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Oh, "fairly" informed means knowing the "prebate" details in SOME "fair tax" proposals......Possibly I was wrong to assume that you were a fairly informed poster. My bad...
Oh..well..."most"....and they don't even have to reference it! We should know, even when those talking about it don't know that they are talking about it, that they are talking about it!
Omniecessence!!!
Um..ALL.....um, it isn't a great idea to defend the current tax laws with a chart showing the massive income gains enjoyed by the top 1% from 1979 to the 2000.
What you should have shown was "Figure D"
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/tomnta.pdf
lower taxes for the rich?...no i want to return to voluntary taxation, as the founding fathers designed our system of government.
i dont have feelings in my heart of hate for people who have more money than me, and wish to steal from them, and redistribute that money to consolidate a position of power as you do.
I am showing it, I posted a link to the ORIGINAL document. The reason for the shift in revenue towards the upper income quintiles is due to the fact...wait for it.....because of the larger share of wealth this quintile is capturing. And to add, the top quintile has been able to keep a larger portion of this cature because....wait for it.....their effective tax rate has declined. Oh....and since 2000, all of this has gotten better for the top quintiles.How about you post it? The moderator already chopped my initial post for this to the bone because it was too much from a single source. Figure D should be shown here. It indicates that the fraction of all federal income tax revenue paid by the top 1% grew from 15% to 37% over the period. It shows the 1% to 10% share was a constant 30% over the period. thus in 2000 the top 10% share of the federal income tax revenue was about 67%. The top 20% of income earners paid 83% of the federal income tax revenue. The fraction paid by the all groups below the top 10% declined over the period. The tax rates shown in Fig E were approximately constant so the concentration of taxes paid reflects the concentration income trend.
I am showing it, I posted a link to the ORIGINAL document. The reason for the shift in revenue towards the upper income quintiles is due to the fact...wait for it.....because of the larger share of wealth this quintile is capturing. And to add, the top quintile has been able to keep a larger portion of this cature because....wait for it.....their effective tax rate has declined. Oh....and since 2000, all of this has gotten better for the top quintiles.
Tax rates have become less progressive as the top quintiles have seen bigger slices of the income pie.
Chart E is not an effective tax rate chart, it is an average tax rate, and the top 1% enjoyed lowered rates under the GOP presidential years, their "average" rate only increased during the Clinton years, and I agree, the rates had little to no effect on investment. I have been arguing against voodooism for decades, all I am pointing out is that you need to be more accurate about what the data you present shows.But the point that I made originally was that in the period 1979 to 2000 (before the capital gains rate was reduced to 15% and before the "Bush tax cut") the effective all-in rate for the top 1% was approximately constant at 25% (see Figure E which I posted above) yet that group's average inflation adjusted income more than doubled and the 1% to 10% and 11% to 20% groups incomes grew about 25%. Everybody else was stagnant. The charts show two things: 1) tax policy was constant yet the rich got steadily richer - something other than tax policy was the underlying cause of the trend, 2) the all in tax rate of 25+% did not impede the rich from getting richer - consequently the argument that a higher capital gains tax rate will damage the investment ability of the top group of earners is not supported by the constancy of the data trends over this 20 year period where there were Republican and Democratic regimes, recessions and expansions, deficits and balanced budgets. Why not have a tax progression formula that simply resets us to the all-in tax rate data that was in place in the 1979 to 2000 era - no deductions and no differentiation according to the color of money that you make (oridinary income and capital gain income)?
These don't even approach the top ticket items that drive our excessive tax rates. Nor are these the things that politicians typically campaign and gain too much power by marketing to the public. So no, we're not forgetting those, I think if those were primarily all that government did in addition to the very limited enumerated powers, we wouldn't be this worked up in the first place.Yeah, forget all that stuff about public health, scientific research, and interstate highways. Let's go back to the good old economy of 1870
Near 50% of people maknig over $200K goes in one way or another to a government agency. It's just silly.
Chart E is not an effective tax rate chart, it is an average tax rate, and the top 1% enjoyed lowered rates under the GOP presidential years, their "average" rate only increased during the Clinton years, and I agree, the rates had little to no effect on investment. I have been arguing against voodooism for decades, all I am pointing out is that you need to be more accurate about what the data you present shows.
