Even the very NAME of the TEA Party is a lie ... or at best a misrepresentation

There was enough money for SS until we had a idiot for a president that emptied it out to pay for two wars because he thought it was a great idea to give tax cuts to his buddies.

The SS "lockbox" was looted long before that. It has been empty for at least 25 years because the government borrowed it and left in IOUs.

Just because a person makes more money in no way do they automatically pay more in income tax. Like Buffet said why does his secretary pay more in taxes than he does?

Buffet's words are disingenuous. At his level, he makes most of his income off of capital gains which are taxed at a lower rate than earned income. There is a very good reason for this. Buffet should know this too as he is one of those many people who came up in this country from nothing to be one of its wealthiest citizens.

First off, when you earn income, you are making that money (or wealth) the first time around. So it's taxed at a higher rate. Capital gains is money you have already made. It's money you have invested and usually isn't even equal to the full amount you invested in the venture making the return, but only a percentage of that initial investment. In order to make any money at it at all, you have to invest a huge initial amount. Investment is also always made at a risk. You might not get anything back.

The lower capital gains rate reflects that reality. If the capital gains rate gets too high, if overrides the potential average reward of investment and you get less investment and less potential economic growth that it represents. After all, people with money want to do what it takes to make more, not throw it away between the risk of investment and taxes.

Make capital gains too high, and wealthy really do become Scrooge McDucks with vaults full of idle cash that they can swim in because to do anything else with it is to take a better than even chance of throwing it away rather than realizing a return on it.

People that cry we pay too much in taxes have no idea what paying taxes is really like. They should have been around when we paid 80% and more in taxes. And look what happened when we paid that much in taxes the debt was low the economy did great and the middle class boomed.

People who make that argument did not study history.

At that point in time, we had the only functional industrial base thanks to a little thing called WWII. You might have heard of it? Not only were we booming at home, but we were also actively rebuilding the rest of the world, too. That will tend to boom business no matter what your rates, and most of the wealthy were actively re-investing rather than paying the taxes because our regulatory burdens were much lower as were some of our other tax rates.

What do you expect from a party that named themselves after a historical even that they haven't even gotten remotely right?

Chrisfishenstein
reply to post by babybunnies

 

Americans should get sent a list of what our money was spent on yearly, or even every quarter or 6 months....Setup a website with receipts and I would be happy! I want to know where my money is going and if I don't agree with their spending, I can protest or file a complaint online...

That isn't that much to ask for, is it? Why can't this be done? Because they don't want us to know where OUR money is going....It is a joke!!

People who make statements like these are woefully ignorant of how government works. This isn't a family checking account. It takes 4 extremely busy financial people just to handle my office of 30. The work is mind boggeling.

reply to post by nixie_nox


I don't know. What do you expect?

Or are you just going to troll ... *emote with quirked eyebrow*

reply to post by babybunnies


Maybe you can interpret this and compare.

Maybe it was a tax.

The Tea Act was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. Its principal over objective was to reduce the massive surplus of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses and to help the struggling company survive. A related objective was to undercut the price of tea smuggled into Britain's North American colonies. This was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to accept Parliament's right of taxation. The Act granted the Company the right to directly ship its tea to North America and the right to the duty-free export of tea from Britain, although the tax imposed by the Townshend Acts and collected in the colonies remained in force. It received the royal assent on May 10, 1773.

The Tea Act

Maybe it was an "ObamaCare" style tax HaHa.

nixie_nox
What do you expect from a party that named themselves after a historical even that they haven't even gotten remotely right?

What specific parts did "they" get wrong?

What would have been "remotely right" in your humble opinion?

Just because a person makes more money in no way do they automatically pay more in income tax. Like Buffet said why does his secretary pay more in taxes than he does?

Because that is the GD difference between CAPITAL GAINS and PAYROLL TAX.

They aint the same thing, They have never been the same thing.

Investment income, and Salary.

neo96

Just because a person makes more money in no way do they automatically pay more in income tax. Like Buffet said why does his secretary pay more in taxes than he does?

Because that is the GD difference between CAPITAL GAINS and PAYROLL TAX.

They aint the same thing, They have never been the same thing.

Investment income, and Salary.

Wonder what ole Buffet has to say about that new MEDICARE tax on his capital gains.

apiexchange.com...

For the record that hits the middle class as well with their pensions, and IRA's and their 401's.

Since they are all taxed at the capital gains rate.

Oh but they were already 'paying' for the 'medicare'.

reply to post by xuenchen


No. It isn't about "too many taxes". It was about fighting the walmart of their time.

Lets say the government came in and told everyone that they were helping subsidize a failing walmart (we could only hope), but in order to help them, they set the price of equal goods to a higher price for all other companies. You have to pay 5$ here but you really can go to walmart and get it for 2.

Not only that, Walmart is selling the only coffee, sugar, and chocolate in town that the government profits from.

Which means that government now controls all the essentials that the colonists need.

Now what would scare you more, high priced tea? Or the government that you are fighting with taking control of all essentials coming in, especially a company that has its own military and took over a country?

What tea partiers also forget that as a result of the Boston tea party, the Crown put in place the very restrictive Boston Port Act, Massachusetts Government Act, Administration of Justice Act, Quartering Act and Quebec Act.


So saying it is just about taxes is like saying the LOTR trilogy is just about a wizard. Yes there is a wizard in it, but that is only a very small portion of the story.

Saying it is just about taxes is the very scrubbed, first grade history lesson version of it. But that is about the level of education for tea party members.

BTW, the founding fathers, that many on here love touting so much, very rarely ever participated in these acts of aggressions. They riled up other people to do it for them.

