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stormson
the tax rate for the top. in 1946 it was 91%. it was 50% when reagan took office. 8 years later it was just 28%.
taxes serve two purposes. one is to fund the gov, the other is to place checks on greed.
the only way for the gov to get money is by taxes,
yet you are the same people that say a fry cook shouldnt make living wage because it takes from profits.
just as i believe in progressive taxation, i believe in progressive income.
from ww2 till reagan, the national debt decreased. from reagan till now the debt increased, 186% under him alone ( what a fiscal conservative? ). the only time it decreased was under clinton, which ill explain in a moment.
remember how clinton balanced the budget and decreased the debt? it was because he increased taxes on the rich, bringing in more money to the gov. the only way for the gov to get money is by taxes, so lower the taxes, lower the money the gov has to pay its bills.
We are already over taxed.
FlyersFan
GOOD! The lower the taxes, the better. The government has NO RIGHT to steal money from Americans. We are already over taxed. There is no reason for the taxes to be as high as they are. If the government would spend more wisely, we wouldnt' be paying the taxes that we do today.
'Place checks on greed'???? Are you kidding???
1 - The people running government in DC are the greedy ones. They want more and more money to fund their stupid irrelevant projects and to fund their rich lifestyles.
That's not true. If the government would SPEND MORE WISELY and not waste money, it would have plenty of money and wouldn't be trying to steal more of ours to fund it. And if the government invested wisely it wouldn't need any money from us at all. And if the government stopped giving away our money to foreign governments in 'aid', they'd have plenty to keep things moving along just fine.
Separate issue. Not all wages are supposed to be 'living wages'. A fry cook is a dime a dozen and easily replaced... but an educated professional like a doctor or engineer has more skills and knowledge, is harder to find, and is therefore worth more. Simple economics.
I believe in what a free market can support ... not a forced communist ideal. Free market works. Invasive government intervention like a fored 'progressive income' will fail every time because the government is incapable of running anything correctly. Obamacare is a perfect example of the buffoonery of big government.
buster2010
The constant cutting of taxes is what screwed this country.
its been 30 years from ww2 till reagan. 30 years from reagan till now. lets compare....
A leveraged buyout... occurs when an investor, typically financial sponsor, acquires a controlling interest in a company's equity and where a significant percentage of the purchase price is financed through leverage (borrowing). The assets of the acquired company are used as collateral for the borrowed capital.... Typically, leveraged buyout uses a combination of various debt instruments from bank and debt capital markets...
The leveraged buyout boom of the 1980s was conceived by a number of corporate financiers, most notably Jerome Kohlberg, Jr. and later his protégé Henry Kravis. Working for Bear Stearns at the time, Kohlberg and Kravis, along with Kravis' cousin George Roberts, began a series of what they described as "bootstrap" investments...en.wikipedia.org...
....Both economic and regulatory factors combined to spur the explosion in large takeovers and, in turn, large LBOs. The three regulatory factors were the Reagan administration's relatively laissez-faire policies on antitrust and securities laws, which allowed mergers the government would have challenged in earlier years; the 1982 Supreme Court decision striking down state antitakeover laws (which were resurrected with great effectiveness in the late eighties); and deregulation of many industries, which prompted restructurings and mergers. The main economic factor was the development of the original-issue high-yield debt instrument. The so-called "junk bond" innovation, pioneered by Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham, provided many hostile bidders and LBO firms with the enormous amounts of capital needed to finance multi-billion-dollar deals.... www.econlib.org...
...In January 1982, former US Secretary of the Treasury William Simon and a group of investors acquired Gibson Greetings, a producer of greeting cards, for $80 million, of which only $1 million was rumored to have been contributed by the investors. By mid-1983, just sixteen months after the original deal, Gibson completed a $290 million IPO and Simon made approximately $66 million.[9] The success of the Gibson Greetings investment attracted the attention of the wider media to the nascent boom in leveraged buyouts.[10] Between 1979 and 1989, it was estimated that there were over 2,000 leveraged buyouts valued in excess of $250 billion..... www.econlib.org...
......The three regulatory factors were the Reagan administration's relatively laissez-faire policies on antitrust and securities laws, which allowed mergers the government would have challenged in earlier years; the 1982 Supreme Court decision striking down state antitakeover laws (which were resurrected with great effectiveness in the late eighties); and deregulation of many industries, which prompted restructurings and mergers. The main economic factor was the development of the original-issue high-yield debt instrument. The so-called "junk bond" innovation, pioneered by Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham, provided many hostile bidders and LBO firms with the enormous amounts of capital needed to finance multi-billion-dollar deals....www.econlib.org...
Corporate takeovers became a prominent feature of the American business landscape during the seventies and eighties. A hostile takeover usually involves a public tender offer—a public offer of a specific price, usually at a substantial premium over the prevailing market price, good for a limited period, for a substantial percentage of the target firm's stock. Unlike a merger, which requires the approval of the target firm's board of directors as well as voting approval of the stockholders, a tender offer can provide voting control to the bidding firm without the approval of the target's management and directors.....
Because it allows bidders to seek control directly from shareholders—by going "over the heads" of target management—the tender offer is the most powerful weapon available to the hostile bidder. ... Although hostile bidders still need a formal merger to gain total control of the target's assets, this is easily accomplished once the bidder has purchased a majority of voting stock.... www.econlib.org...
