraging someone to not work in a field in which they earn so little per hour that working that long doesn't allow them to provide for themselves.


I just think you've got things backwards. The reason someone might work long hours yet not be able to afford a decent life is exactly because of high taxes. Raising taxes and then providing entitlement isn't the right answer.


What's funny is that we saw this in a microcosm just recently with oil prices. Obama made the mistake of tossing out the standard Dem answer of "raise taxes", but in this case, everyone could see clearly that increasing taxes on the oil companies would only increase the price of gas. What's funny is that while it's so clear in that case, most people fail to see that this applies to every industry and every tax. If you raise corporate taxes, don't you think they'll pass that on to the consumers? Yeah. That or cut pay to workers, hire fewer people, reduce raise/promotion rates, etc. All of which results in the increased taxes being "paid" by the middle and working classes.


Wealth redistribution is not really about helping the poor. It's about making people think it's in their best interest so that they'll vote for the party proposing the taxes. It's also about perpetuating the condition of poverty so that more people will think they're better off as the recipients of said redistribution. But what you're really taxing is your own opportunity. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter where you tax, it all affects everyone. In small ways, perhaps, but it's there. Maybe the cost of your weekly groceries goes up a tiny amount. Of the price of gas. Or your ability to get a job is slightly decreased. Or the rate of promotion or pay increase is lessened. All of those are effects that occur when the government takes more money from the people in the form of taxes.


We should do the minimum of that, not the maximum. That's all I'm really saying. To me, this just seems like common sense.

Wealth redistribution is not really about helping the poor. It's about making people think it's in their best interest so that they'll vote for the party proposing the taxes. It's also about perpetuating the condition of poverty so that more people will think they're better off as the recipients of said redistribution. But what you're really taxing is your own opportunity.

Says the guy who votes for the party who consistently enact policies that increase his tax burden. I guess you just haven't found the right opportunity to make $500,000 a year yet. Oh wait, you never will. Keep hope alive, though!

Complete rubbish. The level of taxation never come as a surprise to companies. All their hiring is done with this level in mind.



Again, this is simply not true. Companies don't fire people, or go bust, or merge, because "taxes are too high". What world do you live in? Not only that, but the top end of the economy is barely taxed in the US. In Catwho's case, her company merged departments, presumably in order to be more "competitive" with other comanies that, wait for it, pay the same amount of taxes. If all the companies in that sector paid less taxes, exactly the same thing would've happened.





No, they don't.

But in order to understand that, you'd need to understand the differences between the various "left".

If you start at the furthest left possible, pure communism, there is no unemployment. Everybody is guaranteed a job by the state. That's the whole point of it. You don't pay poor people to do nothing, the state employs them. That's how Communism is meant to work.

If you take "socialism", the kind we have in Europe, then benefits for unemployed people decrease over time. Not only that, but to claim it you have to show you're actually looking for a job, by going to the job office regularly. As time goes by, the amount of money you can claim decreases. If you refuse a certain amount of jobs, your benefits go down. This encourages work more than anything. It prevents people from dropping out of society and being outcasts. It gives them the economic means to find another job.

There isn't a single lefty political movement that claims people, poor or otherwise, shouldn't work.

Not one.




It's certainly not "incredibly accurate". It's extremely easy to manipulate, and completely skewed towards those that have the economic power. The "market" isn't some magic tool that allows one to determine what things are worth. The "market" is nothing more than an empty space where people trade. The "market" is nothing but the absence of regulation. It is the law of the jungle. The "market" isn't fair, it isn't "right", and the only thing it does is to allow those that have the power to use it without restraints.

The proof is that there isn't a single country in the world with an unregulated "market". You know why, a well as I do. If you allowed to market to work on its own, you'd get a pyramidal system completely dominated by monopolies, that would be omnipotent. If you didn't have monopolies, you'd have cartels. That's why markets are regulated everywhere. Check out the history of XIXth Century economics if you want to see what completely free markets do: it's the exploitation of the masses at its finest.

Not only that, but when companies decide to close in the US and move to India, that's the working of the market. When companies fire employees eventhough they make gigantic profits, that's the working of the market. When companies decide to sacrifice health and safety at the expense of profits, that's the markets. All of this comes from the maximisation of profits: the prime driving-force of the market.

What lefties want to do is to control this market. Is to have rules in place so that the market is "human". It's to make sure that the maximisation of profits is not always the most important driving force. It's to recognise that some things are more important than profits: health, safety, justice, fairness, the environment, long-term sustainability.

Economics is an inexact science. Humans are not robots. They will make the wrong choices, they will be driven by egostitical desires which will harm themselves or others, by psychosis, phobias, misunderstanding, lack of knowledge. There are dozens of factors which make ordinary individuals contradict the theories of economics. It is a quaint illusions to think that human beings always act in their own self-interest. It is a dangerously and incredibly naive illusion to think that human beings act in the interest of their community, or society, or long-term sustainability.

Having said all this, there is a middle-ground between completely free-markets and absolute state control. It's what most Western nations are trying to do right now. It is a difficult balancing act that implies a broad understanding of society, as opposed to a narrow-minded view of the omnipotence of unregulated markets.



Total lie. The reason why someone might work long hours and be paid like sh*t is because the market allows it. Why should the employer pay an employee more when he has a gigantic wealth of similarly unskilled employees at his disposal? If not in the US, then in India, Bangladesh, Thailand, whereever... So why should he pay employees more? And how do taxes even come into the equation? When companies get important profits, they never re-invest those profits purely into higher salaries for the worst paid employees of their companies. There will always be cheap labour, and if takes a move to the sub-continent to find it, they will do it.

What powers do the employees have? None, except to walk out of a job and be unemployed.

One side has all the power, the other none. And yet, somehow, you blame higher taxes?



It is entirely about helping the poor. It's not even about minimising the asymetry of power relationship between employer and employee, but purely about providing a safety net for when this power is excercised. It's about social cohesion and humanity.

Or at least it would be if companies and rich people actually paid the taxes they were supposed to. Tax evasion costs the state more than benfit fraud. I hear people constantly whining about the latter, but never about the former. Funny that.

Finally, all your assumptions are based on the premise that things would get better if we left the markets alone. And yet, and yet...

There is no doubt that the single biggest contributry factor for reducing poverty is a mix of market economy and government intervention and regulation. One without the other just doesn't work. When the USSR broke-up, and Russia become and completely unregulated market-economy, your wet-dream, I suppose, the standard of living actually decreased, the oligarchs made a fortune buying state assets at knock-down prices toc reate giant monolpolies, and the ordinary people starved. When the IMF was creaming itself and other countries with its "Washington consensus", it caused collapse in developping economies, espceially in South America. Why do you think we are seeing a ressurgent left over there? Because people realised you needed more than just a tiny government with no power: you needed infrastructure, you needed strong government investments, you needed regulation, oversight, accountability, and yes, a certain degree of wealth redistribution. It's not shocking to learnt hat wealth doesn't spread itself on its own. Somehow, it tends to stick to people's hands.

The single biggest decrease in poverty in the last 20 years has come from China. Economically, they have a tightly regulated market economy with a lot of state intevention. The highest quality of life countries are always countries that follow this economic model: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, the Netherlands, etc... It's not hard to understand that there are certain things the market can't adequately provide for. Its role is to maximise profits. It can't do everything alone.


Edited, Aug 19th 2008 10:12am by RedPhoenixxx