Fox News Poll on Raising Taxes on the Wealthy

[Pilot1]

This was not the intent of the founding of our Constitutional Republic (we're not a Democracy as the educated know). We were supposed to be a loose collection of strong States, with a weak Federal Government that only did a few things the States couldn't do, like National Defense, and Border Security.

 

[Mr Natural]

It's amazing to watch people who aren't rich themselves fight tooth and nail to continue to support legislation to make things harder on themselves and aid the richest in this country to take an even bigger piece of the pie, year after year.

They're supplied their talking points such as -

"The reach should get to keep their own money"
"Why do you think you're entitled to someone else's money?"
"Maybe you should work harder and you can be rich too"
"Why do you want to punish success"
"The reach will just leave if we tax them more"

Yet when challenged on any of these statements, there is no response or actual substance.

You all make good sheep.

They don’t want to be taxed to death when they make the big time.

 

[Thinker101]

The intelligent and mature thing to do is to emulate the Rich instead of looting the Rich

How do you propose the poor and middle class afford to hire their own lobbyists?

Gee, how about you start with getting a job...dumbass.

 

[RDD_1210]

The intelligent and mature thing to do is to emulate the Rich instead of looting the Rich

How do you propose the poor and middle class afford to hire their own lobbyists?

Gee, how about you start with getting a job...dumbass.

I have a job. Now what?

 

[Conservative65]

We should be lowering taxes on everyone. Its time that the federal govt do without.

Great, let each state fend for itself, oh why have states, like just be the wild wild west and kill for land.

According to the 10th Amendment, unless it's specifically delegated in the Constitution, that's as it should be.

 

[Remodeling Maidiac]

The intelligent and mature thing to do is to emulate the Rich instead of looting the Rich

How do you propose the poor and middle class afford to hire their own lobbyists?

Gee, how about you start with getting a job...dumbass.

I have a job. Now what?

You also have your own lobbyists. You elected them. If they ignore you then it's on you to remove them.

 

[Thinker101]

The intelligent and mature thing to do is to emulate the Rich instead of looting the Rich

How do you propose the poor and middle class afford to hire their own lobbyists?

Gee, how about you start with getting a job...dumbass.

I have a job. Now what?

Really? How about a job where you actually earn an income you can live off of.

 

[RDD_1210]

The intelligent and mature thing to do is to emulate the Rich instead of looting the Rich

How do you propose the poor and middle class afford to hire their own lobbyists?

Gee, how about you start with getting a job...dumbass.

I have a job. Now what?

You also have your own lobbyists. You elected them. If they ignore you then it's on you to remove them.

I assume you are aware I am referring to professional lobbyists who work full time on behalf of their deep pocketed employers. I mean, I guess you could define our elected officials the same way....and therein lies the problem. Thanks for highlighting that.

 

[McRocket]

We should be lowering taxes on everyone. Its time that the federal govt do without.

They NEVER cut spending.
The coxuckers only cut taxes and borrow more.
Here is the 2019 Budget. Not much room to cut.

2019 Federal Budget
Mandatory spending $2.74T
Social Security $878b
Medicare $625b
Medicaid $412b
Welfare $462b
Interest on the Debt $363b

Discretionary $1.3T
Defense $893.0
HHS $70.0
Education $59.9
VA $83.1
Homeland $52.7
Energy Dept $29.2
NNSA $15.1
HUD $29.2
State Dept $40.3
NASA $19.0
All Other Agencies $133.1

I agree with generally what you said but one point: there is TONS of room to cut.

10 years ago, federal spending was under $3 trillion. It has climbed 33% in 10 years...MILES over the inflation rate. It's just largely more government waste.

US Government Recent Spending History with Charts - a www.usgovernmentspending.com briefing

- Social Security should end - it is eventually doomed anyway. Just give back what is in the 'kitty' to those that paid. Seniors who need money just go into the welfare roll like everyone else. Keep the tax though - call it something else. $800 Billion saved.
- Welfare. Change it from handing out money to government shelters in every, major regional center. People need food, shelter, clothing...you go to a shelter and stay as long as you want. Split them into singles, families and seniors (each level have a bit better conditions than the former). The present budget will now cover ALL Americans who need welfare. No saving.
- Military Industrial Complex is TOTALLY out of control. Bring all troops home and cut military budget by 1/2 (and there is NO WAY you can factually prove that will hurt America's national defense substantially as that would still leave $450 billion which is more then twice as much as China and Russia spend combined). $450 billion saved.
Defense Spending by Country
- Reduce Education Department to just an oversight agency. Let the States look after their own education. $50 billion saved.
- End Homeland Security - give it back to the FBI. Was a knee jerk, fear-driven, post-911, personal freedom-constraining organization anyway. $40 billion saved.
- End the VA. It's stupid for veteran's to have to drive miles out of their way to get VA medical assistance if there is a normal hospital that is nearer. Just allow vets to get their medical care at ANY hospital and the latter bills the government. $40 billion saved.
- End NASA. It was created to beat the Soviets to the Moon. It succeeded. Now - like NATO - it is time to end it. The private sector can do ANYTHING NASA can do...and do it MUCH better. $20 billion saved.

