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

To: SilentZ who wrote (749745)	10/27/2013 2:11:48 AM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574056

Z, I already know about the Keynesian argument against excessive savings. But IMO, his arguments should be taken abstractly, i.e. more theoretically than as a practical rule for setting policy. In any case, it seems like liberals advocate policies that punish savings because they think that money would be put to better use if it were "redistributed." Progressive income taxes are an example. Sure, I get it, people who make $5M/year probably can afford having 45% of it confiscated by the government. But those aren't the only people affected by the anti-savings policies. Let's say you are making a steady income of $50K/year, but one year thanks to good (or lucky) investing, you make a windfall of $500K. Guess what? That income gets taxed as if you just won the lottery. It would have been better if, instead of making that windfall in one year, you got that money spread out over 10 years. But we all know that most of the time you can't structure such income that way. Why do I bring up the windfall example? Because for most people who make it big, the money comes in spurts. Their income is highly uneven, and that is true for most of the so-called "one percent." (The exception, of course, are the truly rich who don't have to work hard for their money, but whose money works hard for them.) Guess what the progressive income tax rates punish the most? That's right, those whose income isn't steady, but comes and goes. Now you can tell me that I'm arguing too much over this, and that the alternatives like a flat tax are not much more desirable. But this is one of the many reasons why I believe in limited government. Progressive tax rates should only be structured to fund the primary services of government. To use them as a vehicle for "wealth redistribution" is silly, because you might as well just pay people to dig holes that others fill up. Tenchusatsu