Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
And what did you sacrifice to do it?
Besides, that wouldn't be enough to pay the rent for next month.
Except Stormtroper. Stormtroper's cool.
Hatter: how would you intend to pay the court costs and attorney fees for a suit? Plus, you don't get time off from work to attend court.
And is that ending balance before or after the rent is due?
But yeah, tax brackets (and common sense) means that income-after-taxes monotonically increases with income-before-taxes. So you can't tax the rich into the poorhouse.
And they only said they were forcing equality; equality never happened anyway.
You are wrong to think that forcing equality causes shit like that. That shit happened because dictator was dick.
> Because the opposite, communism, totally works, amirite?
Have you considered the possibility of something that's neither nasty-brutish-and-short-state-of-nature free market anarchy nor totalitarianism top-down enforced-by-killing-people Stalinist communism?
There's a middle ground, y'know.
> Commando: Life sucks and isn't fair. Deal with it. The world isn't a socialist utopia where everyond holds hands and is the same. There will always be economic inequality.
Easy to just say "deal with it".
Much harder to actually deal with it.
If you can make the country as a whole far more productive economically and enjoyable to live in (thus attracting talent from abroad, in both people and companies) by increasing the wealth of the middle and lower classes, then it's definitely worth it.
This isn't about economic philosophies. This is about running a country.
> and it works by holdign guns to everyone and FORCIGN them to share?
Last time I checked, the People's Republic of Cambridge has very few gun owners.
> xactly you make a valid point ninjaclown and yes it does work that way if you don't pay a tax that you don't agree with? threat of a gun. if you don't follow a regulation you disagree with? threat of a gun. Every law is backed by the threato f a gun.
Uh, no.
If you evade taxes, then you get letters sent to you. Not mercenaries.
This isn't sub-Saharan Africa, y'know.
> Everyone hates economic conservativism. You don't want to keep your own resources and have the right to do what you will wiht your own property? WHy is that su xch a bad thing?
No, this is a great thing.
The bad thing is that people who are HIDING BEHIND this idea and advocating that society need not look after its least-well-off members.
> Rich people don't deserve the money they "earn." Most of them made it through either straight-up luck or through unethical means.
There are a lot of completely ethical rich people, y'know.
That said, luck is definitely a very big factor in financial success. Look at the fucking stock market.
> ok unethical you have a point but they still deserve that luck.
Well, here's the problem.
They get more luck because they have more opportunities to make money. If you had a thousand dollars, you could invest $10 in a hundred different things each. If you had just ten dollars, you can only invest $10 in one thing.
The more money you have, the easier it is to get more money.
The less money you have, the easier it is to lose more money.
How are you going to fix this problem?
> Yeah yeah they ahve money and yeah taking it from them is theft. If I earn money I don't want it taken form my by force that's the simple fact of it and i'm not rich i'm lower-middle class.
Do you realize that having a government that's able to provide more social services will make it easier for you to become wealthy and live a great life?
> Not like the "make the rich pay 90% of their income" stuff I've heard.
That's not 90% of their income. That's 90% of the PART of their income that's above a certain, very high amount of money.
And that was only in the 1950s. It was 50% going into Reagan's administration, and he took it down to 39%, IIRC. And then Bush took it down to 36%.
> Classic liberalism and Austrian school are pushed aside now but there are still scientists who support it.
By the way, economics is not quite a science.
It can be studied like one, but that's only the part that is "positive economics"--that branch that just seeks to talk about what's going on and what already happened.
However, the branch you're talking about is "normative economics"--the branch that tries to say what SHOULD or SHOULD NOT happen. This is all judgement calls based on people's own values. There is no such thing as should or should not, in the real world, only people's ideas of what should or should not be.
> If you tax the rich heavily, you'll eventually tax them to a lower economic class.
Um.
Let me address this in another post. Here's a marker for myself: [1]
> > This is always suggested by middle-class people who are pissed that others actually worked and gained wealth through business. Shut the fuck up, maybe you should have payed attention in school you lazy piece of shit.
> Poisoning the well. Unnecessarily antagonistic.
Yeah. You should probably have stopped after "business", and left off the "shut the fuck up" and "lazy piece of shit" parts.
> And yes, I agree expecting anyone to pay 90% of their income is preposterousness.