TOTAL SAVING - $1.4 trillion.

I am not going to debate this as ALL of these things can (and should) be done. If people are too blind to see that...tough. The Reps will hate the cuts to the military and the Dems will hate the cuts to social services.
Whatever.

Fiscal responsibility MUST return to America. Or America will continue to weaken.

And it is simple to do it...it just takes people having some political guts to make the right, tough decisions.

Good day.

 

[RDD_1210]

The intelligent and mature thing to do is to emulate the Rich instead of looting the Rich

How do you propose the poor and middle class afford to hire their own lobbyists?

Gee, how about you start with getting a job...dumbass.

I have a job. Now what?

Really? How about a job where you actually earn an income you can live off of.

I earn a good living, thanks. I'm going to go out on a limb and say I earn more than you do, but I'm just playing the odds.

Now, back to my original point. How do the middle class afford to start buying off lobbyists and elected officials the way that the rich do?

 

[TNHarley]

yes, lets punish the ambitious to pay for unconstitutional programs.
Statist faggots. The lot of ya

 

[Thinker101]

The intelligent and mature thing to do is to emulate the Rich instead of looting the Rich

How do you propose the poor and middle class afford to hire their own lobbyists?

Gee, how about you start with getting a job...dumbass.

I have a job. Now what?

Really? How about a job where you actually earn an income you can live off of.

I earn a good living, thanks. I'm going to go out on a limb and say I earn more than you do, but I'm just playing the odds.

Now, back to my original point. How do the middle class afford to start buying off lobbyists and elected officials the way that the rich do?

Yea, ought to watch out for those limbs.

 

[RDD_1210]

yes, lets punish the ambitious to pay for unconstitutional programs.
Statist faggots. The lot of ya

Ambitious is such a cute term. Your masters are pleased.

 

[RDD_1210]

How do you propose the poor and middle class afford to hire their own lobbyists?

Gee, how about you start with getting a job...dumbass.

I have a job. Now what?

Really? How about a job where you actually earn an income you can live off of.

I earn a good living, thanks. I'm going to go out on a limb and say I earn more than you do, but I'm just playing the odds.

Now, back to my original point. How do the middle class afford to start buying off lobbyists and elected officials the way that the rich do?

Yea, ought to watch out for those limbs.

That....is your response? I get it, Thinker101 is meant to be an ironic screen name.

 

[alang1216]

We should be lowering taxes on everyone. Its time that the federal govt do without.

You mean like the military, poor children, and senior citizens ?

 

[H B Lowrie]

So, it sure looks like Republicans are the NEW 'liberals'

But to be fair, I stated many years ago, actually several decades ago: When the US starts to go down the path of a third world shit hole country, those with the means to flee the US will flee.

When the folks making $10 million plus per year start getting the idea they are gonna be targeted for a massive tax hit, then you will see flight of wealth leave the nation.

I said it decades ago & maybe we are getting closer.

Guess we should not have allowed our economic system to be re-rigged to such an extent that such a small group of aristocrats were able to horde that much societal wealth.

A "massive tax hit" like they had before? Into the Reagan administration? They didn't leave did they? The following scenario mey be more predictive of the next few years:

The inept and corrupt presidency of Donald Trump has unwittingly triggered the fatal blow to the American empire—the abandonment of the dollar as the world’s principal reserve currency. Nations around the globe, especially in Europe, have lost confidence in the United States to act rationally, much less lead, in issues of international finance, trade, diplomacy and war. These nations are quietly dismantling the seven-decade-old alliance with the United States and building alternative systems of bilateral trade. This reconfiguring of the world’s financial system will be fatal to the American empire, as the historian Alfred McCoy and the economist Michael Hudson have long pointed out. It will trigger an economic death spiral, including high inflation, which will necessitate a massive military contraction overseas and plunge the United States into a prolonged depression. Trump, rather than make America great again, has turned out, unwittingly, to be the empire’s most aggressive gravedigger.

The Trump administration has capriciously sabotaged the global institutions, including NATO, the European Union, the United Nations, the World Bank and the IMF, which provide cover and lend legitimacy to American imperialism and global economic hegemony. The American empire, as McCoy points out, was always a hybrid of past empires. It developed, he writes, “a distinctive form of global governance that incorporated aspects of antecedent empires, ancient and modern. This unique U.S. imperium was Athenian in its ability to forge coalitions among allies; Roman in its reliance on legions that occupied military bases across most of the known world; and British in its aspiration to merge culture, commerce, and alliances into a comprehensive system that covered the globe.”

