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  1. Income disparity is a problem to you because its a vehicle for politicians to flame the masses. Today's middle class enjoys more amenities, larger homes, more cars, electronics than the one in 50s despite having a wider income disparity according to you. We have a better lifestyle overall by far and yet you point to income disparity. We should care about poverty, not income disparity. Caring about income disparity is like you pointing to some guy's nice car and wanting it just because he has it. Do we have poverty? Sure. Are there resources to take care of poverty? Yes. Have we improved on poverty since the gilded age of the 50s that you DSAs love to talk about when it was at 20%? Here you go: US Poverty Rate – How the Great Society Programs Reversed its Decline It is notable that in post World War 2 America, the poverty rate was declining constantly every year, until in 1973 it hit a level of just below 8.8% from where it has since then bounced back to now around 11% and rising. How can this be explained? Well, one way to approach this is the following: What do you expect would happen if the government started to enact new major welfare programs that would affect families across the board? Of course: the programs would keep the recipients in poverty, rather than motivating them to lift themselves out, and, as a tendency, produce a lasting underclass of dependents. Is there evidence that an unusually high number of such programs was introduced in the US shortly before 1973? I believe that there clearly is, the Great Society programs: DSA's constant thread on income disparity is nothing but jealousy.
  2. The problem is you come from a place where one has to apologize for their success. If Gates creates a product that is an absolute must for one to organize their lives via work and personal he shouldn't be the one that enjoys the fruit of that creation. Its the populace. You are trying to draw America to be some sort of a Russian replica where oligarchs rule. You do realize that 2/3rds of Forbes 400 are self made entrepreneurs right? At one point we allowed slavery, clearly we were wrong. Same goes for 90% tax rate. Now note, that in no way am I equating those two. Its used as an example to point out that we have been wrong before so we have no need to follow it again.
  3. Fair enough. I don't have a problem with your notes, I do have a problem with her though.
  4. Here's a better question: Would you rather have the income, amenities and lifestyle of someone in the middle class of the 50s or someone today? By any objective method of reasoning, we have it better today. What the one percent has, is irrelevant.
  5. This is a cute chart but here is the reality: https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-rich-1950-not-high/ Taxes on the Rich Were Not That Much Higher in the 1950s August 4, 2017 Scott Greenberg There is a common misconception that high-income Americans are not paying much in taxes compared to what they used to. Proponents of this view often point to the 1950s, when the top federal income tax rate was 91 percent for most of the decade.[1] However, despite these high marginal rates, the top 1 percent of taxpayers in the 1950s only paid about 42 percent of their income in taxes. As a result, the tax burden on high-income households today is only slightly lower than what these households faced in the 1950s. The graph below shows the average tax rate that the top 1 percent of Americans have faced over the last century. The data comes from a recent paper by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman that attempts to account for all federal, state, and local taxes paid by different groups of Americans over the last 100 years.[2] The data shows that, between 1950 and 1959, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average of 42.0 percent of their income in federal, state, and local taxes. Since then, the average effective tax rate of the top 1 percent has declined slightly overall. In 2014, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average tax rate of 36.4 percent. All things considered, this is not a very large change. To put it another way, the average effective tax rate on the 1 percent highest-income households is about 5.6 percentage points lower today than it was in the 1950s. That’s a noticeable change, but not a radical shift.[3] How could it be that the tax code of the 1950s had a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent, but resulted in an effective tax rate of only 42 percent on the wealthiest taxpayers? In fact, the situation is even stranger. The 42.0 percent tax rate on the top 1 percent takes into account all taxes levied by federal, state, and local governments, including: income, payroll, corporate, excise, property, and estate taxes. When we look at income taxes specifically, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average effective rate of only 16.9 percent in income taxes during the 1950s.