If Bernie Sanders is president the amount in additional taxes I would pay equals a new Honda Civic

a reply to: Edumakated

Stop paying taxes. Hide your money as a loss. Make it look like Poor investments abroad and keep it there.

You can keep about 9000 as an apparent loss for only 1000 in bogus paperwork and operating costs.

Go to school in Mexico and "pay too much" write it off.

And so on.


Dont own property here and dont keep money in US banks.

a reply to: matafuchs

I think not.

All it would take, is for some very wealthy people to accept that their profits will have to be smaller, and continue to employ the same number of people, at a better rate of pay. That is what a decent person would do, from a position of wealth and comfort. Business worth more than twenty million? Personal assets in the hundreds of millions? The sort of problems experienced by such people as a result of taking a profit hit are not problems, they are illnesses, kleptomania in a posh frock, and little else.

"Why can't I keep exploiting people, like I used to? It was much better for me, because that huge pile of cash that no human being ever born could spend in one life time was growing much faster before I had to behave like a human! Damn you fairness and decency in business!"

a reply to: TrueBrit

However, since it is the case that a small number of people holding a huge majority of wealth is bad for society in general (which, by the way, is not in question in the least), and since one persons rights end, where the rights of another begin, it cannot be right that a persons right to become obese off the backs of the labours of others, can ever outweigh the right of a hardworking person to have safety, security, health, warmth, light, and access to data, without having to worry about the cost of it to the point of choosing to drop one of these things from their expenditure for a year.

There is a fine line between holding the majority of wealth and creating the majority of wealth. What's worse than both of those is expecting wealth while at the same time doing very little to hold or create it.

If that 1% never created that wealth to begin with, it's foolish to believe it would have just magically found its way into the hands of the vast majority. Wealth has to come from somewhere, and as far as I can tell it comes from the wealthy.

originally posted by: LesMisanthrope
a reply to: TrueBrit

However, since it is the case that a small number of people holding a huge majority of wealth is bad for society in general (which, by the way, is not in question in the least), and since one persons rights end, where the rights of another begin, it cannot be right that a persons right to become obese off the backs of the labours of others, can ever outweigh the right of a hardworking person to have safety, security, health, warmth, light, and access to data, without having to worry about the cost of it to the point of choosing to drop one of these things from their expenditure for a year.

There is a fine line between holding the majority of wealth and creating the majority of wealth. What's worse than both of those is expecting wealth while at the same time doing very little to hold or create it.

If that 1% never created that wealth to begin with, it's foolish to believe it would have just magically found its way into the hands of the vast majority. Wealth has to come from somewhere, and as far as I can tell it comes from the wealthy.

You will notice they never talk about all the wealth the uber rich created. So Bill Gates is worth $75 billion. How millionaires did he create? How many hundreds of thousands of jobs. We haven't even gotten into all the ancillary businesses, jobs, etc and entities that benefited from doing business with microsoft like advertising, legal, manufacturing, etc. Heck, even Seattle as a city boomed largely because of Microsoft's success.

I'd wage the secretaries who started working at Microsoft in the early 80s retired multimillionaires aren't jealous of bill gates.

The fallacy in all these arguments about the wealthy is that people think they just horde the money under their mattress like scrooge mcduck. All that money is in circulation and people benefit from it directly and indirectly. Most of these folks though are too blind with greed and envy to see it though. It is easier for the simpletons to just say take his wealth than to truly understand how wealth flows through an economy.

a reply to: Edumakated

I have an uncle, my dad's youngest brother, who came back from the military and went in with a bunch of his buddies out in Cali. They started a company that had something to do with scanner technology in grocery stores. It was an enormous risk that paid off. When I was entering high school he was retiring early with his first million, but he got bored and went back to work for Apple and made a few million more.

He retired for the second time this past year to Hawaii.

My dad and all his siblings grew up dirt poor. I begrudge my uncle nothing. He earned every single penny and he has every right to do whatever he wants with it.

a reply to: LesMisanthrope

Did you know that there is a finite amount of money in the world?

There is not an unlimited amount of currency. There is a limited supply. Do you know what that means? It means that if one person has a huge amount of it, hundreds, thousands, millions of others cannot possess that wealth, no matter how hard they work, unless those with the money are prepared to pay a fair wage. Furthermore, did you know that purely capitalist economies cannot operate if everyone is gainfully employed? It's a fact. A certain amount of unemployment is necessary to the function of capitalist economics.

