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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (43753)	6/11/2010 9:24:46 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Precision in terms is necessary for any argument. False. If I say that our sun is larger than an ant, I don't have to define what type of ant, or whether larger means mass, volume, distance along the longest axis, or some other measurement. Obviously that's a particularly extreme example to show the point, but you did say "any" argument. And it is utterly impossible to answer a question about 'is the tax load higher or lower' for one period of time vs. another WITHOUT specifying the exact period or time Which already was specified. It is also impossible* to say what the tax load on the "Middle Class" is until and unless you specify exactly what income range is "Middle Class".* Again false. For large differences the group doesn't have to be precisely defined. If I say Americans make more than Africans, I'm right whether I mean US citizens, residents of North America, or residents of the Western Hemisphere, and whether I mean people in all of Africa, or just sub-Saharan Africa. The term has to be defined, (if no one knows what your words mean, than all communication is fairly meaningless), but not precisely. The normal English meaning of the word is imprecise, but it is sufficiently precise for these purposes. If we dropped payroll taxes from consideration, than it would not longer be precise, because the differences would be too small, to tell without very careful examination of precise data, but with the massive payroll tax increase, the difference is large enough that a relatively vague definition is sufficient. Re: [Using the metric of 'all taxes' will make it a very difficult and tedious comparison] "Only if you want to examine every point to the most minute detail," YOU were the one who wanted to talk about "TOTAL tax loads". And one can examine differences in the total tax loads, without examining all taxes, just as one can examine differences between the wealth of citizens of the US and the citizens of Zimbabwe even if we had no date for residents of Wyoming and Montana. The taxes that where not detailed are also larger now, they would just add to my case. But if we were to assume that they where 10 times as large in the 50s and 60s as they are now, they still wouldn't be large enough to make any difference, so there is no need to research the fine details about them, just as there is no need to consider data on Wyoming and Montana to come to the conclusion that the US is richer than Zimbabwe. I NEVER said that it 'reduced your taxes'. What I said, (what the economic argument is), is that often enough much, or even all, of your paid-in capital is RETURNED to you directly. Sometimes even the returned amount is multiples LARGER then what is paid in. OK, then instead of being false, the argument is irrelevant, since the discussion was one of tax burdens. And you are not claiming that the transfer payments to you reduce your tax burden.