The total effective tax rate on the top quintile during the Clinton admin came in at around 28%, the top 1% were paying around 36% in '96, I would be very happy just to go back to those laws. we were well on the way to to actually getting a balanced budget....not to say that tax rates effect gdp.....which would be voodooism.Really. How do you make progress arguing against voodooism by splitting semantic hairs, demonizing republicans, and exhalting democrats? If you were presented a graph of these data without axis labels and told to choose the best fit line through the top set of points you would pick a horizontal line at the 25% value by inspection and judge that the error would be about +/- 2%. Another way of putting this is that these "average" data points should have standard deviations that should have been shown as error bars on the points. if that had been done the 25% line probably would have touched nearly every error bar. There were marginal tax rate changes and also deduction and credit changes during the era. These were noted in the paper. They figure shows that they had minimal effect on the all in tax rates of any of the groups. So why not just set the tax rate for the top 1% at 25% of net income with no distinction of how the money was made and no deductions; set the rate at 16% for the 1% to 10% income group ... etc ? It is progressive, it is clean and simple, it eliminates the divisive politics of deductions for special purposes, and it produced adequate income for the government in the 1990s.
So no memes, no name calling, no blaming. How should we go about getting this under control?
why do we need deductions, why just have a simple 1 page tax system, instead of 10's of thousands of tax regulations...which cost the tax payer to enforce.
I do not know how true this old adage is, corporations do not pay taxes, people do by buying their goods and services. I suppose the idea is to make people think a corporation's goods and service would be cheaper if they paid no taxes. It's possible I guess.
Divide and conquer has been the policy of both of the major parties in their attempts to win elections for quite awhile. That and the negative attack ad attacking something from a candidates past and trying to make him look like the devil reincarnated. Some how, ideas, solutions to our problems, vision of the future of America, your state, town, county or whatever has been lost in elections. The idea is to make the voter hate the other guy so much he ends up voting for the candidate he hates the least.
I see no solution.
I do. It is you and me - even Fenton and HoJ. Check this out. I published it a year ago for just this reason. Notify me if you buy it - I'll donate your payment to this forum.
Amazon.com: The Wind of Hope eBook: Paul Smith: Kindle Store
Because if we did that the wealthiest people and corporations wouldn't have the loopholes to exploit middle-class taxpayers to pay for subsidies and government contracts.
In post #59 Gimme campaigns against tax policy argument voodooism. This is it. Consider the data posted above. 60+% of federal income tax revenue is paid by the top 10% of income earners. 80+% is paid by the top 20%. The wealthy aren't using loopholes to expolit middle class taxpayers to pay for subsidies. They are actually paying for government for everybody. The "loopholes" were generally created to encourage or discourage social behavior (the gov't wants you to buy a house so they give you a mortgage deduction.....) or to serve special interests such as "green" proponents or to enhance the income of some Congressional district or State with an oil field. To compensate the marginal rates are set high so that the after deduction rates achieve the desired income. It is like a store marking up its prices so that it can offer a sale. Tax law should not be an indirect way of enacting social behavior legislation and it should not be a means of negative campaigning and accusation.
I don't do Kindle as i like to sit down and read from a book and not a computer. But i like the description.
Hardship -> Resolve -> Satisfaction-> Happiness Our nation has experienced this cycle many times before. We know from experience that determined effort, persistence of purpose, unquestioned faith, and supporting one another will transform hardship into satisfaction. Resolve is “as American as God, Motherhood, and Apple Pie”. President Eisenhower said, “There is nothing wrong with America that faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure.” In the Wind Of Hope you will find fourteen essays about the very basic purposes of America that are so simply stated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. They are timeless simple statements that capture the fundamentals of human harmony. We will find wisdom in our past and joy in our present. We will choose happiness for our future. You will conclude that pursuit of happiness is, in fact happiness.
Eisenhower was the first president I can remember through personal experience. I was born during Truman and outside of books, I can't remember what life was like during his administration. But during IKE, it was at a time when the majority of Americans trusted their own government. IKE is in my opinion still the best president during my lifetime.
I too was a Truman era baby and IKE was the President of my elementary school days - I also don't do Kindle (but my wife is an addict). It is a very easy and inexpensive way to publish a book however - so I did it that way. Here is another IKE quote from the essay "Government By the Party and of the Party" in the book “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. ” IKE was also the signer of the interstate highway act.
You can read Kindle books on your computer. A free reader program is available from Amazon.
And just how will we pay for govt.? You are making a fool of yourself. The progressive tax system is what made America the most prosperous nation on Earth.
People like you STILL want to demonize Henry Ford for paying his workers 5 dollars a day. Living in the past is not pretty.
i am foolish?
no i am for freedom, not for compulsory taxes placed on people.
not for unlimited government, who feels they have powers to control people lives through taxation.
your tax and spread world, is drawing closer to its end.
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