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

To: tejek who wrote (587669)	9/28/2010 12:14:33 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574000

your first 250, that's still on the house No it isn't. Its taxed as well. ow, this week we got some horrible news: that one in seven Americans are now living below the poverty line. A number wich higher taxes would tend to make worse. And the poverty line overestimates real poverty because it doesn't count many forms of government assistance as income -- ...The official poverty measure counts only monetary income. It considers antipoverty programs such as food stamps, housing assistance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Medicaid and school lunches, among others, "in-kind benefits" -- and hence not income. So, despite everything these programs do to relieve poverty, they aren't counted as income when Washington measures the poverty rate. We're talking about big bucks here. In 2002, the federal government spent $522 billion on low-income assistance programs. But $418 billion was not considered cash income and not included in calculating any family's income. Did that $418 billion do nothing to alleviate poverty? ... Studies that take into account all income and transfer payments to low-income people have found a decline in the number of those in poverty. A 2006 study in the Journal of Economic Perspectives reported that if in-kind benefits are included in income, poverty rates in 2003 would have declined from 12.7 percent to 9.9 percent. By counting all income and taxes, the poverty rate falls by more than 20 percent. The current system's bad accounting can lead to bad public policy. The misleading figures make it difficult to accurately judge anti-poverty programs... heritage.org -- Meg Whitman is running for Governor out here, and her claim to fame is, she started e-Bay. Yes, Meg tapped into the Zeitgeist, the zeitgeist being the desperate need of millions of Americans to scrape a few dollars together by selling the useless crap in their garage. What is e-Bay but a big cyber lawn sale that you can visit without putting your clothes on? So you think E-bay is useless to the country? Creating it, created new wealth, and far more new wealth than was personally grabbed by Meg Whitman. She didn't create it, but she took over when it had 30 employees and helped turn it in to what it is today. Its net income increased over 1000 times when she was in charge. That's also creating new wealth. Even 39% isn't high by historical standards. Under Eisenhower, the top tax rate was 91%. Under Nixon, it was 70%. Rates that few people paid. Not only because you had to have extremely high incomes to reach the top rate, but because such rates encourage all sorts of avoidance and evasion efforts, and result in lower government revenue than lower (but still fairly high) rates would. We don't hate rich people I care more about the actions than the emotions behind it. Maybe Maher, you, etc. don't hate rich people. But you want to take from them, and because of confusion or dishonesty consider any effort to avoid increasing what is taken, to be an effort to give handouts to the rich.