"I'm rich; tax me more!"Follow

Haven't we realized yet that gbaji has no idea when it comes to economics?

Unlike other people in this thread, I've explained this clearly several times. What do you think wealthy people do with the extra few hundred thousand they earn each year above and beyond their personal expenses? They invest that in the market and/or they put that into their own businesses. Someone running a home business as an S-corp is most certainly going to have their business decisions affected by personal tax rates. As are people in partnerships and sole proprietorships. Even "big business" is affected by this in the form of stock impact based on buying or selling trends in the market. More relevant to the issue of economic recovery and growth, investment in new businesses come pretty much exclusively out of the money left over in the hands of private citizens after paying personal and capital gains taxes on their own personal earnings.


So yes. Income taxes on people affects business growth. Why would you think otherwise? I've explained this quite clearly and repeatedly in this thread, but you all just keep replying with dismissive comments insisting I'm wrong and some other non-defined position which apparently accepts the assumption that we can tax the upper ends of our earnings range without any negative side effects is right. But in all of this, not a single one of you has chosen to take the time to clearly explain why you think that is so.

Can anyone do it? I don't want repetitive assertions that I'm wrong. How about someone actually explain to me how forcing someone who makes say $500k/year pay an extra 10% in income taxes (as well as a jump in the bottom long term capital gains tax rate) is going to have no effect on economic growth. Be very specific. What does that person do with the money that is going to be taken from him in the form of taxes? How does that effect economic growth? What will the government do with it, and how will that affect economic growth?


It just doesn't seem like those jumping on the "tax the rich and give to the poor" bandwagon have really thought this through. If you want to do that for purely social reasons (rich people don't need it and poor people do), then that's one thing. But if you're trying to take a position that this will be better in terms of economic growth, then you need more than just repeated assertions. Some kind of logic and reason would be helpful here. It's one thing to lie to me and lie to others about why you support something. But don't lie to yourself.





BS. Both of those countries have experienced economic growth precisely because they came up with ways to make better products at a lower cost. Do you really think that Sony and Sanyo are big successful companies because they are still making the same products they made in the 1980s using the same techniques? You need to get out from under that rock and look at the real world. You probably could not have picked to worse examples to make that case for.




Lol. You don't like my line of thinking purely because it disproves a position you want to keep holding on to. The idea that the producers in an economy don't actually do anything to help make our lives better is the sacred cow of communism btw. It's enshrined in the entire thought process and must be drilled into young communists/socialists so that they never question it.

Guess what? I'm questioning that assumption. And you should to. Open your eyes and look around you! Ask yourself what things have made your life better in the last 20-30 years. Was it environmental activism? Was it food stamps programs? Was it anti-war protests? Or was it perhaps big business and the wealthy people who work for and invest in them making things like computers, cell phones, ipods, the internet, a thousand channels of cable, better materials for our homes and our clothes, better cars? Was it the guys who sunk their own money into micro-breweries to bring you better and more variety of beer? How about the chefs who made enough money to invest in their own restaurants to bring you different types of cuisine than the standard stuff? How about the wealthy people who sink money into film and TV products which provide you entertainment?


We can list off all the things that make our lives different and "better" than they were say 100 years ago, and the vast majority of them came because some wealthy people decided to make a better <whatever>, or to invent something completely new that the world had never seen before. If you don't think that's important and that it didn't have anything to do with the massive economic growth of the 20th century then by all means embrace the "take from the rich because they don't do anything for us" mentality. But I think you're wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, but horribly tragically wrong.

I don't know, are you going to speculate about it in a manner that proves your point though?



Oh, you sure are! Cute.

Stop acting as though if the money gets taken away, it's just disappearing and the economy is DOOMED! DOOMED! DOOMED! because the wealthy have to pay more in taxes. ECO101 - things balance themselves out.



Did anyone really directly suggest otherwise?



Did anyone really directly say that it would have no effect on economic growth?

PS: I know the answer to this one is "no."



You're beyond delusional.

When a business invests in plant equipment, more employees and skills up its employees it increases it's productivity efficency (if done right) and it's overall productivity capacity.

When a nation invests in public/private road, rail, airport and port infrastructure, it bears a short term cost that is outweighed by long term national productivity gains. (Overall private wealth expands, government reaps rewards in more taxes without raising taxes.)

Same is true for investing in the health infrastructure of a nation, and the education infrastructure of a nation. The higher skilled the citizens are, the more sophisticated and higher paid/higher producing the national workforce/employers can be. The children of healthier individuals put off child-bearing until later when they are more mature parents. If teenagers see that their Dad is on the edge of heart failure at 45 and their Mom is slowly dying of diabetes at 40, they tend to unconsciously think: well, if I ever want kids I'd better get on with it then, so I can be alive to see them through to 20 and out of the nest. Not to mention that Dad and Mom have their skills taken out of the employee/employer force early.

National investment in physical infrastructure and the wellbeing and mental advancement of its citizenry costs a lot of money mid term, and returns more money long term. Sadly often well beyond when election cycles are over. Sometime spending, like education, takes 20 years to pay up its profits.

So the question is where do we fairly get the seed money to invest? And the second question is when is it safe and a good time for the government to go into deficit, to smooth out an economic downturn, and when is it time to bite the bullet and let government investment in the national wealth dry up, and not smooth out a downturn, because past deficit spending has been mishandled, or national credit and savings are too far out of whack, or the trade imbalance is insupportable, or whatever.

