PigtailsOfDoom wrote:
gbaji wrote:
It's not all or nothing. However, as you raise taxes on the rich, the rate at which they create jobs in the market will decrease. It's about degrees and it shouldn't be hard to noodle out. Everything else staying the same, if you raise taxes on a rich person (lets specifically look at rich business owners) then he will have fewer dollars after taxes on his profits than he would have had otherwise. Which means he's got fewer dollars to invest in expanding said business.
You make it sound as if the wealthy in this country live paycheck to paycheck, and if we increase taxes on them they can't afford to invest.
What part of "it's not all or nothing" and "it's about degrees" made my post sound like that? It's not about suddenly making it so they can't afford to invest. It's about realizing that everything else being the same, if you reduce the amount of money someone has to invest, they will end out investing less money. It's not like this is hard to noodle out.
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Don't make me laugh. People who make that much money don't even spend half of what they make in a year, if even that. They sit on their wealth and let it grow either by putting it in savings accounts, bonds, etc.
Yeah. That other half is "invested". What do you think is done with the money they put in the bank? Banks loan that money out to people, like small business owners trying to start or expand their business. There is no such thing as idle money. You reduce the amount of money the wealthy have and you reduce the amount of things done with that money. And while not every dollar is going to result in something which employs people. the amount which does is a function of the whole amount. Reduce one and you reduce the other.
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You want to know why us crazy liberals want to raise taxes on the wealthy? BECAUSE THEY CAN @#%^ING AFFORD IT!
Yeah. I know that. But that's a terrible reason to raise taxes on a group. Also, it's not about whether the wealthy person can afford it, but how those taxes affect the things that wealthy people do with their money. You said it yourself, but seem unable to grasp the import of it. If a wealthy person only spends half his earnings on things for himself, then you'll have to raise taxes on him significantly before ever affecting his own person standard of living. However, while doing that, you will eliminate the funding for whatever he does with the other half. So less money in banks to make loans with, less money invested in the market, and less in all the things that the wealthy do with their money. And that will affect, not the wealthy, but those who are not wealthy but want to improve their own lives in some way. It most affects the middle class. Which is why raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for lowering them on the middle class isn't really a great idea. You're taking away with one hand what you give with the other. And let's face it. Having lower taxes doesn't help if you can't get a job because there's less investment capital floating around.
And of course, if you can't get a job, you aren't going to be middle class, so the tax break doesn't help you at all. So you're basically screwed over because liberals think that since taxing the rich doesn't hurt the rich, that there must be no negatives to doing it.
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Seriously, check
this article out. Right before the Great Depression, tax rates on the wealthy were at all time lows, and income inequality was at an all time high. During the 40's and 50's (largely considered the U.S.'s "Golden Years"), tax rates on the wealthy were higher and income inequality was significantly lower. In the late 20's and early 00's, the top 10% of earners in this country earned 50% of the income! And yet, even with all that extra money, we still entered The Great Depression and The Great Recession.
Yeah. Because the tax rates didn't have anything to do with the causes of the Great Depression, just as they didn't have anything to do with our current economic problems.
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You can claim all you want that lower taxes on the supposed "job creators" help the economy, but history doesn't agree with you.
You've got it backwards. My argument is that raising taxes on the rich during an economic down period will tend to extend the length of the down period. It's the wrong thing to do at that time. We can debate the effect of taxes on economic growth during normal periods, and during those times there are reasons to raise taxes and reasons to lower them. But, once you're already in an economic hole, and unemployment is high the exact wrong thing to do is raise taxes on the rich.
I am not, nor have I ever argued that right now we should lower taxes on the rich and this will fix the economy. What I have argued is that we should not *raise* the taxes on the rich, or the economy will not recover (or not recover as quickly). And don't get caught up in the action being taken. Letting the Bush tax cuts expire has the effect of raising taxes, regardless of what we call it. Extending those taxes through this economic downturn is not "lowering taxes on the rich". It's keeping tax rates where they currently are. Semantics, I know.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, the far bigger factor for job creation and economic recovery is a sense of stability. It's not strictly about how much money the rich have or don't have. It's about their ability to predict what will happen if they do certain things with the money that they have. So when we've got half the people in government clamoring for higher taxes and regulations on the rich and big business, and their supporters seem to be operating on the reasoning you listed (tax them more because they can afford it), can you be surprised that they're going to be hesitant to put their money into anything that they can't take it out of quickly if they need to? When you don't know how much taxes might change, or where they might be raised, you can't intelligently choose where to put your money. And this affects job creation directly because any investment which creates jobs will tend to be a longer term investment. If I buy gold with my money, I'm not creating very many jobs, but I can sell that gold and spend the money on something else pretty quick if I need to. If I spend that money leasing office space, and buying desks and computers and whatnot so I can hire people to do something, I can't get out of that investment quickly if the winds shift. I want to know that they wont shift (much) before I'm going to spend money on something like that.
Again, this is not an all or nothing thing. It's about degrees. Some investment will go into things which result in job creation. But not as much, and not at the same relative rate as would if those with the money were more confident in the direction things are going.