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

To: tejek who wrote (285153)	5/9/2006 5:56:40 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573311

Its not an issue of whether its acceptable or not. Being rich is not a God given right. They have to pay for the privilege. In my opinion property rights are human rights just as freedom of speech. Even if you don't go that far I fail to see how you can assert that the government has a right to the property. Its the nature of our inheritance laws which allows people to inherit large sums of money. No, people can inherit large sums of money in the absence of inheritance laws. Recognizing those facts you have to either accept 1 - Ever increasing taxes on the rich, or 2 - That the wealthy will benefit more than everyone else when tax rates go down. There are no other alternatives except maybe fixing taxes rates so they no longer move up and down, and that isn't very likely to happen. I don't understand what you're saying. I don't think you are making any effort to understand the point. Its not the complex. You seem to consider each tax increase in isolation. If taxes go down and the wealthy benefit you consider that a bad thing. If taxes go up on the wealthy you have no problem with that, and may consider it a good thing. But you don't just get one change in the tax rate. You have taxes go up and down over the years. You want the rich to never recieve more benefit from any change than anyone else, but at the same time you want them to have to pay the majority of any increase. If you have an increase followed by a decrease, followed by an increase, followed by a decrease in tax rates over the years, and you don't allow the wealthy to benefit from the cuts at any point, then you have a situation with continual increases in taxes for the rich. Maybe a concrete, specific, hypothetical example would help you get your head around the idea. Imagine the rate that tax payers pay goes up 5% and than down 3% every 4 years. The current top rate is 35%. The last change was a cut, so lets assume it goes up to 40% in 2010 (4 years from now). Then 8 years from now there would be a cut, but since you wouldn't let the rich benefit from the cut it would stay at 40% for them, 12 years from now it would be 45%, 16 years from now any cut once again would not be allowed to help the rich, 20 years from now the rate would be 50%, continue that pattern for another 10 changes (or 40 more years) and the top income tax rate hits 100%. I'm not saying that pattern will actually be followed. But the reason why no pattern that vaguely resembles that pattern will be likely to be followed is that the wealthy are allowed to benefit from tax cuts. If you refuse to let them benefit from tax cuts, and if taxes get raised and lowered over time, then eventually the rich pay 100%. It won't happen because never letting the rich benefit from tax cuts is a stupid idea. You might say that you like the idea of tax increases for the wealthy, but if you do its simpler to just go ahead and raise their taxes. There is no need to invoke the nonsensical idea that it is wrong for the wealthy to benefit from tax cuts. Given that no nation has an economy that is truly laissez-faire, the US economy is about as close as you can get. The US economy is far from as close as you can get. I said......as close as a country can get. Its far from as close as a country can get. "I don't actually expect such a situation to happen, at least not soon, but by insisting that the wealthy not benefit from tax cuts you are effectively calling for this to happen." I am not. I am calling for them to pay the tax rate that existed before Bush's foolish tax cuts. That might be what you want, but it was not what you are calling for. If you want to say the rich should pay the same rate as they paid under Clinton it would be much easier to just say that rather than attack the idea of the rich benefiting more from tax cuts than anyone else. Tim