Damn those evil rich people!!!!Follow

Yet you are the one that created this whole topic about how people with the majority of the earned income pay the majority of the income tax. Surprise Surprise!

Or that since they make more money, it's pretty damn obvious that they would pay more taxes.
That people shouldn't be surprised or offended. Seems fair enough.

Allegory? IIRC, when Varus made the same mistake of mixing "percentage of wealth" with "percentage of income paid in taxes" you are making, everyone rightly called him on it. What the hell is your excuse?

You get that you can't equate the percentage of the total amount of taxes paid by a given percentile of income earners to the actual percentage of income being paid, right? I mean, that's like a rookie mathematics mistake...


How about you figure out what the hell point you're trying to make and then try again?

Is it? And remember, it's not just that they pay more, but that they pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes. I'm not saying that this is a horribly bad way to assess taxes, but I'm not sure why one would just state that it's "obvious" that they would (should?) pay that much more.

How much higher a percentage of their income is it "obvious" that someone earning 100k/year should pay than someone making 30k? The devil's kinda in the details, isn't it?

If you're making a bottom of the barrel income, then you have less wiggle room for general survival. I guarantee, if someone making $20,000 has to pay an extras $2,000 in taxes, they're going to miss it a hell of a lot more than someone making $200,000 will miss that extra $20,000. And that's on the "fair tax" plan everyone seems to spout.

Only if you promise that doing so will prove his arguments correct. If it proves them wrong, it's a no go.

lol, right?

Yes. Many (not most) rich people "earned" their money. Doesn't change anything. There's a hell of a lot more people that work twice as hard but will never have anything to show for it, because they won't be getting a lucky break.

Or, you know, all those people who work really hard and enter into VERY important fields and get paid nothing for it. My brother, for instance, teaches in a NJ charter school (and he LITERALLY teaches every student K-8, as he's a language instructor). He get's paid 90% of what normal teachers get for way more work, due to the fact that charter schools receive lower funding. His job is extremely important in the grand scheme of human affairs--far more so than the corporate lawyer for Burger King. Yet he gets paid a pittance next to those less important jobs, and is losing benefits because New Jersey has a ridiculous deficit.

And, at the end of the day, the people making way more do so BECAUSE others make less. If all the workers in a corporation made $20 an hour, the heads wouldn't have nearly the incomes they do now. It's by exploiting the bottom that they get to the top. People who don't have an interest in completely ******** over their fellows tend to have much lower incomes (being a public defender vs. corporate lawyer, for instance). So, at the end of the day, I DON'T care that the top get a higher tax, because they *are* a major reason many at the bottom has no money.

Plus, what conservatives never seem to care about is that this is the only option we have. We CANNOT tax the bottom more. They can't pay the taxes and survive. The reason we tax more as incomes become higher is twofold:

1. We need the money.

2. They can afford to lose it.

We can't lower the taxes on the rich--we just don't have the money we need NOW, let alone if we reduced it. And the poor can't make up the difference with higher taxes, even if we ignore the fact that they can't pay them and survive, because as we pointed out, all the money is held by the top.

The bottom can't pay what they don't have.

Do you understand the concept of "underemployment"?

No, they're not cutting jobs - they just shave a few extra hours off everyone's time. If someone (or several someones) quits as a result of this, are they hiring to fill that position? Probably not - it'd be cheaper to double the amount of self-checkout instead since they already have the technician (or, more likely, the contract with a technician) to handle anything that goes wrong with those.

Automation is all fine and dandy in general, but it does lead into a spiral of squeezing out low-end jobs - and these are people who can't readily afford any sort of retraining.

Shorter explanation of the cycle that occurs:

1. Store decides to install self-checkout lanes on a trial basis.
2. Store funds self-checkout lanes by cutting checkers' hours.
3. People go into store, see horrendous lines at checkers, use self-checkout.
4. Store notices lots of people using self-checkout.
5. Small proportion of the checkers quit due to insufficient income (presumably to try and move somewhere with a lower cost of living, if such a place exists and is readily reachable).
6. Store notices savings due to fewer people on payroll.
7. Due to volume of self-checkout business and savings on payroll, store installs more self-checkout lanes.
8. Store realizes they're not going to cover it just through that, so go back to #2 if any checkers are still employed.
9. Unemployment goes up; ThiefX blames Obama.

A dirty look while I swipe my card suffices.

Edited, Apr 10th 2010 5:18pm by Sweetums

I miss Kroger's down in Austin and Houston when I visited my friend. They seem to at least pretend about your business, even if you were just in there to buy a couple items. Here in Grand Island I am barely able to get that out of Hyvee on a good day. :l

Wal-Mart pulled out all their self-checkout lanes around here, because of inventory loss. All lanes are now fully-staffed again.