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Let's Drug Test The Rich Before Approving Tax Deductions, Says US Congresswoman (theguardian.com)
Press2ToContinue writes from a report via The Guardian: "The [tax] benefits we give to poor people are so limited compared to what we give to the top 1% [of taxpayers]," Congresswoman Gwen Moore says. "It's a drop in the bucket." Many states implement drug-testing programs to qualify for benefit programs so that states feel they are not wasting the value they dole out. However, seven states who implemented drug testing for tax benefit program recipients spent $1 million on drug testing from the inception of their programs through 2014. But the average rate of drug use among those recipients has been far below the national average -- around 1% overall, compared with 9.4% in the general population -- meaning there's been little cost savings from the drug testing program. Why? "Probably because they can't afford it," says Moore. "We might really save some money by drug-testing folks on Wall Street, who might have a little cocaine before they get their deal done," she said, and proposes a bill requiring tests for returns with itemized deductions of more than $150,000. "We spend $81bn on everything -- everything -- that you could consider a poverty program," she explained. But just by taxing capital gains at a lower rate than other income, a bit of the tax code far more likely to benefit the rich than the poor, "that's a $93bn expenditure. Just capital gains," she added. Why not drug-test the rich to ensure they won't waste their tax benefits? She is "sick and tired of the criminalization of poverty." And, she added: "We're not going to get rid of the federal deficit by cutting poor people off Snap. But if we are going to drug-test people to reduce the deficit, let's start on the other end of the income spectrum."
Seriously, the USA forces you through a drug test to get access to government benefits? I can't think of anything more invasive. This is why you don't make deals with the devil. The devil keeps you on a short leash.
Extending such a screwed up program to more people doesn't make things better, it makes things worse.
Lets drug test bloggers before they are allowed to post online. It should result in a marked decrease in idiotic headlines...
How about we start treating each other with some god damned respect and abolish the entire drug-testing paradigm?
On the one hand, when you drug test poor people, you're testing them before giving them money that they did not earn. If they do not want to be tested, they don't need to apply for the money. On the other hand, under the Congresswoman's proposal to drug test rich people, rich people would be drug tested just for filing taxes, something that the government forces them to do. In other words, it's forced drug testing without cause or recourse and for no reason other than they are wealthy, which is a violation of their constitutional rights.
Personally, I'm not for drug testing anyone unless it's part of a criminal investigation or unless they are in a job where they are responsible for other people's safety.
I think the best place to start would be mandatory drug test for Congress.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
To drug and alcohol test the congresspeople and senators too.
They must be high on something.
Obviously, the correct approach is "Don't drug test anyone outside of performance critical situations"; but this proposal seems like a reasonable way to point out one of the (numerous) ways we identify some people as presumptively scum until exhaustively proven otherwise; and others as presumptively guiltless until they really screw up(at which point the loss of standing caused by the case is punishment enough...)
Also worth considering that, even if you hate filthy poor people and criminals and such with a righteous passion; people nobody cares much about tend to be the beta testers for bad ideas that will eventually come to be imposed on the more 'respectable', usually starting with the ones that have less economic leverage. In this case, that's already mostly happened: mandatory drug testing of employees is pretty widespread, even in areas that aren't safety critical, and for metabolites that tell you nothing about the user's impairment on the job.
As a heuristic, you could do a lot worse when evaluating a law than asking "Would I approve if this law were applied to people I sympathize with?"
... if you're a capitalist. If you accept you live in a purely capitalist society, then someone "bad at capitalism" is as a natural extension of that a "bad societal actor", or more concisely, a "bad citizen". It isn't hard to see how someone who views the world through a lens of "money is the all important" that someone without money or who is bad at managing it would be a criminal. It's wrong but I've known people who believe the abolition of debtor's prison was one of the single biggest blows to modern capitalism. Think about that. It's nuts. That being said, making the rich take drug tests before receiving those tax breaks is about as likely as the rich actually paying their fair share of taxes.
Drug test their children.
This is idiot is equivocating:
1. getting free money from the government
2. having to pay less money to the government
There is nothing as equalizing as a bullet. In the eternal words of Trinity, "Dodge this!"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ideally all forms of income earned income, interest and dividend income, capital gains, carried interest, partnership distributions, profits, gambling gains, IRA distributions all should be just treated the same way. Ordinary salaried folks have no ability to reclassify their income streams. They have limited ability to defer income. But the top 0.1% earners can create shell corporation after shell corporation, trusts etc. Each acting as a way to defer income, change its category etc.
