The Super-Rich Want You to Hate Taxes So They Can Keep Your Money

[bchavez]

Start your flame engines... it's so hard left it hurts... :eek:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/14-7

lol

[LibertarianfromGermany]

How about The Super-Rich Want You to Embrace Taxes So They Can get Your Money through the government?

[Fox McCloud]

wow


When it comes to the American economy, there is one fundamental lie and one fundamental truth and it is up to you which you choose to believe. Tax Day is really a chance to ask: “Which side am I on?”

instantly framing the debate here casting those who are against taxes as being cronies for the rich/wealthy or they're just plain morons...heaven forbid we want more money to spend on goods that we want.


The lie is that if the maximum freedom and, thus, maximum benefits are given to the super-rich elites, ultimately everyone will win because the super-rich will create companies and create jobs and buy things and that will benefit the rest of us. It’s been called various things over various times — Reaganomics, trickle down economics, free market capitalism. But mostly it’s just been called bullshit.

The average five-year-old could tell you the truth — that if you want to create the most amount of opportunity and prosperity for the most amount of people, it makes much more sense to spread opportunity and prosperity from the get-go rather than give it all to the top and pray it will spread. Bullshit economists — who are mostly from elite backgrounds, educated in elite institutions, and invested in preserving the elite status quo — have been trying for decades to persuade us to believe their lie rather than the common sense truth. Their lie led our economy right into the toilet, but the bullshit economists and their Wall Street pals are still scrambling to convince us that they’re the solution, not the problem.

Um, no, just no--this is exactly how it works; the rich do want to get richer so they have no choice but to invest it; it's not like they're going to reach a point where they'll suddenly say "OH MY GOSH, I have enough money, I'll pile all of it in a warehouse and swim in it all day". Money is only good for buying things and investing to make more money...that investing does create job and the expensive things they buy (yachts, bigger homes and office buildings, bentleys, diamonds, etc) all require human labor to produce...Bush's so called "yacht tax" which was designed to tax the rich to help the poor had the exact opposite; those on the margins (of which there are a lot of people on the margin even amongst the rich) didn't want to pay the extra tax so they chose to hold on to their money. The result? The yacht industry plummeted and middle-class workers lost their jobs. Yeah, taxing the rich more makes complete sense; go ahead and do it and watch our economy grow at a slower rate or shrink. Heck, even if you're for taxes, you should consider lowering them--reducing the capital gains tax under Reagan, Bush, and (oh, oh!, oh!) Clinton increased the amount of revenue the government brought in.


The anti-tax agenda perpetuates the lie. In a currently uneven economy where wealth and privilege easily reproduce themselves while it’s harder and harder to climb from the bottom or the middle up the economic ladder, taxes are the primary way we as a society redistribute money to all the hardworking Americans who deserve their fair share and a fair shake. Sure, those Harvard-educated bank CEOs work hard, but do they work 300 times harder than you? Their pay is based not on hard work but on bullshit economics that favor the already-rich. Taxes are our way of saying, “Hey, good for you for making a bazillion dollars, but since you’ll still be rich with a bajillion, we’re going to use some of your money to help other have a shot.”

you can thank your lefty (and many MANY right) buddies for putting more stringent regulations, taxes, and restricting free trade (oh, and did I mention the subsidies?) that has decimated the middle-class...even then, there is no indication that the middle class is worse off now than it was 10 years ago; incomes are higher and goods are cheaper; sounds to me like the ladder is a bit easier to climb now, eh? '

This also completely leaves out the effects of inflation, which is a policy that does favor the wealthy; particularly the banks and wallstreet who get to use the money first before it's diluted in value...therefore you have an indirect tax from the poor to the wealthy (and the government, of course, who is the very first to use it).


Picture the classic image of rich titans of industry sitting around a wood-paneled private club, animal heads on the walls, butlers with white gloves — the exclusivity of the rich enjoying their riches together while plotting how to get richer. Government is the clubhouse for the rest of us. Public schools, roads, electricity, Medicaid and Medicare, veteran’s benefits — government helps the rest of us have the things we need in life, the otherwise only the super-rich could afford.

isn't the idea of having all those luxuries great? As a middle-class individual myself, I consider this one of the many motivators to attempt to better myself, increase skills, or look for that niche in the market so I can enjoy this lifestyle; why punish it and disincentivize becoming wealthier; isn't that the supposed goal of redistribution? Furthermore, it's difficult to formulate a plan that would work effectively here...and I'll demonstrate the absurdity. If we were to confiscate 100% of Bill Gates' money, then redistribute it, we'd all only get $100 richer...hardly worth doing, as resources would be consumed in this process leaving us with less than $100...and worse off, you're going to cause anyone and everyone to not want to become that wealthy anymore.


