The point is that lots of people had essentially the same idea; it was an inevitable and obvious application of existing technology. It's ludicrous that anyone accrues monopoly profits off such ideas. It's the perfect example of why a top marginal tax rate of 90% or higher does not, in fact, hurt the economy at an appropriately high level of income: the people making enough to be in the highest bracket didn't do any real work to get there; they got there by being lucky.
You've misinterpreted my point of view. First off, if you didn't click the spoiler in my original post, go do that. I set the tax brackets I believe in. Actually I'll save you time and just add them again right here: Alright so there are some key take aways to that brief summary of how I would implement the tax code. And one key thing I left out, consumption tax would still be in full effect. 1. You don't even start paying income taxes until the 100K per year line and even that that line only the dollars you make past 100K are taxable at a rate starting at 1%. 2. The Hockey stick is a very important part of making this work. I am just borrowing the following visual to give you an image of what I mean, the text and numbers on the graph are unrelated to my point. I'm not sure how much you make but I assume it's over 100K given your comments. Unless you're over 1 million a year I doubt you would pay as much in taxes as you are paying under the actual tax rates you're paying today. 3. I'm not just some down and out poor kid out of college wanting the wealth of the 1% to be thrown my way. My earnings have made a few significant jumps over the last several years and I would pay income tax under my proposal. The idea is not to punish success. To be in the 1% bracket you only earn about 360K per year. Those people would pay substantially less than their current rate. It's that 1/10th of 1% crowd that actually has the power and that has stacked the deck against all of the rest of us. That is the group I would like to see brought back down to Earth a little bit from their current seats in the stratosphere. They would still be wealthy but they would no longer be the equivalent of modern day dictators that can literally buy their way out of anything. I don't like the idea of being ruled by the wealthy elite, many of which were either just born into money or as Liet stated about Zuckerberg, just born at the right time to execute an idea that would have come about anyway, regardless of their existance. Add to Zuckerberg both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs btw. In the Malcom Gladwell book, The Outliers, there actually is a very interesting chapter about the luck of birth timing. 4. I'm not sure where your "why do we need an army" comment came from. While I would definitely cut military spending in half and put in place a system that rewards efficiency instead of the current system of rewarding waste, I would never cut it back completely. 5. I absolutely believe in success. I'm a great example of hard work paying off. What I resent is that I lose 35% (no state tax in Texas) of my income while mega corporations that earn 10's of billions of dollars are paying nothing in taxes and people like Warren Buffet and Mitt Romney having a lower effective tax rate than me. 35% of my income is a big hit to me, it's the kind of thing that holds back 99% of the population (though half don't pay any taxes) and keep us from being able to influence political decisions. On the other hand if guys like Buffet were taxed progressively up to 90% they could cover the rest of the income tax bill that is such a burden on the rest of us and STILL be very wealthy men. As mentioned above the consumption and luxury taxes on goods and services would still be in place so that you're covering the necessary gap you would lose by cutting out so many people from paying income tax. Obviously this is all theoretical but if we were also cutting back on wasteful government spending I believe there is plenty of room to make a system like the one I've proposed actually work. It's really a hybrid between capitalism and socialism with the goal not to make everything even, but bring more balance to the massive skewing of power and influence we're all being subjected to currently.
You could tax the top 1% at 100% tax (i.e. take all the money they made that year) and it wouldn’t be fair and it still wouldn’t dent our annual spending deficit (excess of spending over taxes). Would not dent it. Your comment about Zuckerburg was the catalyst for my reply, but the rest of my post wasn’t directed at you - as you say, we share a lot of opinions re tax policy. But I'll add that consumption taxes are a good idea but they have a regressive impact, so that one will continue to be a tough sell. Anyway, imo you don’t have to become a billionaire to have achieved the ‘american dream’. Anyone who once had little and now has a lot is thankful, as am I, for the bits of meritocracy left in the system (nearly completely absent places like Euroland and Japan). I mentioned a summary of my transition from liberal to free market conservative in reply to the OP using your change in the opposite direction as a trigger, nothing more. Riddle me this, why did I move to Texas from New York last year, and take everything I owned and even my pension savings along with me?
I'd say both Tex and Tuttle demonstrate the idea that we are not captive to our initial environment. Continuing with the red pill analogy, I took it when I was quite young, spending my formative political years as an ardent Reaganite, nationalist, and militarist. This was in contradiction to family tradition -- my mom would be best described as a social Democrat (European mold) and my dad was an avowed anarchist -- not the bomb throwing variety, but the idealistic, each man should be completely free variety. I took the red pill and parroted the RNC talking points of the day, only becoming disillusioned by the blatant dishonesty George HW used during the '88 campaign. The trigger was in his attack on the ACLU. I couldn't understand how a Vice President of the US could vilify an organization dedicated to the Constitution for simple political gain. From that point on, I became more and more suspicious of a conservative movement so willing to throw the Constitution under the bus.
