Top 3% of Taxpayers paid majority of income taxes in 2016.

That is no answer to the questions you were asked.

 

Facts are just so darned inconvienient.

 

Actually bet you cannot actually support thst rather silly statement. And claiming being concerned about growing weath inequality is jealousy is just your rater pathetic way of not dealing with the issue. Facts are facts and have nothing to do with being jealous.

 

Inequality of wealth is a math problem. But not a social problem. The poorest immigrant can still become extremely wealthy in this land of opportunity. Wealth for the rich essentially in the two forms named. Stocks and real property.

The CEO of Nextiva went from hoping he could get cash to pay his mortgage to being very rich.
Rather than whine the rich have wealth, learn how it is done and join them.

https://www.pressheretv.com/lessons-from-a-polish-immigrant/

 

Give you how the system actually works and it is not the way you preach here to posters.

Take the game of Pro Basketball. The other day, Steph Curry scored 38 points I believe. He got far more than his share of points. But he took nothing from other players.

I wish you understood two things. Money and wealth.

 

Here is your post:

You should not be concerned. As a fraction of the entire nation, they really do not have all that much. The fact is this nation is for each human. Each human should pay equal to support the government. This is how the founders set things up.

I could swear it says the founders set it up so everyone should pay equally to support the government. Guess I read it wrong. Ha,ha.

 

To fight me, you must know the founders tax rate and what the rate was charged on. Do you know that?

When one attends a movie theater, pays for the seat, do they pay equally? For sake of argument, I am excluding things like cheap seats for the old or children. Just your typical earner.

Do theaters screw us by charging us equally though our incomes vary widely?

 

I believe jealousy is prime. More than nothing as you say, but prime. There is no wealth inequality if by that you mean that we are supposed to be all equally wealthy. We are not set up for that to happen.

 

History of Federal Taxes in the US



So when the founders set things up. do you see a income tax or payroll tax? No you see tariffs and excise tax.

 

To educate you.

 

Actually, Paine may have been one of the most lucid and fair-minded of American intellectuals of his day. Rand I won't even comment on as this is beneath a rational discussion and we are seeing the results of Freidman's brand of neo-Liberal economics playing out in real time as we speak.

Tell me, do you think a society with inequality greater than that of the gilded age is a stable and prosperous one?

I'm happy to discuss this in depth though I'm on a phone a lot so I'll have to wait to get to a terminal to go into detail.

 

But the very wealthy still use common resources in proportion, no? Think police and legislative resources to protect and preserve property rights, capitalists use state resources such as land labour and commodities, and often are subsidized by tax-payers to build property and assets.

Why is corporate welfare okay but progressive tax structure stealing from the rich?

Does this make sense to you?

 

Yes but my response was to the op's point that the very wealthy pay a disportionate amount of tax. Yet by any standard their wealth has been increasing despite the horrible tax burden they suffer under under this "unfair" system of ours.

Consider for instance that productivity of the workforce has increased dramatically but wages have been stagnant for decades meaning that the capitalist class has reaped almost all profit from these gains.

Should not there be some cost to operating in a stable, controlled economic system that allows such gains-often subsidized with tax-payer dollars or should all this just be free for a certain class as the libertarians would have us believe?

 

If you own 100,000 stocks of Microsoft, as time passed you went from a few hundred dollars to very wealthy.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/stock-price-history

 

Say in 1986 you owned Microsoft to the tune of 100,000 shares, your cost was per share .06 per share vs today $108 .... how are the citizens harmed by this vast increase in wealth?

 

The rate is applied to the whole.

Why do you deserve to be subsidized by those who earn more than you?

 

Way more than his rate

 

What about your neighbor that earns twice as much as you? He's not the "very wealthy" you just described. Why should he pay higher rates than you? What is it about his income that makes him less deserving of it than you, and why do think you deserve to be subsidized by his higher rates?

 

We are going to clash and you know it very well. I am no longer a Democrat. I shed their false dogma a long time ago.

Rand is not lousy as you present. She is primarily for human freedom. How can you knock human freedom? Same with Friedman. Friedman did not enact economics, he taught it. He is a winner of a nobel prize for economics.

I do not accept any premise we have inequality.

Let me sum it up quickly this way. Since 1933 Democrats are the lawmakers. Few times has the R had the 3 bodies. 4 times over short periods in the last 100 years. Time for Democrats to step up and understand that any so called inequality is due to their regulations, laws and legislation.

So if you preach inequality, you are anti Democratic party.

Is that what you want to tell me?

Actually my claim is this. Due to Democrats this nation has not so much changed inequality, but changed the nature of law. To use it as a hammer to remake the public into their own lumps of clay. so if you mean that, we agree. Democrats created inequality as you define it.

 

Both parties are part of the same two-headed power structure. Your problem is buying into the paradigm that one party is markedly different from the other. Don't forget, it was Clinton who dismantled Glass/Steagall and brought in draconian welfare reform which as a Republican you should applaud and Nixon who created the EPA to regulate environmental concerns.

Both parties have largely become tools of military/corporate/intelligence interests and no longer serve the people in any meaningful way. If you are part of the 0.1% of course you will love this as you are living through the greatest transfer of wealth from the middle and working classes to the very wealthy and corporations in the modern history.

