Progressive idea 80% tax - income over $500K doesn't go far enough to fix income inequality

originally posted by: criticalhit
Riddle me this, why the hell would I ever remain an American citizen and live here if you took 80% of my money?

Well that is a real conundrum here. How does a country make money if all the people who can actually make money leave?

a reply to: xuenchen

I was talking about an income cap, not higher taxes. The government already takes enough of what we make. Their problem is that they spend it all on finding new ways to kill people instead of using it FOR THE PEOPLE.

I agree with them getting off of their bums and getting jobs back. Whoever thought it was smart to outsource all of our work was a greedy and stupid person. That decision could have only been made with greed at heart.

I myself am currently out of work, and decided to start my own computer repair business. Its pretty sad when the ONLY option I had was to either go on unemployment (which I'm sure you will be glad to hear, I haven't) or take out my 401k money that I had been saving for the last 5 years(30k before taxes and fees, 17 after.), and try to make my own work.

If this doesn't succeed I will be broke, out of a job, and probably homeless. BUT it's better than relying on others to get me by.

It it works, I'll get some of the wonderful tax breaks you get when owning a business. So there's that.

originally posted by: beezzer
Just hush up and buy a Xbox for someone who didn't earn it!

Why do you need to bring my kids into this?

originally posted by: beezzer



Just hush up and buy a Xbox for someone who didn't earn it!

A Xbox? Beezer, you elitist holier-than-thou jackass, that's wage discrimination. They exist so they deserve the best... get out there and buy them a Playstation 4 you selfish capitalist greedmonger. You and yours can make do with the Atari 2600 you can afford after the taxes have been paid.

originally posted by: burdman30ott6
a reply to: Xtrozero

It's a damned strange world, my friend. We live in a society in which there are people who feel there's zero responsibility required of someone who can't keep it in their pants and bears numerous children... yet if you make enough money to live comfortably you suddenly should be responsible for a slew of strangers outside your own family.

Arrogance, pure unadulterated arrogance... yet bizzaro world arrogance. Usually people express arrogance over their personal acheivements, but America 2014 it's all about the arrogance of failure and the entitlement of the strugglers. "I exist therefore I deserve..." I've called it off putting before, but the person I was talking to go confused and ordered butterscotch, so I let the topic drop.

You just don't care. I don't want to hear about the years it took you to become successful.
I don't want to hear about your charities.
I don't want to hear about how much you give to help others.

It.
Isn't.
Enough!

Gimme.

originally posted by: andr3w68

I was talking about an income cap, not higher taxes.

Seems like a good way to enact an effort cap, too. In other words, "My boss has told me I'm at my federally mandated income cap so that means I've also reached my logically mandated effort at work cap."

originally posted by: Xtrozero

originally posted by: beezzer
Just hush up and buy a Xbox for someone who didn't earn it!

Why do you need to bring my kids into this?

Kids???

Do they need some trophies?

We'll give them to your kids, but if they try to better than anyone else. . . . well. . . we'll have to suspend them.

Sorry!

a reply to: andr3w68

And which genius would decide who the genius would be to decide where to cap an income?

You realize that won't work.

If somebody buys stock in a company, who would decide when enough profit is enough?

Who would decide how much a brain surgeon is worth?

originally posted by: andr3w68
a reply to: Destinyone

Well then how does a cap at 1M a year sound. Something needs to be done, because greed is a thing. If you built a company from the ground and have 500 employees, wouldn't the sense of pride be better trickling that extra money down to your employees? You can't tell me that someone actually deserves to make millions or even billions a year, regardless of what they do. If I can get by on less than 100k a year, what makes you need the ability to earn more than 500k+. The answer is nothing. If people stopped wanting to live in extreme excess, maybe some of the people who have nothing would be a little better off.

I have nothing against you personally, I just think it's wrong to be that greedy. At 500k per year you can live JUST FINE. If you live like a normal person, you can even take some really nice vacations, and maybe even own a yacht or two. Why do you need more than that?

One person's extreme excess, is another's comfort zone. Your proposal to tell me what is extreme, is stupid. Yep, I said stupid.

Then, if we follow your thinking. We ALL live with the exact same appliances, homes cars, number of children. Eat the exact same foods....and so on...

Who the hell is going to make sure we are equal...not Bezzer that's for sure. He's for a hard work ethic, and you reap what you sow.

Your Socialist Utopia, is what this administration would like, exempting themselves, of course.

Sorry, I can't agree with what you think, I should do with MY money, I EARN.

