At what level would you support a maximum income?

There is only one comment that this post deserves - stupid on steroids. The rich aren't parasites government is and government was only spending about forty percent as much. Oh and for what it is worth you don't have to live in the US to buy US stocks.

 

"At what level would you support a maximum income?"

corporate level only, make it based on a set amount more then lowest paid employe (including outsourcing - LOL)

.

 

Speaking as a true Socialist weith decades of experience in the matter of income disparity, since at least 1933, I would say that the America people do not need more than thirty thousand dollars a year to live on.

There is absolutely no excuse for anybody to make more than that.

Anybody who makes more than that amount is a thief and is stealing from the government.

And the government only has your best interests at heart. When the greed robber barons who exploit the workers steal that hard earned money, then the people will starve and not ahve a high quality of life.

So you see, nobody should be making more than thirty thousand dollars a year.

Anything more than that is capitalis exploitation, pure and simple.

 

What an incredibly ignorant thing for you to say.

 

Not necessarily... if that money was already stuffed under a mattress and not doing anything, it would have a negligible effect on the economy if it was removed.

As for OP, this seems to be more of a solution in search of a problem and it is certainly not a step in the direction of less government intrusion in our lives. Basic Econ 101, caps and floors distort the economy. What this proposal will do is discourage ambition. That is taking things in wrong direction as we should be encouraging ambition and discouraging and punishing (when appropriate) greed.

 

That's not the way it's done. In the 50's and early 60's any wage earner making over $300,000 a year paid 91% of the excess in Federal taxes. That was when the debt from the second world war was almost paid off and we had a middle class. Reagan came along and in the early 80's slashed tax rates to just about the same level they were at the time of the great depression and at the same time increased spending. Since then the middle class has been gutted and all those at the top have made out like bandits:

(click image to enlarge)
View attachment 33739

View attachment 33740

View attachment 33741

The good ol' guy(Super Wuss) also fired the biggest and most important union in the federal government and that began the demise of unions.......and the middle class:

View attachment 33742

 

No cap, period. Absolutely no benefit derived from that. You don't grow wealth by capping how much individuals can make and giving the rest to government.

 

1. And how many were in the 91% rate class?
2. What write offs and exemptions were available? Only and idiot would risk an investment or work harder only to give 91% of the next dollar to the government to waste. I know quite a few "rich" people. I don't know any who are so stupid as to keep working and investing to make a dollar to keep a dime.
3. Government revenues and the overall economy BOOMED after Reagan's tax rate decreases.
4. Before you say Clinton's economy was booming, look up the fact that it only really took off after he and Republicans under Gingrich lowered taxes, cut regulations, and reformed welfare.
5. Damn right Reagan decreased the power of unions. I was in an airport 2000 miles from home and saw a bunch of the PATCO fools picketing in the airport with signs that said "Silent Skies". Those jerks didn't care about me and my wife and kid possibly being stranded with no way to get home. I, therefore cheered when Reagan fired about 7000 of them. They didn't care about my well being, I didn't care about theirs.
6. Unions killed themselves. They continued with outrageous demands that they were able to get in the postwar period before the economy got more global. Americans weren't going to pay far more for a crappy GM Oldsmobile Cutlass when they could get a well made Volkswagen or Toyota product cheaper. So unions didn't adjust their demands, companies kept paying them off (e.g. 30 and out at 55, job banks, etc.) and made worse product to lower costs.
7. And mostly none of the factors you mention delineate demographic changes. The rise of single parent and divorced households, which virtually guarantees lower incomes and less future chances and improvement. Also, women increasingly entered the workforce with the phenomena that, say, a graduate doctor married a newly graduated accountant. So in 20 years they were both making a total of $500K a year whereas in the 50's, 60's and 70's a doctor would marry his nurse and she would quit work, stay home to care for kids. Now the nurse marries the plumber or she has kids without being married and tries to take care of them on a smaller salary than if she had (like in the old days) stayed home and enjoyed the doctor's pay. In either case, the highest income folks combine into families in which the top earning families have much more income than the lower earners.
8. In a global economy, the opportunities exist for new businesses to make far more money than in the past. Facebook is an international company, it has an opportunity to exponentially increase its earnings because of its global reach than it would have had in the 60's in which a company's market would mostly have been in the US, or even restricted to a region of the US. This offers the founders and owners an opportunity to make far more revenues than they could have in the past. I go to Cabelas to get various outdoor items. In the past, Cabela's sales would have been limited to people who can come in their stores, now their internet reach is world wide. This increases the number of jobs they need, but also exponentially increases the revenue the organization and its owners receive.

