Well - I do own a small company; this may sound self-serving as hell - but I felt the same way as a private in the Army many years ago...
If you had a 20% flat tax for everyone, no exemptions at all, how much tax would a guy earning 45,000 per year pay and how much would a guy making 1,000,000 per year pay? $9,000 Vs $200,000 of course.
Now go check out which groups actually pay the most in actual dollars of tax under the current tax codes, loopholes and all.
Pretty simple I know, but that, to me, is the heart of the matter. The so-called "rich" already pay the bulk of taxes (the assumption is they have more benefit and stuff to protect so pay more). Dont take my word for it - check it out. If you take something from somebody, give it back to the people you took it from.
Most folks believe that corporations don't pay much in taxes; here's one example - check your paycheck for how much social security got - Your employer pays an EQUAL matching amount for all their employees - if "Joe" had $1000 pulled out, I also sent in a matching $1000.
How about "hidden taxes" - do you have health insurance at work? How much did you pay? Now check out what your employer paid. Guess who's underwriting the vast bulk of health costs?
On inheritance taxes, I guess it comes down to: who owns the fruits of you're labor? You or "the people"? Mr. Brin follows a very tortured "ends justify the means" argument but bottom line, he's for grabbing what's yours to achieve a little social engineering....
"... But about a third of that fifteen trillion dollars is set to flow to a few thousand people who never produced a thing to earn it...."
Uh, so what? what's your point Mr. Brin? We're already subject to an annual shakedown - we work every year right thru May to support our government. If after a lifetime of work Grandpa or Dad leaves me some bucks (or great-great grandpa for that matter) - I have to justify that too? Why? How many times do I have to go thru the tax gate on the same dollar?
Just to keep it straight, 90% of those few thousand people will squander all of it in the first generation. And they'll do it by spending it on stuff that produces jobs - big houses, travel, boats and planes that lots of "normal" people have jobs making. The few that keep it have invested it, stocks, bonds, bank accounts - money that goes right back into circulation growing companies, financing homes, etc. It isn't stuffed in a mattress someplace.
The point is that family fortunes are invested - which creates jobs; or squandered on products or services, which creates jobs. Rich people create jobs.
The diamond Vs pyramid example is wonderful. Mr. Brin makes a mistake in suggesting the changes came about peacefully - two world wars is hardly peaceful. The industrial revolution created the economic imperatives for a "middle class", not enlightened europeans. You can't get filthy rich selling Windows and NT unless you've got somebody with enough bucks to buy it.
Mr. Brin mentions Andrew Carnegie - Mr. Library himself - in the same paragraph with charitable tax relief. He forgot to mention that NONE of those tax codes existed when the grand old man passed his fortune along! Carnegie did it because that's where he got his start - in a library reading; and very much believed that everyone should have access to what he had. No one asked him to do it, no special "tax relief for libraries" tax codes existed. To even imply that Carnegie did it to save taxes is to impune the man and his motivations. Broke people don't start charities, rich people do. Sorry if that rankles, but it's true.
Look; there's always a little class-warfare hiding under the well chosen prose - in the case of "rich" people - that little irritation is that someone has more than you and they didn't sweat enough (in your opinion) to have it. You can't pander to that for a hundred lines and dismiss it with a paragraph - or claim you're trying to somehow prevent it.
Two points for your considerstion:
From here on out, everytime you hear a group described - rich, poor, black, hispanic, whatever; substitute the desciptive with "white" or some term that describes you. Offensive is offensive, despite the historical accidents and current cultural relative positions of any group.
Number two; unless you're a gifted writer or other artist, you'll have to make your money like the rest of us. If you think creating wealth is easy - I suggest you go out there and meet a payroll sometime. For every high profile rich person you can name, there's thousands of people out there eaking out a net in some corporate park - employing 5 to 15 people and working far into the night when they go home at the end of the day.
Unless you're a crook, use a gun or you're a government (see use a gun); money is exchanged as a measure of the value of your service to the other party. If you want more, better find a way to increase the value of your services: learn a skill that pays well (like writing well and the ins-n-outs of the publishing game); or multiply your personal worth by building a company; - or get a gun, OR, if you don't like guns, get the government to do it for you - they have plenty of guns. If you think the gun analogy too extreme; pick any ethical or moral stance in opposition to government edicts and keep saying "NO". You'll eventually see what backs up government rules and regulations strapped to the waist of the latest representative paying you a courtesy call.
Maybe, someday, I'll have some bucks to pass on to my kids - right now I get downright giddy when there's something left over and I get my tax return done on-time. But in the meantime, if I live to be a hundred, I'll never understand how the baby-boomers got from personal freedom advocates to a cabal of condo-CC&R committees who don't give the slightest thought to funding their ideas with other people's money.