When corporations gain personhood, and have too much to do with government, you know what happens then? Masses and masses of wealth concentrate themselves toward persons at the top, and those who work with their hands and backs and put themselves out constantly for the company at the bottom end, never see a damn bit of the benefit of that work. Why? Because the corporation has paid off a senator to argue that a persons sweat is worth nothing like what it costs to live.

They basically say "You worked till your hands bled, you sweated till you ruined the shirt you cannot afford to replace for another five weeks, you improved on last months productivity. Well played! Here is your pay cheque, and by the way, you might want to visit the welfare people on the way home, so that you can afford to eat tomorrow."

There are no arguments, positions, or political ideologies that can excuse this situation.

a reply to: TrueBrit

People go into business to make money, not to plant daisies in the asscracks of society, man. Profit goals don't go down year over year because the companies depend on stock investment (which is based wholly on profits) to obtain their mechanism for growth, technological advancements, and to cover risks.

Not real sure why some folks seem to believe Star Trek and other works of fantasy and science fiction, where a centralized government is mommy, daddy, and concubine and those big meanies in the corporate world are the scurge of nations was anything other than fiction spewed from the brains of fantasy authors. It does scare the hell out of me to see these ridiculous concepts being viewed by a growing majority of people as realistic and, even worse, expected.

a reply to: ketsuko

but hey also can deduct part of their mortgage, claiming that it's a home office for the business... along with other nifty tax deductions. and well all those expenses that they incur in the business is also tax deductable, so well, and....
since the business and their personal expenses are together, the taxes that are being made if for the business's profits also...
that profit, weather it is put aside for future investment (obviously it hasn't yet been invested or is would show up on the expense side), or taken home to buy groceries and pay rent is still income!

a reply to: Hazardous1408

first steady paycheck job (as I stated above) was mayor of Burlington at 40 years old. That's FACT. Prior to that, he roamed the country going from protest to protest, music faire to music faire, painting fences, picking weeds from yards, and trying his hand at vagabond carpentry. That is also FACT. Let's not sugar coat this man's life as being something which gave him even a hair's width of insight into business or economics, please.

Yeah most of that "Sanders will raise all our taxes" crap, is just that, crap.

Most of what he's talking about is about "redistribution of Wealth" which means, taking the tax money we already pay and putting towards stuff that we actually want.

We don't want Wars in the middle east or subsidizes for Fossil fuel companies or increases in the budgets of our Alphabet agencies etc. We'd rather "redistribute" some of that money to Education and Healthcare. Things we actually need.

Also he'd like to replace the bloated Obamacare with a cheaper streamlined universal health care system. Something we all want. Except for the "supermen" that inhabit ATS= There is an abnormal amount of Right leaning American males that have an abnormal amount of money to spend on healthcare and the never get sick right here on ATS. LOL

a reply to: TrueBrit

Did you know that there is a finite amount of money in the world?

Wealth isn't necessarily the same as money.

It's common to look at wealth as a big pie, with only so many pieces for everyone, and a small minority holding the largest pieces of pie by taking it and hoarding it from the rest. Unfortunately, the assumption that wealth is fixed is just that, an assumption. Because someone has a dollar doesn't mean that someone else is less a dollar because of it.

Yes, the rich are getting richer, but so are the poor as well. More and more people have televisions, cell-phones, material goods, access to healthcare, higher life-expectancy and so on.

a reply to: ketsuko

but if you have a bunch of tomatoes plants and need help harvesting and go and hire people for 25 cents an hour, even though you know danged well they have no other income and will use every penny they earn just buying enough food to keep them going. so they go to the welfare office and they apply for food stamps, hud, and all the other goodies...of which, well, if the gov't does tax their pittance, they will only have to give the money back....
well....
you don't see the employees should be keeping all the money they earn while the business owner, who is making a profit on those tomatoes has to pay taxes???
hey here's an idea.....
let's just not help your employees out and you can watch your employees wither away in your field!! when the employers quit abusing the welfare system and at least put some effort into paying the decent wages, I will take their whines seriously!! at least their business can deduct just about every expense they incur.... a family, no so much so... we get standardized deductions, unless we can come up with enough approved deductions to go over that amount. as far as I know, that close to two hundred dollars I have to come up with to fix my car won't be approved, nor the food that I put on the table, the gas in my car, heck even most of those that they have approved wouldn't apply because well, I am just struggling with meeting my day to day needs, forget about the solar panels or all the other garbage that they might have listed... including medical!

a reply to: burdman30ott6

People do go into business to make money, that is very true. However, before one floats upon the stock market, ones business may require one, and by one I mean the boss, to take a pay cut, or not be paid at all for a time, to buffer certain start up costs. You know why? Because with out a business, you have no ability to make the money in the first place.

