President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

There is nothing fundamental about that nonsense. We fought a revolution because of a despotic government that tried to steal from its citizens. Teddy Roosevelt (or you or anyone else) shouldn't be allowed to compel others to hand over their wealth so he can try to socially engineer the world to his liking. That is despotism in a nutshell. Property rights are what are really fundamental to a free society.

 

Fewer than 5 percent of people pay close to 58 percent of our Federal taxes (close to half pay zero and collect transfer payments of various types meaning they pay a negative amount).

But thank goodness we have you to sit back in your arm chair and subjectively determine how valuable the people paying the bulk of what we collect are, and how much of what the earned they deserve to keep.

 

When Oliver Wendell Holmes first said that in a speech in 1904 there was no Federal income tax (our constitution didn't allow it), let alone any form of a wealth tax such as the inheritence tax. When he wrote it in an opinion in 1927, the top marginal tax rate was 25 percent and you had to be ridiculously wealthy (as in only a handful of Americans paid it) to pay it. 93 percent of Americans paid no income tax. I am certainly all for something like the world that Oliver Wendell Holmes knew. He'd probably be horrified by the barn door the 16th Amendment opened and what it has led to.

 

I was talking about the income tax. Not the death tax. My point was that you were pontificating about how much the small group people who already pay MOST of what we collect deserves to keep of what they earn -- based on how valuable you think they are to you. It bothers me. They aren't living or working for you, and the attitude that they should be is where we have strayed.

As for what I think? I think there is absolutely no virtue in handing over what you earn to someone else for their ends. I think it has even less virtue when you are compelled to do it (especially when it is angry mobs playing class warfare). And when you look at our $4 trillion budgets and just how money is corruptly slung around (not that we even collect enough to cover our spending), the whole exercise has even less virtue to me.