The Super Rich Tax you to death

www.amazon.com...

Blowback by Christopher Simpson is another great classic

economics is a lie!!

Blowback: The First Full Account of America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on The cold war, Our Domestic and Foreign Policy. (Paperback)
~ Christopher Simpson

The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Paperback)
~ Christopher Simpson

www.amazon.com...=ntt_at_ep_dpt_4

Originally posted by drew hempel
reply to post by OnceReturned

 

Let's be real simple about this

over 50% of U.S. taxes goes the military.

Those who have no capital gains money coming in -- dividends -- with a LOW TAX RATE -- are forced to

SACRIFICE their kids

so the elite effeminate rich can continue with their

"passive ownership" of the corporations.

This investment goes to technology which then further automates production and seeks the lowest paid labor pool

SLAVERY if possible.

And there you have it.

Questions?

Social security and other wage poll taxes are REGRESSIVE and not counted in the tax rate since they're not income tax....

You sir, are a beast. This is one of the most striking analysis I've ever seen anywhere. It doesn't get any plainer or truer than that. The so called tax guidelines have little to do with actual taxes paid by the elite because they write off everything from their lunch, sons viper to the 20 grand in fuel for every ride on their private jet as a business expense. Most of the real profits are ferrited into offshore tax free accounts. The belief that the bottom 50% of wage earners only pay 3% of tax is logically faulty because they pay tax on all purchased goods and have little opportunity to use the writeoff scam.

[edit on 20-3-2010 by ISHAMAGI]

reply to post by drew hempel


So, what, halt progress and go back a few thousand years so that we can all be on a level paying field again?

Listen, pointing to dozens of books and then getting all smug about how I probably won't read them all because stupid people don't like to read is not the right way to have this conversation. I'm not insecure about my intellect and I read constantly. I don't have the time or desire to read a library of books indicting a system which I know works. I'm open minded and if you can provide something which you think is particularily compelling I'll check it out, but let's not get carried away.

If you want to play a highschool game about who uses their brain more I would suggest that you talk to me about some of the ideas that you got out of those books, instead of just pointing to them and saying you read them. I know that if I want to hear about how wrong anything is I can go to a library and read about. We're on a discussion forum to discuss, not to make a claim and then list all of the books someone could read in order to find out more about it. If you're comfortable with your position, express it and talk to me instead of just refering to things you think I should read.

I'm interested in having this sort of debate, especially if you're well informed and confident about your position, and we can keep from becoming repetitive or disrespectful. I think you're right on the line with that last one. I'm not interested in insults. If you want to have a respectful discussion, proceed accordingly. If you have a compelling argument and are smart then you will be able to make it - for yourself - without also being insulting. If you're not interested in having this discussion in a respectful way, or if you're too emotionally involved to be able to separate my attacks on your position from attacking you personally, then say so and we can stop. In general I like hearing what you have to say in part because you're pretty good about not watering down your position with rudeness, even when you disagree strongly.

Yeah I was in the streets of Seattle protesting the WTO:

Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire
By Walden Bello

books.google.com...,+wto,+walden+bello&source=bl&ots=Ko7t2lfNxL&sig=VPvNL6I023a-qW2UXoFdk1n9GiY&h l=en&ei=ilOlS8nGGIWVtgeYnYT_CQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CBYQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Where your income tax goes to:

www.wri-irg.org...

Originally posted by ISHAMAGI
The belief that the bottom 50% of wage earners only pay 3% of tax is logically faulty because they pay tax on all purchased goods and have little opportunity to use the writeoff scam.

You seriously think that the bottom 50% make up for the sliding scale tax differences by paying sales tax? They don't buy as much stuff and the stuff they buy isn't as expensive. The sales tax on a nice mercedes is more than the average earner pays in total income tax each year. There's absolutely no data to suggest that the bottom 50% pay even a substantial portion of the government's bill, let alone the majority of it. The wealthy pay for everything, even if they write off business dinners on a regular basis to avoid sales tax.

reply to post by OnceReturned


Houses are a tax shelter. So is commercial real estate! -- that's all highly leveraged speculative purchasing.

Art is tax deductible.

Horses are tax deductible.

tuesdayshorse.wordpress.com...

Yachts are a tax shelter.

www.huffingtonpost.com...

So there you have it - the purchases of the wealthy are write-offs.

All the "net operating loss" scams are fake sales to the wealthy as a tax shelter!!

www.nytimes.com...



[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

www.alternet.org...

