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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (31411)	11/10/2006 3:51:00 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541933

If you remove the decision making from the individual because the individual isn't responsible enough, you can easily move it to a government official that isn't responsible. In a democracy, there is at least a feedback loop around that, so the problem becomes more an issue of whether you think collective judgements infringing individual freedoms are sometimes useful. I say clearly yes! I know from prior exchanges with you that you advocate "as little as needed". It is hard to argue with that conceptually, since what is the point of "more than is needed"? Unfortunately, "as little as needed" provides no proscriptive means of determining "how much is needed", which is where most the political divide comes about. "Whose pocket it comes from" has trended to "the rich", at least if your talking about income tax. The poor often don't pay it anymore. The lower middle class pay a small part of the total. The tax income comes from the upper half of the middle class and from the upper class. This has normally been the case but that extent has increased in the past few decades, even as marginal rates have tended to decline. Factually correct. Two points: 1) the top brackets are increasing their share of the total wealth pie (a trend from the '50's or so on (IIRC) that has spiked even further in the last decade)and 2) there are significant tax code distortions which somewhat mitigate the progressive appearance of the tax code wrt to the upper brackets, namely SS as you mentioned, but also the much more complex treatment of non-wage income which greatly facilitates tax avoidance endeavours on the part of the more affluent. If you have ever lived in the 3'rd World, you will come to understand that societies lacking a robust middle class have some major problems, not the least of which is maintaining security for the well off. It concerns me greatly that the USA is drifting towards a significant class which pays no tax, and indeed sees the government as a source of wealth, while at the same time a smaller and smaller percentage of the population reaps a larger and larger share of the economic pie, mostly by painless skimming of wealth in one way or another, and then shoulders an increasing fraction of the State's "obligations". I would much rather see the State concentrate on enhancing the economic ecosystem of the middle, than in enhancing the economic ecosystem of the top only to reshuffle a fraction of that to the bottom. The former leads to long term State health, while IMO, the latter leads to long term problems.