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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez


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33 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

Here is how Democrat Socialist Nordic countries the left jerks off to tax income:

High, but Flat Income and Payroll Taxes

Scandinavian countries are known for having high taxes on income. According to the OECD, Denmark (26.4 percent), Norway (19.7 percent), and Sweden (22.1 percent) all raise a high amount of tax revenue as a percent of GDP from individual income taxes and payroll taxes. This is compared to the 15 percent of GDP raised by the United States through its individual income taxes and payroll taxes.

In order to raise a lot of income tax revenue, income tax rates in Scandinavian countries are rather high except for in Norway. Denmark’s top marginal effective income tax rate is 60.4 percent. Sweden’s is 56.4 percent. Norway’s top marginal tax rate is 39 percent.

However, the rates are not necessarily the most important feature of the Scandinavian income tax systems. In fact, the United States’ top marginal income tax rate is higher than Norway’s and only 18 percent lower than Sweden’s, yet raises 40 percent less income and payroll tax revenue than Norway and 50 percent less than Sweden.

Scandinavian income taxes raise a lot of revenue because they are actually rather flat. In other words, they tax most people at these high rates, not just high-income taxpayers. The top marginal tax rate of 60 percent in Denmark applies to all income over 1.2 times the average income in Denmark. From the American perspective, this means that all income over $60,000 (1.2 times the average income of about $50,000 in the United States) would be taxed at 60 percent.

Sweden and Norway have similarly flat income tax systems. Sweden’s top marginal tax rate of 56.9 percent applies to all income over 1.5 times the average income in Sweden. Norway’s top marginal tax rate of 39 percent applies to all income over 1.6 times the average Norwegian income.

Compare this to The United States. The top marginal tax rate of 46.8 percent (state average and federal combined rates) kicks in at 8.5 times the average U.S. income (around $400,000). Comparatively, few taxpayers in the United States face the top marginal rate.

 

 

What is your point?

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a whole page about gaffes, media coverage and who started what

and we do write blank checks on killing machines and we nit-pick on healthcare, education, the shit that we need. 

and we also don't calculate correctly (her other point) on global costs but instead react and are moved by on how it affects the individual. i.e. no public good

killing in the name of. party on America

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33 minutes ago, this said:

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

SEG-150x150.jpg
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]

Average Effective Tax Rate on the Top 1 Percent of U.S. Households

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.

you are arguing with that chart with that article?

the chart says: top 0.1% paid ~40% in taxes.

you rush to post an article that says "top 1% paid ~40% in taxes.

okay. good post. thanks?

EDIT: also, i'll note that you ignored every single other chart in my post. care to offer commentary or an opinion on the obvious display of income disparity?

Edited by hayden_horn
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3 hours ago, Pig Bellmont said:

I still don’t understand this thread or the media obsession. Her ousting a top incumbent in a primary was certainly news worthy. A month or more of coverage for a (likely to win) candidate for Congress representing one district in NY? Why should I care what she plans to do for Queens or wherever?

This.  I can't believe this thread is this long.

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23 minutes ago, hayden_horn said:

you are arguing with that chart with that article?

the chart says: top 0.1% paid ~40% in taxes.

you rush to post an article that says "top 1% paid ~40% in taxes.

okay. good post. thanks?

EDIT: also, i'll note that you ignored every single other chart in my post. care to offer commentary or an opinion on the obvious display of income disparity?

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. 

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14 minutes ago, this said:

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. 

you just pointed out that nobody paid a 91% tax rate. you're all over the road.

you also have not yet addressed the growing income disparity as displayed in those charts above. nobody is saying that people shouldn't succeed. that's the american fucking dream man. but what we are seeing with ballooning CEO and executive pay, the middle class is shrinking. when that happens, it's bad for everyone, except the top %. what i'm arguing here is that while it may not be bad for the top 10% now, they are pulling up the ladder behind them. median income is flat, and has remained that way.

i never argued, anywhere, where someone has to apologize for success. shit, my mother is a perfect example of someone who became a top earner in a time and place when pretty much everything was tilted against that in the 70s and 80s. 

what i'm saying is that as income and wealth coalesce at the top, so must the tax dollars. we've been moving in the opposite direction. it's madness.

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13 minutes ago, hayden_horn said:

you just pointed out that nobody paid a 91% tax rate. you're all over the road.

you also have not yet addressed the growing income disparity as displayed in those charts above. nobody is saying that people shouldn't succeed. that's the american fucking dream man. but what we are seeing with ballooning CEO and executive pay, the middle class is shrinking. when that happens, it's bad for everyone, except the top %. what i'm arguing here is that while it may not be bad for the top 10% now, they are pulling up the ladder behind them. median income is flat, and has remained that way.

i never argued, anywhere, where someone has to apologize for success. shit, my mother is a perfect example of someone who became a top earner in a time and place when pretty much everything was tilted against that in the 70s and 80s. 

what i'm saying is that as income and wealth coalesce at the top, so must the tax dollars. we've been moving in the opposite direction. it's madness.

