francoHFW
Diamond Member
You are a brainwashed functional moron. Dems want to tax the bloated rich MORE, and the rest LESS. READ THIS.Socialism works great. Too bad Europe can't bust their way out of GOP depressions with fracking like we can. And too bad all our wealth goes to the rich now...When the richest get all the new wealth and are bloated, the nonrich are going to hell, and the country is falling apart, that's injustice, dupe. No strawman.
After 30 years of Voodoo: worst min. wage, work conditions, illegal work safeguards, vacations, work week, college costs, rich/poor gap, upward social mobility, % homeless and in prison EVAH, and in the modern world!! And you complain about the victims? Are you an idiot or an A-hole?
Yes this is a problem. This is the opposite of capitalism though. The only way the rich get all the new wealth is through a lack of competition. The only way they stamp out competition is with government help. (Look up why America has the worst internet infrastructure in the developed world, it's not because we're following capitalist principles). Yet America still leaves Europe/and the rest of the world in the dust when it comes to Nobel prizes. Why is that? Europe has been dabbling (unsuccessfully I might add) with socialism for the past couple centuries. Now much of Europe is moving right, and not in a good way.
Where are these numbers, and while you're pulling them up, look at switzerlands numbers (country we're based off of, and the oldest government on the planet), and tell me how they compare to the rest of Europe. We have fallen far from the free market, yet we seem
to blame all our problems on the free market.
Oh I see, GOP fracking on one continent, excuses economic policy in another.
And you still want the government to take taxes from the poor, but talk about how bad the rich are...that's about as fake as it gets. You actually don't care about the poor, you want the government to care about the poor in your place, and blame the rich for how many poor are still out there...How about we stop fucking taxing them. Anybody not making 50,000, you're not getting taxed...sounds pretty damn good to me. That more than the average median of America.
No no, you're right, let's keep taxing folks making 30,000 grand a year. That's how we'll stick it to the rich.
At the heart of the debate over "the 47 percent" is an awful abuse of tax data.
This entire conversation is the result of a (largely successful) effort to redefine the debate over taxes from "how much in taxes do you pay" to "how much in federal income taxes do you pay?" This is good framing if you want to cut taxes on the rich. It's bad framing if you want to have even a basic understanding of who pays how much in taxes.
There's a reason some would prefer that more limited conversation. For most Americans, payroll and state and local taxes make up the majority of their tax bill. The federal income tax, by contrast, is our most progressive tax -- it's the tax we've designed to place the heaviest burden on the rich while bypassing the poor. And we've done that, again, because the working class is already paying a fairly high tax bill through payroll and state and local taxes.
But most people don't know very much about the tax code. And the federal income tax is still our most famous tax. So when they hear that half of Americans aren't paying federal income taxes, they're outraged -- even if they're among the folks who have a net negative tax burden! After all, they know they're paying taxes, and there's no reason for normal human beings to assume that the taxes getting taken out of their paycheck every week and some of the taxes they pay at the end of the year aren't classified as "federal income taxes."
Confining the discussion to the federal income tax plays another role, too: It makes the tax code look much more progressive than it actually is.
Take someone who makes $4 million dollars a year and someone who makes $40,000 a year. The person making $4 million dollars, assuming he's not doing some Romney-esque planning, is paying a 35 percent tax on most of that money. The person making $40,000 is probably paying no income tax at all. So that makes the system look really unfair to the rich guy.
That's the basic analysis of the 47 percent line. And it's a basic analysis that serves a purpose: It makes further tax cuts for the rich sound more reasonable.
But what if we did the same thing for the payroll tax? Remember, the payroll tax only applies to first $110,100 or so, our rich friends is only paying payroll taxes on 2.7 percent of his income. The guy making $40,000? He's paying payroll taxes on every dollar of his income. Now who's not getting a fair shake?
Which is why, if you want to understand who's paying what in taxes, you don't want to just look at federal income taxes, or federal payroll taxes, or state sales taxes -- you want to look at total taxes. And, luckily, the tax analysis group Citizens for Tax Justice keeps those numbers. So here is total taxes -- which includes corporate taxes, income taxes, payroll taxes, state sales taxes, and more -- paid by different income groups and broken into federal and state and local burdens:
As you can see, the poorer you are, the more state and local taxes bite into your income. As you get richer, those taxes recede, and you're mainly getting hit be federal taxes. So that's another lesson: When you omit state and local taxes from your analysis, you're omitting the taxes that hit lower-income taxpayers hardest.
But here is really the only tax graph you need: It's total tax burden by income group. And as you'll see, every income group is paying something, and the rich aren't paying much more, as a percentage of their incomes, then the middle class.