When George W. Bush unilaterally invaded Iraq, defying with his doctrine of preemptive war international law and dismissing protests from traditional allies, he began the rupture. But Trump has deepened the fissures. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iranian nuclear agreement, although Iran had abided by the agreement, and demand that European nations also withdraw or endure U.S. sanctions saw European nations defect and establish an alternative monetary exchange system that excludes the United States. Iran no longer accepts the dollar for oil on international markets and has replaced it with the euro, not a small factor in Washington’s deep animus to Teheran. Turkey is also abandoning the dollar. The U.S. demand that Germany and other European states halt the importation of Russian gas likewise saw the Europeans ignore Washington. China and Russia, traditionally antagonistic, are now working in tandem to free themselves from the dollar. Moscow has transferred $100 billion of its reserves into Chinese yuan, Japanese yen and euros. And, as ominously, foreign governments since 2014 are no longer storing their gold reserves in the United States or, as with Germany, removing them from the Federal Reserve. Germany has repatriated its 300 tons of gold ingots. The Netherlands repatriated its 100 tons.

The U.S. intervention in Venezuela, the potential trade war with China, the withdrawal from international climate accords, leaving the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the paralysis in Washington and disruptive government shutdown and increased hostilities with Iran bode ill for America. American foreign and financial policy is hostage to the bizarre whims of stunted ideologues such as Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams. This ensures more global chaos as well as increased efforts by nations around the globe to free themselves from the economic stranglehold the United States effectively set in place following World War II. It is only a question of when not if the dollar will be sidelined. That it was Trump, along with his fellow ideologues of the extreme right, who destroyed the international structures put in place by global capitalists, rather than socialists these capitalists invested tremendous resources to crush, is grimly ironic.

The historian Ronald Robinson argued that British imperial rule died “when colonial rulers had run out of indigenous collaborators.” The result, he noted, was that the “inversion of collaboration into noncooperation largely determined the timing of the decolonization.” This process of alienating traditional U.S. allies and collaborators will have the same effect. As McCoy points out, “all modern empires have relied on dependable surrogates to translate their global power into local control—and for most of them, the moment when those elites began to stir, talk back, and assert their own agendas was also the moment when you knew that imperial collapse was in the cards.”

The dollar, because of astronomical government debt now at $21 trillion, a debt that will be augmented by Trump’s tax cuts costing the U.S. Treasury $1.5 trillion over the next decade, is becoming less and less trustworthy. The debt-to-GDP ratio is now more than 100 percent, a flashing red light for economists. Our massive trade deficit depends on selling treasury bonds abroad. Once those bonds decline in value and are no longer considered a stable investment, the dollar will suffer a huge devaluation. There are signs this process is underway. Central-bank reserves hold fewer dollars than they did in 2004. There are fewer SWIFT payments–the exchange for interbank fund transfers–in dollars than in 2015. Half of international trade is invoiced in dollars, although the U.S. share of international trade is only 10 percent.

“Ultimately, we will have reserve currencies other than the U.S. dollar,” the Bank of England Gov. Mark Carney announced last month.

Sixty-one percent of foreign currency reserves are in dollars. As these dollar currency reserves are replaced by other currencies, the retreat from the dollar will accelerate. The recklessness of America’s financial policies will only exacerbate the crisis. “If unlimited borrowing, financed by printing money, were a path to prosperity,” Irwin M. Stelzer of the Hudson Institute said recently, “then Venezuela and Zimbabwe would be top of the growth tables.”

McCoy explains what a world financial order untethered from the dollar would look like:

For the majority of Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered as a demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness. After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2030 the U.S. dollar eventually loses its special status as the world’s dominant reserve currency.

Suddenly, there are punitive price increases for American imports ranging from clothing to computers. And the costs for all overseas activity surges as well, making travel for both tourists and troops prohibitive. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure at home and abroad, its forces begin to pull back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. Such a desperate move, however, comes too late.

Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying its bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace.

The collapse of the dollar will mean, McCoy writes, “soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages throughout the 2020s, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over symbolic, insubstantial issues.” The deep disillusionment and widespread rage will give an opening to Trump, or a Trump-like demagogue, to lash out, perhaps by inciting violence, against scapegoats at home and abroad. But by then the U.S. empire will be so diminished its threats will be, at least to those outside its borders, largely meaningless.

It is impossible to predict when this flight from the dollar will take place. By the second half of the 19th century, the U.S. economy had overtaken Britain, but it was not until the middle of the 20th century that the dollar replaced the pound sterling to become the dominant currency in international trade. The pound sterling’s share of currency reserves among international central banks fell from around 60 percent in the early 1950s to less than 5 percent by the 1970s. Its value declined from more than 4 dollars per pound at the end of WWII to near-parity with the dollar. The British economy went into a tailspin. And that economic jolt marked for the British, as it will for us, the end of an empire.