One concession I would agree for capital gains is to let people adjust their cost basis for inflation. This will help people who buy and hold rather than short term investors. Reduce volatility and provide stability to the instruments.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Actually, it depends on how they earn that money. Capital gains are taxed much lower than income from a salary. And deductions can be abused in all kinds of ways. Just look at some of the shit the Walton family (owners of Wal-mart) do. Not strictly speaking, illegal, but they use a bunch of foundations to avoid paying estate taxes and gift taxes.
As for welfare, a lot less of the federal budget is spent on it than most people think. A far higher percentage is used for military spending, which leads to things like the F-35 boondoggle (over 1.5 TRILLION spent thus far on the program).
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Adults have the right to consume any substances they choose so long as they do not hurt others while doing so.
That is unless we've moved to a ideology that government already owns everything the citizens have and we are all serfs.
That's exactly where she's coming from.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Taxes are collected from privately owned assets. Tax deductions are government taking less private property.
One can only believe what you do if one believes that the concept of private property does not exist. For your premise to be true, all property would have to be owned by the government.
If you want that shit, move to Venezuela.
Whoops! There's traces of codeine and marijuana in your system (contact highs, they are a bitch). That means we have to tax you MORE!
Yeah...fuck that noise.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Hmmm, someone in government said something stupid, and the party was left off by the media.
Wanna bet she's a Democrat?
"But the average rate of drug use among those recipients has been far below the national average -- around 1% overall, compared with 9.4% in the general population"
Isn't it conceivable that drug users might be aware that benefits come with a drug test and they simply don't apply? The 1% that do test positive are just too stupid to realize their habit will cost them benefits.
Now, what the hell is it doing on /.?
Slashdot is full of liberal-libertarian wargarble largely in the vein of "money is economy" and "we can solve all our problems by hurting the rich". Basically, the response to poor people suffering is to attack the rich for being too well-off, with no explanation of how that helps. That attitude is what drove me largely toward economics; the tax impacts (WageTax sheet) of my Citizen's Dividend pisses people off for not terrorizing the rich, even though the impact on the poor is massive. (Of course, the hyper-conservatives on Slashdot hate this, too, because hand-outs are bad.)
You'll notice the yammer here is about ending deficit spending (not always a bad thing: if your deficit is smaller than your debt grows by inflation, your debt is getting smaller) by accusing the rich of being drug addicts and then taking away their money. Rich people bad. Bad bad bad.
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So they tax you so it's "Their money" and then give it back to you with conditions. Why don't they do that with all money? Tax rate is 100%, then give it back on condition you don't assert any of your rights..
But you will say that these people are paying negative tax, because of credits.
Fair enough, but all these benefits are just subsidies for those who employ cheap labor. Without these, the people would have to move away driving up the price for labor until people could afford to live on what they earned. With a minimum wage high enough that people don't qualify for benefits, you don't have the pernicious loss of rights for the poor. ( and if you import enough cheap labor from abroad to keep wages down, they can make sure as few as possible can afford rights )
If they at some point must pay benefits, the appropriate quid-pro-quo should be sterilization-for-benefits, not drug-testing and umpteen other things. By shrinking the labor pool and driving up wages, ( all with closed borders of course ) people have the dignity of earning a living wage that is theirs free and clear from the control of government petty tyrants.
...
This is a lot of philosophy and not a lot of economics. Let's all "do the right thing", even if it means 17,000,000 starving children, because not "doing the right thing" and getting food to all 17,000,000 of those starving children would leave a bad taste in our mouths. Blood on your hands is better than the knowledge that you didn't get to stroke your ego.
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I'm about as left as they get and I think this proposal is so stupid that the congresswoman should be ejected from office.
And her comment on the unfairness of the lower capital gains tax is... profoundly ignorant.
Drug testing the destitute? Not poor, destitute. Those who cannot support themselves and require a handout from society. Those who's net contribution to the economy is negative... I support drug testing.... although, you cannot cut benefits unless you want to live in a society where truly desperate people roam the streets stealing food.
There are many reasons you drug test. Do your really want some hooker doped up on coke sheltering next to the pregnant girl with downs? It's not fair to the poor to tolerate this behaviour in the shelters. Wouldn't it be nice if shelters were full of positive people who didn't shit on the sidewalk, litter needles in the yard and smash cars in the neigbourhood for their next hit?
You want benefits? You want to be in a shelter? take a drug test, if you fail, accept treatment. If you don't test and don't take treatment, society has a duty to protect the most vulnerable *from* you. I don't have a solution for these suicidal trainwrecks, but sheltering them next to good people and ignoring their drug abuse is not the answer.
