krose wrote:The quick and easy answer to your fairness question is that a person making many millions per year should never pay a lower rate than someone making $80K, which is what we have now.
Why not? What do tax
rates have to do with anything (and why should there be various progressive tax rates at all?)? If a millionaire pays vastly greater sums of his own money in taxes than someone making $80K, what is the relevance of the rate being higher? Mitt Romney pays oceans of his own money in tithing compared to most LDS, and the rate is a flat 10%.
To fix that, we have to equalize the way capital gains and dividends are taxed. Taxing work income at a higher rate than investment income is absurd.
Taxing capital gains at all is absurd (and morally questionable). You're inability to comprehend the conceptual and economic link between investment and work - as if the one could exist without the other or as if people who invest their money in productive economic activity do not "work," is telling.
I do agree that the word "fair" probably has as many interpretations as there are people, in a discussion of taxes. And the emphasis is always going to be on how much is paid by other people at other income levels. That's how we get people advocating raising taxes only on upper incomes, while at the same time Romney and his wealthy donors complain that 47% of the country don't pay income taxes because their incomes are too low.
46.4 percent of American filers pay “zero or negative” income tax.
But one thing that's certain right now is that tax revenues are much too low for current spending levels. Either taxes have to be increased or spending cut, because there isn't enough money coming in to pay for everything we want to spend it on.
And your recommendation, having come to that understanding?
And as long as we are unwilling to have a serious national debate about what our values are (what programs we want and are willing to pay for), it's going to continue to get worse.
I have no idea what this means.
In my opinion, we need to cut back drastically on bloated military spending...
We are now running perilously close, relatively speaking, to a skeleton crew military that is recklessly underfunded, undermanned, and degraded in its ability to project power given present and realistic future threats. We are nowhere near what is realistically required of a superpower under present conditions in what is now essentially a monopolar (and WMD-proliferating) world coming apart under the influence of radical Islam and its allies in the post and remaining socialist world - Russia, North Korea, China, and Venezuela etc. I like Grimm's fairly tales, Krose, but yours are a poor substitute.
and let all tax rates return to pre-Bush levels. The rates were not too high 15 years ago.
Upon what criteria?
They're too low now, across the board.
Upon what criteria?
Tax cuts don't create jobs.
The level of both theoretic, historical, and empirical
stupefaction necessary to make this statement reaches escape velocity with only a little help from the classic leftist sense of anointed moral supremacy of the kind that explains Obama's messiah-like cult status on the Left as well as the Left's traditional stubborn resistance to the stark facts of its own history of abject failure in everything it has ever attempted or supported. They all see themselves in this messianic light, to one degree or another, and Obama is really something like a canvas upon which to paint their own displaced and externalized vision of themselves as redeemers of humanity.
That's been made clear in the last decade.
Empirical, historical, and economic nonsense. But so what? We are in a postmodern, post-rational, post-normal, post-critical thought world, in which wishes
are horses, and beggars
can ride (while they check their food stamp balance on their government cell phones).
As for cutting social programs, I believe the majority of us want to keep them strong. We just need to make sure we're also willing to pay for them.
Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, are gone after the 2020s. (Social Security runs out of money in 2033 and people coming into the system will face a 25% reduction in benefits (Social Security is already broke, as a matter of economic fact. It is running a permanent and continuing deficit (for all leftists, this means it pays out more then it actually has in revenue) each and every year. Its present unfunded liability is $11.3 trillion). Medicare now faces a long term unfunded liability of $37 trillion and already, in 2012, its hospital insurance (HI) program is running a deficit of $31.8 billion. Medicare will begin its final plunge into insolvency in 2024. Medicaid spending - equally unsustainable - is skyrocketing with no end is in sight. By 2035, these three programs alone will be consuming some 35% wealth produced in the American economy.
Medicaid and Medicare together face a long term unfunded liability of almost $46 trillion).
This is not, as statist collectivists like the author of this post want you to believe, a matter of what we're willing to pay for, or what we want. Its a matter of stark realities, both economic, philosophical, and moral, that we are going to have to face and face very soon. The reality is that we are impoverishing and destroying the economic and societal futures of our children and grandchildren, bankrupting both them and their nation, suffocating any possibility that they will be able to enjoy the kind of economic possibilities, opportunities, or freedoms we and our progenitors have enjoyed, and inevitably closing the window of freedom, liberty, the unalienable rights of the individual, and a lawful, civil society, upon ourselves and our posterity.
The New Deal welfare state is
unsustainable. The welfare state and its major entitlement programs are doomed, both here and in Europe, and if not deeply reformed and rethought, will take our economies and civil society with them when they collapse. This is not theory but stark empirical and economic reality. To save these programs as government programs means either, for all intents, the destruction of the economy in depth (if the EPA doesn't finish it off first, that is), or drastic cuts in benefits.
There is a way out of all of this, but, of course, that way is anathema to the Anointed (if for no other reason than that they, the Saviors, Redeemers and the conscience of humanity, would not be able to take any credit).
The way out is liberty; it is the way of unleashed, unchained democratic capitalism, limited, constitutional government; an economy grounded in work, industriousness, thrift, savings, and investment instead of debt and entitlement; a concept of economic relations founded in personal aspiration and personal responsibility and not in envy and political activism; an emphasis on wealth creation
by rather than redistribution
to, and a return to gospel - which means home and family - centered concepts of that which constitutes optimum social, cultural, and economic conditions within which individuals and the society as a whole can both prosper materially speaking, but maintain itself as an ethically viable civilizational structure as well.