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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING
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To: cosmicforce who wrote (4935)3/26/2002 7:41:33 PM
From: TimF  Read Replies (1) of 21057
 
How do you balance the budget on the backs of the poor (if that is even possible) when the majority of wealth resides in the top 10%?

We are not balanceing the budget on the backs of the poor. The bottom 50% (which includes a lot of middle class people not just the poor) pays about 4% of the total federal income tax bill.

I'm for people paying the TRUE costs of their operations. If you open a foundry and leave a toxic waste pit behind, the money "saved" by not cleaning up your mess is NOT yours in the first place. I don't see "taking it back" is a problem since it was wrongfully acquired in the first place.

I can agree with you a bit on the general issue here, but I have some doubt that we would agree when it actually comes to policy. I'm not sure that companies should face bankruptcy now because of activities which where legal, even normal, often even considered safe thirty plus years ago. I also think some of the standards for some clean up projects go to far, sometimes apparently requiring that the site be cleaner then it was before the toxic waste was created. If a company violated the legal and regulatory standards that where active at the time I can see slamming the company for the full cost of the cleanup and then maybe penalties and fines on top of that, but I have some problem with putting billions of dollars of costs on companies that followed the law at the time the chemicals were dumped in order to require the chemical in question to be reduced to a level that wasn't even detectable at 30 or 40 years ago. I'm not saying all of cleanups are like this, perhaps only a small minority are.

Tim
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