I think before every funding vote or discussion all of the congress critters and senatorial types need to pee in the little cup AND blow into a breathalyzer. And no immunity should apply if they test positive.
The [tax] benefits we give to poor people are so limited compared to what we give to the top 1% [of taxpayers]
I think someone should read up on the "Earned Income Tax Credit". There was no point in reading anything after the first sentence, this person is obviously a totally clueless idiot.
The poor benefit handsomely from our, I would say overly progressive, tax system. Its the middle class that gets the squeeze. The very wealth have access to tax avoidance strategies and investment vehicles that get favorable tax treatment. The poor get outright handouts at tax time and mostly end up paying no federal taxes at all. Meanwhile the middle class foots almost the entire bill, and gets basically only the mortgage interest deduction and child credits as a consolation prize.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
...by drug testing the gov't.
So you want to drug test people before TAKING their money and they think that's the same as drug testing someone before you GIVE them OUR money?
Quite apart from all the rest, the claim that not taxing something (in this example, capital gains) counts as an "expenditure" really irritates me each time I see it. It proceeds from the assumption that all wealth belongs to the government, which has to decide how much to allow the governed to control and how much it can better allocate itself. In other words, it is fundamentally hostile to the concept of private property as a moral statement.
Is this for real? The rich don't care about your SILLY little drug test, they are RICH, there are multiple multiple ways to evade drug testing, the rich have a lot more resources available... It's good that people are thinking about "equalizing" in a sense, but this idea is just stupid I'm sorry...
After all, this is America. If you can't use your wealth and power to break the rules with impunity, what's the point of being rich?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Drug testing the wealthy could be one way to clamp down on those very tax avoidance strategies that the ultra-wealthy take advantage of. That's the whole point of this discussion. And the quote you mention is talking about absolute numbers -- the tax handouts and loopholes for the ultra-wealthy are so big that even a small increase in their tax rate is larger than all "handouts" for the poor.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
The bar for getting in the top 1% still usually leaves you in the W2 arena. I'll pay over 50% of my income this year in income taxes (not to mention all the other taxes). To not be a W2 employee (carried interest, etc), you are probably in the top 0.1% or top 0.01%.
50%? You must live in New York, but work in New Jersey and have a really bad accountant.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
If you want to get technical, the Federal Reserve owns the money. We're just borrowing it.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Your property and your money is not yours. It belongs to the government. The government takes your wealth at the barrel of a gun and the decides how you get it back.
Public assistance recipients haven't earned that money. That money was taken from those who earned it and was distributed to those who did not.
A tax break is government taking less of your money. Assistance programs are government distributing the wealth of others.
Why should the government test anyone for anything when the government is taking property that is rightfully yours?
Do you think the only measure and worth of a person is in their ability to work? Is that whey they were born, to work? If a person cannot work, should they simply be left to die? If something were to happen that left you impoverished (ridiculous, I know) would you not ask for help? Or would you take it as a just punishment for being such a worthless human being?
You think poor people are poor because they're lazy, but that's not borne out by reality. Poor people actually work harder than most others.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Because I think she has been smoking something...
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
There was a question on some forum (perhaps AskReddit) for formerly poor people about what surprised them the most after they became better off.
One poster claimed that he was surprised people with more money actually do drugs for recreation. Everyone where he grew up that used drugs did it to soothe the pain. Everyone knew it. Everyone also knew the price. And those that chose this way were not judged too much.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
In public.
You clearly understand ('there are multiple multiple ways to evade drug testing'), but go on a rant about richers.
Anybody can study for a drug test and pass, it's not expensive or hard.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
My comment only dealt with property rights. I never said that assistance programs were improper.
What is improper is the view that taxes "belong" to the government and that tax-breaks and incentives are somehow "stealing" from the government.
That is a wrongheaded view.
Taxes are necessary for a functional nation, and yes, some of those taxes are distributed to the less-fortunate.
What I dislike is the view that if the government takes less money from its citizens, somehow those citizens are doing something wrong.
Come on 'Dr. Evil'. You know you want the wood chipper for the junkies.
The problem with your plan is drug tests are easy to cheat on. You'd have to use hair tests (or some other drug test that actually works). Those cost $200 and results take days.
Instant answer drug tests are defeated by drinking lots of water.