Goodbye to the Dollar
Goodbye to the Dollar

 

[H B Lowrie]

Dang, this is really simple shit. Tax those making $10 Million/year at 90% and what happens? Those making $10 Million will cut their businesses so they don't make $10 Million. To make up for the shortfall go after those making $5 Million/year and only have them pay 60%. Guess what, they'll cut back their businesses so they make under $5 Million. Do some of you folks have any fricken common sense?

No they won't, we've had those rates before. Do you know how a marginal tax rate works?

 

[OKTexas]

Looks like NOBODY's buying the GOP's BS any more folks...

Thank God for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez!

Methodology

Interviews were conducted January 20-22, 2019 among a random national sample of 1,008registered voters (RV). Landline (315) and cellphone (693) numbers were randomly selected forinclusion in the survey using a probability proportionate to size method, which means telephonenumbers for each state are proportional to the number of voters in each state.

Results based on the full sample have a margin of sampling error of ± 3 percentage points.

The Fox News Poll is conducted under the joint direction of Beacon Research (D) (formerlyknown as Anderson Robbins Research) and Shaw & Company Research (R).

Note: In 2019, the firm Anderson Robbins Research changed its name to Beacon Research; the Fox News bipartisan polling team remains unchanged.
Fieldwork conducted by Braun Research, Inc. of Princeton, NJ.Fox News Polls before 2011 were conducted by Opinion Dynamics Corporation.
Results are of registered voters, unless otherwise noted. An asterisk (*) is used for percentages of less than one-half percent. A dash (-) represents a value of zero.Some percentages may not add to 100% due to rounding. In the same way, percentages in “total”columns may be one point more or less than the sum of their parts due to rounding...

Fox News Poll document 1/30/19

Yeah, they get similar numbers on single payer health care, till folks find out what their costs would be. The commies want more form everyone, they just won't say it out loud.

.

 

[RDD_1210]

Dang, this is really simple shit. Tax those making $10 Million/year at 90% and what happens? Those making $10 Million will cut their businesses so they don't make $10 Million. To make up for the shortfall go after those making $5 Million/year and only have them pay 60%. Guess what, they'll cut back their businesses so they make under $5 Million. Do some of you folks have any fricken common sense?

No they won't, we've had those rates before. Do you know how a marginal tax rate works?

Of course he doesn't.

 

[bullwinkle]

Looks like NOBODY's buying the GOP's BS any more folks...

Thank God for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez!

Methodology

Interviews were conducted January 20-22, 2019 among a random national sample of 1,008registered voters (RV). Landline (315) and cellphone (693) numbers were randomly selected forinclusion in the survey using a probability proportionate to size method, which means telephonenumbers for each state are proportional to the number of voters in each state.

Results based on the full sample have a margin of sampling error of ± 3 percentage points.

The Fox News Poll is conducted under the joint direction of Beacon Research (D) (formerlyknown as Anderson Robbins Research) and Shaw & Company Research (R).

Note: In 2019, the firm Anderson Robbins Research changed its name to Beacon Research; the Fox News bipartisan polling team remains unchanged.
Fieldwork conducted by Braun Research, Inc. of Princeton, NJ.Fox News Polls before 2011 were conducted by Opinion Dynamics Corporation.
Results are of registered voters, unless otherwise noted. An asterisk (*) is used for percentages of less than one-half percent. A dash (-) represents a value of zero.Some percentages may not add to 100% due to rounding. In the same way, percentages in “total”columns may be one point more or less than the sum of their parts due to rounding...

Fox News Poll document 1/30/19

Well, with respect, let's be clear.

That poll simply says 'raising taxes on the rich'. It does not - from what I can see - specify the 70% rate that Ocasio-Cortez is suggesting.

I HIGHLY doubt that 54% of Reps and 71% of Indy's are for a top tax rate of 70%. Dems? Maybe.


And let's also be clear. According to figures from the Social Security Association, the 70% tax rate that Ocasio-Cortez is talking about will only bring in an extra $15 billion per year.

In theory, how much could Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 70% tax rate bring in?

That is almost literally a drop in the spending bucket of just over a 1/3 of 1% of the over $4 trillion per year federal budget.

This will do almost nothing for the federal deficit and is clearly just an anger tax directed at the mega rich.

You want to do that - fine.

But I think it is important to say what things really are.

Your level-headed post is appreciated. In our new either/or world an assessment of both sides is valuable. The goal is not (or should not be) to impoverish the rich. Heck, we'd all like to be in their shoes. So how can we aid the truly needy without stripping the wealth? I suppose some taxes are figured in, but over-taxing would not be of benefit IMHO. Although I do strongly urge removal on SS caps. But we need fairness.