Of mergers and acquisitions each costing $1 million or more, there were just 10 in 1970; in 1980, there were 94; in 1986, there were 346. A third of such deals in the 1980's were hostile. The 1980's also saw a wave of giant leveraged buyouts. Mergers, acquisitions and L.B.O.'s, which had accounted for less than 5 percent of the profits of Wall Street brokerage houses in 1978, ballooned into an estimated 50 percent of profits by 1988...
THROUGH ALL THIS, THE HISTORIC RELATIONSHIP between product and paper has been turned upside down.. These days, corporations seem to exist for the investment bankers.... In fact, investment banks are replacing the publicly held industrial corporations as the largest and most powerful economic institutions in America....
Corporate raiders transfer to themselves, and other shareholders, part of the income of employees by forcing the latter to agree to lower wages.....
January 29, 1989 www.nytimes.com... New York Times
Congress spends the money. Reagan asked for cuts in spending repeatedly and was chastised for it by the left.
No, Clinton did not balance the budget. Remember, Congress spends the money. It was the much maligned Newt Gingrich that led the Congress that accomplished this feat (where did it get us?) that you are trumpeting!
However, this talking point is much more fiction than fact. For starters, as USA Today noted, “Gingrich was in office for only two of those budget years (fiscal 1998 and 1999). But he continues to claim credit for two balanced budgets that were passed after he left office (fiscal 2000 and 2001).” Furthermore, as Citizens for Tax Justice’s Bob McIntyre wrote, it was actually the 1993 budget, which all Republicans opposed, that laid the groundwork for the balanced budgets that occurred under President Bill Clinton:
stormson
taxes serve two purposes. one is to fund the gov, the other is to place checks on greed. by taxing the top so much, the desire for them to pay themselves stupid amounts of money is reduced. all that extra money in the company allows for expansion, increased benefits, and retirement plans.
...The idea of pooling resources and spreading risk using closed-end investments soon took root in Great Britain and France, making its way to the United States in the 1890s....
The creation of the Massachusetts Investors' Trust in Boston, Massachusetts, heralded the arrival of the modern mutual fund in 1924. The fund went public in 1928, eventually spawning the mutual fund firm known today as MFS Investment Management....
The mutual fund industry continued to expand. At the beginning of the 1950s, the number of open-end funds topped 100. In 1954, the financial markets overcame their 1929 peak, and the mutual fund industry began to grow in earnest, adding some 50 new funds over the course of the decade. The 1960s saw the rise of aggressive growth funds, with more than 100 new funds established and billions of dollars in new asset inflows.
Hundreds of new funds were launched throughout the 1960s...
The 1970s also saw the rise of the no-load fund. This new way of doing business had an enormous impact on the way mutual funds were sold and would make a major contribution to the industry's success.
With the 1980s and '90s came bull market mania and previously obscure fund managers became superstars; Max Heine, Michael Price and Peter Lynch, the mutual fund industry's top gunslingers, became household names and money poured into the retail investment industry at a stunning pace....
www.investopedia.com...
Abstract
The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability... We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.
...In many countries the distribution of income has become more unequal, and the top earners’ share of income in particular has risen dramatically. In the United States the share of the top 1 percent has close to tripled over the past three decades, now accounting for about 20 percent of total U.S. income (Alvaredo and others, 2012). At the same time, while the new convergence mentioned above has reduced the distance between advanced and developing economies...
stormson
from ww2 till reagan, wages were higher and companies gave you retirement and benefits.
after reagan, those things have vanished for the most part.
If you think we are overtaxed now you know nothing about paying taxes. The constant cutting of taxes is what screwed this country.
I think it's time for a new definition of usury as follows: any interest on any loan of fiat money (meaning money made out of nothing). This example of a $100,000 home, as shocking as it is, producing $172,741 unearned interest, this is just a grain of sand in the Sahara. You have to multiply that by all the homes in America, by all of these hotels in America, all the high-rise buildings, all the factories, all the airplanes, automobiles, farm equipment, schools, everything, all the physical assets of America. You apply this same ratio and can you see it in your mind? We're talking about a river of unearned wealth that is so wide you can't even think of crossing it, flowing perpetually into the banking cartel. A dead short across the productive element of society. Money being taken from people who are working hard providing the material and the labor. They don't even know that this is being taken from them and it's in this huge river of wealth flowing into the banking cartel. It's a staggering thought.
“A disordered currency is one of the greatest of evils. It wars against industry, frugality, and economy. And it fosters the evil spirits of extravagance and speculation. Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effectual than that which deludes them with paper money. This is one of the most effectual of inventions to fertilize the rich man’s field by the sweat of the poor man’s brow. Ordinary tyranny, oppression, excessive taxation: These bear lightly the happiness of the mass of the community, compared with fraudulent currencies and robberies committed with depreciated paper.”
“Robberies committed with depreciated paper,” the man said. This was another way of referring to bad debt. In the accepted American view of the time, bad money led to excessive credit. Excessive credit led to bad debt. And bad debt was part and parcel of bad economic policy. It harmed the nation. The accumulation of bad debt was ruinous to the growth of the economy.
Stunning. Where did you get that idea? Taxes punish the greedy?
Federal receipts by source as share of total receipts (1950-2010). Individual income taxes (blue), payroll taxes/FICA (green), corporate income taxes (red), excise taxes (purple), estate and gift taxes (light blue), other receipts (orange). en.wikipedia.org...