How the scam works: A public company grants stock options to a top executive. The executive transfers the options to a trust or partnership controlled by his or her family. The transfer is called a "sale" and the trust "pays" for the options with a note due in 20 or 30 years. After the options are transferred, the trust exercises the option to buy stocks which it sells on the market. The executive plays out the fiction that tax is not owed until the deferred payment date, although in fact he controls the profit stashed offshore in a secret account where the IRS can't find it.

According to the IRS, business executives have used such shelters to evade taxes on $8 billion in income. Assume that means "at least." And that's just one swindle in the panoply of tax cheating which the IRS says contributes to the loss of $40 billion to $70 billion a year from individual use and $30 billion from corporate use of tax havens.

Those numbers are probably low: According to a Tax Justice Network report quoted by the Senate investigation and based on statistics from Merrill Lynch/Cap Gemini's "World Wealth Report" and the Boston Consulting Group's "Global Wealth Report," 16.2 percent of the private wealth of North Americans, $1.6 trillion, is held offshore. The overwhelming reason for that is tax evasion.

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

www.alternet.org...

French filmmaker Philippe Diaz, in an illuminating documentary opening in New York Friday, traces globalization back 500 years to the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the Americas. Diaz shows how the colonial North used the South’s resources to build its industrial base and how its continued control over resources, global trade and debt rules prevents developing countries from ending poverty.

He adds, "In the 18th century the Indian textiles were of a much better quality than those of the British. The British destroyed the Indian textile industry and prevented merchants within the British Empire from importing fabrics and other manufactured products from the colonies."

This economic model, the film says, has created a global situation in which today, less than 25 percent of the world’s population uses more than 80 percent of the planet’s resources.

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]

www.huffingtonpost.com...

The recent American International Group (AIG) scandal has outraged Americans from red and blue states alike. And now, we learn from the New York Times that AIG has the gall to sue the U.S. government demanding over $306 million back in taxes it paid - twice the amount of the now infamous executive bonuses.

The Panama FTA, a hangover trade deal negotiated by the Bush administration, would grant SICO and other Panama-registered corporations with offshore ties with expansive new rights to challenge U.S. public-interest regulations (like U.S. policies that crack down tax cheating, money laundering and risky shady financial dealings) in foreign tribunals, and to demand taxpayer compensation for regulations that undermine their expected future profits.

Free Trade -- the price paid:

www.globalissues.org...

findarticles.com...

Samir Amin gets reviewed:

The process of capital accumulation involves a transformation of initial money into commodities and then into a larger amount of money: the initial money plus surplus. Through this production and reproduction (accumulation) process, the surplus value is obtained by capitalists through exploiting the proletariat and working people. Amin has extended this process of capital accumulation into a theory of capital accumulation on a global scale. Capital accumulation process starts from a certain point at a specific time and continues penetrating and expanding on a global scale.

This center-periphery distinction means that the center is involved in the articulation of production of capital goods (sector I) and consumer goods (sector II) in a self-reliant (autocentric or inward looking) capitalist economy, delinked from structural dependence (Amin 2002). The center is characterized by the use of skilled labor and by the cohesive linkage between sectors I and II. Moreover, the center is integrated culturally, and the capitalist mode of production is the dominant one. The other part, the periphery, is generally marked by the articulation of production for export and luxury consumption (Amin 1994:92), and there is "lack of linkage between sectors I and II" (Ougaard 1982-83:388). In the periphery, the economy is specialized in the production of primary products and raw materials to satisfy the needs of the center. The periphery is characterized by an economic structure that is 'extraverted' "in the sense that the spinoff effects of growth are quickly transferred to the international economy." Culture and politics in the periphery are also weakly integrated, and "the capitalist mode of production, though dominant, is articulated with various "pre-capitalist" forms which are reproduced through the "development of underdevelopment" (Dunn 1978:79).

Samir Amin's latest book Eurocentrism:

www.amazon.com...=sr_1_1/187-6924538-5610712?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269129308&sr=1-1

This book is a provocative and compelling critical account of the historical, ideological, political, and economic order of the present world defined by the author as "Eurocentrism."According to Amin, Eurocentrism is the world view fabricated by the domination of Western capitalism that claims European culture reflects the unique and most progressive manifestation of the metaphysical order of history. Amin convincingly explains that Eurocentrism, thus understood, is an ideological distortion, an incredible mythology, and an historical and moral travesty. Eurocentrism. illegitimately appropriated Greek rationality and Christianity to legitimize and justify its newly created capitalistic social order; its economic, political, cultural, and military conquest of the world; and its exploitation of non-European humanity.

dailygrail.com...