I know lots of people in their 20s and 30s who used to be left-of-center or moderate. They are swinging FAR left in response to the above. Its hard to be lectured on why your proposed solutions are unworkable when the current model is absolutely eviscerating the middle class and creating a new gilded age.  But good luck with the status quo. Just make sure you secure those gates.

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13 minutes ago, Foosters said:

I know lots of people in their 20s and 30s who used to be left-of-center or moderate. They are swinging FAR left in response to the above. Its hard to be lectured on why your proposed solutions are unworkable when the current model is absolutely eviscerating the middle class and creating a new gilded age.  But good luck with the status quo. Just make sure you secure those gates.

No no, I was told her ideas are dumb and unworkable and we should just stick to the familiar status quo like a security blanket.

People are sick and tired of it.  Period.

 

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24 minutes ago, Foosters said:

I know lots of people in their 20s and 30s who used to be left-of-center or moderate. They are swinging FAR left in response to the above. Its hard to be lectured on why your proposed solutions are unworkable when the current model is absolutely eviscerating the middle class and creating a new gilded age.  But good luck with the status quo. Just make sure you secure those gates.

this is my ultimate point, of course. why did this particular candidate displace an established incumbent? because he's an old white dude who is viewed as being out of touch.

and that's the danger of wealth (and income) consolidation. it squeezes the middle. 

this chart illustrates the difficulty we have today. i can't believe i have to explain it, but here we are:

 

1024px-Income_inequality_panel_-_v1.png

take a look at the top right most chart. 20% of pre-tax income in 1962 was in the bottom 50%. that has now switched to the top 1%. 

and people are fucking wondering why candidates and messaging about taxing the top 1% more are staerting to gain traction. 

THAT'S WHERE THE FUCKING MONEY IS.

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20 minutes ago, hayden_horn said:

you just pointed out that nobody paid a 91% tax rate. you're all over the road.

you also have not yet addressed the growing income disparity as displayed in those charts above. nobody is saying that people shouldn't succeed. that's the american fucking dream man. but what we are seeing with ballooning CEO and executive pay, the middle class is shrinking. when that happens, it's bad for everyone, except the top %. what i'm arguing here is that while it may not be bad for the top 10% now, they are pulling up the ladder behind them. median income is flat, and has remained that way.

i never argued, anywhere, where someone has to apologize for success. shit, my mother is a perfect example of someone who became a top earner in a time and place when pretty much everything was tilted against that in the 70s and 80s. 

what i'm saying is that as income and wealth coalesce at the top, so must the tax dollars. we've been moving in the opposite direction. it's madness.

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

 

poverty-rate-historical

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:

Civil Rights

(…)The Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade job discrimination and the segregation of public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 assured minority registration and voting. It suspended use of literacy or other voter-qualification tests that had sometimes served to keep African-Americans off voting lists and provided for federal court lawsuits to stop discriminatory poll taxes. It also reinforced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by authorizing the appointment of federal voting examiners in areas that did not meet voter-participation requirements. The Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas in immigration law. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 banned housing discrimination and extended constitutional protections to Native Americans on reservations.

 

DSA's constant thread on income disparity is nothing but jealousy. 

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49 minutes ago, Foosters said:

I know lots of people in their 20s and 30s who used to be left-of-center or moderate. They are swinging FAR left in response to the above. Its hard to be lectured on why your proposed solutions are unworkable when the current model is absolutely eviscerating the middle class and creating a new gilded age.  But good luck with the status quo. Just make sure you secure those gates.

The worst thing to happen to the middle class in the last 25 years was Obamacare.  Force people to buy expensive insurance with massive deductibles so high they can’t afford to use it.  It’s butt fucked the middle class.  

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1 hour ago, Jiggy-Z said:

What is your point?

That to pay for the socialism this dipshit advocates, it will be on the backs of the middle class.  Won’t hurt the rich much.  You talk about taxing people who make $60k at a 60 percent marginal rate.  That will go over well. 

Right now it’s the rich paying high taxes.  Dem socialism requires everyone but the poor to pay high taxes. It’s a lot flatter tax structure.  It has to be.  The rich don’t have enough income to tax.  Even though that’s how the Bernie types sell it — just tax the rich.  

Edited by Johnny Sack
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15 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

That to pay for the socialism this dipshit advocates, it will be on the backs of the middle class.  Won’t hurt the rich much.  You talk about taxing people who make $60k at a 60 percent marginal rate.  That will go over well.  

So we should just raise the taxes on the rich?  Seems to be what you are saying.

All kidding aside, comparisons with Scandinavian countries are really tough. They benefit from having had these systems in place longer, smaller populace, landmass, and budget, defense spending etc.  But the reason they work is that they actually get something for those taxes.  Additionally, from your article, the reason their taxes are much "flatter" than ours is that they have a much more even distribution of income across their populace so that structure works. Plus Norway at least has some sort of huge oil fund that kind of bankrolls everything.

Also, lost in this discussion, is the concentration on individual tax rates.  The real problem with the Trump tax bill was the corporate stuff.  40% reduction in corporate taxes when things seemed to be going pretty well already -at the expense of the budget yet again.