The shelter workers know who is a junkie. They have the authority to send them packing. The junkies end up in the homeless camps with the crazies.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There are ways to improve tax revenue by playing with various tax rates, but capital gains is not one of them. It's been tweaked up and down enough that raising it now would produced lower revenues in the long term. Economists all know this. Biden and Obama know this as well, even when they talk about raising it ("It's an issue of fairness," they say).
Besides, taking less money from people is not an "expenditure", any more than a mugger giving you $5 for bus fare before he walks off with your wallet a "kindness".
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
If you actually read the link you cited, what it says is that the United States taxes former citizens for the taxes that they owed before they renounced their citizenship.
In other words, saying "I renounce my citizenship" does not mean that your debt suddenly vanishes.
Most of these are corporations, and I don't know how you would make a corporation take a pee test.
But if you could, I bet a lot of them would fail!
Different thing.
However, seven states who implemented drug testing for tax benefit program recipients spent $1 million on drug testing from the inception of their programs through 2014. But the average rate of drug use among those recipients has been far below the national average -- around 1% overall, compared with 9.4% in the general population
People who grow marijuana and smoke it should be prohibited from receiving government aid, but if you can not get a job because you are a chronically lazy, chain-smoking obese alcoholic with a porn addiction and a gambling compulsion then you are welcome to government handouts. What kind of incentive is that?
Conditioning government aid on actual need would be more appealing if the people devising policy were not imbeciles.
They could start by weighing fat people before giving them food stamps (SNAP). Your income is seized, under threat of prosecution, fines and imprisonment, to fund other people making themselves unhealthily fat. Your income is seized, under threat of prosecution, fines and imprisonment to pay for "free" health care required for medical treatments incurred from that obesity. "Your tax dollars go to save the lives of staving orphans" has more appeal when you are actually paying to save the lives of starving orphans and not buy groceries for that lardass blocking the aisle at the grocery on her i-am-to-fat-to-walk scooter with a cartload of donuts and steak, and then pay her medical bills.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
"That's a $93bn expenditure. Just capital gains." Sorry, a bit off topic here, but how is not taxing people an "expenditure"? By the same logic, one could claim that because the tax rate on anything is X rather than something bigger than X, the difference is an "expenditure" that is costing the government money. I think perhaps Ms. Moore might be in need of an accounting class... or maybe just a dictionary.
Might makes right irrelevant.
Anyone who takes drugs and is remotely sane will either not apply for a program which has drug testing, or will stop taking drugs so they can apply for the program. So it's not surprising that recipients of the program don't use drugs--all the drug users either didn't apply or stopped using. Nobody's going to take drugs, apply, and get caught. The fact that it's even as high as 1% only happens because some people are stupid.
Being below the national average is what you would expect if the drug testing program works.
I watched a "banned" TED talk wherein the speaker claims that the rich get tax breaks because they are historically seen as "job creators". He further contends that this is not factually accurate, and that lower taxes on the middle class would create jobs. I've got a hybrid approach: What about if we auctioned off the lowest tax rates to the most job creators? This way the rich would actually be creating jobs. It for the first time directly incentivises job creation. If they don't create jobs then they don't get the rate.
It's a put-your-tax-rate-where-your-influence-is deal, which could be a win for everyone.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
... or at least the "gain" should be indexed to either gold or silver (government's choice - but in advance of the period during which the so-called "gain" occurs).
The "capital gain" of the tax code is actually a PRICE gain measured in dollars. The value of the dollar is under the control of the government (via its proxy, the Federal Reserve), and is systematically lowered ("inflation"). So an asset whose value doesn't change at all nevertheless suffers a "gain" in price, which is taxed. (An asset whose actual value does rise still suffers an additional "gain" in price, and one whose value falls doesn't start to show a "loss" unless the loss in value is more than that of the dollar.)
This means that the government not only steals the value out of money held by printing more of it, for itself and its cronies, diluting the supply, but it also steals a portion of the value of any other property held by someone between its purchase and its sale. Thus the "capital gains" tax is an additional incentive to inflate the currency and rip off the general population for the benefit of the government officials, functionaries, and their cronies.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A lot of serious academic research went on in the early 70's to prove that taxing the poor was wholly unproductive. See Dennis Moore's work, for a good, easy to digest example.
Well I would rather have the rich waste it than have the grandparent listen to this
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Who cares what people do on their own time? It is none of the state's business and the War on Drugs (which this is part of) is an epic waste of time and, yes, money. Lots and lots of money.
You pretend your nation is an example of freedom to the world, but you are like a bunch of busybody old babas - everyone wants to butt into other people lives for a whole array of completely subjective reasons.
Man I am so glad I don't live there.
Liberal stupidly at it's finest.