This did not end well for a lot of empires before yours. Do you think you will be substantially different that those who had great inequality before? Why?

 

I think people who want to live in an affluent society with highways that are safe to drive, trains that run on time, safe neighborhoods with parks and recreation facilities should pay a fair tax rate based on income no matter who they are as part of the privilege of living in a modern healthy society. If you want to live in a military state with gated communities surrounded by slums then that is your prerogative. Hopefully most members of society will see the lunacy of great inequality. Who was it who said you can tell the nature of a society by how it treats it's weakest and most vulnerable? Do you know?

It only makes sense that those with a higher income should pay more based on ability. Why should Warren Buffet pay less taxes than his secretary? Does this sound like a rational way to build a modern society?

 

I am sorry but do not accept the premise, that you never proved, that the two parties are essentially the same thing.

While you do make claims, I notice none are backed up. Such as your diatribe against Rand, you cherry picked. Now I suppose I have to defend Rand though that was never my intent nor desire. I only used her as a reference of things i have studied and agree with. You handed me your socialist sources. This leads to the clash.

I have studied wealth since at least by 1965 and forward. I see that poor people hit it strikingly rich since my birth. Were it inequal, how can a poor man become the richest man on earth?

 

Why won't you approve them being taxed on purchases rather than income?

You sound precisely like you accept the Democratic party dogma. You are using Marxist notions on taxes.

 

What about that makes you deserving of him subsidizing you for your portion of those services?
Are you advocating that you receive prorated use of those services, since you don't want to pay the same rates for them that you advocate he pays, out of fairness?

 

The critique of Friedman and the Chicago School are many including that there is anything like a free market in the US which has long used tax-payer funds to subsidize industry or to bail out actors when unfettered capitalism's contradictions rise which they always do:

"In terms of the policies he inspired or influenced, however, the report card is not so glowing. His great claim, the idea that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" may have set off the Monetarist versus Keynesian "econ-wars" of the late 1970s and 1980s. But Friedman's ideas of directly targeting the money supply were tried and rejected as a failure, in both the UK and the US, and Friedman himself backed away from his dogmatic earlier positions. Today, no major central bank directly targets money supply data in setting monetary policy - instead they are far more pragmatic. Even Friedman's great admirer Alan Greenspan never tied himself to the monetarist mast, preferring to keep his options open.

Friedman also railed long and hard for school vouchers to be adopted, to little avail, and his libertarian leanings provoked him to call for recreational drugs and prostitution to be legalised. He lobbied against environmental protection and regulations of all kinds, the vast majority of which were happily ignored by his friends and enemies. Even the economic reforms in Pinochet's Chile he is said to have inspired have run into trouble."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/nov/16/post650

A statistical analysis of the delusion that mathematically anyone can make it in America:

"Yet the opportunity to live the American dream is much less widely shared today than it was several decades ago. While 90% of the children born in 1940 ended up in higher ranks of the income distribution than their parents, only 40% of those born in 1980 have done so.

Attitudes about inequality have also changed. In 2001, a study found the only Americans who reported lower levels of happiness amid greater inequality were left-leaning rich people – with the poor seeing inequality as a sign of future opportunity. Such optimism has since been substantially tempered: in 2016, only 38% of Americans thought their children would be better off than they are.

In the meantime, the public discussion about inequality has completely by-passed a critical element of the American dream: luck.

Just as in many of Alger’s stories the main character benefits from the assistance of a generous philanthropist, there are countless real examples of success in the US where different forms of luck have played a major role. And yet, social support for the unlucky – in particular, the poor who cannot stay in full-time employment – has been falling substantially in recent years, and is facing even more threats today.

In short, from new research based on some novel metrics of wellbeing, I find strong evidence that the American dream is in tatters, at least."

The starkest marker of lack of hope in the US is a significant increase in premature mortality in the past decade – driven by an increase in suicides and drug and alcohol poisoning and a stalling of progress against heart disease and lung cancer – primarily but not only among middle-aged uneducated white people. Mortality rates for black and Hispanic people, while higher on average than those for whites, continued to fall during the same time period.

The reasons for this trend are multi-faceted. One is the coincidence of an all-too-readily-available supply of drugs such as opioids, heroin and fentanyl, with the shrinking of blue-collar jobs – and identities - primarily due to technological change. Fifteen per cent of prime age males are out of the labour force today; with that figure projected to increase to 25% by 2050. The identity of the blue-collar worker seems to be stronger for white people than for minorities, meanwhile. While there are now increased employment opportunities in services such as health, white males are far less likely to take them up than are their minority counterparts.

Lack of hope also contributes to rising mortality rates, as evidenced in my latest research with Sergio Pinto. On average, individuals with lower optimism for the future are more likely to live in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) with higher mortality rates for 45- to 54-year-olds."

There are high costs to being poor in America, where winners win big but losers fall hard. Indeed, the dream, with its focus on individual initiative in a meritocracy, has resulted in far less public support than there is in other countries for safety nets, vocational training, and community support for those with disadvantage or bad luck. Such strategies are woefully necessary now, particularly in the heartland where some of Alger’s characters might have come from, but their kind have long since run out of luck.

In reality, the Myth of the self-made man in America is more and more a statistical anomaly. Sure it happens but largely based on blind luck and more and more vanishingly rare.

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/jun/20/is-the-american-dream-really-dead