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The liberal Palm Beach Post likes to print Sam Goodstein's Letters to the Editor. Sam, as you remember, was Mayor Rene Varela's campaign treasurer and is a member of the Democratic Party and its club here in Lake Worth. Another one was published in today's paper. In it he slams the wealthy and mocks them unmercifully.
The last time I saw Sam he was at the Commission chamber and wanted me to move so that he could sit in my seat. I told him "no." Sit somewhere else. Different rules apply to Communists.
This attitude against the wealthy bothers me greatly. This is a capitalistic society. We are not Socialists or Communists who want to reward people the same for their ability or lack of as does Goodstein. Those who work hard reap the rewards of their labor and ingenuity. That's how it should be. It is fashionable among these people to sneer at the free enterprise system, the very system that has allowed us to be the greatest country on earth.
The top 10 percent of households in income are responsible for at least a quarter of all the money contributed to charity, and households with total wealth exceeding $1 million give about half of all charitable donations.
From Wiki Answers: Some quick statistics: The top 1% of earners pay 21.20% of all taxes paid at an average rate of 24%, the top 2 - 5% of earners pay 14.55% of all taxes at an average of 18% (Top 5% pay @36% of all tax) The bottom 50% pay 3% of all tax collected at an average rate of 2.98%.
The upper 50% of the wage earners pay @97% of all tax collections, and the lower ones only @3%. The upper of the upper pay a disproportionate share of that too, the Top 1% of earners = 37% of taxes paid, the next bracket 2-5% accounts for another 20%. So about 57% paid by the top 5%. Especially as this is for Personal Income Tax only, and many of the more wealthy have much of the income taxed (some would say double taxed) by in the Corporate returns of those corporations they control/own.
The problems we have here are all those who think they deserve everything without working for it. They want to take it all away from those who have worked hard, who have saved, who are giving back to society, who are creating jobs, who are innovative and yes, those who are grateful and give back to those less fortunate by huge contributions to charity and pay a lot in taxes.
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Here is an old email that explains it very well. Another is the college professor who redistributed grades until his entire class flunked. The fact is, that when you tax the rich, the rich leave......because they are able. Remember twenty years or so ago when the government thought that they would be smart and institute a luxury tax. Hell, the rich took one look at that and began purchasing their luxury cars, planes, and yachts overseas and denying the government all that tax revenue, and it shut down both the plane and boat industries in this country as well.
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
* The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
* The fifth would pay $1.
* The sixth would pay $3.
* The seventh would pay $7.
* The eighth would pay $12.
* The ninth would pay $18.
* The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. "Since you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20." Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But, what about the other six men; the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?' They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.
And so:
* The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
* The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
* The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28% savings).
* The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
* The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
* The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.
* "I only got a dollar out of the $20, "declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man," but he got $10!"
* "Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!"
* "That's true!!" shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!"
* "Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!"
* The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being
wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier
Great. You get your economic information from a spam e-mail.
Kind of a nonsensical comment. Whether true, untrue, or in email form, the gist of the story is what matters.
Maybe this will help educate.
Last week members of the Senate Finance Committee including chairman Max Baucus (D., Mont.), Jay Rockefeller (D., W.Va.), Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), and Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) cut a deal to increase the funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program to the tune of $35 billion over five years. To generate this money, the deal imposes a new luxury tax on cigars.
To understand why the luxury tax on cigars is a terrible idea, we need to revisit the history of the luxury tax of the early 1990s--a history that congressional members' severe amnesia is preventing them from remembering. Class-warfare thinking infected the luxury tax of 1990. Think of the multimillionaire whose wife was wearing a gold-and-diamond necklace and a fur coat. They were getting into their limousine to drive to their 100-foot yacht on which they would spend their weekend. How was it possibly fair that the rich spend so lavishly on such unnecessary items when Joe Six-Pack struggled just to put food on the table? Imposing a luxury tax on those items was a proper way to even things out, to make the rich pay their "fair share" to fund the government programs that helped Joe Six-Pack.
Unfortunately, Congress never bothered to consider that increasing the tax on these items, and thereby increasing the price of those items, might change the behavior of said rich people. (Indeed, many members of Congress stubbornly refuse ever to acknowledge that taxes ever affect behavior.) But said rich people had other ideas. If the price of jewelry, furs and yachts suddenly increased, then maybe purchasing a winter home in Florida seemed like a much better deal. Or maybe those rich people would take a shopping trip to other parts of the world, where the prices of jewelry, furs and yachts were now much more competitive thanks to the U.S. Congress.
And if members of Congress never considered that the luxury tax would discourage rich people from buying luxury items in the U.S., then they surely never considered that such an effect might not be so good for the Joe Six-Packs who worked in the industries producing luxury items. A Joint Economic Committee study later found that 330 jobs in the jewelry industry and 7,600 jobs in the yacht industry were lost thanks to the luxury tax. Perhaps the greatest irony was that in 1991 the federal government paid out over $7 million more in unemployment benefits to those workers than it collected in luxury tax revenues....
Fast forward to 2007. The current tax on cigars is a maximum 4.8 cents a cigar. The new proposed luxury tax on cigars is 53.13%, up to a maximum tax of $10 a cigar. Thus, if you like cigars worth $20, you'd be facing a staggering tax increase of 20,733%. By comparison, the luxury tax of 1990 was an increase of only 10%...
Of course, about as many people are going to shed tears for the person buying a $20 cigar as did for the rich person buying a yacht. But they might feel a lot of sympathy for the Joe Six-Packs who work in the cigar industry. Exact numbers about how many people work in the cigar industry today are hard to come by since the federal government stopped collecting data on cigar producers a few years ago. In 1999, the Census Bureau reported that 3,845 people worked in the cigar industry. Norm Sharp, president of the Cigar Association of America, guesstimates that the industry now employs between 7,500 and 10,000 workers, a plausible number given the growth in the industry in recent years. Whatever the number, what is clear is thousands of cigar employees face a fate similar to workers in the yacht and jewelry industries in 1990.
That is what Congress's severe case of historical amnesia yields--an astronomical tax increase leading to workers losing their jobs. But try to look at the bright side. If those cigar workers lose their jobs, the resulting decline in their incomes will mean that their kids will have no trouble qualifying for the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
"The last time I saw Sam he was at the commission chamber and wanted to sit in my seat. I told him no." Wow you must be very powerful and influential to have your own seat in the city chambers.
Wow! You must be a sarcastic witch.
Instead of these people trying to change our country, why don't they just move somewhere more pleasant for themselves? Freeloaders are in communist countries. they can go there. In the meantime, the working class stiff can support the rest of the world's freeloaders as we work our ass off.
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