Againsheila
Gold Member
Do you honestly still not know the difference between income and wealth?One thing I'm pretty sure he would NOT do is say, "Have Government take money from other people and give it to the poor." I think he'd say "YOU help the poor."
I don't think they should necessarily tax the poor more. What they should do is reduce government to the point where we would not need to pillage a relatively small percentage of the population in order to sustain such massive expenditure. Someone said something about the majority supporting this. Well, OF COURSE. That's because the majority gets the "benefit" of massive expenditure while a minority of the population bears the overwhelming preponderance of the cost.
It's not just the income tax either. Go to http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/88xx/doc8885/Appendix_wtoc.pdf and look at Table 5. The share of total federal tax liability borne by the top 20% was about 69% as of 2005. The bottom 40%, meanwhile, bore less about 5% of the burden. You can see that the top 40% bore about 86% while the bottom 40% bore about 14%. It's pretty easy to support expensive government when you're not the one paying for it.
A "moral" tax would require that everybody who lives in the country pays an equal share of the cost of running the government. And, I assure you, if we had such a system people wouldn't be supporting anything remotely like the level of expenditure the United States government engages in today.
As far as charity goes: It should be voluntary. Charity should not be compelled by government as it is now.
Yeah, you're right, the top 20% paid 69% of the taxes, but the top 10% own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined, they should be paying MORE than 90% of the taxes, they aren't taxed enough, the bottom 90% is taxed too much, and that includes 50% of your 20%
.
The top tax payers also happen, not coincidentally, to be the top job creators. That's usually how they got there. Why would you want to punish the most productive people in your society to subsidize the least productive?
Think about it...without the laborers, the rich wouldn't have all their wealth....why should we subsidize them so they can screw their workers? There would be no productivity without the workers. In truth, the most productive ARE the workers, not the top 10% of our nation who uses tax shelters and invests much of their money overseas and places them in overseas accounts that the rest of us have no access to. When the dollar dies, it's the worker that loses everything, the wealthy will already have sold all their dollars and invested in other currency. Heck a majority of their wealth is on paper as it is....not exactly something they've WORKED for, or produced.
Again, no country can long survive when the majority of it's wealth lies in the hands of a few. I believe it was Plato or Aristotle that said that, I'll have to look it up. The point is, it was said by someone far smarter than you or I.