The idea with progressive taxation is not to "take from the rich", but is simply to take taxes from every citizen (which is fair since every citizen benefits from living in a public invested in nation) and give systematic discounts to those who have less income. The poorer you are, the higher the discount. The discount is simply needful for everyone involved.

Edited, Oct 9th 2010 4:05am by Aripyanfar

Thank you.

you're like our own little glenn beck.

The problem is that the left doesn't seem to know the difference between "investing" and "spending". It seems like they assume that since investment requires spending some money in a way which gets you more down the line, that any spending is investment and will return greater amounts down the line. But that's not true. If you "invest" money into welfare, the return you get down the line is more people on welfare. If you "invest" money into cost inefficient energy sources, what you get down the line is higher energy bills for the same amount of energy. If you "invest" money into providing free services for people, all you get is more people taking the free services and a less productive economy down the line.


You can't just label something an "investment" and have it be true.



Why did you use the word "infrastructure" (twice even!) in that sentence? We're not investing in infrastructure, we're spending money providing health and education services to our citizens. Why the deception? Is it possible that you know that there's a difference, but you don't want people to notice or pay attention to it, so you use a word which implies that we're just building hospitals and schools in which people can be educated and healed, not that we're spending many many times more money actually paying for their education and health care.


Those are two different things, right? When we build a highway, we don't also buy the vehicles which travel on it, and provide free transportation to everyone, do we? So why pretend that one is analogous to the other?



Sure. No one's debating the value of providing education for our citizens. The difference is that I'm honest about it, while some want it to appear like we're doing something else. The value of an educated population absolutely makes the cost of educating them worthwhile.

This does not automatically mean that the value of providing free health care works the same way though, does it? They are also different things.



But the data doesn't suggest this pattern works. What we find is that when we provide more services to "the poor", the poor don't feel that they are any more capable of supporting themselves, either today or tomorrow, but their ability to provide for themselves tomorrow is reduced. Thus, we end out just eternally paying money to provide for them "today", without most of them ever achieving that brighter tomorrow they were promised. It's one of the big lies of liberal politics. They promise to make the lives of the poor better, but end out trapping them into a cycle of poverty instead.



Again. There's is a huge difference between providing children with sufficient education so that they can become more productive members of society, and providing for them even when they grow up and don't. One is a net positive, the other a net negative. We should be very selective about what kinds of things we spend money on, but it seems as if liberals think that the very act of spending it is sufficient to justify itself. I've even seen liberals crow, not about the positive results of programs they spend money on, but just about the amount of money they spend. As if simply spending the money is enough. Gee. Ought we not to actually go back and see if all that money did anything? Shouldn't we look at poverty rates over time? Shouldn't we compare the outcomes of the children of families who've received public assistance to those who didn't? Shouldn't we look at the trends of crime, poverty, and violence among populations we've targeted for government assistance?

Because when we actually do that we find that those programs have made things *worse* for the poor, not better. We make the state of poverty more bearable, but the surrounding aspects get worse and it's harder to become "not-poor".


This is not an investment in our future. It's a road to disaster for future generations. Let's not kid ourselves.



That's the wrong question. It's like asking where we should get the money to buy our dope. How about we not spend that money in the first place, and then we don't have to go looking for who should pay?



Sure. But the lefts answer to this is to not care about deficits when they are spending money, and then care about them a lot after they are done and they need to find someone to pay for all the money they borrowed. Which seems kinda like the exact wrong way to do this. If we are to run deficits it should be in the cause of decreasing the tax burden on the people, not increasing the size of the government.



We already have a progressive tax system though. The problem is that despite this, the left seems to think that the rich should increasingly pay even larger shares of the taxes.

I'm a fan of progressive tax structures. I really am. They are a good way to distribute the burden of government spending. I'd prefer smaller government with tariffs, but if we have to have an income tax, this is the best way of doing it. The problem though is that over time we've introduced so many tax credits and rebates that the bottom 40% or so don't actually pay any income taxes at all. While that may seem like "help" to some, the effect is that they don't care if taxes are raised (regardless of where), since they don't have to pay it.


Surely you can see the danger of a Democracy in which 40% of the voters aren't affected negatively by a choice they're asked to vote on. That's not about progressive taxes. With progressive taxes, the poor should pay very little, but they should still pay. And they need to be affected by every single change in overall taxes (and by extension choices to expand government). If adding some new government program is going to increase total government costs by 1%, then every single citizens taxes should go up by 1%. That the base rate for one group is lower isn't the point. The ratio's need to be maintained.


What's going on here is that we're proposing to pay for massive increases in spending by only making a small portion of the population pay for it. IMO that's absolutely wrong. We should all pay for it, or no one. If we're going to raise taxes to pay for the increased cost of government, then everyone ought to feel that increased cost. That's the only way to ensure that "the people" are making good choices. If you protect a portion of them from the costs, then it will skew those choices. And that's a bad thing.

Edited, Oct 11th 2010 3:55pm by gbaji

That is the absolute worst argument I've ever heard. You know, I've never had experience in the auto industry; therefore, I must want it to fail.

So hiring Sarah Palin as VP would have been a wise choice based on her plethora of experience..... Can't wait to see 2012 when she is tops on the ticket.