The idea that the government at any point had rich people to pay 90% of their income is silly, because it comes from a total misunderstanding of how taxes work.
I'll also address that in another post. WAIT NEVERMIND, FUNNYGUTS EXPLAINED IT ALREADY. READ FUNNYGUTS'S POST ABOVE.
> Spent (game)
Oh wow. I finished the week with $5.
I also got fired for talking with a co-worker about organizing.
And this involved me telling my kid that he wasn't going to get ice cream and had to learn to deal with bullies and continue getting free lunch.
I had to give blood to get $25, so I basically ended $20 short. And apparently rent's due right after that.
> Because flash games and hypothetical situations prove that the poor have no benefits and we're heading towards a dystopian future.
Well, I wouldn't consider the game to be necessarily realistic, but I would argue that it does a good job of making people think about stuff.
> Shit guys... I actually agree with most of what people are saying here, more or less, but do y'all have to be such dicks about it?
This.
I don't want to see strawmen on both sides, for goodness's sakes; one side is enough.
Aww. Thank you, Bobby.
Spend it on cars and travelling and video game and anime/manga and shit.
I'd always save some to give to charity and social programs, though.
Before.
As for taxing the rich into poverty:
Let's take a look at this.
If you are wealthy, you can sell off assets that you have, and then become less wealthy. However, even at massively short-sale prices, you're still going to make a ton more money off a $1M house than you would off a $250K house. A badly-maintained 10-year-old Mercedes will almost certainly command more money on the secondary market than a badly maintained 10-year-old Ford Escort.
But if you're already poor, you have nowhere left to go.
Also, money is worth more the poorer you are.
Think about this. You have to spend a minimum amount of money. At the very least, you need to buy food for yourself. If you want to have anywhere NEAR stability in your life, you need a place to stay. This means at least very basic rent, for at least several hundred dollars a month. And you've gotta be lucky to find a place that includes utilities; otherwise you'll have to pay. Then you have to pay for transportation, whether it's private or public transit. Maybe, hopefully, you can find a place really close to your job, but if you're in the suburbs or rural areas, you pretty much HAVE to have a car. Oh, and the shorter the rental, the more tattered you look, the worse your credit record looks, the more people are going to charge you, for rent, for loans, and for just about anything with variable pricing.
A raise of $10K a year means FAR MORE to you if you only make $50K a year than if you make $250K a year. In fact, it means far more than even a proportional increase--if you got a $50K raise on a $250K a year salary. Those $10K mean more to you because you don't have room to go down further. If you're wealthier, you can always choose to spend more and live more comfortably and you can can also always choose to be more thrifty and spend less and live less comfortably and thus save more money for rainy days.
But if you're poor, YOU DON'T HAVE THIS OPTION.
And then there's the fact that the way taxes work in the United States--a tiered progressive tax system--means that you can't be taxed into poverty. As funnyguts explained, the highest tax rates are only charged to the part of your income that is in the highest bracket range--i.e. everything you make past your first quarter million a year in income.
----
As for strawmanning and bad arguing, I am going to note that there are at least four people in this thread who are guilty of this. Please stop it; I'd rather not have to thump people's posts.
I hate money so goddamn much. Fuck that guy.
> Spend it on cars and travelling and video game and anime/manga and shit. I'd always save some to give to charity and social programs, though.
I'm actually rather curious about this.
Chagen, let's say you made $100K a year. Which is a decent middle-to-upper-middle-class salary. How would you budget things?
In short, do you believe that your willingness to give some money to the poor would be enough to ensure the poor get what they need?
For example, let's say you own a shoe factory. With it comes your capital, material, and labor expenses, buying and maintaining equipment, buying stuff to make shoes with, and paying your employees to make shoes. You employ 100 people.
You have an extra $10,000 lying around, and you have no current intentions to expand your business (buying a new shop, hiring new workers, etc.).
Would you rather invest that $10,000 in some bonds, that are guaranteed to give you 3% to 4% interest a year? Or would you rather give all of your employees a hundred dollars each?
One option clearly benefits you; the other clearly doesn't.
Gamble it all on oil futures. Simultaneously screwing over your shareholders AND all of America by driving up gas prices.
Just give it to yourself as a "Bonus"
Buy a Senator. Senators are always a good investment.
You see? Corporations are fucked up.