[4] There are a few reasons for the discrepancy between the 91 percent top marginal income tax rate and the 16.9 percent effective income tax rate of the 1950s. The 91 percent bracket of 1950 only applied to households with income over $200,000 (or about $2 million in today’s dollars). Only a small number of taxpayers would have had enough income to fall into the top bracket – fewer than 10,000 households, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. Many households in the top 1 percent in the 1950s probably did not fall into the 91 percent bracket to begin with. Even among households that did fall into the 91 percent bracket, the majority of their income was not necessarily subject to that top bracket. After all, the 91 percent bracket only applied to income above $200,000, not to every single dollar earned by households. Finally, it is very likely that the existence of a 91 percent bracket led to significant tax avoidance and lower reported income. There are many studies that show that, as marginal tax rates rise, income reported by taxpayers goes down. As a result, the existence of the 91 percent bracket did not necessarily lead to significantly higher revenue collections from the top 1 percent. All in all, the idea that high-income Americans in the 1950s paid much more of their income in taxes should be abandoned. The top 1 percent of Americans today do not face an unusually low tax burden, by historical standards. [1] The top federal income tax rate was 91 percent in 1950 and 1951, and between 1954 and 1959. In 1952 and 1953, the top federal income tax rate was 92 percent. [2] Some of the distributional assumptions in the Piketty, Saez, and Zucman paper are questionable. In particular, the authors assume that the full burden of the corporate income tax falls on owners of capital, which may not be correct. However, the authors note that they “have tested a number of alternative tax incidence assumptions, and found only second-order effects.” [3] It is worth noting that, per the Piketty, Saez, and Zucman data, the tax rates of the top 0.1 and 0.01 percent of taxpayers have dropped substantially since the 1950s. The average tax rate on the 0.1 percent highest-income Americans was 50.6 percent in the 1950s, compared to 39.8 percent today. The average tax rate on the top 0.01 percent was 55.3 percent in the 1950s, compared to 40.8 percent today. [4] The data from Piketty, Saez, and Zucman is not divided among federal, state, and local taxes, so it is difficult to tell exactly how much the rich were paying in federal income taxes specifically during this period.
  6. Uh, have you not read the AOC bill of rights? This thread is about her and the ones supporting her.
  7. Fine, let's cut military spending in half. We'll save 350 billion dollars/year. Let's forget about universal healthcare, we'll save 3.3 trillion dollars/year. Something we do not have. The entire 1% makes 2 trillion dollars in income/year. We tax on income, not wealth. Wealthy having more wealth as a data point is ridiculous because they are a self selected group. Not only do they have more disposable dollars to save but they are better at managing money than the rest so they will always have more wealth.
  8. We are already doing that. Top 1% pays for 40% of all income tax generated (27% effective tax rate) Top 5% pays for 60% of all income tax generated Top 10% pays for 70% of all income tax generated Top 25% pays for 86% of all income tax generated. Bottom 50% pays for 3% of all income tax generated. (3% effective tax rate) No one's suggesting tax the poor, but fuck the right off with asking for more shit. Just because you keep repeating that this or that is a right does not make it so.
  9. So (your) or democratic stance is that every time there is an increase in (voluntary) cost anywhere in the economy the burden to cover it should fall on the wealthy because they might benefit from it? Now I also don't want to get into the discussion that a constant flood of tax dollars has led to unnecessary luxuries such as lounging pool at UT to Ritz Carlton quality education buildings in colleges and universities which has a more of a direct relationship to the hike in costs. Something that has spurred competition amongst state universities to "keep up" with each other. You must attend a semester in other countries around the world to really see the stark difference in college amenities Americans enjoy vs. the world. I'd argue that by raising the fees due to these ludicrous amenities shifted on to the people attending it vs govt writing the check for the difference is more helpful in keeping that in reign. Affordable state college tuition has a lot more to do with that than anything else. And as a life long republican, you must know that throwing more dollars at something like this only worsens the problem. Just like it did with housing. But that's for another time.
  10. I don't disagree with any of what you have just said. I just hate the rhetoric from Bernie and AOC that the "rich" dont pay their fair share. Bull shit.
  11. You and facts, lol. But I'll play, what people?
  12. She speaks from a conveniently biased place so its just tit for tat. She is either too dumb or naive or downright pandering to her base. Here are some of the fallacies in her dumbass statements: We didn't "write" a check for tax cuts for the rich. Tax cuts were for everyone, the rich pay pretty much ALL the taxes so of course they saw a larger benefit. When bottom fifty percent of this country accounts for (a whopping) less than 3% of all the income tax collected they will obviously see a lower impact when there is a tax reduction. Because you know, uh math. Its intellectually dishonest at best and a lie at worst to say that "we wrote a check". You didn't do anything, people are just keeping more of THEIR OWN fucking money. And the CBO data suggests it will be a bit over a trillion dollars over 10 years. Her demand for universal healthcare will cost 3 trillion every year. Apples and oranges. However I can agree with her on war related expenses but we have the benefit of hindsight and again its 2 trillion over 17 years vs 3 trillion every year. She makes these false equivalencies and obviously her base who is equally adept at bad math cannot see the difference that spending 200 billion/year does not equal spending 15 times as much every year forever.