Chrisfishenstein
reply to post by babybunnies

 

Americans should get sent a list of what our money was spent on yearly, or even every quarter or 6 months....Setup a website with receipts and I would be happy! !

It is published yearly. All you have to do is look for it. Here, I did it for you: www.gpo.gov...

It's alost 1500 pages, so have fun.

reply to post by babybunnies



Well, if I have my choice between a Party
and a Democ "RAT" I know which one I would choose.

There is a lot to a name - sorry to inform you that the
Tea Party got it right.

reply to post by babybunnies

Massive misrepresentation, even just based in the NAME of the organization.

This is an understatement.

The "TEA party" is 'just' the John Birch Society with a more sucker friendly name.

This is truly an actual conspiracy, ripe for dissection by conspiracy buffs.

reply to post by ketsuko

The SS "lockbox" was looted long before that.

It has been empty for at least 25 years because the government borrowed it and left in IOUs.

No it isn't. I understand that it might be poor form to introduce actual facts into a discussion like this but:

SOURCE

Is There a Social Security Crisis?

No, But the Privatizers Gave It Their Best Shot

First, how bad is the situation?

• The Social Security Trust Fund has been around for about 70 years.
  
• It's at an all-time high of over $2.5 trillion dollars.
  
• Social Security has been tweaked many times to keep it in balance.
  
• If we do nothing the Trust Fund will run out in about 2035.
  
• But Social Security would not be bankrupt.
  
• Its continuing payroll contributions would still pay about 70% of legally required benefits.
  
• In 1983, the Trust was a few months from running out of money when Greenspan fixed it.
  
• That was 100 times closer to a crisis then now, and no one even remembers.
  
• That fix was good for over 50 years, and we've got about 25 left to go.
  

And it will be 'fixed' again when the time comes, unless of course the privatizers get their way and make it impossible.

And 'just IOU's' ? U.S. Government Treasury Bonds are 'just IOU's'? What the heck does that mean? What politician in their right mind would renege on T-bills and destroy the financial good name of the United States? What politician would void their oath of office and destroy the economy of the United States by reneging on the loans the people of the United States have made to their own Government? (Yes, given recent events in the House of Representatives, you may detect a 'small' dose of sarcasm in my mood here.)

"Just IOU's?" Are the American People illegal book makers issuing IOU's to a Gambling Addict Government that is gonna cut and run into hiding? Do you understand what that attitude implies about your own idea of civic understanding and 'the way the world works'?


(I left out discussion of how the privatizers would destroy SS for the sole benefit "big finance" and the sole detriment to 90% of all Americans because I don't see that argument here.)

I'll just finish with a quote from an American Conservative Icon:

SOURCE

The following is President Eisenhower's candid view of Social Security and those who seek to abolish it. It is from a letter he wrote to his brother on 8 November 1954:

"This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon "moderation" in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

Here's a coincidence (and since this is a Conspiracy oriented site, we all know that there are no such things as 'coincidences' don't we?) that links my two posts above.

An article in the New Yorker from October 2013 has this to say when discussing the right wing thought in in the early 60's:

Medicare then, as Obamacare now, was the key evil. An editorial in the Morning News announced that “JFK’s support of Medicare sounds suspiciously similar to a pro-Medicare editorial that appeared in the Worker—the official publication of the U.S. Communist Party.” At the same time, Minutaglio and Davis write, “on the radio, H.L. Hunt (the Dallas millionaire) filled the airwaves with dozens of attacks on Medicare, claiming that it would create government death panels: The plan provides a near little package of sweeping dictatorial power over medicine and the healing arts—a package which would literally make the President of the United States a medical czar with potential life or death power over every man woman and child in the country.”

Read that article and see how similar the propaganda 'memes' and the personal attacks were to today. The very words are exactly the same ( 'death panels' for crying out loud).

(from the above linked article)

The John Birch Society, the paranoid, well-heeled, anti-Communist group, was the engine of the movement then, as the Tea Party is now...

(from Wikipedia article on John Birch Society)

Fred Koch, founder of Koch Industries, was one of the founding members.

And who are the founders/financiers of the TEA party organizations? (I leave that as an exercise for the reader).

rnaa
reply to post by babybunnies

 

Massive misrepresentation, even just based in the NAME of the organization.

This is an understatement.

The "TEA party" is 'just' the John Birch Society with a more sucker friendly name.

This is truly an actual conspiracy, ripe for dissection by conspiracy buffs.

What's wrong with the John Birch Society?

What do they stand for that is negative to you?

Are they really the same as the "Tea Party"?

F4guy

Chrisfishenstein
reply to post by babybunnies

 

Americans should get sent a list of what our money was spent on yearly, or even every quarter or 6 months....Setup a website with receipts and I would be happy! !

It is published yearly. All you have to do is look for it. Here, I did it for you: www.gpo.gov...

It's alost 1500 pages, so have fun.

I think many people simply aren't aware of how much is available, completely free and for the taking from the government themselves. The couple million people who fill the countless office buildings across the nation all do something every day and it's all there in one form or another (well.. most of it, anyway)

Thanks for sharing that! It's something I'm adding to my collection.

reply to post by muse7


Social Security is individual pay meant to be an IRA basically, medicaid is a separate tax, public roads are gas tax, public schools are tied to property tax(people who don;t have kids still pay this), and most hospitals in the US are private owned nothing public about them.....Income tax is what most complain about and what does that pay for......well at least 80 cents on every dollar?.....'National Defense Programs'.......You think it is ok that middle class pay more % wise than million and billionaires?

Now that said the TEA Party is utter BS because it was co-opted by the Koch Bros much like the Progressive movement took over the true left.