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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SiouxPal who wrote (24992)	5/23/2004 9:02:34 PM
From: Alan Smithee	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 81568

SiouxPal I attended a lunch last week at which William Gates, Sr. spoke. Boring as hell, but he made the point that the taxes in my state (Washington, also home to my good bud tject) has one of the more regressive tax structures in the country. He's right. It's not a question of soaking the rich, but the simple issue that the more you earn, the more you pay as a proportion of income. Fundamentally, I don't have a problem with that. If I earn $500,000 (which I do not) and pay 30% of my income in taxes, I still have a helluva lot more in my pocket at the end of the day than does the guy who makes $45,000 and pays 20% of his income in taxes. As a practical matter, most income taxes are progressive. Sales taxes and the creature we have in this state, the Business & Occupation tax, are regressive.

To: SiouxPal who wrote (24992)	5/23/2004 9:09:42 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Yeah, soak is a term that can be taken the wrong way. Here is a table of the historical top tax rates. Looking at it, it's easy to see why Warren Buffet says his class is winning the "class war"! How about that 91% rate from 1950 to 1964! Those were the good old days, when the rich weren't a bunch of whining greedheads and hadn't yet figured out how to buy the government.<g> ( actually, the gov. managed to scare the hell out of 'em with commies! - paying high taxes was "patriotic") taxguru.org