US study lays bare extreme pay-ratio problem

Only if you count public assistance in addition to personal income.
https://www.cbpp.org/long-term-poverty-trends

 

Then you have not understood the essence of Income Fairness. You have not understood that the purpose of a Taxation System is NOT ONLY to obtain government funding, but the economic purpose of civility, decency and humanity.

You probably think, as I said in the previous post, that the poor are irrelevant and deserve to live and die below the Poverty Threshold. Because that is the destiny they were born to fulfill?

Your lack of compassion for the poorest of our fellow Americans is astonishing ...

PS: The Federal Budget is out of whack and has been so for quite some time because just about half of it goes only to one agency - the DoD:

That breakdown of the Discretionary Budget shows where the US priorities lie.

But please do explain what Defensive war are we fighting that urgently requires the expenditure of half the nation's discretionary budget ... ?

 

I agree wholeheartedly with that statement. The problem is that guys like Rockefeller figured out how to avoid paying taxes by bribing enough of the whores in congress to write legislation allowing them to skate and keep all their money while bleeding the hardworking people who make a few hundred grand a year.

 

Yes I know, the "relevant" comments are the ones defined by the scourge corporatist market manipulators. Give a rest Statey boy

 

Thank you.
Finally someone one here that can understand the issue!
The corporatist tool economist in this thread will now accuse you of being a Marxist

 

Your lack of helping them with your own time, energy and resources is astonishing

 

That increase is due to the rich getting richer while the middle class stagnated so the rich now pay a larger share of taxes. The taxes for the richest people has historically come down a lot.

 

who cares what its due to? The point is the top 1% pay 44% of the taxes. That's unfair to them (they should pay 1%), plus it deprieves them of the investment capital only they know how to use to improve our standard of living with innovative new products. Plus, it makes the rest of us freeloaders off the rich. This is very bad do you understand? We don't want to tax the rich for welfare to make the poor ever more freeloading. Got it now?

 

total 100% BS. IRS tells us the 44% of all the money they collect comes from top 1%
Now please apologize to us for being a Marxist puppet without knowing it.

 

2 billion people would come to capitalist america tomorrow if they could get in. Greatest country in human history by far. China just switched to capitalism and instantly eliminated 40% of the entire planets poverty after Kode communism had slowly starved 63 million human souls to death.

 

or helping them by teaching them that Republican capitalism is the sustainable way eliminate poverty.

 

know idea what that means given population is far larger than at any time in human history, poverty is defined in many different ways, and, with huge GDP growth we can easily now sustain billions at or near subsistence thus in some ways increasing poverty.

 

The top 1% pays 44% of federal income taxes. Income taxes are only 1/3 of all taxes. The top 1% earns 20% of all income so you will need to provide a study of federal, state, and local taxes that shows that they are paying significantly more than 20% of all taxes.

 

it is a fact 1/2 of NYC's budget is paid for by a hand full of fat cats. Do you see the problem if we are all on welfare from the top 1%??

 

I don't see any data showing that 50% of their budget is paid for by the rich. Also, NYC is very different than most cities and to even live there you have to be pretty rich to begin with with rent being $40,000 per year and it has attracted a lot of rich people. When you factor in property taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, sin taxes, state incomes taxes, etc the richest pay about 7.1% of their incomes in state and local taxes while the poor pay about 10.9%. This is because while the rich pay a higher amount the poor tend to spend a larger part of their incomes on things that are taxed.
https://taxfoundation.org/comments-...sis-tax-systems-all-50-states-second-edition/

 

so why should the top 1% pay as much as bottom 60%? top1% should pay 1%. Do you want everyone on welfare from the top 1%??

 

I am not any kind of 'ist' champ. However if you do not realize that the IRS is squeezing working people and small businessmen who make between 9

The whole idea of income tax and the IRS is the second plank of the Communist Manifesto champ. It took the US until 1917 to sneak this commie idea first written about by Marx in the 1850s into our government under the guise of helping support the idiotic war in Europe and it was a mere 1%...Once the international bank percentage swindlers realized that we were too ignorant to stop them from enacting their commie idea they kept buying off our congress to keep raising this commie tax until they bilked it up to 90% at the high point. Now the people think they are getting a fair deal by only having 30-40% of our money confiscated at gun point. The IRS has turned all of our banks and financial institutions into an army of informants that report directly to the IRS while selling out their former fiduciaries.

 

squeezing working people? what do you call it when they squeeze the top 1% for 44% of all the money they collect?

 

I call the whole IRS and income tax scam a Communist idea. It has also turned all of our banks and financial institutions into an army of informants who no longer work as fiduciaries for their clients but rather backstabbing rats who report directly to the scum running the IRS. The government should learn to support itself without taxing labor or income at outrageous rates the way it did before this grand theft began just over a century ago. We should also get rid of the Federal Reserve which is another scheme hoisted upon us by the international bank percentage swindlers. America is the richest country in the world by far. How is it that we are borrowing money instead of loaning it out with interest.

 

Again, you are only looking at income taxes which are only 1/3 of all taxes. For state, local, and non-income federal taxes the poor and middle class actually pay a higher percent than the rich. The rich have seen their incomes rise by 150% since 1980 even for accounting for inflation while middle class wages have stagnated. Their taxes can been cut dramatically over the past century. The rich are doing just fine and don't need a tax break. You have no data showing that the rich a significantly higher percent of all taxes compared to the percent all income they earn.