In any event, many studies have shown that the average person considered to be in poverty today has access to a better lifestyle than the average union worker in 1950 in terms of homeownership, air conditioning, indoor plumbing, TV, ownership of a car, etc.

Incomes will always be "unequal" unless you want everybody to be equally poor. Income inequality is not a problem in an expanding economy (The wealthiest human on earth could not afford an HD flat screen TV in 1960, an article that is now such a commodity nearly every household has one or more today.

Finally, to assume that capping incomes (my cap would be eleventy trillion a day) and that turning the excess over to government assumes government would do a good job getting it where it needs to be without wasting it. A foolish assumption, at best.

 

There's something wrong with what we're left with after Reagan and the Bushes. About two more rounds of that and the uppercrust would have all the money.....money borrowed from foreign banks I might add.

How in the world can anybody justify cutting tax rates for the wealthy, increasing their spending and borrowing from foreign countries to support it? They can't!

................................................................Total U S Debt........................................................

09/30/2009 $11,909,829,003,511.75(80% Of All Debt Across 232 Years Borrowed By Reagan And Bushes)

09/30/2008 $10,024,724,896,912.49(Times Square Debt Clock Modified To Accommodate Tens of Trillions)

09/30/2007 $9,007,653,372,262.48
09/30/2006 $8,506,973,899,215.23
09/30/2005 $7,932,709,661,723.50
09/30/2004 $7,379,052,696,330.32

09/30/2003 $6,783,231,062,743.62(Second Bush Tax Cuts Enacted Using Reconciliation)

09/30/2002 $6,228,235,965,597.16

09/30/2001 $5,807,463,412,200.06(First Bush Tax Cuts Enacted Using Reconciliation)

09/30/2000 $5,674,178,209,886.86(Administration And Congress Arguing About How To Use Surplus)

09/30/1999 $5,656,270,901,615.43(First Surplus Generated...On Track To Pay Off Debt By 2012)

09/30/1998 $5,526,193,008,897.62
09/30/1997 $5,413,146,011,397.34
09/30/1996 $5,224,810,939,135.73
09/29/1995 $4,973,982,900,709.39
09/30/1994 $4,692,749,910,013.32 (Clinton Raised Taxes On the Wealthy in 1993 While he still had a Democrat Congress)

09/30/1993 $4,411,488,883,139.38 ( Debt Quadrupled By Reagan/Bush41)
09/30/1992 $4,064,620,655,521.66
09/30/1991 $3,665,303,351,697.03
09/28/1990 $3,233,313,451,777.25
09/29/1989 $2,857,430,960,187.32
09/30/1988 $2,602,337,712,041.16
09/30/1987 $2,350,276,890,953.00
09/30/1986 $2,125,302,616,658.42
09/30/1985 $1,823,103,000,000.00
09/30/1984 $1,572,266,000,000.00
09/30/1983 $1,377,210,000,000.00

09/30/1982 $1,142,034,000,000.00(Total Debt Passes $1 Trillion)((Reagan Slashed Tax Rates To Pre Depression Levels)

09/30/1981 $997,855,000,000.00

 

"Only and idiot would risk an investment or work harder only to give 91% of the next dollar to the government to waste. I know quite a few "rich" people. I don't know any who are so stupid as to keep working and investing to make a dollar to keep a dime."


I was there. They did. It's a fact. Back in the day people cared about everyone not just their own greedy self.

We won the second world war NUMBNUTS!! Then....totally contrary to what modern day Republicans have done, WE PAID FOR IT!!!!!

 

You have been brainwashed into thinking that the rich actually contribute commensurate with their take … they don't.

The government provides communities with roads, schools, libraries, parks, police and fire protection, and much, much more … the rich are the takers, that is why governments are poor and in debt and the rich have most of the wealth. Seriously, I cannot wrap my head around what is going on inside that head of yours … you claim the rich are the victim and the government the thief, but the government is poor and the rich are wealthy beyond imagination … it does not compute!

Right, and now that the government is bigger than ever, the rich are also proportionally richer than ever, and yet you cannot conceive that the rich are using government to their advantage? The rich love big government, they lobby for big government, because big government puts mountains of money in their pocket.

I was using the stock market as a gauge of economic health. The economy did very well right after 1950, the year you claim those paracites left the country.

 

Sorry pal, you have that backasswards.

Let businesses flourish and get corrupt politicians (government) out of the way.
Businesses are not beholding to the people, government is.

 

Write in votes make you feel good but have no impact on the election, although I do think all ballots should have "none of the above" as an option. What would happen if "None of the above " won would be fun to contemplate.

