Since I promised to take a shot at the other side also...
"Conservatives believe in a "fair" America. A place where people get to keep the money they have inherited or earned. A place where government provides minimal services, collects minimal taxes and does almost no wealth transfer. (ie safety nets) A place where citizens can choose to help those with similar beliefs, while letting strangers and those they disapprove of suffer. (ie selective charitable giving) Or they can choose to help no one.
Since the Conservative was lucky to have been born in America, to have been raised well, to have been successful, etc, they really can see no reason why everyone can not attain success. And if those people have not attained success, they are likely sinners, lazy or not too smart.
The government of the people should not transfer Private Property from the successful to
the less successful, because they do it inefficiently, ineffectively and distribute too much to the lazy, sinners and not too smart. (and the bureaucrats / public employees) "
Thoughts?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
10 comments:
That may be the fantasyland conservatives believe in, but it isn't now and never has been the country in which they live, or want to live when it's their own interests at issue.
--Hiram
Mitt Romney wanted to middle class taxpayers to pay more in taxes so the wealthy could pay less. Do conservatives have a problem with moving property from the less successful to the more successful?
==Hiram
I disagree. It looks like the USA met these criteria for the first ~156 yrs of its history. It is only the last ~80 where we have slipped away from their dream. USA Spending History
That philosophy problem again. Taking less Personal Property from a group is not wealth transfer... To transfer you need to take from one group and write checks to another.
Tell me how, please, I can get rich by taking money from people that don't have enough? That old liberal math just doesn't compute and never did. Why didn't Robin Hood rob from the poor? There are certainly more of them.
J.
Taking less Personal Property from a group is not wealth transfer.
Then does it follow that taking more personal property from a group isn't wealth transfer either? And if the answer to both of those questions is yes, why are we talking about wealth transfer at all in the context of tax policy.
And by the way, my answer to both of those questions is yes. I don't think allocation of tax burden is a wealth transfer issue.
--Hiram
Tell me how, please, I can get rich by taking money from people that don't have enough?
It can be done, but that's what people have revolutions about. Remember, we tax people who have money, not because it's either fair or unfair, although fairness considerations can enter into our decision making process, but because they are the ones who have the money. It just doesn't make sense to try to tax people who are broke. And in our economy as currently structured, more and more people are effectively broke. Many of the forty seven percent of the people don't pay federal income tax, not because they are lazy; they work hard and often a lot harder than the fifty three percent. The reason they don't pay federal income taxes is because they aren't paid enough for the work that they do.
--Hiram
In Robin Hood terms, a fundamental problem in our economy is the one alluded too, the rich are getting wealthier, but the rest of the populations isn't. This undermines the premise of Republican economics, namely that we all do better when the rich get richer, that rewarding "success" through tax policy and in other ways, means that more people will be more successful. That has proved contrary to what has actually happened.
--Hiram
I repeat, again, redundantly, over and over. The purpose of tax policy is NOT to redistribute wealth NOR to be any kind of "fair," though it SHOULD hold people "equal before the law." The purpose of taxation is to derive the funds necessary to fund the essential and permitted functions of government, and no more. To that end I propose that a fair tax policy would be a simple flat tax on disposable income (everything above the poverty line). It would be perfectly progressive and let the poor alone. This is NOT what we have today. The "working poor" pay taxes, sometimes at a (slightly) greater % than those in the middle class, but the rich pay a much higher percent of their income in taxes than middle class people do. I will allow there is some fairness in saying that somebody making ten times as much as I do pays ten times the DOLLARS I do, but there is no way, on fairness grounds, to justify them paying ten times the PERCENTAGE that I do.
J.
Tax policy has a lot of purposes.
--Hiram
Written like a true Liberal...
Post a Comment