We should be focusing on lowering taxes for US businesses which Trump is doing but also eliminating taxes for small businesses to encourage people to be more entrepreneurial and increase business competition. We should also focus on reducing the complexity of taxes and this can be most effectively done in a bipartisan way that doesn't change the level of taxation for each income group and will reduce tax preparation costs for people and businesses. Also simplifying regulations have the same impact as tax cuts.

 

... which is why we have a progressive tax system.

No. I believe we have an obligation to take care of the most vulnerable in our society - children, the disabled, the elderly and sick. I also believe that a good day's work is worthy of a wage that can minimally sustain a person. But, by the same token, choices have consequences. If you drop out of school, if you take drugs, if you commit crimes, if you produce children you cannot afford, if you earn a bad work record, and if you treat people badly, there will be consequences, and they are very likely going to be economic consequences.

Well then you can stop being astonished. No one has more compassion for the vulnerable in our society than I do. But able bodied adults who are poor in this country have, in the majority of cases, made poor life choices, and being poor is a consequence.

Whenever anyone wants to make it appear that defense spending is eating up the lion's share of the federal budget, they show a chart of the discretionary spending of the federal government. But the federal budget is made up by discretionary spending and non-discretionary spending. The two combined are the total federal budget, and defense accounts for 15-16% of it.

I shall not insult your intelligence and mine by listing all of our security issues in today's world. But I am curious ...

Given that the Defense budget accounts for only 16% of total federal expenditures, just how small do you think it should be?

 

There is no problem with the above. I agree wholeheartedly. What you are getting at is perfectly sound and reasonable.

The problem is that people are not born ipso-facto with such adult reasoning. They are not taught that "choices have consequences". They are inundated by Boob-Tube Comercializing inducing them to think that life is worthless unless you have "what everybody else is having".

We are being manipulated psychologically (by advertising) to behave in a certain manner such that consumption is conducive to profits by a select group of companies. And, of course, the richer one is the more "gadgets 'n goodies" one can afford.

What I see today in the US is the awesome belief that the sole purpose in life is to amass riches - so that we can live like some Hollywood Superstar. This is a purely personal observation evidently. But the consequences are glaring, given that the waste is enormous.

That's sooo nice for you to have so much compassion. Soothes your guilt, does it?

You are making a very evident mistake if you think that "life choices" are the dominating factor of our lives. They aint.

It's the pure-chance consequences of choices that determines far more the outcomes of our lifestyle. (And if that were not the case, we'd not have 14 million of our fellow citizens "living below the Poverty Threshold". They were born into the wrong family far below the Poverty Threshold.

You're both right and wrong.

The non-discretionary part of the budget is mostly paying the debt. And had we not a massively expensive DoD that debt would be much smaller.

You're just watering down the total DoD-percentage by adding in non-discretionary spending. You are mixing apples with oranges and the result is fruitfully meaningless.

The DoD is willfully the largest part of the Discretionary Spending AND THAT IS SPECIFICALLY THE POLITICAL DECISION OF SUCCESSIVE AMERICAN PRESIDENTS! (Probably because they had a vested-interest in the money spent on their elections/reelections from that industry!)

We can have a similarly effective DoD-stance without the mindless boondoggles of the fighter-aircraft expenditures. "The Top-5" in the US:
*Northrop B2 Spirit bomber (2 billion development cost)
*F-22 Raptor (costing $350M each)
*C-17 Heavy Air-freighter ($2.95B for 15 of them)
*Poseidon P8 anti-submarine bomber ($2.4B for 17 aircraft)
*VH-71 Kestrel Helicopter ($241M due to enormous cost overruns)

And the above is just one indication of where the money spent on "defense" is questionable. Defense from WHAT POTENTIAL THREAT? North Korea? Ya gotta be kidding!!!

Now tell me how funding free Tertiary Education at $1B year for anybody that wants is a "Useless Federal Expenditure".

Depends upon what you mean by "defending the nation". The Europeans, for instance, think that it's worth about one third to half the expenditure of the US. And why? Because the Europeans do not see the sense in competing with the US in terms of Defense Spending!!!

This chart from 2017 shows relative defense expenditures US and Europe:


You will note that of the total spent, the lion's share belongs to Uncle Sam ....

You are "playing games" with the numbers comparing what is not comparable.

The non-discretionary budget contains massive debt, and when added to the discretionary budget, together the DoD part is greatly reduced.

Nice try, but you're no economic numbers trickster ...

Progressive has nothing to do with the fact that American-taxation it is a Intentionally Designed Boondoggle for the rich. There is nothing "politically progressive" about taxation allowing a flood of money to go to those who need it least.

And you should know better ...

 

More senseless sarcasm ...

 

Historically revolutions happen when there is a vast and growing wealth inequality gap.

 

Naming names again? (All you are good for!)

Tax rates at the very top actually are lower than the group just below "super-rich status". Upper-incomes are "not progressive". In fact, they diminish for the top 5%!!!

They are a flat-tax, as shown here:


Which means what? They make more money than anyone else and they get to keep more or their income tax-percentwise!

You want to have Replicants run government? OK! But this is what happens:
*Uncle Sam is paying through the nose tax-wise to do so! Taxation is actually lower for them not progressive!
*And then the government spends half its discretionary budget on the DoD, which means the tax-income money goes right back into the pockets of the Replicants!
*And, we-the-sheeple get peanuts in return! No National Healthcare Service and No Free Tertiary Education.
*Do the ultra-rich care? Of course not, they've got more than enough money to pay for the best of both!!!