We are now at a point where if the U.S. government taxed Americans 100% of their income, the tax receipts generated would not be enough to balance the budget. Likewise, if the U.S. government cut 100% of its spending including defense, but kept paying Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, we would still have a budget deficit. NIA believes it will be impossible for the U.S. to have a balanced budget ever again. The U.S. national debt is now $12.55 trillion of which $8.061 trillion is public debt. Due to the Federal Reserve's artificially low interest rates of 0% to 0.25%, interest payments on our national debt last month were only $16.9 billion, an interest rate of only 2.548% on our public debt. The reason for the spread between our 2.548% interest rate on the public debt and the federal funds rate of 0 to 0.25% is that a portion of our national debt is made up of long-term bonds at higher interest rates.

Originally posted by OnceReturned

Originally posted by ISHAMAGI
The belief that the bottom 50% of wage earners only pay 3% of tax is logically faulty because they pay tax on all purchased goods and have little opportunity to use the writeoff scam.

You seriously think that the bottom 50% make up for the sliding scale tax differences by paying sales tax? They don't buy as much stuff and the stuff they buy isn't as expensive. The sales tax on a nice mercedes is more than the average earner pays in total income tax each year. There's absolutely no data to suggest that the bottom 50% pay even a substantial portion of the government's bill, let alone the majority of it. The wealthy pay for everything, even if they write off business dinners on a regular basis to avoid sales tax.

I'm suggesting it makes up for some of the difference, not all. If what you say is true then why are these elite so opposed to a flat tax without loopholes. As far as big
business they are given breaks on land, breaks on permits, and then many times don't even have to pay a dime of tax on any of the startup till they turn
a profit. Conversely when I start a small business I'm afforded none of these advantages.
As far as your worldview it can't really be called that because you tend to only care about what affects you and your immediate surroundings. Lets not forget this little American experiment is only 250 years old, it cannot be compared to Greece, Rome, China, Egypt, Persia civilizations which worked for millenia. But outside of that do you generally care how your comfort is obtained?

In the short timespan of 400 years Europe and America has laid Africa barren, stripped the rainforest away and robbed without prejudice virtually every
3rd world country on the planet under the guise of capitalism and democracy, but in truth it was just a big wealth and resource grab. We move through human capital and leave devistation in our wake. When it got to expensive to pay Americans we went to Mexico, that got to expensive India, that got to expensive Honduras. And we just keep rolling.

Your idea of an a to b system for moving up the ladder is nieve at best. A degree doesn't guarantee employment even for smart people its more about who you know. And these elite never had to earn their fortune we ain't talking Andrew Carnegie or other captains of industry who were really intelligent, were talking silver spoon never worked a day in their life till they were handed the governership of Texas George Bush types. Used to be a day when daddy started em at the bottom and made em work to the top, no these guys are given the keys to the kingdom from birth and just told to run with it. Intelligence bah, they almost bankrupted the country then cry for a bailout and get retention bonuses! Any retard can put a business under quite efficiently and for a lot less with no so called 'special skills'.

The point is our economy operates as a resource oriented, profit driven, human capital exploited ponzi scheme. And what do you think will happen to your way of life when there are no slaves left to exploit, and no foreign land left to plunder, it'll go right into the crapper along with the rest of the failed fiat currency economies of times past and much faster than a millenia.

reply to post by drew hempel


So, it sounds like the Eurocentrism thesis is that europe(and presumably the u.s.) are able to grow economically by exploiting less developed naitons. Let's assume the argument described above advancing this position is correct. Doesn't this state of affairs seem to be what people want? At least, north american and european people? Don't we have the right to act in our own best interests? It's not like humanity has any history of coming to a globaly equitable arrangement. Some group of people will be in power, and control and use more of the resources. Aren't nations motivated to control resources and exploit the less powerful?

I don't think that it's necessarily a bad thing for a group of people to act in a way that secures more resources for themselves, even if that means that another group of people is deprived of those resources. The earth does have limited resources. Isn't this whole human civilization thing somewhat of a competition? Isn't evolution - biological and cultural - predicated on the idea that when availible resources are limited it's survival of the fittest? I'm not implying any biological superiority here, I'm implying cultural/national economic dominance.