Des

a reply to: beezzer

I don't know Beezzer, but that is how I feel sometimes already, the government is been doing that for quite a while, remember now they are telling us how to buy insurance. he, he.

a reply to: grandmakdw

Here is the truth...WE are in DEEP..DEEP TROUBLE.

A recent French economist summed it up by looking back through history.

The "shared prosperity" and general income equality the USA and most of the world experienced during the 50's, 60's and declining into the 70's and 80's was NOT the normal state of our system, it was the ANOMOLY!..The after-effects of two world wars and the industrial revolution.

The normal outcome of the system we have is what we are getting...the very rich and the very poor...the middle class was an anomaly that resulted from WWI+WW2+Great Depression.

Looking back in history there was always the peasant class and the wealthy...and that is where we are headed again as the anomaly of the "middle class" withers naturally and dies.

We can either have another World War or we can change things systematically...or we can continue on the path to peasants vs. the few, very wealthy like the norm has been in history.

It basically goes like this...as long as return on investment is higher than GDP..the difference will gather toward the top 5-10% at the same rate the rest of the country gets poorer.

If we decide that we don't want an old world European society of peasants and the wealthy (no middle class) then we need to look to countries that have been successful in slowing the race toward that default state.

Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, Germany, hell even Australia, France and the UK...

The USA has one of the most flawed systems, actually rewarding the wealthy for sitting on their money vs. investing it. It's more profitable for the wealthy to do nothing and get wealthier than to re-circulate that wealth back into the economy.

We are screwed unless big changes come...

a reply to: Indigo5

Exacto mundo, you are very much right, look what happen with the bailout and now the QEs, the money is been held back, even invested in foreign countries and what is happening with our own nations economy? we are not better now than before the bailouts, the big corporate America run by elite either are afraid of the next soon to be another downfall of our nations markets or they are soo greedy that they can not seem to feel they need to help the economy.

a reply to: Indigo5

In his new book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (Harvard University Press), Mr. Piketty, 42, has written a blockbuster, at least in the world of economics. His book punctures earlier assumptions about the benevolence of advanced capitalism and forecasts sharply increasing inequality of wealth in industrialized countries, with deep and deleterious impact on democratic values of justice and fairness.

...

His findings, aided by the power of modern computers, are based on centuries of statistics on wealth accumulation and economic growth in advanced industrial countries. They are also rather simply stated: The rate of growth of income from capital is several times larger than the rate of economic growth, meaning a comparatively shrinking share going to income earned from wages, which rarely increase faster than overall economic activity. Inequality surges when population and the economy grow slowly.

....

The reason that postwar economies looked different — that inequality fell — was historical catastrophe. World War I, the Depression and World War II destroyed huge accumulations of private capital, especially in Europe. What the French call “les trentes glorieuses” — the roughly 30 postwar years of rapid economic growth and shrinking inequality — were a rebound. The American curve, of course, is less sharp, given that the fighting was elsewhere.

A higher than normal rate of population and economic growth helped reduce inequality, along with higher taxes on the wealthy. But the professional and political assumption of the 1950s and 1960s, that inequality would stabilize and diminish on its own, proved to be an illusion. We are now back to a traditional pattern of returns on capital of 4 percent to 5 percent a year and rates of economic growth of around 1.5 percent a year.

So inequality has been quickly gathering pace, aided to some degree by the Reagan and Thatcher doctrines of tax cuts for the wealthy. “Trickle-down economics could have been true,” Mr. Piketty said simply. “It just happened to be wrong.”

www.nytimes.com...

a reply to: grandmakdw

Your satire is not amusing....
The Obamantion's interest in raising the minimum wage is just another tactic to keep us at each others throats... $10.10 / hr.?
Why not make it $50.00 / hr.? Hell...what wrong with $100.00 / hr.

originally posted by: nomickeyshere
a reply to: grandmakdw

Your satire is not amusing....
The Obamantion's interest in raising the minimum wage is just another tactic to keep us at each others throats... $10.10 / hr.?
Why not make it $50.00 / hr.? Hell...what wrong with $100.00 / hr.

Why not eliminate minimum wage and allow child labor again?

Are you aware that the minimum wage in real dollars has been steadily falling since it's high in 1968? While CEO pay continues to jump year after year breaking new records annually?

A lot of you guys are complaining but are no where near making 500k a year...
Ok, sure 80% taxes sounds too much at first hand but let`s say I would come up with an idea like :
Taxing the rich 80%!
No no, wait wait, I would also give them conditional tax breaks.