On the spending we totally agree. Rewriting the tax code will not fix everything, deficit spending must be stopped and reversed until the debt is paid down. At that point you could choose either to expand programs that promote the general welfare of the people until a balanced budget is reached or cut the taxes and run a balanced budget (clearly the better of the two choices in my opinion). Just to be perfectly clear though I will reiterate that the problem does not lie within the top 1%. It is primarily the top 1/10th of 1%. Consumption taxes kept at a pretty flat rate aren't nearly as harmful as the current income taxes we're imposing on the middle class. Yes they are regressive and thus shouldn't be applied on basics such as medicine or food and water bought at stores, farmers markets, or most places other than restaurants. In order to have a more progressive effect luxury taxes should be added to the consumption tax on certain types of items. So if you have a basic tax of 10% on all items other than basic survival goods, the luxury tax of an additional 5% could kick in on things like televisions and cars under 25,000. And then an additional luxury tax of 5% added on more extravagant things like yachts or cars over 60,000. I just made up those figures on the spot for this example, but you get the idea. I also love that I'm rewarded for my hard work and believe that achieving the American Dream isn't something restricted to billionaires or even millionaires. It is something that millions of people of all income levels are doing everyday. I just want my son to live in a world where the policies that dictate his life aren't set by a small fraction of self serving special interest groups run by such a tiny fraction of the overall population. Thus I find myself saying that what I think is fair on paper just doesn't work in real life and I'm open to embracing the idea that the needs of the many do indeed out weigh the needs of the few to have a fair tax rate or "not be punished for their success." I would guess it dropped your effective tax rate from 50% down to 35% if you were living in NYC. Not only that but after years of working up there, especially if you owned a house or apartment, mean that moving to Texas would afford you a significantly larger house and increase in standard of living. I'm not sure if New York has additional taxes on pensions upon retirement or not but if so then you're taking steps to protect your assets by changing locations prior to cashing in.
You people who are young conservatives and become liberals as you get older make Zombie Churchill very sad.
That line attributed to Churchill doesn't even make sense in the context of British political parties. Also, though I'll grant there is some wisdom to it in the sense that people do often become set in their ways as they age, conservatism by adhering to personal custom means very little with regard to conservative political philosophy.
It's also interesting how often that "Churchill quote" is cited by the same people whose initial reaction to anything said by anyone their parents' age (unless, of course, it's Clint Eastwood) is not to the words themselves but to the "useless old fuck" saying them.
before moving on to page six, I want to see if i can navigate a bit of middle ground between the posts by Tex and Tuttle, both of which I sympathize with to some degree. I agree with the premise that at some point, those with ENOUGH wealth gain access to levers of power which, by virtue of the failings of human nature, they often use to selfish ends to accumulate more wealth - wealth that they really don't need for anything more than "keeping score" (I speak not here of those minority who use increased wealth to expand the economic opportunities for others...but those who simply get off on "running up the score") I do not object to the idea that there ought to be mechanisms - whether or not the current system is the proper one - to minimize the abuse of the levers of power. On the other hand, I agree with Tuttle in the implication that the effort to "curb wealth (however it is disguised) inordinately affects those who do have a measure of wealth but not to the extent that they have the ability to abuse those levers. and i wholeheartedly agree with the contention that such taxation absolutely funds a great many things government has no business doing. On the former hand again - I don't disagree with the idea that government ought to - in the absence of effective private sector actors willing and able to do so (and yes, government granting to private sector vehicles might well be a good choice here) - ought to act to: a. support those who are incapable, via age or infirmity, to live a decent lifestyle and b. act to pave the way for those who ARE capable to appropriate some of the opportunity to exercise their talents and abilities in pursuit of success. c. to the extent possible, see to it that those who have not achieved but CAN have failed to do so by lack of opportunity, rather than by lack of effort. So that - again to the extent possible - those who have the will and the ability also have the circumstances, so that it can be truthfully said "if you are poor, you did it to yourself" in the vast majority of cases. Yes, this will involve transfer payments from the Zuckerburgs of the world to those on the bottom. Back on the latter hand, the current arrangement seems to be about the worst possible way to accomplish lifting those on the bottom into the mainstream. All that to say, I suppose, that I believe in libertarian principles as a starting place - a set of fundamental assumptions from which to build - but that they are the beginning of wisdom, not the end. It's necessary for adjustments to be made for the imperfections of human nature.
My views haven't changed too much over the past 10 years or so. mainly it's the death penalty (was for it, now against it), military spending (if I had my way I'd cut the DoD budget by at least 50%), and I've come to realize that "big business" can be as dangerous, if not more so, than "big government".
I did. I was a long-haired, pot smoking art student. Then I grew up. And try not to have too big an orgasm over "catching" me in a misquote, G. It was just too unwieldy to say "Apocryphal Zombie Churchill." You knew what I was talking about.