So, once again, a person running a company worth millions, who is worth personal millions themselves, should have no problem working for free, since their entire life from this point forward is already paid for, and cannot possibly cost them their fortune to secure. If they love the business they built from the ground up, they will do this, and much more besides, to keep the business open, because you know what?

Very few people go into business JUST because they want money. Wanting money is why you get a damned job at someone else's firm, not why you start your own. Starting a business is something you do when you have a product, or a manner of delivering a service, which you think people would love to have access to, and you are so sure about that conclusion that you spend your personal time and money to build a business plan, get it in action, get a location and a start up fund together, and actually make it happen.

Wanting masses of money? You are hundreds of percent more likely to get that by doing a non-job, like stock trading, than you ever are starting your own business doing anything else. Working for someone else is much more likely to get you a pay check. It will be an awful small check unless you are a genius with the documents to match and some good fortune to mark you out from other contenders for the top engineering or R&D job, or that position with a tech giant.

I will tell you this for nothing, no one gets into business because they want a heap of money, unless they are deluded or retarded.

Why do I say that? Because most businesses run on that model fail horribly and quickly. Businesses built on stable foundations, small outlays, small profits, slow growth, are far more likely to survive fluctuating markets, and why do you suppose that is? Because the people running these businesses can survive, and do, on bugger all. These businesses are not the sort of businesses and business owners, that Bernie will be savaging, and that is just as well for America, because it is businesses run by hardy, real, regular people that actually keep the USA afloat. None of the large businesses can be trusted to do that, because they are exposed to stupid threats, like housing bubbles, credit crunches, and all the other buzz sword poppycock.

Small businesses run by families will suffer, their owners will be miserable for years, even a decade or more at a stretch, but you know what will not happen during a period where the company failed to make much money? Bonuses handed out to its top dogs, wage hikes for their top earners, wage stagnation at the bottom end. In a small business, one sinks or swims with ones employees, and that should be the lot of any person in business, no matter how large or small that business is.

At the moment, that is not the way of things. And as for your being terrified of the Star Trek idealism...oh boy. First things first, if you fear that, then you need to take a hard look at whatever analogue for a soul you possess. Light like that should only cause fear in the shadows.

And besides "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and Trump is basically Palpatine so that will suit everyone wonderfully won't it?"

a reply to: LesMisanthrope

Piffle!

There is no way to put enough of a rose coloured tint on a lens, to suggest that a nation which has tent cities still, which has cities which do not have proper drinking water infrastructure, which do not have proper road infrastructure support, which has crumbling bridges all over the place, which still has districts using twenty year old textbooks in its classrooms, which contains the city of Detroit, can EVER say that there is not a wealth concentration problem.

The reason that people look at wealth like a big pie, IS BECAUSE THAT IS PRECISELY HOW IT DAMNED WELL WORKS! If one person earns ninety million dollars out of the hundred that were in circulation, everyone else IS going to have to share the remaining ten somehow. That IS how it ends up working out, no matter what mechanism is involved, and do you know how I know that?

When I look at a graph showing the cost of living, the one percent, and the other ninety nine, the cost of living keeps going way up, the wages at the tippety top go way, WAY up, and that leaves 99% of people getting crapped on either just barely affording to live, or failing to afford it at all. The whole nation, given the capital available there, should be living above the poverty line. There is no excuse, no acceptable reason why anything else should be the case, especially when you realise that the vast majority of those 99% will work harder for a pittance than most CEOs have worked in their whole lives to date.

a reply to: TrueBrit

Sir, I take my hat off to you for those last two posts.

Stated far more eloquently and effectively than I could ever achieve.

originally posted by: TrueBrit
a reply to: burdman30ott6

People do go into business to make money, that is very true. However, before one floats upon the stock market, ones business may require one, and by one I mean the boss, to take a pay cut, or not be paid at all for a time, to buffer certain start up costs. You know why? Because with out a business, you have no ability to make the money in the first place.