The studies doesn't show how many actually welfare applicants dropped out of welfare, or the number of people that decided not to even apply for welfare in the first place, because of drug testing.
The claim that only 1% of welfare recipients tested positive for drugs has been repeated so often it's not a cited fact in articles such as this. It's like the 77 cents on a dollar for a man's work when the statistic is for all work averaged out. An outright lie.
Here's what happened: A million dollars was spent on a drug test (which says a lot about the cost of government workers more than the program being a bad idea) and a statistical sampling of a few percent of welfare recipients were tested. They tended to be doing drugs MORE often than the general population (let's say to illustrate the point, 20 percent) but only 5 percent were tested. So the result? 1 percent total of the welfare recipients were found to be on drugs. So the left cites the statistic of "only 1 percent of welfare recipients were shown to be on drugs" implying that all welfare recipients were tested when they were not. Repeat the statistic until someone fills in the assumptions for them.
Nice try.
I'm not sure that's actually correct. Poor people get caught more often, but IIRC there's research showing that the rich are more likely to break the law. Also, the rich have more resources so their crimes have the potential to have a much bigger impact.
The proposal doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. The purpose is to draw attention to consistent attacks wage on the poor and a pattern of class warfare used in politics to divide the working class.
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Stop for a moment and consider that retail outlets pay at or near minimum wage and typically hire only part time workers outside of management and sometimes even in lower management. These companies treat their employees like garbage giving them schedules so variable and inconsistent they have to be computer generated week to week and are rarely willing to accommodate. They can and do fire employees regularly for using sick time without notice (in practice, they certainly don't write this down) and for failing to answer their phone and come in when scheduled off combined with habitual underscheduling thus creating a need to call in employees on a regular basis. Consider that even the management make low to lower mid level income.
Now consider that every walgreens, cvs, walmart, kmart, etc has a custom designed employment application submission kiosk and has since the electronics in such kiosks would have been several thousand dollars. These are companies that cut every penny not companies that throw money away trying to impress job applicants. Those kiosks are there because there are so many people desperate enough to be trying to get these horrible jobs every day that it's actually more economical to build these custom machines than have their low paid management pick up the stack each day and toss it in garbage bin.
I'm not sure that's actually correct
I think the GP was trolling.
But there's one case where poor people are more criminal -- substance abuse. Some rich folks can manage to live their lives while being a total addict, but for most people, an uncontrollable drug addition is a nice downward spiral into poverty. If you get fired from your job and can't get another due to addiction, you'll quickly find yourself in poverty. And as long as the addiction drains whatever funds you receive, you're not getting out.
That's exactly where she's coming from.
Documenting that some portion of your revenue is not, per the tax code, taxable income is not the same as asking the government to give you some of the money someone else spent the day making. How are you not clear on this?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Betting you have a neat Final Solution to such scum.
He did, via taxes. Thats the rub.. he gets to complain. Those that are a drain on the system don't.
By virtue of living in America, you get to complain. That's the 1st amendment.
By virtue of being a US citizen, 18+, and not subject to restrictions due to felony status, you get to vote. That's Article I, Section II, Clause I, as well as the 12th, 14th, 15th, 17th, 19th, 24th, and 26th amendments.
The amount of taxes you pay has nothing to do with the rights of Americans to complain or to vote. Your comments are, frankly, un-American (except for your exercising your right to make an un-American comment... that is distinctly American).
Support a few technologists in Washington.
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Bet we catch more drug users testing the poor than the rich, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
That's a fairly common assumption, but I'm also not sure that one is actually true, depending on how you define substance abuse. In terms of legality, there are lots of otherwise perfectly normal people who use illegal drugs and don't really suffer any ill effects. Again, IIRC, the rate of illegal drug use among the rich is higher than among the poor, probably because the poor can't afford it.
Defining substance abuse more reasonably, in terms of dependence or use that causes negative effects, alcoholism is very common in all socioeconomic classes, and prescription drug abuse is extremely widespread among the wealthier classes.
You can certainly become a heroin addict and end up in an alley somewhere, but that seems to be a relatively rare outcome. Much more common is to get drunk regularly and beat your family, or become addicted to prescription painkillers.
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Documenting that some portion of your revenue is not, per the tax code, taxable income is not the same as asking the government to give you some of the money someone else spent the day making. How are you not clear on this?
I'm clear as crystal on it. I was referring to the Congresswoman's perspective...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The "benefits" are supposed to help people who need money for food, shelter, clothing or child support, not get their next fix.
