President Trump

There is a problem with assuming that every rich person started with absolutely nothing and was able to become rich purely through hard work or whatever (and thus deserves to stay rich) - just take this one billionaire who got his start because of a "small loan of a million dollars" from his father:



Dudes like this have more money than they could ever realistically spend in their remaining years and they intend to either hoard it for themselves or pass it on to heirs who are liable to perpetuate the cycle - meanwhile, millions of other people who don't have the privilege of being billionaires (due to inherited wealth or not) are stuck trying to make ends meet in a system that will let them die if they can't manage to make enough of the money that the rich can so easily take for granted.

So, per your points:

1) The idea of rich people being "implicitly evil" is more to do with how they function and thrive within the capitalist system that relies on a severe division of wealth and class. If rich people's wealth is determined by allowing that system to keep the majority of people in the poorer classes, then even the nice billionaires are responsible in the "good people who do nothing" sense.

2) A meritocracy shouldn't be solely determined by whoever arbitrarily happens to have the most money. If I do nothing all year and inherit a million dollars from a dead relative, that doesn't automatically mean that I'm a harder-working person than someone who works 40-hour weeks all year for $50,000, but I'm the millionaire and they're not so clearly I'm the one doing something right, yes?

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I don't see where he assumed this, though that assumption would actually be closer to the truth than the inverse assumption that none of them did.

Stop right there. What do you think "hoarding" involves? You know they don't put it into a giant mattress, right? And they don't convert it into gold coins and swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck, either. It's invested. Rich people's "hoarded" money is literally funding other business ventures, usually large and small, which in turn have vendors of all sizes, which in turn employee people of all income classes. None of this happens unless/until people amass more wealth than they need.

You can't just say something opaque involving the word "system" and leave unexplained how wealthy people in general (not some, but most, or at least in the aggregate) are wealthy in some way that exacerbates other people's poverty, which seems to be what you're implying.

This isn't actually a substantive response unless you're willing to restrict any redistributive tax policies you favor to inheritance alone. Are you?

Between the taxation-is-theft rhetoric and the emphasis on defending the rich by questioning socialist criticism of the same, it seemed like a reasonable assumption that he thinks rich people don't deserve to be "stolen from" because they've worked hard for everything they've got.

In fairness, I should not have written this so quickly after focusing on Trump in particular since he is the living embodiment of everything wrong with the concept of the billionaire. That being said, what is the point of investing if not to expect a greater return on one's personal investment and thus grow one's personal fortune? I suppose that's not necessarily the only reason, but I don't get the impression that people become venture capitalists purely out of an altruistic desire to give people more jobs (which seems to be borne out by the various stories about bad working conditions for those on the lowest rungs of the ladder). It can't help but seem irresponsible to profit so much at the expense of employees.

It depends on where exactly you draw the line between "wealthy" and "not wealthy", though - perhaps you and I have different concepts of what constitutes a "wealthy" person, or I was just focusing on the unquestionably mega-rich types instead of splitting hairs over where to draw the aforementioned line between rich and poor.

Omnizoa stated that he thinks taxing the rich is "discriminating against financial success" and "un-meritocratic", whereas I'm making the case that one's wealth is not necessarily a reflection of one's abilities and therefore can't (or at least shouldn't) be used as the sole criteria for a meritocracy.

I'm glad you used the word "product" here.

If your wealth is the product of your ability multiplied by the leverage that society gives you, you are entitled to some of that wealth, but so is society (both on an ethical and practical level). You should still receive (a great deal) more of the wealth than you would if society was not there to provide that leverage, but you should not keep ALL of it because you are not responsible for ALL of it. Luckily, because this is a positive sum game, both society and you should be better off from this transaction.

Now, that argument is trying to justify taxes on a basic level, so there's still an ocean of disagreement between how much society is responsible for and how much the individual is; and therefore how much wealth should flow back to society and how much should stay with the individual.

(and as you all could guess, I think society should be getting more)

Who you're depriving then, in that case, is the father, because it is his money you are dictating to whom it belongs.

Yeah, what he said.

