Slashdot Mirror
White House Proposes "Wealthy Tax"
President Obama is proposing a new tax rate for people making over $1m a year. The new rate is part of a larger plan which seeks to bring in $1.5 trillion in new tax revenue and is sure to meet opposition in congress. From the article: "The core of the president's plan totals just more than $2 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. It combines the new taxes with $580 billion in cuts to mandatory benefit programs, including $248 billion from Medicare." GOP Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin said, "Class warfare may make for really good politics but it makes for rotten economics."
Remember how awful the economy was when Clinton was president? Eight horrible years of peace and prosperity, thank God that's long gone.
Going back as far as 1950, higher top marginal rates are (weakly) correlated with improved economic growth, not reduced economic growth ( http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/002279.html ).
This is a subtle point that is covered in first semester microeconomics. The "incidence" of a tax (who actually pays it, seller or buyer of a commodity) depends on the relative slopes of the supply and demand curves. If the commodity is inelastic (i.e. demand doesn't depend much on price: gasoline in the short run), then if you put a tax on the seller, they can just bump the price, and their revenue remains the same, while the buyer pays the full tax. On the other hand, if you have a very elastic commodity (where people are happy to not buy it if the price goes up a little bit), then a tax applied on the mfr falls mostly on the mfr, because if they raise prices, people stop buying. (Example would be a tax on domestically produced toys vs imported ones. There's a lot of toy mfrs out there, and people buy just on price)
So, corporations send tax money to the govt, and some of it is manifested in higher selling prices, but some is manifested in lower revenue. If you have a tax policy that is uneven across lines of business/commodities, you can use this to encourage/discourage certain lines of business (e.g. tobacco taxes). The problem is that different commodities all have different elasticities, and that elasticity changes with time scale (gasoline is inelastic in short run, you still have to drive to work today, but quite elastic in the long run, jack the price of gas up to $6/gallon, and people stop buying Escalades and start buying Honda FITs) If you put a huge tax on gasoline (to encourage reduction in consumption) it would hit the consumer first, but the manufacturers in the long run. So you could give individuals a rebate on the tax when they file everyyear.. OK that helps the overall consumption reduction goal, but now the tax code is more complicated. And so it goes
This smells like more class warfare shit.
The only class waging war in this country on other classes is the rich.
Someone had to do it.
While I didn't take economics in Junior High, my High School course taught me that the supply of most goods is not perfectly price elastic. It taught me that in theory taxes are only partially passed on to the consumer except in cases of perfect price elasticity. It taught me that in theory, except in cases of perfect price inelasticity of supply, higher taxes on businesses will result in higher prices and fewer goods being sold in that market. Apparently this concept is called tax incidence, though I don't remember that from High School. It also taught me that a tax on individuals is not the same as the tax on corporations. Therefore, based on what I learned many years ago in high school economics, in the case you're talking about, which has very little to do with the proposed tax on individuals, it's true that the consumer bears some of the burden of those taxes. However, it's also true that corporations do in fact pay taxes. That is, ceteris paribus, assuming things like that they don't totally avoid the taxes by using loopholes.
Warren Buffet wants wealthy people (like himself) to pay at least the same percentage of their income as the middle class do in taxes. I find it difficult to argue with that logic.
God is imaginary
Number of households in the United States filing tax returns: 140,494,127
Number of households in the United States filing tax returns with incomes of $1,000,000 or more: 236,883
Percentage of households in the United States filing tax returns with incomes of $1,000,000 or more: 0.19959471529%
Percentage of households in the United States filling tax returns with incomes of less than $1,000,000: 99.80040528471%
Number of people in the US living at or below the poverty line in 2001: 34,570,000
Number of people in the US living at or below the poverty line in 2010: 46,200,000
Percentage of US population living at or below the poverty line in 2001: 12.1%
Percentage of US population living at or below the poverty line in 2010: 15.1%
Of those living at or below the poverty line in 2010, the percentage that are 18 years old or younger: 35.5%
Of those living at or below the poverty line in 2010, the number that are 18 years old or younger: 16,401,000
Total number of people living in the United States, as of September 19, 2011: 312,204,000
Maximum number of people living in the United States who would be affected by President Obama’s proposal to impose a minimum tax rate on those earning more than $1 million a year : 450,000
Highest possible percentage of people living in the United States who would be affected by President Obama's proposal to impose a minimum tax rate on those earning more than $1 million a year: 0.144136526118%
Number of people in the United States who would not be affected by this tax increase: 311,754,000
Lowest possible percentage of people living in the United States who would not be affected by President Obama's proposal to impose a minimum tax rate on those earning more than $1 million a year: 99.855863473882%
All stats derived by me from Census.gov using 2010 and 2011 census data, and from IRS.gov data using 2009 data, the most recent year for which reporting, especially Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) information, was available.