Money is labor, time and resources captured into a easily tradeable form. The wealthy, by being allowed to be wealthy, are being entrusted with the resources of society. If you are going to assume the role of moral arbiter of poor people and put constraints on how they spend their money, you could just as easily claim the same rights for the wealthy, and in fact it is probably mush more important to do so.
Moreover, it almost doesn't matter if some poor person blows $100 on some weed. But it certainly will affect the larger society if the CEO of Apple or Google makes a bad business decision while coked off their ass.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Slashdot is full of liberal-libertarian wargarble largely in the vein of "money is economy" and "we can solve all our problems by hurting the rich". Basically, the response to poor people suffering is to attack the rich for being too well-off, with no explanation of how that helps. That attitude is what drove me largely toward economics; the tax impacts (WageTax sheet) of my Citizen's Dividend pisses people off for not terrorizing the rich, even though the impact on the poor is massive. (Of course, the hyper-conservatives on Slashdot hate this, too, because hand-outs are bad.)
I feel like you are trying to say something potentialy smart. But I have no idea what you are saying. You are linking wice to the same impossible to understand spreadsheet an a blog post that seem to assume you already know what this is talking about. Citizen Dividend seem to be akin to state-guaranteed income for everyone. Do you mind making a clarified post about what you are trying to say ?
Fair enough. Take corner grocery guy who buys 150k worth of goods, but thanks to big box store shoppers these days can't charge a lot of markup, he only brings in 151,000 per year...
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It is almost impossible to pay over 50% of income tax in the US.
The highest federal tax bracket is 39.5% (over 415k for single) and only two state have state taxes over 10%: hawai is 11% and california is 13%.
So at infinite income, you'll pay 50.5% tax in hawai and 52.5% in california.
But since federal income tax is piecewise linear, you only start paying over 50% of income if your income is over a million dollar, and live in california.
Or am I missing something ?
You know? As a libertarian myself, it always amuses me how people rush to argue over the relatively few things central government accomplished for people that we can all agree are useful and often used by the vast majority of citizens.
When I think of all the boneheaded things government has done with my money (anything from grants for studying cow flatulence to billions of dollars the Pentagon managed to just make vanish into thin air right around the time we were distracted by 9-11) -- concerns over the expenditures for emergency services and a national highway system are at the bottom of my list.
I guess you need to zero in on those, though, if you want to make sure libertarians look like idiots for pointing out how wasteful government spending can be?
I'd definitely like to see mandatory drug testing ended, across the board. (For that matter, the same goes for those sobriety checkpoints.) You shouldn't be presumed guilty until proven innocent, period. When it comes to most private sector jobs that drug test? Regardless of any philosophical reasons against it, the practice is quite likely just a waste of money overall. I've worked at jobs where drug testing was required as a condition of employment PLUS at random intervals afterwards. Those tests aren't all that cheap, and the labs doing the testing aren't infallible either. So a positive result means you have to do a second test to verify the result. By then, a lot of people are crafty enough to know ways to cheat the tests. And who's to say a company didn't get rid of a really good employee over one of them? Just because someone likes to get high once in a while doesn't prove they can't do a great job at whatever you hired them for. How about we fire people for doing those drugs or drinking on company time and stop worrying about digging up evidence about what they may do on their personal time?
"But, Rawls says, the point at which we stop that inequality is when the extra money for the rich stops benefitting the society as a whole. At some point rich people just get more and more wealth, but it doesn't actually help the poorest to improve their quality of life (and often begins to make the poorest WORSE off). And again going back to the veil of ignorance, if you didn't know what your talent would be before entering in a society (and you might have ended up on the bottom), you probably would say that's not fair for all. Collectively, we need to design the rules to benefit us all, because rich people don't exist in a vacuum."
What I'd like to know is, at what point does someone get "too rich" to benefit society as a whole anymore? That's the problem with these statements. They may be based in reality, but there's no logical way to draw a line saying "X amount of wealth is still acceptable, but don't earn a penny more than that or you'll become one of the bad guys in society!"
In fact, an extremely wealthy individual might wind up donating practically all of his or her remaining wealth, upon death, to charitable causes -- negating all of the hand-wringing and postulating over how amassing that wealth was detrimental to society.
For futures, require that the entity purchasing futures must pay for the transportation and storage of said futures until sold off, that will take the profit out of the futures market.
"Futures" don't exist except on paper or electronically. 1000 bushels of corn due in October don't exist in April. They are just being planted, then. Futures contracts can be even longer term, meaning the grain to be delivered might not be harvested, or its parent plants might not you exist, yet.