Regardless, I'm not convinced we are in a "capitalist" system, insofar as it's been clearly legislated that the means of production do not exclusively belong to you because it can be taxed nearly a dozen different ways and redistributed by the state. Not to mention how the state already corrupts the market by flooding the economy with new money, effectively driving the value of the existing currency down, raising the cost of living, and thereby rationalizing minimum wages which in turn drive up business expenses, which results in increased unemployment, and cycles into welfare dependence.

This is all leaving aside corporate subsidies and bailouts which would also explain a fair degree of "unearned" wealth.

Alright, well let's assume we can both unilaterally agree on what constitutes an "unquestionably mega-rich type". On what grounds does their wealth, and their wealth alone, not belong to them?

Ostensibly, that money is acquired on merit. If not, then it may be pertinent question to ask why not.

Nor does it mean your relative was necessarily a hard-working person. But maybe their relative was, or maybe the money is the result of some fraud that was never charged. Regardless, unless you have grounds to suggest the money in somebody's charge rightly belongs to the community, I'm inclined to leave things as they are.

The only taxes I've referred to are taxes on income, payroll, sales, gifts, inheritance, luxury goods, and more generally any tax that applies to the product of one's labor.

Implying "the rich" are guilty of something? I get taxed too, and I'm hardly rich.

I don't believe anybody deserves to be stolen from, provided "stolen from" refers to someone's rightful property. If you have a case to make for why some % of their money doesn't belong to them, I'll hear it, but that seems like something that would be better solved with a criminal investigation rather than an arbitrary tax bracket on wealth predicated on a presumption of guilt.

What expense? If you're talking about top-down business structures, where profit funnels up, no one's forcing anybody to work those jobs. People can create cooperatives and work those, where profits are shared equally. I think the main reason people don't is because they're selfish, that, or people understand that it's a risky business venture to trust at least half of your company's future to another person who may not share your vision. In either case, it seems like someone wanting to have their economically conservative cake and eat it too.

Taxing the rich disproportionately.

That's presuming their wealth is unearned through labor. Not that the law doesn't permit this, but on what grounds can you contest a given "mega-rich type"'s claim to their wealth?

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Taxing "the product of my ability" sounds like the opposite of leverage. Besides, what "leverage" do I suddenly owe reparations for that inexplicably justifies putting an economic disincentive on labor?

Ethically, society is stealing from work I alone performed.

Practically, you're providing a financial disincentive to do that work.

Ethically and practically, taxes on the product of labor encourage parasitism.

I would be receiving hundreds of dollars more from my paycheck.

I literally look at my paycheck and it will literally tell me how much less money I'm getting because of society.

No, my bank is partly responsible for it, that's why I pay my bank.

I am not. And neither is society.

That's like trying to justify killing on a basic level. Perhaps you can excuse certain forms of it in certain cases under certain conditions, but by and large killing should be forbidden.

Ah, so this "leverage" is an ethereal unquantifiable thing which you're inexplicably comfortably slapping a price tag on. 'Fraid that's not terribly persuasive.

Of course you do, that's one of several problems with your argument. You could set the tax bracket at 16% of total yearly income, yet since that's entirely arbitrary number, there's absolutely nothing objective to suggest it shouldn't be higher or lower.

This also makes no meaningful distinction between types of taxes which obviously have better or worse effects on society depending on what they apply to and in what manner they are calculated.

I'm not sure why you're intent on doing the phrase by phrase breakdown if you decide to repeat yourself, so I'm going to parse things down a little bit. (Though, to be fair I'm certainly not the best at keeping my points concise, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much).

So from this I think I have to ask: do you believe that you have not benefited at all from government programs? Do you believe that the work you perform has not been magnified by being in a society at all?

I guess I should put it like this, if you were not in a society, do you think you could accomplish the same things?

I suppose I am assuming you have a typical type of job. So if you are living in a forest and are growing your own food, etc, I guess you shouldn't be taxed, sure. But even then, you seem to gain some sort of benefit of the internet, which, you know...


There's certainly a lot of arbitrary numbers in taxes. There's a lot of arbitrary numbers in finance, just in general (take bitcoin as a recent example, where people are having a lot of trouble finding its stable value). But my ethos would be that you tax up to the point to fund the types of programs that maximize people's ability to be productive with the leverage of society. Now, it's true that finding a steady state on that is tricky, and probably impossible, and will go up and down a bit. But right now, certain programs are so clearly underfunded (e.g. education) that honestly getting to that steady state isn't even the immediate goal, it's just improving on the current condition. I wish the problem we were faced with right now was getting the balance correct.

