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

To: quehubo who wrote (149498)	11/11/2010 1:12:28 AM
From: wonk	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 541906

...Throwing in SS as a tax is misleading No - of course not. In the immediate prior post, you just claimed you are a supervisor for people making in excess of 100K and yet it appears you don’t understand Cash Flow and Cash Management. It appears that you don’t understand that the only way that the Soc Security trust fund has a $2.5 trillion surplus in the form of bonds is because it generated EXCESS CASH since its inception and that EXCESS CASH was used to supplement the operating budget of the US. It appears that you don’t understand that if the CASH had truly been put in a “lockbox” income taxes would have had to have been much higher, or the deficit would have been much higher. You claim that people who pay little to no income tax will get more out then they put in. Jeez – that’s not even comparing apples to pears. More like apples to meteorites. It appears that you don’t understand present value, time value of money and annuities. The facts are that the wage earner is paying 8-9% direct taxes to the OPERATING BUDGET of the US and an additional 8% in indirect taxes through the reduction in potential wages through the employees match. If they are single, and even in the lowest brackets, they are paying 5-10% effective in federal, on average a couple of points in state, 5% sales taxes. Under any FAIR calculation, for most people in the country, even the most modest wage earner is paying 20-30% of their income in taxes of some kind. It doesn’t amount to much in total dollars because on average, for the vast majority of the people in this country, their incomes are stagnant. DUH! The important metric is the “effective tax rate” on ALL income and the most recent statistics are that the "Ultra Rich" have an effective tax rate around 16-18% 9 years ago in an OpEd in the Wall Street Journal, Warren Buffet exposed this scam. “…“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” You have far more in common with the guy making 100K or 75K or 50K then the guy who makes 5 million, or 50 or 100. Yet it is in those guy’s interest to keep us distracted and fighting while they for grab a larger and larger share of the pie – both in income and in wealth. They are doing that through Corporatism and income tax shenanigans. The tactics are not new - just new names for how the game has been played for 6,000 years of human history. Go back and look at the chart – income distribution has massively shifted. The rich pay more taxes in absolute dollars because they are taking more of the pie. DUH Again. But they are paying less in taxes as a percentage of their total income than any time in 80 years. The “Ultra Rich” are laughing at you, and me, and all of us proles.