So, once again, a person running a company worth millions, who is worth personal millions themselves, should have no problem working for free, since their entire life from this point forward is already paid for, and cannot possibly cost them their fortune to secure. If they love the business they built from the ground up, they will do this, and much more besides, to keep the business open, because you know what?

You fail to see the difference between making a personal choice of sacrifice for the promise of future personal gains and being mandated to take the sacrifice just because some folks are so full of themselves they believe it falls on Mommy and Daddy federal government to take from one so that the politicians Kept Voters can get enough dowry to guarantee continued voting for the Meal Ticket?

I have a lot of trouble rationalizing how the same people who will jump down a tax payer's throat for questioning how someone on food stamps and welfare can amazingly afford an iPhone, newer model truck, cable TV, etc, particularly when it is entirely the tax payers' money and "investment" we're discussing, because "the welfare recipients' choices are NONE of the tax payers' business"... yet turn around and portend to dictate what a business owner or corporate board decides to do with their own money, business models, and employee compensations. IT BOGGLES MY GODDAMNED MIND.

First things first, if you fear that, then you need to take a hard look at whatever analogue for a soul you possess. Light like that should only cause fear in the shadows.

And besides "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and Trump is basically Palpatine so that will suit everyone wonderfully won't it?"

OK, I'm pure, unadulterated evil. Does that help your mind mitigate away from the fact that there's little to be gained in fantastical daydreaming about unreachable systems which can't logicically exist in this world, rather than recognizing this is a waste of time and resources and trying to figure out a path towards something actually achievable, like a free market with EVERYONE shouldering responsibility for themselves and their own place in life?

#MechanicalSoul

a reply to: TrueBrit

Very astute of you to notice there are poor people, but I think a monkey could have made that observation, especially given that there has been poor people since the beginning of time. But no, a pie is not a good metaphor for the global economy.

That isn’t how it works, and it is a piss-poor metaphor.

The fixed pie is a fallacy, a zero-sum fallacy, something one learns in any economics 101 course. Do you really think that wealth hasn’t moved from a fixed position from, say 100 years ago? 20 years ago? 10 years ago even? Its is a simple economic fact that no economy is static.

a reply to: burdman30ott6

The mandate comes about when even an enlightened republican like Nick Hanauer, the billionaire Seattle businessman, is adamant that living wages should be paid, and has not been heard.

You see, when the workers have money, they spend it. They become consumers of the products that they make, and others besides. This is good for business. Workers working three jobs and failing to make ends meet, contracts markets and prevents growth, because a rich man can only eat so many take out pizzas, can only wear so many shoes, can only drive one car at a time, though he may own many of these things.

But if everyone working for every company can afford a place to live in their city or town, food and drink, clothing, heating, lighting, data access and most importantly CLEAN water to drink (21st century people... No? Ok.) without breaking the bank, they can maybe save for a car, or a holiday, or something else. If they cannot afford these things, they cannot contribute to the growth of business generally, and THAT is what is happening right now in ?America.

When you consider that most welfare recipients are getting help despite being employed, because their employer does not pay enough money, you should start to realise that complaining at the poor for being poor is fruitless, but putting more money in the hands of the poor so that they are no longer actually in need of state handouts would be better for the economy.

The deficit will not shrink, as long as bottom end wages are below the cost of living. So, either someone needs to pay more tax, or pay all their people FAR more money, without resorting to ideologically driven mass redundancies to save money.

a reply to: LesMisanthrope

The movement is negative. That is to say that the number of dollars may be up, but the number of dollars relative to the cost of living is not, and in many cases is down for everyone, except the top earners, who walk away with an even greater share than ever, of what money is to be made.

a reply to: TrueBrit

1. Hanauer is by no means a Republican, but he is the luckiest jackass on the planet, stumbling into his money thanks to a ground floor investment into Amazon 2 decades ago. Aside from that, the man has about as much macroeconomic sense as a 2 day old Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

2. Nobody is stopping these people who are economically capable and adamant about redistributing wealth from liquidating their assets and driving through their local skid row, throwing fistfulls of hundreds out their car window. But this isn't about actually closing any gaps or helping anyone "truly in need," is it? Nah, it's about control... make the wealthy appear to take a hit, which just gets passed on to the middle class via taxes, prices, or manufacturing jobs exiting America, and then sit back and watch even more added to the Kept Voter rolls, all chomping at the bit to cast their chit for the Meal Ticket next election.