Hambone10 Wrote:erice Wrote:My basic problem with it, though, is that I don't believe that true equal opportunity is quite pervasive enough in the U.S. to enable those conservative principles of small government and unfettered markets to run free without further separating the haves from the have-nots (sorry for the cheesy phrase). There's nothing that says you can't lay the free market over a few things like progressive taxes and modest regulation and let it go from there. (I know, it's not truly "free" then, but it's about the same idea).
but it is the regulation of our economy (read: tax policy that takes tens of thousands of pages to attempt to be clear, and still gets challenged every day) that favors the rich over the trying to be rich.... and the poor over all (simply from a how much do you have to give, to get.)
I support things like consumption taxes because just like we tax flowers but not milk... we can give tax breaks to the poor... but it is harder for the wealthy to shelter their purchases. They will make more money, I suppose... but they will also pay higher prices for things they want. Interestingly, the wealthy don't really have a problem paying 120,000 for a S65 when the Audi A8L v12 is 110,000... but if you raise taxes from 36% to 39.6%, they'll spend 100,000 to save 110,000. If the S65 were suddenly 140,000 and the Audi 130,000... they'd still buy the one they wanted.
We talk as if it is tax breaks that make the rich richer... Its loopholes that do that. Look at the truly wealthy... and tell me that they pay 36% in taxes. Heck, they aren't even fully subject to the AMT which was specifically designed to stop them.
C'mon people... we're smarter than this. Some of those on this board have advanced degrees in taking advantage of regulation. Tell me how a family who spends 90% of what they earn... whether that is 25,000 or 250,000 is supposed to do that?
It's not taxes that are causing the widening gap between rich and poor. It's the fact that we don't have the kinds of value-added jobs that existed a generation ago because we've lost our manufacturing base.
Take a guy who's running a large press in a steel mill. Not everybody can do that job. It takes intelligence and it takes some epxerience to do it well. You can pay that guy well for that job, because you can sell the resulting product at a profit, and because you can't replace that guy with someone else that you don't have to pay well. Today, that job is in China. The guy who used to do it is now delivering pizzas. He can be replaced by a high school kid making the minimum wage. This is a dramatization, to be sure, but it's not far removed from reality for a lot of people.
We've replaced the value-added manufacturing economy of a generation ago with a service-oriented retail economy of today. We don't make things, we import them from China. I'm not a protectionist. In fact I see much value in a global economy and I strongly favor things like NAFTA and other free trade accords to promote it. My sense is that we are never going to fix trade problems with protectionist tariffs.
We have to fix the reasons why we are no longer competitive in the world. We're never going to have cheaper labor. But our education system should be giving us more productive labor, and it's not. Our infrastructure should be providing the most reliable transportation, communication, fuel, and other services to support economic activity, and we're experiencing too many failures there. Our tax system creates considerable disincentives compared with other countries which actually raise more revenues but do it in ways that don't penalize investment and growth. We get points for having a more stable and less intrusive government, but those advantages are lessened when we do things like the patRIOT act. Our overhead costs are raised by our failure to provide health care financed by means other than employer-funded programs and by the high-risk all-or-nothing nature of our environmental regulations and jackpot civil justice system.
We may not be able to fix all these things. As a nation, we may not want to fix some of the ones that we can fix. But we need to fix at least some of them in order to attract the kind of investment we need to turn things around. Otherwise, we're killing the goose that used to lay the golden eggs.
I don't see anyone in any political party talking about these problems. The bemoan the loss of jobs, but their proposed cures are worse than the disease.
Obama is proposing to raise the average tax load on the top 1% of the population by an average of $250,000 to provide, inter alia, an additional $500 of tax relief to persons at the lower end of the income chain. Much has been made about how the $250,000 will disincentivize investment and job growth. But what about the $500? Is that really going to make any difference? Did the Bush economic stimlus package of about the same amount make any real difference? Is that man/woman and his/her family still going to be poor after they cash their check? Isn't their best chance of getting rich the job that is now not going to be offered because we taxed away $250,000 from the guy who was going to offer it? We're not going to tax ourselves rich.
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New Yorker Editorial about Obama and McCain