Think about it. If there was no public water system in your town, the rich could import gallons of water from wherever, pay staff to wash their clothes in the river and boil water to drink, and so on. What would you do?

Well, this is an easy one; people would move into this business. Why? To get rich, of course!---Oh dear, heaven forbid! Companies competing to deliver water to your home that is of a higher quality and lower price than that public water? Perish the thought you evil capitalists out there!


The rich want you to think that government is a bad idea for YOU because it’s really a bad idea for THEM. They would be more than happy to keep their tax money, send their kids to $30,000-a-year private schools, pay thousands out of pocket to get a cavity filled, fly a private plane here and there because highways would be ruined. But since there aren’t enough super-rich folks to rule elections (though they keep trying with corporate donations to candidates) they need our help, too. They need the rest of us to swallow their lie so they can keep getting richer and, as taxes decline by our own doing, the rest of us fall further and further into despair.

this is just plain silly, again....it's insinuating that the market cannot produce certain goods......what's so hilarious is that the reason many of these goods he mentions are expensive is precisely because of the government, so he unknowingly is advocating policies that would further hurt the middle class.


This isn’t to say government is perfect. We need a much more accountable, transparent and participatory politics in America. But thinking that if government doesn’t work perfectly then it doesn’t work at all is part of the lie. At a time when free market capitalism in its current form has failed us wildly, we’re not questioning the fundamentals of that system remotely as much as we should. But one minor or major misstep on the part of government, and we’re ready to throw the baby out with the bath water. We’re that brainwashed to believe the lie.

how's that 100+ years of "more transparency and reform" workin' out for ya, eh? The current system has nothing to do with Capitalism; we have a system where-in government grants favors to corporations (monopoly), writes legislation to "protect consumers" (restraint of trade/erecting barriers to entry), and if it fails, gets bailed out by the US tax payer. I'm sorry, but that's not "Free market capitalism"; that's out and out Corporatism, which is a horrendous bastardization of the free market. This is unwittingly building a strawman and setting it ablaze...


Last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said the people of Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands, who pay the highest taxes in the world, are also the happiest people in the world. Taxes don’t just benefit poor people. Taxes are what create shared prosperity and keep the middle class prosperous.

ahh yes, the a-typical Scandinavian socialism myth: http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/5616.aspx correlation does not always equal causation either.

It's also hilarious that they state that taxation creates prosperity; taxes are incapable of doing this....Stossel said it best when he said "government can't create wealth, it can just move money around", even then this isn't always accurate; often times taxes just out and out destroy wealth; this is definitely the case, with, for example some of the green energy subsidies, which create X many jobs, but destroy X+Y jobs (in Spain's example, I recall it being about 2.1 jobs destroyed).


The article is just plain silly, through and through and shows a very poor comprehension of economics, to say the least.

Website like that make me want to barf my guts out xP

[lavis88]

We both hate the corporatists and the empire. They want the government to control their lives and take care of them. We want liberty and to take care of ourselves.

[BuddyRey]

A rich businessman can't even get my money if I don't choose to do business with him...unless of course some noodle-headed Keynesian bails him out on my dime!

[The Patriot]

"Think about it. If there was no public water system in your town, the rich could import gallons of water from wherever, pay staff to wash their clothes in the river and boil water to drink, and so on. What would you do?"

Is the river going to evaporate all of a sudden? :rolleyes:

What the hell does this idiot think a water bill is for? I have a feeling he hasn't ever paid one in his life. Nor does he realize that privatization of water and competition amongst businesses who provided water would lower prices. It would also hold polluters accountable for damaging another's private property.

[MN Patriot]

Did anybody here bother to debate the author? I scanned through the comments, but didn't see any real opposition to the article.

We should be out debating these people on their turf (or sites). If we can't convince them, at least try to understand how they think. I have been trying to understand liberals for some time now. It seems to me they are basically insane and/or retarded. But still able to function adequately from day to day to keep from starving to death.

[The Patriot]

Did anybody here bother to debate the author? I scanned through the comments, but didn't see any real opposition to the article.

We should be out debating these people on their turf (or sites). If we can't convince them, at least try to understand how they think. I have been trying to understand liberals for some time now. It seems to me they are basically insane and/or retarded. But still able to function adequately from day to day to keep from starving to death.

I did.

[SamFisher]

Start your flame engines... it's so hard left it hurts... :eek:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/14-7

lol

The biggest lie from MSM is they constantly overstate the taxes the rich & corporations pay by talking about nominal as opposed to effective tax rate and understate the taxes paid by the poor by constantly talking about income taxes as "federal taxes" and omitting any mention of payroll taxes.

YouTube - Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense, part 1 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ezb9rDIkbQ)

YouTube - Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense, part 2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgxxfQyrlhg)

[bchavez]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sally-kohn/the-super-rich-want-you-t_b_537210.html

http://movementvision.org/rants-polemics/taxes/