  13. You have a point. I'd even insert Trump in there somewhere, no?
  14. It also helped that he had a very very punchable face, second only to Ted Cruz.
  15. Here's Wapo's take on your ridiculously stupid analysis of the study that(obviously) neither one of you or any of your dumb socialist leaders read but loved pointing out: Twitter Ads info and privacy But Blahous is crying foul, saying Medicare-for-all proponents are misrepresenting his findings. Let’s take a look. The Facts We often warn readers that you can’t get something for nothing. In the health-care realm, even relatively small shifts can lead to major dislocation and changes; President Barack Obama discovered that, to his chagrin. As former Lyndon Johnson White House aide Joseph A. Califano Jr. once noted, congressional dealmaking during the passage of Medicaid unexpectedly led to one-third of the Medicaid budget going to nursing homes — an industry that was literally built on Medicaid funding. In doing his research, Blahous decided to follow the text of the Sanders plan and assume that providers — doctors, hospitals, and the like — would face an immediate cut of roughly 40 percent for the treatment of patients now covered by private insurance. (Note: an earlier version of this fact check incorrectly included a reference to drug companies in the sentence above. The analysis found that drug costs would be $846 billion lower over ten years from an aggressive program to negotiate lower prescription drug prices but it would not be as much as a 40 percent decline.) That in theory would reduce the country’s overall level of health expenditures by $2 trillion from 2022 to 2031. But he makes clear that it’s a pretty unrealistic assumption. In the fourth sentence of the report’s abstract, Blahous wrote, “It is likely that the actual cost of M4A would be substantially greater than these estimates, which assume significant administrative and drug cost savings under the plan, and also assume that healthcare providers operating under M4A will be reimbursed at rates more than 40 percent lower than those currently paid by private health insurance.” Under an alternative scenario, which assumes these cuts cannot be achieved, national health spending rises even faster than under current law because health-care demand would increase. “To lend credibility to the $2 trillion savings number, one would have to argue that we can cut payments to providers by about 40 percent at the same time as increasing demand by about 11 percent,” Blahous said. The main point of his study is being ignored by Democrats — that even by generously accepting Sanders’s assumptions that he could squeeze providers so much, the plan would still raise government expenditures by $32.6 trillion. This is in line with a 2016 estimate by the left-leaning Urban Institute of an earlier version of the M4A plan — that it would cause federal expenditures to increase by $32 trillion. (Without the provider cuts, Blahaus estimated the additional federal budget cost at nearly $40 trillion over 10 years.) Sanders has said his plan would cost $1.38 trillion a year, paid for in part with new taxes on employers and an income-based premium, but under Blahaus’s analysis it would be closer to $3.3 trillion. “For perspective on these figures, consider that doubling all currently projected federal individual and corporate income tax collections would be insufficient to finance the added federal costs of the plan,” Blahous wrote. (He’s referring only to income tax collection, not existing Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes.) Blahous told the Fact Checker: “Every table in the study (Tables 1-5) is very explicit that the additional costs arising from higher demand are substantially higher than the potential administrative efficiencies of going to a centralized national health insurance system. So whenever proponents argue that eliminating private sector insurance profits and overhead would enable us to cover more people for less money, that conflicts with the findings of the study.” Congress has passed cuts to health-care providers that do not come to fruition. More famously, the 1997 balanced-budget agreement between President Bill Clinton and the GOP-led Congress included cuts that Congress deferred for 17 years with an annual provision known as the “doc fix.” It was finally eliminated under a deal Obama reached with Congress in 2015, or else providers would have faced a cut of 21 percent. Other efforts to control spending in Medicare, however, have fared better, including as part of the enactment of the Affordable Care Act. In 2012, Blahous wrote a study questioning the budget assumptions in the Affordable Care Act, such as the political prospects for a tax on “Cadillac” health plans. He turned out to be right: The tax keeps getting pushed off and weakened. Health-care costs did decline after the passage of the ACA, but whether that pre-dated the law or not is a subject of continuing debate. For the record, Blahous says the Kochs had nothing to do with his research. “It’s academic research, it goes through a blind review process, and it represents my own work,” he said. “I choose my own research subjects and follow the facts where they lead. You’d have to ask someone else about where funding comes from, I don’t follow that and it doesn’t affect me.” We shared Blahous’s concerns with Gillum’s campaign, which confirmed that he relied on the Mercatus study, and received this response: “The Mayor’s a proud supporter of Medicare-for-All