I don't think anyone implied that wealth redistribution was the solution to wealth dominating the election system.

 

Explain exactly what do I have backwards. I think you are reading what you want to read and not what I wrote. And please provide more details on how you think corrupt politicians are hindering business.

 

Name one thing that income disparity affects.

It affects how many people will have how much money to buy the goods and services rich people produce. If nobody but the rich have money then the rich will very soon begin to become poor. Capitalism produces wealth by CIRCULATING money, adding a little more at each cycling. If not enough money circulates a tipping point is reached and the economy locks up. It can be very difficult to get it circulating again.

Income disparity is actually more of a problem for the rich than the poor. A rich person has the expenses wealth entails and so cannot remain rich unless he is making money, a poor person's situation remains unchanged if his income should lessen or cease

 

The above lie has appeared three times now in the thread. Others and myself have corrected it over and over and over in thread after thread, yet it never sinks in. Get it through your heads, ignorant leftists, when we had those high brackets, we also had 1) very easy to abuse passive loss tax shelters that could defer income all the way until retirement; 2) near unlimited personal deductions; 3) an AMT with no teeth. Before 1986 those high brackets were all but MEANINGLESS. So please, for once, be HONEST and stop peddling the horseflop of those "good old high Eisenhower brackets." It's inaccurate to do so, purposefully misleading, and to parrot it over and over once the misperception has been corrected brands you as flagrantly dishonest.

ALL these things were changed in the 1986 IRC Reform. The above has been pointed out so many times now on this forum, and in this thread by garyd, others, and myself. The way leftists repeat such nonsense just adds to the perception of them as parrots or advertisers, not anyone with legitimate political opinions worth considering.

 

The fact that Reagan and Bush had bad policies does not mean a maximum income cap is a good policy.

 

I give benefit of the doubt to most that it's not DELIBERATELY misleading. Your average joe citizen can't possibly understand ALL tax laws of 2015, much less, be able to apply 1956 rules that complicate arguments.

I think it's just agenda driven ignorance they TRULY believe.

 

Well, I'd agree with that if I hadn't corrected the exact same people posting it over and over. They know full well it's inaccurate to refer to those brackets out of context, and keep doing it anyway hoping to fool their core voting blocs and enrich the Complex.

 

How can that be?

The claim justifying redistribution is that the if the rich have all the money and ordinary people don't, then ordinary can't spend it and the rich won't be able to get richer. Then we have the complaint that the rich keep getting richer and the rest have less.

How can both of those be true?

 

And how do they do that?

How many votes do rich people get in primaries that determine who the candidates are. If I recall, it was a done deal that Hillary was going to be the Dem nominee in 2008. She had all the Wall Street and union money behind her.

And John McCain was broke and firing people off his staff at one point in the primary season. Rudy Guliani was the frontrunner and he also had Wall Street money behind him.

What happened? Did the rich people change their minds midway through primary season and select Obama and McCain?

 

Odd, your analysis seems to have left out that the 2009 budget deficit was swollen by an emergency appropriation put in place by Obama (you remember the "Stimulus" used to payoff Obama's union and envirowacko buddies like the Solyndra investors?)

And the discussion of deficits seems to stop at the Obama years while excoriating Reagan and Bush. You point out that Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy in 1993, implying that is the reason for the surplus achieved at the end of the decade. You did not point out, however, that Clinton and the Gingrich led congress, beginning in 1995, greatly reduced cap gains taxes, reformed welfare, reduced regulations and capped federal spending. Those items, particularly the cap gains cut led to a reduced rate of spending by government as well as a booming economy and resulted in huge increases in federal cap gains tax revenues. (Somehow progressives who extol the Clinton economy always seem to mention tax increases, but leave out those other details - just an oversight I'm sure)

Why would that be?

Oh, and I agree Bush was a big spender. I was against the prescription drug benefit program and I was against the huge increase in spending on education he and Ted Kennedy cooked up and I was against any spending that was not deficit neutral and accompanied by reduced spending in other areas.

 

I think you meant to quote someone else, because nothing you typed has anything to do with the post of mine you quoted.

 

This right here - the theory of diminishing marginal utility - has led to pretty destructive policies. It's something that has very little basis in reality, because it assumes that everyone has the same risk profile - i.e. everyone is risk averse. This is decidedly not the case, as people can, and generally are, risk neutral in some cases and even risk seeking.

More to the point, utility functions are not concave for everyone, and so you can't expect that someone who already possesses incredible wealth will be less likely to spend an additional $X amount than someone who is less wealthy.