Budget talks: This is getting nasty

Maybe it's because the credit card payments and home equity loans they should not have taken are burying them.

 

Maybe from Bachman but the rest are in rope a dope mode.

 

Thanks for the response. It's slightly better. Not a ton.

1. I asked you how you knew poor people liked to point fingers at rich people and say "let THEM pay for it." How do you know? Anecdotal? Statistical? Barack Obama and John Edwards and people on this board hardly qualify. And, furthermore, when you talk about people not paying income taxes, do you mean they get a income tax return greater than what they paid in? Because I think most journalism salaries - OK, I know most journalism salaries - are high enough to draw federal taxes out of them.

2. Your notion is ludicrous - and remains so - because of a sudden, magical turnaround from being finger-pointers to "aware" of the drain of government waste. You can't critique those who don't pay income taxes on one hand, and then suggest, on the other, that the cure for what ails them is paying for a pie they already get, in your view, for free. This, to me, seems like one those paternalistic, "poor people can be boiled to down into a single child and I'm its dad" plans that suggests a good chunk of America just needs to get off the couch and start sweatin for a living. Your hope for awareness isn't ludicrous on face; it becomes ludicrous in the face of your initial vitriol.

If whole chunks of America are engaging in class warfare, do you really think expanding the tax base going to work?

As to your spreadsheet, it seems very isolated to me. First, the study is titled: "Alternative measures of progressivity of taxes in selected OECD countries."

So what's the primary measure?

Second are these all taxes, or just income taxes?

Third, since your spreadsheet is pre-wall street meltdown, how have percentages been affected since?

Fourth, it doesn't measure wealth inequality. The Gini does - you'll notice that your spreadsheet includes it, and as of the late 2000s, the United States was second-to-last on wealth inequality behind such luminaries as Thailand, Niger and Indonesia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_distribution_of_wealth

According to this chart, the US's gini is 46 or so, well above many developed nations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_since_WWII.svg

 

Can't offer something you ain't got.

 

Take one drink if somebody says "get government out of the way of small business."
Take one drink if somebody says "job creators."

 

Save us, Job Creators!

 

Life begins at incorporation.

 

Or maybe those credit cards and home equity loans are burying them because life circumstances made them need those lifelines in order to put food on the table or to repair the car so they could go to work, which at one point, included your's truly.

Not everyone used those things to buy flat-screen TVs.

 

"Corporations are people my friend." - Mitt Romney, at the Iowa State Fair

 

HRC said something similar about lobbyists.

Both wrong.

 

Corporations don't exist ...

 

All hail "job creators"! Where are the jobs, oh exalted ones?