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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (158468)	1/20/2003 4:44:33 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575430

The average household cash income has remained flat through the '80s and '90s for all but the top 1% I question that claim. In any case even if the cash income was flat the cash value of the total compensation package went up, and both wealth and spending adjusted for inflation (and in the case after adjusting for the increased level of consumer debt) have gone up. Houses are bigger and more elaboratly furnished, people own more and better computers, VCRs, DVD players, more cars and the average car is more advanced and powerful and more safety equipment and convience features. I could go on and on with a whole bunch of other examples but I think I gave enough for you to get the point. If you want more examples or more detail about the examples you can look here reason.com or reason.com Another interesting link - reason.com Tax policy is increasingly skewed to the benefit of millionaires Not at all. More and more Americans are being dropped off the tax roles entirely. Also - " But as the Republicans construct their tax plan, there is a large and under-appreciated fact they would do well to keep in mind. Over the past decade or so, fewer and fewer Americans have been paying income taxes and still fewer have been paying a significant percentage of income in taxes. While we would opt for a perfect world in which everybody paid far less in taxes, our increasingly two-tiered tax system is undermining the political consensus for cutting taxes at all. Even the barest of glances at tax data reveal a system that is steeply progressive. Tax revenue has been increasingly squeezed out of top earners. According to the most recent data, from 1999, the richest--with income above half a million dollars--constituted 0.5% of taxpayers but accounted for 28% of total tax revenue. Simply put, a tiny group of people (553,380) were responsible for more than one-quarter of the income tax take of $877 billion. Well, maybe you're saying--so what? They can afford it. Then take a look at those who aren't Richie Rich. The most recent data from the IRS, in 2000, show that the top 5% coughed up more than half of total tax revenue. Specifically, we are talking about folks with adjusted gross incomes of $128,336 and higher being responsible for 56% of the tax take. Eyebrows raised? There's more. The top 50% of taxpayers accounted for almost all income tax revenue--96% of the total take. These numbers are more arresting when compared with the situation 14 years earlier. In 1986, the top 1% paid 26% of revenue, the top 5% was responsible for 42% and the top half contributed 93%. And what about the bottom half of taxpayers? They accounted for 7% of the total in 1986 but only 4% in 2000. " opinionjournal.com while Social Security and Medicare are facing long-term deficits Mainly to to structural defects in the programs. SS is basically a ponzi scheme and medicare did not anticipate that people would live longer and medical care would get more expensive. They are not facing long term deficits because they have been starved for resourses but rather because their costs have exploded beyond what even the programs oppoents thought was a worst case scenario. Corporate welfare riddles the tax code and the federal budget. I agree with that but its nothing new, and nothing that broad based tax rate reductions would make worse. Manufacturing companies are moving production and jobs abroad in search of lower wages and taxes. Many companies have moved but manufacturing in the US has continued to increase when you measure from the peaks or the bottoms of each economic cycle to the next peak or bottom. The U.S. presents the "aging visage of the leading world economic power--purple-veined with years of high living, lips curled with the insolence of great wealth, eyes bloodshot with the late vigils of increasingly frequent financial crises," Phillips writes. Most ominously, Phillips compares the U.S., post-September 11, to Holland in the early 1700s and Britain in the 20th century, when each nation, at the peak of its economic power, expended its energy and treasure in a burst of warfare. This isn't very accurate. Britain was in relative decline even before the world wars, and the world wars drew a large percentage of its resourse. Even with a possible Iraq attack and a general increase in military spending we are spending less then 4% of our GDP on defense. (as opposed to over 7% in the 80s and much higher levels in the 60s and maybe 40% during WWII) Tim