Slashdot Mirror
Well - I do own a small company; this may sound self-serving as hell - but I felt the same way as a private in the Army many years ago...
..."
If you had a 20% flat tax for everyone, no exemptions at all, how much tax would a guy earning 45,000 per year pay and how much would a guy making 1,000,000 per year pay? $9,000 Vs $200,000 of course.
Now go check out which groups actually pay the most in actual dollars of tax under the current tax codes, loopholes and all.
Pretty simple I know, but that, to me, is the heart of the matter. The so-called "rich" already pay the bulk of taxes (the assumption is they have more benefit and stuff to protect so pay more). Dont take my word for it - check it out. If you take something from somebody, give it back to the people you took it from.
Most folks believe that corporations don't pay much in taxes; here's one example - check your paycheck for how much social security got - Your employer pays an EQUAL matching amount for all their employees - if "Joe" had $1000 pulled out, I also sent in a matching $1000.
How about "hidden taxes" - do you have health insurance at work? How much did you pay? Now check out what your employer paid. Guess who's underwriting the vast bulk of health costs?
On inheritance taxes, I guess it comes down to: who owns the fruits of you're labor? You or "the people"? Mr. Brin follows a very tortured "ends justify the means" argument but bottom line, he's for grabbing what's yours to achieve a little social engineering....
"... But about a third of that fifteen trillion dollars is set to flow to a few thousand people who never produced a thing to earn it.
Uh, so what? what's your point Mr. Brin? We're already subject to an annual shakedown - we work every year right thru May to support our government. If after a lifetime of work Grandpa or Dad leaves me some bucks (or great-great grandpa for that matter) - I have to justify that too? Why? How many times do I have to go thru the tax gate on the same dollar?
Just to keep it straight, 90% of those few thousand people will squander all of it in the first generation. And they'll do it by spending it on stuff that produces jobs - big houses, travel, boats and planes that lots of "normal" people have jobs making. The few that keep it have invested it, stocks, bonds, bank accounts - money that goes right back into circulation growing companies, financing homes, etc. It isn't stuffed in a mattress someplace.
The point is that family fortunes are invested - which creates jobs; or squandered on products or services, which creates jobs. Rich people create jobs.
The diamond Vs pyramid example is wonderful. Mr. Brin makes a mistake in suggesting the changes came about peacefully - two world wars is hardly peaceful. The industrial revolution created the economic imperatives for a "middle class", not enlightened europeans. You can't get filthy rich selling Windows and NT unless you've got somebody with enough bucks to buy it.
Mr. Brin mentions Andrew Carnegie - Mr. Library himself - in the same paragraph with charitable tax relief. He forgot to mention that NONE of those tax codes existed when the grand old man passed his fortune along! Carnegie did it because that's where he got his start - in a library reading; and very much believed that everyone should have access to what he had. No one asked him to do it, no special "tax relief for libraries" tax codes existed. To even imply that Carnegie did it to save taxes is to impune the man and his motivations. Broke people don't start charities, rich people do. Sorry if that rankles, but it's true.
Look; there's always a little class-warfare hiding under the well chosen prose - in the case of "rich" people - that little irritation is that someone has more than you and they didn't sweat enough (in your opinion) to have it. You can't pander to that for a hundred lines and dismiss it with a paragraph - or claim you're trying to somehow prevent it.
Two points for your considerstion:
From here on out, everytime you hear a group described - rich, poor, black, hispanic, whatever; substitute the desciptive with "white" or some term that describes you. Offensive is offensive, despite the historical accidents and current cultural relative positions of any group.
Number two; unless you're a gifted writer or other artist, you'll have to make your money like the rest of us. If you think creating wealth is easy - I suggest you go out there and meet a payroll sometime. For every high profile rich person you can name, there's thousands of people out there eaking out a net in some corporate park - employing 5 to 15 people and working far into the night when they go home at the end of the day.
Unless you're a crook, use a gun or you're a government (see use a gun); money is exchanged as a measure of the value of your service to the other party. If you want more, better find a way to increase the value of your services: learn a skill that pays well (like writing well and the ins-n-outs of the publishing game); or multiply your personal worth by building a company; - or get a gun, OR, if you don't like guns, get the government to do it for you - they have plenty of guns. If you think the gun analogy too extreme; pick any ethical or moral stance in opposition to government edicts and keep saying "NO". You'll eventually see what backs up government rules and regulations strapped to the waist of the latest representative paying you a courtesy call.
Maybe, someday, I'll have some bucks to pass on to my kids - right now I get downright giddy when there's something left over and I get my tax return done on-time. But in the meantime, if I live to be a hundred, I'll never understand how the baby-boomers got from personal freedom advocates to a cabal of condo-CC&R committees who don't give the slightest thought to funding their ideas with other people's money.
Steve Brown