proselytism

[rone]

I am throwing my support behind Wesley Clark (not merely because of this, that is, but it's a good quote).

"If [Republican strategist] Karl Rove is watching today, Karl, I want you to hear me loud and clear: I am going to provide tax cuts to ease the burdens for 31 million American families -- and lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty -- by raising the taxes on 0.1 percent of families -- those who make more than $1,000,000 a year. You don't have to read my lips, I'm saying it," Clark said.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Punish the rich, or punish the poor. People say it's not a zero-sum game, but they are essentially lying. If rich people pay less taxes, and you are not rich, you will pay more sooner or later. That's how it works.

Rich people were arguably being punished by the tax structure that existed prior to the Reagan administration. The pendulum has swung absurdly far in the other direction since then, and conservatives unabashedly speak now of wanting poor people to get soaked even more, ostensibly with the idea that they'll advocate smaller government then. (The favored rhetorical trick is to point out that destitute "lucky duckies" don't pay any income tax, as if that were the only kind of tax.)

Somehow this method of shrinking the government is better than, you know, actually just shrinking the government, probably because the shrinking part takes place in some unspecified future in which somebody else makes the hard decisions. Kind of like how the Republicans used to want to balance the budget by passing a constitutional amendment requiring people to magically balance the budget. Strange how you don't hear much about that any more.

Those who call this kind of talk "class warfare" are just trying to prevent retaliation for first strikes.

And that is my liberal soapbox speech for the week.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Matt. The "lucky duckies" rhetoric is especially condescending and insulting, and the "class warfare" crap is reaching the same level.

"Something dee oh oh economics?" You really ought to read Al Franken's "Lies", lots42. Feel free to skip over the humor and head straight to the parts where he explains how the poor get taxed.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

There are aspects of the tax code that inadvertently punish people attempting to improve their lot - escalating your income just slightly can nudge you into a higher tax bracket and the tax increase is greater than the income increase. But on the large scale, the principle of 'punishing the wealthy' is only valid if the wealthy must suffer deprivations or cease to be wealthy because of taxation. While I could argue I'm being punished at my income level - I could buy a car with what I paid in income taxes in 2003, and I can really use a car right now, as a professional necessity, not a luxury - there are no equivalent deprivations for people in the top income brackets, and there have probably never been in this country.

I can't generate any sympathy for the problems of the wealthy. None whatsoever. Go ahead, make me wealthy, and I'll tell you how much I suffer. If it sucked so much, so many people wouldn't be aspiring to it.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That's not how tax brackets work, at least not with federal taxes; unless I'm mistaken, when you pass a bracket threshold the higher rate applies only to income above the threshold, so that your take-home pay still increases monotonically, just at a lower rate. The discontinuity is in the first derivative, in other words.

That said, the tax code is not perfect and there are things in it that create perverse incentives. A good example is the Alternative Minimum Tax. This was a well-intentioned means of closing some loopholes that allowed millionaire CEOs to avoid paying most of their income tax by being compensated in creative ways. But an unintended side effect is to make it dangerous to hold onto stock obtained as a result of exercising employee stock options, because if the value goes down you can end up being taxed under the AMT on money you never actually had, something that can really wipe you out if you're not prepared for it. The result is that people almost always dump the stock immediately, and options no longer function as a means of encouraging employees to invest in their own companies, which is something the tax code generally tries to promote.