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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gamesmistress who wrote (25509)	1/21/2004 10:48:17 AM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793738

RFK was running on anti-war platform. Certainly most of the losses suffered in the four years nixon was president wouldnt have occurred. But given that, he would have had to work hard to reestablish american credibility around the world. It is hard to say how he would have evolved. He would have reacted to 9/11 like bush. He would have advocated ruthlessly going after terrorists. He may not have supported iraq but if he had and he was president heads would have rolled regarding what seems to be the bad intelligence re:wmds. BTW Bush was really bad on wmds yesterday. He should never have brought up the kaye report and talked to that issue. It is enough to say that it is still unclear where they are if they existed at all. Are they in syria? Did saddam actually destroy them and not tell anyone? That seemed so absurd but perhaps it was not given that sadam himself is an absurd character. Or did the scientists lie to saddam telling him what they thought he wanted to hear??? It would have been better to go there than try to justify the war on wmd grounds. MIke

To: gamesmistress who wrote (25509)	1/21/2004 7:01:02 PM
From: gamesmistress	Respond to of 793738

THE PROBLEM WITH SOAKING THE RICH The million-dollar earners peaked in 2000, when 44,000 of them -- about enough to fill your average baseball stadium -- reported incomes totaling $172 billion and paid more than $15 billion in taxes. The tax take from that relative handful of returns accounted for more than one-third of all income tax paid in the state. (From Daniel Weintraub, via Virgina Postrel) Daniel Weintraub looks at California tax data and finds that the state's in fiscal trouble because rich people aren't making enough money: Because California's skewed income distribution, combined with progressive tax rates, means that the people at the very top of the income heap pay a very high percentage of the personal income tax collected in this state. Their extraordinary, onetime income surge at the end of the last century provided most of the new tax revenue that legislators and former Gov. Gray Davis used to raise teacher salaries, increase welfare benefits and expand eligibility to state-provided health care. But the decline that followed also accounted for most of the revenue drop that contributed to the state's fiscal crisis. And as of the most recent tax year, they hadn't hit bottom yet. The million-dollar earners peaked in 2000, when 44,000 of them -- about enough to fill your average baseball stadium -- reported incomes totaling $172 billion and paid more than $15 billion in taxes. The tax take from that relative handful of returns accounted for more than one-third of all income tax paid in the state. The next year, the number of returns reporting incomes that high slumped to 29,000. Their combined income also declined, by nearly half, to $95 billion. And here was the killer: Their tax liability dropped from $15 billion to just under $8 billion.... The remaining 25,000 million-dollar earners took in a combined $75 billion, down from $95 billion the year before. And the tax take from that crowd declined again, to just over $6 billion. The super-rich, and the state's treasury, are basically back to where they were in 1998.... Since 2000, when the high-tech bubble was concentrating income at the higher end of the scale, the share of California income reported by those highest fliers -- the million-dollar earners -- has been cut in half, from 20 percent to just 10 percent. More broadly, all of those earning more than $100,000 in California saw their combined income drop from 54 percent of all the money earned in the state to 46 percent. The middle-class, meanwhile, saw its share of the income expand. Those earning between $50,000 and $100,000 increased their share of the income from 23 percent to 27 percent. But people in that income category pay relatively little income tax in California. Combined, they pay a bit less today than they did in 2000. In fact, those earning between $50,000 and $100,000, while they took in 27 percent of the income in 2002, paid 19 percent of the income tax. People earning more than $100,000, while earning 46 percent of the money in the state, paid 73 percent of the income tax. The tax-collection data should provide an important reality check on Democrats who've been responding to Arnold's budget cuts with calls for higher taxes on the richest Californians. Soaking the rich is already the state's approach to taxation, and it's one reason the budget is such a mess. Concludes Weintraub: "Raising tax rates on this small group of highly successful Californians will undoubtedly be part of the mix of deficit-closing policy proposals debated in the Capitol this year. But the tax return data suggest that a more fruitful and more stable approach to balancing the budget over the long term would be to somehow figure out how to make more Californians wealthy, and keep them that way. dynamist.com