I think that competition for resources is the name of the game on a fundamental level, and I don't feel bad for being on the winning side. Anyone who wants to donate their resources to less developed nations is free to do so, but the reality is that most people don't particularily want to. The people who are more powerful are the ones who get to make the decisions - like it or not - and we are living those decisions right now. Exposing that we are living well at the expense of undeveloped nations will not make anyone sell their TV and send aid to Africa.

Of course, at some level I acknowledge that all of this is an unfortunate state of affairs. It would be nice if people didn't want stuff so badly, and would therefore give up some of their resources in an effort to create a more equitable situation for undeveloped nations. It would be nice if suddenly we could find ourselves in a state of global equality in terms of resources, and then we could all agree that no one group of people would try to become more powerful or try to take anyone else's resources. But, it's self evident that this is not a realistic situation. People compete for resources and always have and always will because it is human nature. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Maybe someday technology will advance to such a point that we can endulge our empathy to such an extent that everyone can live equally well because the resources that people consider valuable will be made inexhaustable. We're not there yet. In the meantime every group of people is in competition with every other group of people. If the population as a whole decided they wanted to put an end to this they could, immediately. We're not there yet, either.

reply to post by ISHAMAGI


See post above as far as the exploitation thing is concerned.

I think your concept of the wealthy is an inaccurate stereotype. According to Forbes about one third of the super-wealthy in the United States inherited their money. Two thirds are self-made. Not to mention it's okay to pass your fortune on to your kids. If it's your money you get to decide where it goes. Who else should have any say?

As far as what happens when the exploitation thing has gone as far as it can go.... the SHTF as they say over in the survival forum. I don't know. The world will change a lot and it will probably be really bad. I think that that is indefinitely far into the future and I hope that technological advances are of the sort that allow us to mitigate global meltdown.

Technology does not have to advance for a more equitable distribution of resources. During the great depression they let grain rot in the silos because it couldn't be sold. America alone has enough to feed the whole world while thousands die everyday from starvation and diseases attributed to it. If it doesn't make profit human life means nothing to those in control of said resources. If you cannot see that there is something fundamentally wrong with that it is because you bought the beans.

Hoarding and greed are not natural concepts they are taught and learned just like the free market and capitalism. After generations the weak through their own comfort and immobility begin to accept these ideas as the best system ever and perhaps even part of human nature.

The real issue lies with Darwinism and the dogma behind it. Survival of the fittest may apply to ants in a colony or even a caveman, but the very concept of civilization negates his theory's when applied to modern day humans. There is more than enough on the planet for everyone right now, scarcity is another taught myth used to manipulate the so called free market for profit. When you wholeheartedly buy into Darwinism you immediately devalue human life. There need be no competition for
the basics of life as survival of the fittest does not apply to sentient intelligent human life this day in age. Lets remember Darwin was not studying humans he just applied his simple minded concepts to us. Thus he created 150 years of chattel and the foundation for a new type of slavery.

What is wrong with this doctrine is it is morally reprehensible, and negates any further real humanitarian progress. As mixed up as religon is the one thing they got right is a moral code and that's what needs to be taken into account in any area of application to changing the system. If you would not run into your neighbors house steal all his food and money and make him your endentured servant for a slice of bread and 32 cents per day, how can you defend someone else's 'right' to do it.

reply to post by OnceReturned



Hello? Commerce Clause in the U.S. constitution rules family farm protection unconstitutional -- NO we don't have the right to act in our best interests!!

aglaw.blogspot.com...

So while the Eighth Circuit may be going hog wild striking down anti-corporate farming laws, I'm not so sure that the Supreme Court will uphold these opinions - that is, if it ever decides to review one of these cases. However, I don't think that this new public/private distinction will provide any new ammunition for the anti-corporate farming crowd.

reply to post by OnceReturned


Flat tax Forbes is an idiot -- yes I know he's promoting his new "how capitalism will save us" book -- right now on CSPAN!!

How ironic -- that capitalism is shoved down the throat of U.S. citizens, again, as per the Commerce Clause -- Chomsky documents this in detail -- the founding fathers overtly promoted a plutocracy, not a democracy.

Just consider Shay's Rebellion.

Oops - Forbes just ain't very successful is it?

www.businessinsider.com...

Forbes had layoffs this morning according to a source at the company, and more cuts will be coming later this week. It's not clear where the cuts will come--from the business side or the editorial side. Reading the memo sent by Steve Forbes to the staff, it appears the cuts will fall more on the business side of operations.

[edit on 20-3-2010 by drew hempel]