So either the poor have an extraordinarily low (1/10th) drug use rate, opposite of nearly every other notion, understanding, or evidence among those living in poverty...or they're simply better at beating the drug tests.
I hope /. realizes how simplistic it is to beat a urine test...though I sincerely doubt those making the decisions do.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
before they can vote or put forth such legislation
Right. Just wanted to be clear that her perspective is complete BS.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
How about routine drug tests for politicians, could explain a lot of things lately.
"The shelter workers know" - sounds like a recipe for arbitrary evictions.
Drug tests are for benefits. It takes more than a few days to get benefits, and more than a few days go get results. The shelter workers know if you're smoking crack in your bed. If you fail your drug tests, you don't get to stay in a shelter. You go to rehab or you get nothing.
I think $200/head is better spent creating a society where we don't need security guards 24x7.
I'm not sure that's actually correct. Poor people get caught more often, but IIRC there's research showing that the rich are more likely to break the law. Also, the rich have more resources so their crimes have the potential to have a much bigger impact.
I'm not sure about that. Rich people crimes are mostly just inconveniences to others, poor people crimes usually involve violence and death.
If I had to be a victim, I prefer to have my shares lose value illegally, than my wife being raped.
Tax deductions or "offsets" as you call them are written into law by lawmakers - just as the initial taxes are.
Your definition of "acceptable fee" must also include those deductions.
We as a society through our representatives have decided that those tax deductions encourage certain behaviors - that is the reason for their existence.
Why should we penalize those with a drug-test for taking lawful tax deductions? Those people taking those deductions have already fulfilled their obligations by performing certain qualifying activities and paying the balance of their tax bill.
These types of policies very much come from "liberal" mindsets - "Sticking it to the man" as such. I hear very few conservatives or libertarians advocating for more wealth distribution - and I certainly know of none calling for drug tests on people that take mortgage and investment deductions.
Generally people with property support conservatives and libertarians, people with less property generally support liberals.
I understand liberal philosophy very well - and I do not agree with much of it.
... to test welfare recipients for drug abuse:
Read the goddam summary and note that it's the OTHER people abusing drugs. 1% vs 9+%.
Most people on welfare work. Get off your fucking ass and click over to Google to check that.
Look at the test case in Florida (it's a classic) and look at the current results.
Here's the real reason for testing welfare recipients:
1.) They are too fucking poor to to defend themselves. If you and I were subjected to this, as a class, we'd vote the fuckers out of office.
2.) Stupid people stereotype welfare citizens as non-Americans and not worthy of basic human rights.
3.) The drug testing companies have lobbyists who push this shit just like commercial prison ventures lobby for imprisonment of minorities for drug possession.
4.) Politicians' sole endeavor is vote survival and they will sell you bullshit as wild honey, to get reelected.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
So 1% of $81BN isn't enough savings to implement drug testing on welfare recipients that cost several states $1M since the drug testing programs went into effect. If 50 states each spent $1M/year on drug testing, and the same 1% failure rate persists, that should invalidate 1% of the $81B we spend on welfare programs, or about $810M. So spending $50M to save $810M isn't a worthwhile investment? Really?
There are vastly more laws for 'rich' folks to violate: The unemployed can't cheat on their taxes The poor tend to not have cars, removing moving violations You don't have to be rich to commit a crime with great impact - the Orlando shooter bought $1,000 worth of guns and ammo.
When it comes to junkies living in homeless shelters, I'm fine with arbitrary evictions. I'd call it discretion though.
Especially in the age of 'test chems' (legal drug analogs that are changed faster than they can be made illegal), drug tests are a terrible solution and basically don't work. Even the $200 hair tests have a special shampoo.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Source: http://thinkprogress.org/econo...
Source: Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality. (2015). 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Detailed Tables. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Rockville, MD, - See more at: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cm...
Eat the rich!
Next billionaire.
This dose of cyanide works.
Next billionaire.
I think I'll try strychnine on this one - ohh, it's broken it's back in muscular convulsions before suffocating slowly and in conscious awareness.
Sounds a good plan to me.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Gotta love it! It seems logical: Poor folk cannot afford dope! Rich folks afford the pay-offs to reduce taxes so they can by more dope! Problem is that the dope clouds their judgement such that they forget to help those poor folk! See - that trickle-down shit does NOT work! The only thing trickling down is the cocaine trickling down the throats of the rich and greedy! And I digress from here.
Point is: Rich folk need to actually pay a fairer share of taxes. Period.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Rich people crimes are mostly just inconveniences to others, poor people crimes usually involve violence and death.