and this study shows the potential for significant savings,” said communications director Geoff Burgan. “It would be a strong improvement over the Republicans’ attempts to destroy our current system and rip health care away from people.” In response to this fact check, Sanders’s office provided links to several articles, including in The Washington Post, that reported that Blahous concluded that the Sanders plan would reduce national health expenditures by $2 trillion. Blahous said these articles are good examples of the misinterpretation of his research: “It’s precisely because people have been saying that, that the correction is warranted.” The Pinocchio Test We don’t intend to pick on Gillum, who appears to have picked up a talking point that is circulating among Democrats. But we do want to lay down a marker because this goes too far. All too often, politicians mischaracterize conclusions that are contained in academic or think tank studies. At the Fact Checker, we rely heavily on how a study’s author says the data should be presented. In this case, it’s clear that Blahous bent over backward to accept Sanders’s assumptions, only to find they did not add up. Democrats cannot seize on one cherry-picked fact without acknowledging the broader implications of Blahous’s research. Three Pinocchios https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/08/07/democrats-seize-on-cherry-picked-claim-that-medicare-for-all-will-save-2-trillion/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e72e3a4c5e46 lulz......your leaders are just as prone to lying as the idiot in chief. You're in great company.
  16. Umm, dont you mean we need to talk about Jeff Dunham?
  17. Add math to the wish list for socialists.
  18. I just upended your "analysis" and called bullshit on what you claimed based on some left wing propaganda website who also did not do their homework and read the study they were quoting. And this is your response? Haha. You should've stuck to what fondren is doing at this moment. Hiding in anonymity for hitching his wagon to your retarded links. BTW, its not coming, because we are in power and we will be in power. And by we, I mean sane people who can do basic math. Just for good measure, I'll throw in that I dislike Trump as much as you do. But I dislike freeloading Bernie and Bernie wannabes just as much.
  19. Neither one of you read the study did you? Just ran with Bernie tweet? LOL, you DSAs crack me up. Page 18: At the same time, more generous healthcare insurance would be provided to everyone at the expense of healthcare providers, who would face reimbursements substantially below their service costs. As noted previously, whether providers could sustain such losses and remain in operation, and how those who continue operations would adapt to such dramatic payment reductions, are critically important questions. While these estimates show little net change in NHE, the same cannot be said of the projected effects on the federal budget. Table 2 includes an estimate for the net increase in federal health budget commitments of $32.6 trillion from 2022 through 2031, which, by itself, is more than all federal individual and corporate income taxes projected to be collected during that 46 Again, the assumption of public financing is retained throughout this study pursuant to the language of the M4A bill text. International experience has been that private financing often retains a substantial role. See Thomson, Foubister, and Mossialos, Financing Healthcare in the European Union. 19 time period.47 So in summation the cost stays below what it is today as long as we work healthcare providers i.e. the doctors offices at a loss. I'm sure the best and brightest are going to line up to go to school for another 12 years on average AFTER high school working at a minimum of 80 hours/week to become doctors once they find out that they'll be paid roughly at the same wage as someone who graduated high school. Its a good thing neither the two of you, nor your messiahs who have a difficult time putting 1 and 1 together are in power. So uh, back to square one again. The costs are going to be what you stated fondren, about 10 times what they are today.
  20. this

    Tax reform

    Let's figure out this deficit thing then, how about the rich pay a higher 30% effective tax rate? How about the bottom 50 percent throw some skin in the game and pay uh I don't know, 15% effective tax rate?
  21. I'm gonna have to go through first 18 pages to find your UBI numbers, go ahead and do me a solid chief. Just repost them, will ya? And where did I say anything about it not replacing the old system? That is exactly what I'm hoping it would do, but I'm asking by how much? So why not stop playing these games? Fill this out for me: Total tax revenue collected: _____________ Total Medicare spending: _____________ Total UBI spending: ____________________ Whatever else Fondren feels spending: __________________ Existent non discretionary spending: _______________________
  22. this

    Tax reform

    See this would be true if the table didn't further illustrate that the bottom 50% also account for under 3% of ALL the income tax revenue generated. You know, because math.
  23. this

    Tax reform

    I told you how I feel about the bottom fifty percent wringing their hands about how the rich don't pay their fair share. Its borne out of ignorance of facts and basic math. I'm here to ail that for you. One day!
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