Some things are just so obvious, and make so much sense that, people from all walks of life can agree.
Like tax fairness, for example.
Way back in 1985, President Reagan -- yes, that Ronald Reagan, hero of conservatives everywhere -- talked about eliminating tax loopholes and giveaways for the richest Americans.
And while even Reagan, Republican icon, has said our tax code should be the same for the middle class and the wealthy, today's right wing won't even come to the table. The Republican leadership mocks the bill and the Wall Street Journal prints the headline "Rich would skirt Buffett Rule." Only to be debunked by Forbes magazine as being "[c]atchy but misleading."
Between all the back and forth, the real underlying issue is becoming lost. We're talking about restoring fairness to our tax system. The tenant of the Buffett Rule is to fix something so broken, so wrong that Ronald Reagan agreed. Our tax code is fundamentally unfair because the system taxes income typically earned by the wealthy, like investments, at a lower rate than income earned by middle class workers, like salaries. More troubling, the system is full of tax loopholes, corporate giveaways and carve-outs for millionaires and billionaires. This has left us with a world in which middle class families are paying more of their overall income than our richest 1%.
And where do we go from here? We're facing a radical Republican Party on the other side who says the Buffett Rule is "class warfare," and attacks our plan. Well -- that's just ridiculous. Tax fairness is something so basic that two people from two very different angles have come to agree. Just watch this video of Presidents Reagan and Obama both echoing our call for tax fairness.
It may surprise a lot of people to find Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, Sheldon Whitehouse and I on the same side of anything. But with an issue like this that makes so much sense the real question is, why does today's right wing disagree?
While we wait for the answer to that question, I'll leave you with this: there are just a few weeks left before Tax Day and Americans across the country are sitting down at their kitchen tables and adding up the numbers. Let's help them out. Click here to add your name to those calling for passage of the Buffett Rule for tax fairness.
Follow Tammy Baldwin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TammyBaldwinWI
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse: The Buffett Rule: Your Straight Deal on Taxes
Kristie Arslan: Mr. President, Focus on the 'Baffle Rule,' not the 'Buffett Rule'
universalexchangetax.com
www.fairtax.org
1. the money was initially taxed as income at the same rate as your earnings would be taxed
2. Unearned income, like long term capital gains, occur over time. inflation can turn a realized gain into a financial loss. For example, I invest $100 in a stock. I sell it a year later for $105. Over that year, inflation was at 6% percent. My buying power fell to $99 in today's dollars yet I would still have to pay taxes for the priviledge of reducing my buying power even further below $99.
This is what would be fair. The person who makes a 100 times as much as someone else pays a 100 times more tax.
Sadly, I doubt if Obama would support such an idea. The Buffet rule is silly. If you really believe in such an idea - then support a flat tax.
As long as we demand that someone else pay for the stuff we want, we will always be poor and dependent and hopeless. It has nothing to do with fairness, it has everything to do with pure, raw power. The power of the government and the power of the mob. When the government taxes some and borrows to make up the difference in order to give to others, running up a monstrous debt in the process, nothing will ever get better.
Here are the hard, cold facts:
- If you tax corporations HQ'd in the US, they'll move out of the US;
- You cannot tax the wealthiest Americans enough (they don't have enough money) to make even a dent in the deficit, much less the debt;
- The more Americans become more dependent on the federal government to fix things up for them, the worse the prospects become;
- Time on the Internet, or protesting, is time wasted that could be used to a) build skills, b) build experience (through volunteering, if nothing else), or c) open and build a business.
Nobody ever became prosperous, much less "free and independent", by relying on government to fix things up for them.
"Somalia is a country that has no taxes, no companies or people want to go there." - - - More pertinently, Somalia has no institutions of democracy. You could give Somalia all the taxes, etc in the world and it wouldn't make Somalia a country.
As to the entire second half of your response: " There has been a huge migration of wealth up out of reach of the middle class." - - - This is a product of the government interceding to provide retirement, healthcare, and a social safety net for the working class. As the working class has become dependent on government to provide, they have essentially quit even TRYING to accumulate personal capital (wealth), so fewer and fewer families have anything to pass on to their children. Not 'cause a someone who took it away from 'em. They just entirely quit trying ... why not buy that Escalade and go on vacation to Hawaii, instead, and let the gummint' worry about my retirement and old age health care.
Iz not comfy to confront this, but iz essential to ever truly unmuck this situation.
Nothing exposes the paucity of that argument like the fact that even the 'leaders' of the party espousing those opinions have to take their families to a country with socialized medicine.
If Jimmy wants to pay more let him ...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/25/warren-buffett-bank-america-too-big-to-fail_n_937118.html
In government, there are two sources of power: votes and money (*). It's fairly easy to turn money into votes, far harder to do the reverse. But politicians keep trying to do it, most recently now through this "tax the rich" scheme.
(*) There are very rare occasions when a politician has "moral authority": Washington, Lincoln, Churchill. But in today's world that just won't happen (too much media, too many critics ... too much media).
That's a pretty meaningless statement and irrelevant to the issue.
" The major flaw in that belief is that lately greed and corruption has caused these same billionaires to invest overseas" - - - The reasons for this are fascinating, and have little to do with the conventional dialog.
a) In 1945, most of the rest of the world lay in smoking ruins, there were no 'consumers' overseas, domestic production and consumption was almost the entire economy;
b) by 1970, that began to change very markedly, in 1990 China joined the crowd, there is no way to go back to the environment of 1945-1970;
c) where this gets really interesting, though, is the social contract. Post-War, with GI's returning home by the millions from war, there was a strong social contract: "The rich will pay their taxes, the poor will not demand expensive entitlements and benefits, and everyone will pitch in and work";
d) all that changed in the 1960's as LBJ waged the war in Viet Nam without calling up the Reserves at the same time he passed his Great Society, which well and truly destroyed the existing social contract;
e) with the poor now demanding expensive entitlements and benefits, the rich are no longer morally obliged to pay, so they don't.