But that doesn't seem to be your argument. Your argument seems to be that you believe that you are entirely entitled to whatever wealth you accumulate and society deserves no credit. I don't think I'll be able to argue you out of that one, because you'll have a very different set of assumptions to start with.

To your second point, I don't believe you made any effort to distinguish between taxation methods, you seem to think all of them were wrong? But yeah, certainly different tax collection methods will yield different results.

I think this is a more telling question than you mean for it to be. Notice that you talk only about the motive of investment, and not its effects. This is, I'm sad to say, consistent with what I see from many progressives, where policies are judged by what they "say about us" or by the perceived moral authority they allow us to have, rather than, ya' know, actually helping poor people.

I agree with this sentiment. My biggest gripe on this issue continues to be the way it is framed by the left. They continue to spout half truths or straight up lies that the rich aren't paying their fair share. Even worse sometimes going as far to say that the 1% are paying less tax than the middle class which couldn't be farther from the truth. Of course if people would think for two seconds they would realize our government could not function off the taxes of the poor and middle class. Of course people don't think for two seconds and politicians know that and so the narrative continues...and continues....and continues.

I believe right now I would vote for anyone who stands up and says "this is how much all the $hit in this country costs, and this is how much we are going to tax you to make it happen. Of course that won't happen because votes come with the lies, and you know, special interests which both sides continue to put forth are a one party problem. More half truths.

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Are you talking about total money or the percent they pay in taxes? Theres a LOT of people in the "middle class" (depending on how you want to define that) and theres only so many in the top 1% (a little over 3 million I guess based on current population). Id always assumed the engine driving the tax ship was generated by the sheer number of people in the middle class. Is that incorrect? How much more do the 1% pay then the entire middle class exactly?

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The top 1% pay nearly half of all federal income taxes. Which is, admittedly, only a partial answer, since how we define "taxes" probably changes the answer a bit.

you have Yoda's link and here is one from the WSJ talking about the top 20% WSJ. The information is everywhere. You will also read a lot of articles where the left talk about capital gains percentages. Those are the numbers Buffet always sites and what they talked about a ton during Romney's run. Apples to oranges if you ask me, but nobody is so you will have to decide for yourself.

thanks for that. Interesting and disturbing that our tax base seems to be largely dependent on how Wall Street does.

So then do any of you guys have a problem with the super rich paying so much of our (federal income) taxes? the issue brought up here seems to be in the apparent mistaken thinking that the rich pay nothing when they actually pay a lot. But not that its wrong for the rich to pay a lot? Or do you think that also?

I am a flat tax person but I freely admit that is probably because it jives better with my simple mind and it is also what I would constitute as "fair. So if 20 cents of every dollar needs to go in the pot to make us function properly do that. Cut out all the loop holes for businesses, make it as simple as possible.

That's not the system we have so in light of that I don't have a problem with their being an income tax scale or with their being variants in property taxes based on more appealing areas. I really object to continuing to put more and more tax burden on that top tier because that is the money that flows back into our economy. I also really hate the narrative that the rich are somehow getting away with not paying into the system. I just find it completely galse.

The super rich can afford to hide their incomes but regardless of what I think of that, they spend and employ on a grand scale. Hiding taxable income is damn wrong, though; I dont care how much they spend. I think the issue is the scale if I'm reading it right.

The poor can hide income too. They just don't have as much to hide. Probably even easier for middle to low income folks to hide income because chances are nobody is going to come looking for it.

By all dignified reports, this totally was NOT supposed to be happening!!!!

most of the world voted in favour of egypt's resolution nullifying trump's decision to declare jerusalem capital of israel . even my country india voted in favour of egypt's resolution when it could have just abstained ; this inspite of growing arms trade and big declarations of friendship between india and israel ever since the right wing government took power in india

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-42446027.

How this forum completely WHIFFED on accurate coverage of this entire flabloncking colossal story of the 21st century, the terrific BEAUTIFUL DREAM!

Hey Nostromo, i'm going to watch Disney's Hercules with my nephew in about an hour. Like your avatar and attitude.