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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (27694)	6/6/1999 11:48:00 AM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

It will take a while to put together the links of those sources. I might be wrong about the trireme, now I think about it, I think it was pentaconters actually, and the source is Aristotle's Politics I guess or more likely, now I think of it, Thukydides -- I'll look it up. I think most tax experts will claim the middle and working classes pay most of the total taxes of the state. There are interesting studies of how the rich manage to keep the net tax percentage low. There are two whole professions --- tax lawyers and accountants who labor to keep the tax take low with great success. FICA, one of our most pernicious taxes (since it is a powerful disincentive to work) has a ceiling, so high earning people like us pay a small percentage of our income into Social Security. "Investors" like Bill Gates on pay taxes on their capital gains when they sell them, and if they give them to a charity like the Bill Gates foundation pay no tax ever and get deductions against their other income. The middle income people who retire get to pay income tax on their Social Security benefits, but the rich don't pay FICA on their capital gains. Gates pays the same FICA tax as I do. Ah well, he probably works much harder.