I don't know about that. According to this study, the global financial crisis caused half a million additional deaths due to cancer alone (essentially, people being locked out of medical treatment due to poverty and unemployment). Other causes (including long-term costs, such as the cost of youth unemployment disadvantaging that generation into their future) are obviously harder to measure.
For comparison, the number of deaths attributable to terrorism worldwide since 2006 is somewhere around 200,000.
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No, he's correct. Either you're borderline retarded or you simply dropped out of high school, because this is really basic accounting and you have a very poor understanding of it. Namely, you seriously misunderstand what income means. Income is NOT revenue. Income is your net gain minus your operating expenses. For example, if you're a business and you make $1,000,000 in one year and spend $500,000 that year on employee salaries, and $300,000 on operating expenses (such as leasing an office, paying the utility bills, etc) then that's only $200,000 of income. Likewise, you get a deduction on the $800,000 from your business's income taxes. Otherwise you'd be taxed on the whole million, and because of government taxes your business would only be losing money.
You're talking about expenses. The topic here is deductions. These are not the same thing.
You are correct about expenses. They are subtracted from income before taxes.
Citizen Dividend seem to be akin to state-guaranteed income for everyone.
It's a form of UBI, yes. A lot of people talk about handing out a fixed amount of money ($10,000/year) or funding the UBI from various taxes (a pure flat-tax system, carbon credits, a national sales tax); my Citizen's Dividend uses a general progressive system as today, and attaches a 17% flat tax to all taxable income (business and personal), which is then distributed evenly.
You are linking wice to the same impossible to understand spreadsheet
Sorry, I keep forgetting people can't understand the meaning of data even if the context is obvious. Those numbers are obviously tax computations on income. In particular, they're tax computations on the current take-home income after taxes compared to the take-home under a revised tax system including the Citizen's Dividend I outlined. Two-adult households have two Dividends (they're per-person) and, as stated at the top, dependents under 18 (children) of low-income families are eligible for public aid (food stamps, etc.); adults are essentially removed from the welfare system (except for naturalized Americans, who receive the Dividend as a non-refundable tax credit, and receive public aid if income is too low--this avoids any and all changes to the situation of immigrants who aren't workers, keeping the existing social safety net and not incentivising non-working immigration).
The second link was meant to go to a long blog post; I mispasted.
I'm currently working on a book covering policy economics, culminating in a full conceptual description of the Citizen's Dividend. This conceptual description includes an analysis of the retail market; description of the United States Federal and State spending and taxes; funding strategy; transitional risks, costs, and strategies; direct impacts on incomes; indirect impacts on jobs; and the long-term effects of the plan (job stabilization, automatic growth with national wealth and GDP-per-capita, etc.). Basically, a step-by-step design of the policy, and not a bill to submit to Congress.
That will take some time and rattle some cages. I call out a lot of flaws in modern economic policies and economists's positions; I've had actual economists agree with me and armchair economists get hella salty, and of course nobody will let me into a Ph.D. program to refine and then formally defend anything new. I've taken to just talking up a few Ph.D. holders and college professors and bouncing insights off them, then validating their disagreements (if any)--sometimes they're right; surprisingly, most academics deal with new ways of thinking about a problem in their field by giving no direct comment, or asking a bunch of questions. Most *students* just claim they read something different in a book once, so you're obviously wrong (this is why you need to vet everything before publishing a book: if you say anything technically-incorrect, some group of idiots will take it as new, brilliant insights).
One of the main contention points is scientific versus engineering economics: Solow-Swan successfully measures an economy's growth in terms of technical progress separate from population growth, necessarily by analyzing the input factors of land (ore, mines, etc.), labor (worker time), and capital (machines, knowledge); while I describe land and capital as products and moderators of labor, thus labor as the single production input factor. A lot of people argue that their textbooks don't say anything about that; other people try to argue that businesses have some other expense (ignoring that the next expense is a supplier's labor plus profit margin); and still others are stuck on theories of value (I don't believe in value as a property of a thing) and Marxism, which is... hilarious. Seriously. Marxists have some argument about how we should move off labor and onto
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the global financial crisis caused half a million additional deaths due to cancer alone
Cancer would kill you anyway if rich people weren't paying for the medical system that improves quality of life for patients.
And life expectancy has increased decade on decade because of inventions and systems and policies put in place by those same rich people.
So if prosperity comes with the occasional correction, it's still a much larger net gain than some poor fool raping your wife for kicks. I'll still take a GFC every few decades over that alternative.