Budget talks: This is getting nasty

Baron, I want to say this gently, because often I enjoy your posts. But really it isn't your business whether the top brass received bonuses. You don't own the company. Someone else does, and it's theirs to do with as they see fit.

Jeff Bridges' character in "The Morning After" said it best: "That's the way it is ... and it's a bitch."

 

So are you suggesting the poor should not pay sales tax? Medicare payroll tax? Sin tax?Property tax?

 

I repeat my post from the previous page, which shows the lie of the "no income tax" position. And again, for all the flag-waving about it, this "everyone should pay an equal percentage share as taxes" is not a principle of America as it is packaged, but rather a principle of the conservative moment since the 1970s.

This is the best chart/article I could find on the topic; it comes from a Paul Krugman blog post so it will automatically be hated, but the numbers (not Krugman's, he is just relaying the data) show that the total tax burden is barely progressive at all, and incredibly non-progressive considering the income gaps we're dealing with. People like Ragu cling to the FIT number, which conveniently leaves out tons of other factors in taxation such as payroll taxes, state taxes, sales taxes, the lower rate of capital gains taxes, and exemptions that are much more available to the rich. The way it all comes out is, there is no material percentage difference between amount earned and amount paid by any particular income group.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/zombie-tax-lies/

So keep citing the federal income tax numbers, but be aware of what an incomplete picture you're painting.

 

Tax-exempt status and the ban on political activity only applies to races involving candidates and not ballot issues.

The higher amount is true in a sense because individual church members were encouraged to donate to the Prop. 8 effort. The amount is a drop in the bucket to what the church receives annually.

 

No, but people keep bringing up "fair". To say the poor are freeloaders not paying taxes is not based in fact.

Is it fair that Google's effective overseas tax rate is 2.4 percent? I don't think too many companies doing business just in the U.S. would think so.

 

No Baron it is not your business what a privately run business pays. If the employees want to do something to protect themselves then maybe they should unionize but if a company decides to pay a bonus to it's CEO whil laying people off that is their right. how the hell do you take that right away from them?

 

Relative earnings do have a place in the debate, though. Since you are citing the Constitution, why don't you get around to the 16th Amendment authorizing a federal income tax. When it started, it applied not to everybody but to individuals making more than $3,000 and couples making $4,000. According to the current political climate, that made America a Marxist country in 1913 because we demanded that wealthy people paid more. You may not like the government differentiating that way, but it absolutely has a "legitimate place in any political debate."

At the very least you should stop citing federal income tax proportions as the be-all, end-all of the debate. Look at my previous post about total tax rates including all income, taxes across the spectrum, and exemptions. You know what a small piece of the true tax picture FIT represents, and what a lie you're propagating by repeating it.

 

Pass a law that only allows the CEO of a publicly-traded company with a certain number of employees a certain multiple of the median workers' wages. Let's say 100 times.

Median salary at a company is $35K. Then the CEO can only make $3.5M. If the CEO wants to get paid more, then pay the workers more. Pay the workers $40K, then CEO can collect $4.0 million. Make the second-in-command collect, say 95 times the average worker. Third-in-command makes 90 times, and so on.

Any extra money made, goes to the shareholders. They get greater rewards for investing in the company.

And when the CEO is indirectly telling me that I have to give up some of my pennies to help fund his bonus, I'm sorry, but it is my business. And I would have loved the company to have unionized. Unfortunately, too many others were too scared to do so. And they, like me, ended up on the unemployment line.

 

MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan had a full meltdown yesterday. Video at the link.

 

Baron that is absolutley ridiculous and unrealistic.
So basically you want a salary cap on private business, good luck with that.

 

Just the same to define "rich" as $250,000 income is not based on fact either.