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To: Solon who wrote (2592)	10/11/2002 11:58:44 AM
From: Poet	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7689

Number 3. You are far more eloquent than I, my friend.

To: Solon who wrote (2592)	10/13/2002 4:06:14 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

"Both would make sense as they pay most of the taxes." LOL! It is more accurate to say rather that they get most of the wealth. Both would be equally accurate. 100% accurate = 100% accurate. Also the percentage of State and local taxes they pay is much lower than the working poor who pay the highest. 1 - I said the rich pay the most taxes not the highest percentage. Its also true that they pay a higher percentage then most other people but even if they did not my statement would still be true. 2 - Federal taxes are higher then local and state taxes and so are a bigger part of the overall tax burden. 3 - "Local and state taxes" include property taxes. The rich often pay high property taxes. It seems to me you have three sensible choices as to how you view Poet's comments and juxtapose them. My sensible choice was to think that she didn't always want the rich to pay more of every increase but to not get more of every cut. That is why I asked her if her idea that the rich should not get the most out of each tax cut would apply no matter what the tax rate or economic condition. Then she suprised me with her statement that she would still hold this position regardless of the conditions. She may have meant something like your statement "I believe that these should be the case so long as the working poor continue to suffer disproportionately to the rich" but I took her at her word when she explicitly stated something different then that. I did't (and still don't) think she would actually still want the rich to get hit hard by tax increases and not benefit much by tax cuts if the rich had much higher rates then they do now. Then she actually stated that she wouldn't want the rich to pay almost 100%, so I have tried to show here the logical contradiction between her two statements. But it is important for those who are ruled to believe they are making headway from time to time. Nothing worse than an angry man holding a shovel... High tax rates, even high tax rates for the rich alone, will do little to help the angry man holding the shovel to make any headway. "I wouldn't have problem with very low tax rates for the wealthy but only if everyone's tax rates where very low" Surely, do away with roads and schools and libraries and military behemoths going off to well financed wars. Encourage the unskilled and the untrained to turn to crime as a means of survival. Turn society into a battleground between the haves and the have-nots. This has all been tried. And it didn't work under communism either... The military gets about 3% of our GDP. Libraries much less. Schools are many a local issue very little federal money goes towards them. The percentage of wealth paid in to income tax has been much lower then it is now and at the time our country was much poorer without our country being any more a battleground between the haves and the have-nots then it is now. There are lots of ways to reduce spending without harming our national defense or short changeing schools and libraries, but even if we don't reduce spending, just reduce its rate of growth to keep real spending per person the same or in other words adjusting spending for population growth and inflation, but with little or no growth beyond that, then we will be able to start running surpluses in a few years even with further tax cuts. "I don't think someone has to be in enormous pain from high taxes to make tax cuts a good idea." Who said anything about enormous pain? The statement was a response to your statement about how tax cuts are not needed (and presumably would be a bad thing) because the rich are not hurting for money. Just because someone is not hurting for money is not a good reason to take a large % of their income away from them. So what is it you think makes tax cuts a good idea? The fact that lower taxes help increase long term economic growth and also that it is wrong to seize a big chunk of someone's income or wealth even if they are rich. ctj.org That site doesn't seem that accurate to me. The poorest group doesn't have much property to tax but they are shown as having high property tax burdens. "Probably true. I would like to see it cut but then social security will not have enough money" Why should anyone care about that, Tim? You want the social security system to go bankrupt? I think it was a poorly designed system from the start but a lot of people have planned their future based on the promises made by the program and those in or near retirement don't have deacdes to save up to fund their retirement themselves. Tim