Buy from your country, get a % off.
Re-invest in your company or other companies in your country, get a % off.
Create jobs, get % off.
Etc.
Up to a point similar to now.

We need something to boost the economy from the ground up. Create jobs, more small companies, blooming regional markets and more.
Like Indigo5 said above me, if we aren`t finding ways to fix the economy, we will go back to feudal days concerning riches. Even neanderthals with their minds focused on personal liberty need to at least understand this part.

originally posted by: Indigo5
Are you aware that the minimum wage in real dollars has been steadily falling since it's high in 1968? While CEO pay continues to jump year after year breaking new records annually?

Then everyone just has to become CEO`s.
Get better jobs.

Freedom baby! Don`t take MINE away and get yours by yourself, I ain`t helping you.

originally posted by: grandmakdw
www.nysun.com...

The Democratic party seems to be excited about fixing "income inequality", even Obama has been talking about it lately.

An economist has written a book that has liberals, Democrats, and progressives thrilled at his proposed solutions.

He advocates sharply higher tax rates on both income and capital. For America, he recommends “a rate on the order of 80 percent on incomes over $500,000 or $1 million a year,” along with rates of “50 or 60 percent on incomes above $200,000.” In addition to that, he proposes a tax on capital of one percent a year on fortunes of about $1,380,000, increasing to an annual tax of five or ten percent a year on fortunes of several hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. That would be enforced globally with new tax forms requiring everyone to disclose the value of all assets.

I say that is not good enough!

There should be an 80% tax on all personal assets over $3 Million because $3 Million is the accepted savings needed for a comfortable retirement. With exemptions for the primary residence, and one vehicle per person in the household. That would bring about true income equality.

How about it!

Should we start a white house petition so that people who live off trust funds and hide money in stocks/bonds and other sources of "non-income, income" which is currently not considered income will have to live off what the rest of us do.

Is this a joke. Why would ever want to make just more that and get taxed into oblivion. Why should others take someone else's money. You don't actually think the Feds will spend it wisely unless it is for more war and spying.

originally posted by: Xtrozero

originally posted by: criticalhit
Riddle me this, why the hell would I ever remain an American citizen and live here if you took 80% of my money?

Well that is a real conundrum here. How does a country make money if all the people who can actually make money leave?

If you leave, make sure you denounce your American citizenship. I hear that ex-patriots get to pay both U.S. taxes AND taxes to whatever country they currently live in. That sounds like a lot of fun. Taxation without representation? Hmmm....

originally posted by: theMediator
We need something to boost the economy from the ground up. Create jobs, more small companies, blooming regional markets and more.

Like Indigo5 said above me, if we aren`t finding ways to fix the economy, we will go back to feudal days concerning riches. Even neanderthals with their minds focused on personal liberty need to at least understand this part.

Most of us "Neanderthals" have been pushing a solution, but both the bought and paid for politicians and the creampuff progressive Americans have lambasted it to hell. REINSTATE IMPORT TARIFFS AND ELIMINATE OFFSHORE MANUFACTURING BREAKS. You don't need a goddamned minimum wage increase or a ridiculous 80% tax bracket to level the playing field, you only need a restored manufacturing base in the USA. The absence of import tariffs allows a widget to be manufactured in Cambodia for $0.10, shipped to America for $0.05, and sold for $4.99 on American shelves next to American made widgets going for $5.50. That undercutting in price is possible because the American widgets cost $4.00 to make (thanks to wages and taxation foreign manufacturers don't have to worry about like Social Security and ACA insurance provisions). Foreign widget sold for $0.51 less per unit makes 3-times the profit vs American widget that people are paying more for.

Instill market price-based import tarifs and remove some of the domestic manufacturing taxes with an eye towards making the American made products more attractive to cost coscious consumers and the imports less lucrative to the producers. The argument that often gets thrown into the mix regarding how this policy will harm American exporters is moot... America's trade deficit is ridiculous already, any further "damage" done to it will experience the law of diminishing returns, with returns being real damage to the American economy. The overall result would be a very positive increase in GDP and a tremendous reduction in imports, likely to the point that America's trade deficit would actually go down. Furthermore, instill a higher tax rate on foreign corporate investment capital gains to discourage investment into foreign companies and encourage domestic investment.

These are common sense, FAIR solutions that would work. The only thing preventing them are globalist minded policy makers and the self depreciating morons that support them and their concept of a global economy.