On Sat, Feb 08, 2003 at 02:38:26AM -0600, Nathan E Norman wrote: > What I was originally objecting to was your seeming assertion that > people with a lot of money (i.e. more money than you have) don't need > or deserve it and thus the government should take it back.
Progressive taxing is a good idea because the lower the income, the percentage of income is required for day-to-day needs than it is for those with higher incomes. Government needs to function, and at this point, lower and middle classes can't take much more tax, it's like trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Assume the tax is 10% of income: For a person making $10,000/yr and has no life savings, that 10% income tax is 10% tax on thier entire wealth. If they manage to keep a roof over thier head, they'll never get ahead. Meanwhile, on the other end of the scale, the richest 1% makes $300,000 or more a year and likely has vast savings. 10% income tax works out to be a tiny fraction of 1% of thier total wealth. It's a flat tax in theory, but who's really paying more? > Anytime I hear people talking about "millionaires getting tax cuts" my > bogometer goes off. I find that many people who make such statements > lack knowledge of economics. This may or may not apply to you. I think the last thing this country needs is a tax cut to benefit the richest 1% (and you'd have to be for the dividend tax break to make more than pennies difference). I think the country would be a little better off, especially when we're about to go to war, with a one or two percent tax break for those in the bottom third, keep it even with the middle third, and one or two percent increase on the top third. That should help the economy out a little bit since the economy will remain stagnant until the little guys go shopping for more than groceries again. > I think the point of the dividend tax cut is to spur investment. I > think we can safely deduce that most people receiving dividends are > investors. The idea is that investors will spend or invest even more > money which in turn will spur the economy. There seems to be ample > evidence that investment spurs econimic growth (though haphazard `, > reckless investment often yields "phantom" growth). Not only that, but companies can't make all thier revenue on stock options, and I'm not sure why Bush still thinks otherwise. While he was sleeping, apparently, we had a stock market crash when everybody else realised this one for themselves. Stock doesn't sustain an economy, goods and services do. Free up some cash for the bottom two-thirds and the economy will slowly grind to a start, whereas with trying to toy with the investors, who is going to wait for some spark of growth before investing anyway... -- .''`. Baloo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> : :' : proud Debian admin and user `. `'` `- Debian - when you have better things to do than to fix a system
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