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

To: Road Walker who wrote (220703)	2/24/2005 11:03:09 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573214

It would make it a less regressive tax. Would you rather go afer the super wealthy? We could keep the cap at $90K, and then put it back in for incomes over, say $200K? What do you think? You would capture more tax from middle class employees. The rich would take their compensation in a lower tax form. The rich can afford accountants and lawyers to tell them how to reduce their gross taxes. Middle class employees can only take their income in the form of wages. Trying to tax the rich is like trying to run up a steep sand dune. The sands keep slipping and shifting. You are welcome to try. Price inflation is understated. But with the current budget and account deficits, I'm not at all sure that price inflation won't top wage inflation in the coming years. It might break the system, better to go with the average, even though it is a "historical" cut in benefits. Some people say that price inflation is understated. I know of no people that do not accept that wage inflation is overstated. The current system causes greater increases in the amounts payable. When a budget is out of balance you can tackle the problem by one of three ways. You can pretend that there is no problem. You can increase revenues. You can decrease expenditures. The fairest system is to allow the people just getting into the system a chance of receiving some benefits. With no changes to the system, they will not. Lowering taxes is what's got us into this mess. We need to put the country back on a sound fiscal basis. This is merely your opinion. You are entitled to it. A great many people do not share your opinion. Two possible causes, revenues or expenses. IMO expenditures are the problem. Lower them. We can play a game of government Russian Roulette; arbitrarily axe one out of six programs. The Constitution specifically allowed the federal government to provide for the common defense, a unified foreign policy, and provide a common currency. Exempt those programs, and you cannot lose by eliminating others. The side benefit is that we could probably trim the budget enough to lower the tax rates and pay down the debt.

To: Road Walker who wrote (220703)	2/24/2005 11:20:21 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573214

Lowering taxes is what's got us into this mess. Now increasing spending got us in to the mess, and yes Bush has been a big part of it but it existed long before he was elected and will unfortunately probably continue after he is gone. It would make it a less regressive tax. Would you rather go afer the super wealthy? We could keep the cap at $90K, and then put it back in for incomes over, say $200K? What do you think? I might go for all sorts of tinkering with the cap as long as the rates are lowered and the additional amount brought in is zero or close to zero. From the current tax levels I would oppose any tax increase. Scrap all sorts of corporate and agricultural subsidies, change the indexing on the growth of SS, throw in some medicare reform (and real reform, not something like Bush's adding to the entitlement), find some other place to cut (including over the next few years at least a big chunk of the money we are spending in Iraq) and than we can talk about if we still need a tax increase. Tim