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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (1257)	8/8/2008 1:33:42 PM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 86355

They ARE heavily taxed measured as a percentage of income. Thats part of what keeps them poor. If a country keeps its people from getting rich, the country will stay poor. Imagine that. Data please. Info on Ghana and Kenya - with Ghana having steeper tax rates: books.google.com South Africa, at 40%, has one of the highest top marginal tax rates of all middle-income countries. By comparison, other middle-income countries have relatively low top marginal rates. Consider the following examples: Botswana (25%), Brazil (28%), Malaysia (28%), Mauritius (25%), Namibia (35%) and Uruguay (0%). The average economic growth for countries in 2004/05 that had a flat tax system was 6,9% compared to South Africa’s average growth rate of 4,7%. These countries also enjoyed higher rates of gross capital formation as a percentage of GDP with an average of 24% in 2004/05 compared to South Africa’s average of 17,5%. anewsouthafrica.com Several economies that seemed on the verge of bankruptcy in the early eighties were suddenly revived once marginal tax rates were reduced. In 1983 to 1984, Turkey's marginal tax rates were slashed: the minimum rate dropped from 40 to 25 percent, the maximum from 75 to 50 percent. Real economic growth jumped to nearly 7 percent in the following four years and to 9 percent in 1990. Like Turkey, South Korea was deep in debt to international banks in 1980, when real output fell 2 percent. Korea subsequently cut tax rates and expanded deductions three times, and economic growth averaged 9.3 percent a year from 1981 to 1989. In the early eighties the African island of Mauritius faced an unemployment rate of 23 percent and massive emigration. Tax rates were cut from 60 percent to 35 percent, and the economy grew by 5.4 percent a year from 1981 through 1987. Egypt, Jamaica, Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, and Mexico had similar experiences after slashing marginal tax rates. http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=26880112&sort=postdate Fundamentally, the political elite uses its control of the state to extract the surplus or savings that if the peasant were free to retain they would have invested in improving their production techniques or to diversify into other economic activities. Through marketing boards, taxation systems and the like, the political elite diverts these savings to finance its own consumption and the strengthening of the repressive instruments of the state. ... samizdata.net ------------------------------------------------------- You said "we" were richer then than now. No, I may have worded it in a way that was confusing. I said we were "richer before the oil era" than other countries were. -------------------------------------------------------- What good does the Dept of Energy do? Mission & Functions .... Thanks. You don't know that they do much worthwhile either.