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Pastimes : My House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: thames_sider who wrote (2093)	10/4/2002 12:52:14 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Respond to of 7689

End tax exemptions, reduce sales taxes on non-luxury goods, and increase taxes on luxuries. In the grips of the green monster, are we? Why should the rich pay a higher percentage than anyone else? Because you want to punish them for your own failings? In which case, the only thing to stop you being smug must be the knowledge that your children are likely to have a lower standard of living than you, and your grandchildren still worse. And why would that be? The rich pay a lower* proportion of their income as tax than all but the very poorest, with the super-rich coming off best.* And it's still true that per capita they pay more. Meanwhile, since the richest 5% (or 10%, I forget) have ~40% of the wealth, isn't it right that they should pay ~40% of the tax? DANG! I thought it was called an INCOME tax, not a WEALTH tax! Your jealousy, f course, thinks it ought to be a wealth tax. If I have more than you, I must have stolen it. Gee, I can't begin to understand why Britain was called "The Poor Man of Europe" for so many decades. Until Margaret Thatcher cleaned out your statist socialist groupthink from the gov't and got the country moving again.

To: thames_sider who wrote (2093)	10/4/2002 3:47:02 PM
From: Bald Eagle	Respond to of 7689

I doubt that I am in the top 5% of earners. Maybe if I was in Mexico, I would be. The difference between you and me is that I am not jealous of other people's success and I don't have the urge to penalize them for working hard and doing better than me financially. Nor do I feel that their money should be confiscated by the government to waste on ill-conceived and poorly run programs.

To: thames_sider who wrote (2093)	10/4/2002 8:29:43 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

Guess who got fooled again. You. The rich pay a lower* proportion of their income as tax than all but the very poorest,* I don't know if this is true in the UK. It is not true in the US. "For 1999, the most recent year for which complete Internal Revenue Service statistics are available, 6.3 million taxpayers whose incomes were in the top 5 percent paid more than 55 percent of all income taxes. They had incomes above $120,846 a year -- meaning two spouses could each earn a bit more than $60,000 and be considered among the nation's richest. "It's very easy to move into the top echelon of taxpayers," Hodge said. The wealthiest 1 percent -- those earning $293,415 and up -- paid more than a third of the taxes, and their share of the nation's taxable income was 19 percent. They pay income taxes at the top rate, now 38.6 percent, compared with a maximum rate of 15 percent for the majority of lower-earning taxpayers. Taxpayers in the bottom half paid only 4 percent of the income taxes in 1999, according to the IRS. These 63 million taxpayers earned, on average, less than $26,415 a year." seattlepi.nwsource.com Do Tax Cuts Work? The Mellon Tax Cut (1921-1925) Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon urged taxes to be cut. They were slashed across the board: The top rate of 73% was brought down to 25%; the bottom rate went from 4% to 1.5%. The results? Tax revenues decreased for the poor by 85%, and tax revenues from the rich increased over 100% [1]. This lead to the largest expansion in peace-time history. [1] Internal Revenue Service, Statistics of Income--1921-1925: Individual Income Tax Returns; Tax Foundation. The Kennedy Tax Cut (1963-1965) Congress passed President Kennedy's tax cut in February of 1964 which lowered the rates from the World War II-vintage 20%-91% range to 14%-70%. The results? Among the poorest, tax revenues decreased 27% and among the richest tax revenues increased 85% [2]. This lead to the longest expansion in history. [2] Internal Revenue Service, Statistics of Income--1963, 1964, 1965, Individual Income Tax Returns; Tax Foundation. The Reagan Tax Cut (1981) Reagan proposed a 25% across-the-board tax cut in 1981. The results? In 1981, the richest 1% paid 17.9% of the total income tax burden. In 1988, they paid 27.6%. In 1981, the poorest paid 7.4% of the total income tax burden while in 1988 they paid 5.7%. Throughout this, the middle class saw their percentage go down from 57.2% in 1981, to 48.7% in 1988 [3]. This lead to the longest expansion in peace-time history. [3] Internal Revenue Service. freedomcommittee.com