Order of importance for people in general. 1. Self 2. Family 3. Friends . . . . . . . 85357. Country Politicians are people. They care about 1. Their own career, wealth, etc. 2. Their family's well-being, which relies on their wealth, career, etc. 3. Their friends, who are also rich elites, and their well being . . . . . . 4543789. The people they're suppose to serve It's very logical if you think about it. I don't know why people here attack their character. They do this because they are normal human beings that resulted from the product of evolution that made people this way. Enough people to keep voting them into offices. They aren't stupid. They have armies of PR people who tell them the correct buzzwords and stir up enough irrelevant controversies to keep the public on their side. Even the democrats are smart. They put up the great "we tried our best but we just can't win" face and the liberals eat it up. But they still keep fail because their millionaire donators want them to fail.
More and more are ready. They think their puppets in the Tea Party are angry, but they don't know from anger. It's very easy to find the top N wealthiest Americans and what they pay in taxes. It's also pretty easy to find out what they give to support political puppets. Best of all, it's not hard to find where they live, but you have to guess which one of seven homes they might be in. ****ers.
simple fact is the wealthy, esp the uber wealthy, haven't been paying their fair share since nixon. time to pony up.
This is after the Repubs spent the last two weeks whining about the earned income tax credit and how easy the Poors have it; Trying to whip up indignation against those below the poverty line by the lower middle class has explicitly been a Luntz/Fox/GOP talkiing point.
Nobody is saying the money comes from thin air, but nice try. Public goods such as highways are necessary for private employers to make things or provide services. Road building and maintenance requires construction workers people who work at "jobs". Without these jobs goods and services don't move magically. Take a second and think about where the Interstate Highway system came from.
Misdirection, jingoism, Orwellian doublespeak are standard propaganda strategies. "For God And Country" .... is usually really "let's keep the current aristocracy rich and in charge".
Money does come from thin air. If I buy a stock for a dollar and market price goes up to $2, I just made a dollar from thin air, just the ether of the pyschological perception of the stock, it's relative value. If a bank has a 10% cash requirement, they can take in a $100 deposit and loan out $1000, creating $900 out of thin air, just the assumption that they are making sound loans 90% of the time. Same thing with housing and on a huge scale, the bond market. The winnable argument here could be, would the rich be relatively more or less rich if they A. paid more in taxes or B. take a loss in asset values from a failing demand side of the economy? (Not to mention higher security costs in a more unstable society) The rich might very well be on the wrong track for their own interest.
It isn't about increasing hiring, but about closing a deficit that makes it difficult to pass expensive legislation that does help hiring. We need to increase taxes on the super rich. Adding a new tax bracket starting at $1 million is a good plan. Also change the LTCG rates. Right now they are at 0% for people in the 10-15% brackets, and 15% for everyone else. Why should the person in the 25% bracket pay the same percentage as the guy in the 35% bracket? I say make it a 5% reduction from what their marginal rate would be. This country really needs radical tax changes, but that won't happen. Too many lobbyists that politicians are mostly forced to obey if they want to get re-elected.
I don't agree with a whole new bracket. But we should reduced deductions, tax breaks, loopholes, especially those that are highly regressive. (Mortgage interest deduction, im looking at you).
I remember going to a lecture at the UT back in about 1980 when Reagan was passing the first of the disastrous budget/deficit busting tax cuts for the wealthy. The speaker was the ex CEO of Ratheon IIRC correctly. He said: I know these rich people who supposedly will use their tax break money to create jobs. They will just use it to buy expensive third or fourth homes in Aspen etc. and it won't create many jobs. He proved right. I know the usual libertarian/country club GOP crowd will wax nostalgic about the jobs for house sitters, yard men etc. created.
Either way it's the same money coming out of the same people's pockets. (the only people with money in their pockets) And as always you have to look for unintended consequences i.e. eliminating the mortgage deduction does further damage to the residential real estate market, where most middle class people have their largest investment.
This is the same stupid, and bogus, crap argument the Republicans have been trotting out for years whenever their wealthy backers are threatened with paying a more reasonable tax rate. If the majority of Americans who bother to vote actually fall for it, they deserve what they are getting, a large Republican shaft right up their collective rear ends. Seriously, if this "class warfare" mumbo-jumbo flies again, how many excuses are we supposed to give those who fall for it? As a country, are "we" really that stupid? Anyone who buys this is a chump.
I'd like to see us go to brackets of: 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40. Do away with the EIC. Instead, just make the first X amount of dollars payroll tax free. Do away with the cap on SS tax, but lower the combined FICA rate to 10%. Mortgage interest deduction, gets thrown out the window, and is replaced by a tax credit for the purchase of your principal residence, thus rewarding the purchase, not the debt assumed. Of course this is without knowing the actual effects at all, but that is the basic premise.
Not high enough. For those old enough to have been aware the country was a much better place for most of the middle class when the top rate was 70%. We would eventually have no deficit, so that GOP deliberately created pseudo issue would go away and we could return to building infrastructure, having cheap college tuition, and other signs of an advanced country.
You meant "those old enough," which would describe you and I, but I get the point. While I don't want a return to a top rate of 70%, the top rate now is absurd, and Republicans (pawns of the wealthy class) are constantly trying to cut the top rates even more.
