'Tax us more,' US billionaires say

Well if you don't feel penalized when the governments takes more and more as you work hard to make more and more, good for you. I didn't say the only reason a billionaire builds a hospital wing is because it's tax deductible -- I said "when someone donates a hospital wing it's tax deductible". That means the deduction is optional. Your representation of what I said is what's silly. We've been helping the poor since LBJ in the 1960's and all it's achieved is more poor.

 

The wealthy use dozens and dozens of loopholes to pay little taxes.

 

It's simple economics. Anything but progressivity twins inequity (given diminishing marginal utility of income, plus differences in benefits from government expenditure) and inefficiency (given the highest effective marginal rates of tax impact on the lower income deciles). Those arguing against progressivity are therefore trying to coerce an inequitable inefficient outcome.

 

Sit around on your backside while working part-time and you get tax money sent to you (Earned Income Tax Credit, EITC) from hard workers income. Work two jobs to better provide for your family and you are taxed twice. If you think that's fair then you must have missed the fairness class in kindergarten. I don't want an equitable outcome (equitable for the non-producers), I also don't want to punish (progressive tax) achievement.

 

My husband worked hard on Wall Street getting high six-figure bonuses...I taught kids and was responsible for their future, who worked harder? So what if a person donates a hospital wing and gets a deduction she doesn’t have to do that . Why are you demeaning their generosity by needing to say it’s a tax deduction.

 

The US focuses on efficiency, rather than effectiveness, of their welfare state. That generates all sorts of problems, such as the high effective marginal rates of tax mentioned. It also eliminates individualism. It's of little surprise, for example, that social democracies have higher self employment rates. An advantage of a well constructed safety net!

The US's neoliberalism has generated Victorian England type inequalities. It has created an economy that celebrates corporate power over the individual. It's a shame that right wingers don't care about the reality.

 

It should be noted here in that the combined income of those three people would finance the federal government of the United States for less than a day. Nothing as large and bifurcated as government in the United States is ever going to be efficient. It simply isn't possible for it to be so and all the incentives are in the other direction.

 

You should move to a south American rain forest and implement your socialist utopia and then you'll be flooded with all sorts of people who would rather live in your utopia than in the united states.

but we both know you won't do that.

Your ideas sound good to you, but they don't work in the real world. So sorry, but if you truly believe this hogswlollop you constantly shovel, then actions speak louder than words.

which is why words are all you have.

 

You did...

 

Greed has very little to do with it. The old Rubric is that in order to make money you have to spend money and a lot of that money will inescapably be spent on salaries.

 

You cannot be both effective and inefficient...

 

Efficiency refers to the % of the dollar going to the poor. Effectiveness refers to the reduction in poverty intensity.

 

Yea, it has NOTHING to do with importing tens of millions of poor unskilled 3rd world people. Funny that the lowest inequality in America history happened just before the door to the 3rd world was opened and that after many of decades of this immigration we have reached the highest inequality in American history. I am sure you will have brilliant (data free) explanation as to why 3rd world immigration had no effect on inequality.

 

I haven't referred to socialism. By ranting incoherently, you've only weakened your position. That isnt logical.

 

Why didn't you refer to an empirical study that shows your extreme inequalities reflect immigration? I'm sure you'll put that right now.

 

Governments don't reduce poverty they spread it.

 

The evidence, where welfare state generosity goes hand in hand with lower poverty, shows otherwise...

 

Generations ago uneducated Jews, Italians Irish etc came here and the same rhetoric was used. It’s the next generation, the generation that the immigrants want to make a better life for

 

1st most of them were not uneducated back in the dead, more importantly there was no welfare state to deprive them of the opportunity to succeed. And most of them brought with them crafts and trades that would benefit the country or they'd have been sent right back from when s they came. That was the purpose of Ellis Island.

 

Lower read slightly more genteel poverty

 

The problem is that again your ideology is inconsistent with the evidence. We know that the US has high poverty. We also know that, inconsistent with individualism, social mobility is pitiful. The standard right wing response, blinded by ideological limitation, is to go into an anti-immigration tirade. They fail to notice international evidence, demonstrating that foreign population stocks aren't particularly high in the US.

And we know that, in social democracy, the welfare net is found to increase self employment. I have to ask: why are right wingers insistent on protecting inequalities that favour corporate power?

 

This is laughable come from Somewhere in Europe where German is still 85% German. and more than 90% European, or England where outside of London Liverpool and Glasgow you can pretty much live your whole life without seeing anyone that isn't a native of the British Isles. Scandinavia is even worse. Meanwhile in the US There are more people of Scandinavian Decent than in Scandinavia. We have people here whose lineage within the last century alone take in most of Europe various native American Tribes of which there are at least a hundred still extant, plus multiple African heritages.

We have no Idea how many illegal entrants there are in the country and that's the only immigrants anyone is concerned about. We've caught almost every nationality in the world sneaking across our southern border. We've got diseases cropping up that hadn't appeared in the US for more than fifty years. I'm concerned right now that the lefts desire for open borders for purely partisan political reasons is going to lead to a major out break of some really nasty contagion starting with a truck load of dead bodies found in a major US city.all killed by some particularly virulent strain of dysentery. And even that probably will be viewed vy some of the left as little more than a minor cost in screwing this country up completely to their liking.

 

Given right wingers are so convinced that they're surrounded by foreigners, its strange that they aren't more worldly wise. Take stocks of foreign born as % of populations. In 2017, the US figure was 13.5%. That did beat Spain. That was only 13%. The UK managed 14.2%. Germany 15.5%. Sweden 18%.

There's a reason that they can't find empirical evidence over immigration to support their ideology. They're talking guff!