The first person to invoke Census.gov or IRS.gov conspiracy theories will receive my 1st Annual Stannous Fedora Trophy. Please reply with your mailing address, so I'll know where to send this very special award.
Apparently Obama will propose that people earning more than $1 million a year pay at least the same tax rate as middle-class earners. That's aiming mighty low.
America's median income is about $50,000. The typical taxpayer at that level pays approximately 20 percent in taxes.
Granted, that's a higher rate than most of today's super rich pay because of countless deductions, credits, and loopholes -- including, especially, their ability to take their incomes in the form of capital gains, taxed at 15 percent. That's a big reason Buffett's hundreds of millions a year are taxed at just over 17 percent -- a lower rate than his secretary faces, as Buffett often says.
But a 20 percent rate is still ridiculously low compared to what millionaires and billionaires ought to be paying. Officially, income over $379,150 is supposed to be taxed at 35 percent....
Robert Reich
So there you have it. Somehow Obama will end up proposing a tax change that will have the millionaires paying a proportionally equivalent share of income, and the Republicans will scream that this qualifies as "redistribution of wealth", and in the end, Buffet will end up with a massive windfall. Warren's a canny one, I'll grant you that.
They do far more than that level of damage to the road. Road wear us a function of axle loading and goes up by the forth power. This means those trucks are being subsidized by small cars.
Actually, Mr. Millionaire probably has the corporation chartered in Scotland, where there is no taxes on business. Therefore all earnings made by the trucks are taxed at scotland's rate of 0%. So no he probably doesn't pay taxes on those trucks.
In the US, if you earn the dollar here then you get to pay taxes here. Now, on those trucks registered in Scotland, he doesn't have to pay US taxes on income earned overseas - but he would if those trucks were registered in the US and used in Scotland.
Any dollar earned in the US is subject to taxation - regardless of the domicile of the company. The only benefit to forming an overseas shell corporation is to defer US taxation on money earned abroad; that's what Google, Apple, Microsoft and the like have foreign offices - they can keep the earnings overseas without paying US taxes. But for money earned in the US - regardless of the country of incorporation - there are US corporate income taxes to be paid. And if you're a US company, you also have to pay US taxes on money earned overseas. Thus you can see why companies set up overseas offices and subsidiaries.
I've looked at this stuff in depth - it's a big concern for all US expats.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Um, Clinton had a dot-com and post-soviet bubble. Not to mention the beginnings of the housing bubble. Not to mention his policies were much more moderate than Obama's and the military at the time had a lot more that could be cut without utterly destroying it. Not to mention that his insistence for SigInt over HumInt(because SigInt is cheaper and looks flashier in sound bites) was probably what allowed both the 9/11 attackers to get through and the crap intel from Iraq.
As for Romney, a republican in Mass. with both houses controlled by Dems, who is by far the Republican equivalent of the most right Blue Dog democrats, is a really fucking stupid appeal to authority.
As for the supposed war debt being off the books, how big of an idiot are you? While the wars were never in the projected totals for defense at the start of the year, at the end of each year their cost was certainly accounted for. The biggest expense signed over to Obama was the first stimulus and bank bailouts.
The Heritage Foundation claim that the poor aren't really poor because you can buy a TV on Craigslist for 20 dollars has been thoroughly debunked:
http://front.moveon.org/the-craigslist-welfare-program-will-it-work/
http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/07/19/272511/poverty-is-mostly-about-housing-health-care-and-education/
The availability of cheap household durables aside, being poor in the US sucks a lot. Which is why we outstrip the rest of the first world in homelessness, school drop-outs, incarceration of the poor, and people dying of treatable illnesses.
A stock market isn't gambling and has nothing to do with gambling. Just because you say "oh, look, there's chance involved" doesn't mean it's identical to a casino. There's chance involved in surgery, or meteorology, or construction.
Gambling is creating a risk (rather than distributing it), it's totally random (rather than people using information to try to make prediction), it does not generate any net earnings for the gamblers (unlike investment), it doesn't convey information or allocate resources (unlike investment), it does not involve gamblers even selling things to each other, and on and on. In fact gambling and investment have nothing in common other than chance and money, which gambling also shares with (say) surgery and meteorology and bridge construction. Anyone who says that the stock market is a casino understands nothing about either.
It has everything to do with a tax on company profits, since profits ultimately drive all capital gains. There could never be sustained share appreciation without profits and growth of profits. There couldn't even by a bubble.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, and you're a child as well.