 

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55 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

The worst thing to happen to the middle class in the last 25 years was Obamacare.  Force people to buy expensive insurance with massive deductibles so high they can’t afford to use it.  It’s butt fucked the middle class.  

or pay the $95 'tax' , no?

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59 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

The worst thing to happen to the middle class in the last 25 years was Obamacare.  Force people to buy expensive insurance with massive deductibles so high they can’t afford to use it.  It’s butt fucked the middle class.  

Talking points.

Obamacare has stabilized and is working quite well.

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5 hours ago, hayden_horn said:

and people are fucking wondering why candidates and messaging about taxing the top 1% more are staerting to gain traction. 

THAT'S WHERE THE FUCKING MONEY IS.

Except the reality is that the money is in the meat of the distribution. See income share by income group chart. If you want to really move the needle you have to hit those very low six figure households.  You have to tax the meat of the middle class to move the needle.  

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18 minutes ago, OatmealRaisinCookie said:

Slave morality/mentality does not aim at exerting one's will by strength, but by careful subversion. It does not seek to transcend the masters, but to make them slaves as well. The essence of slave morality is utilityThe good is what is most useful for the whole community, not just the strong. Nietzsche saw this as a contradiction. Since the powerful are few in number, compared to the masses of the weak, the weak gain power by corrupting the strong into believing that the causes of slavery (viz., the will to power) are "evil", as are the qualities the weak originally could not choose because of their weakness. By saying humility is voluntary, slave morality avoids admitting that their humility was in the beginning forced upon them by a master.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master–slave_morality

Oh, so employees. I agree completely.

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13 minutes ago, OatmealRaisinCookie said:

Employees who cry about how much the CEO makes and feel entitled to a bunch of money even though they aren’t particularly valuable; agreed.

But also, poor and unprivileged people who want that privileged people be brought down and at the privileged’s expense the poor should be given free stuff because they are entitled to comforts and things that others have.

I

Uh, no. All employees. 

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Mugging the haves to give it to the have nots is a bad strategy. You can’t just give hand outs and expect the middle class to recover. You have to structure the welfare system in such a way that encourages people to work and earn. And you have to have jobs for them.

I’m intrigued by what Maine has done and wonder if it could scale.

Income disparity is a bit of a red herring imo. The goal should be to make sure everyone is able to earn enough, not to bring down the high earners because you don’t like how much they have.

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15 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

 

Look, the trade war is fucking dumb. The Space Force is also fucking dumb. Both of those, (as well as the $2T tax cuts) are drops in the bucket compared to what just 1 year of M4A would cost this country not to mention whatever the fuck a pie in the sky "tuition-free college" scheme would fucking cost us. What a dumb fucking tweet.

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2 hours ago, Buzzrock said:

Mugging the haves to give it to the have nots is a bad strategy. You can’t just give hand outs and expect the middle class to recover. You have to structure the welfare system in such a way that encourages people to work and earn. And you have to have jobs for them.

I’m intrigued by what Maine has done and wonder if it could scale.

Income disparity is a bit of a red herring imo. The goal should be to make sure everyone is able to earn enough, not to bring down the high earners because you don’t like how much they have.

I'd agree on most of your post. The income disparity is an issue IMO, and not because I want his or her money, but because it's not good for the economic stability of a country when too much is held by too few.  (SEE: 1929)

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17 minutes ago, 936horn said:

Look, the trade war is fucking dumb. The Space Force is also fucking dumb. Both of those, (as well as the $2T tax cuts) are drops in the bucket compared to what just 1 year of M4A would cost this country not to mention whatever the fuck a pie in the sky "tuition-free college" scheme would fucking cost us. What a dumb fucking tweet.

Free college is pie in the sky but M4A would be cheaper on the pocketbooks of Americans than what we have now.  The average cost of healthcare per person in the US is $8000+.  The average cost per person in the U.K. is around $2500.  We’re already getting screwed six ways to Sunday.

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28 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Free college is pie in the sky but M4A would be cheaper on the pocketbooks of Americans than what we have now.  The average cost of healthcare per person in the US is $8000+.  The average cost per person in the U.K. is around $2500.  We’re already getting screwed six ways to Sunday.

The healthcare cost now is 3.3 trillion a year or 33 trillion over 10 years with no increases. Realistic projections put the 10 year cost under the current system at close to 50 trillion factoring annual cost increases. And yes that means we could be paying close to 6 trillion a year for healthcare in 10 years from now under the current system.

We must do something.

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41 minutes ago, 936horn said:

Look, the trade war is fucking dumb. The Space Force is also fucking dumb. Both of those, (as well as the $2T tax cuts) are drops in the bucket compared to what just 1 year of M4A would cost this country not to mention whatever the fuck a pie in the sky "tuition-free college" scheme would fucking cost us. What a dumb fucking tweet.

M4A would actually save a lot of money compared to our current system.  What a dumb fucking post.

Quote

In the report, Charles Blahous attempts to roughly score Bernie Sanders’ most recent Medicare for All bill and reaches the somewhat surprising (for Mercatus) conclusion that, if the bill were enacted, the new costs it creates would be more than offset by the new savings it generates through administrative efficiencies and reductions in unit prices.

The report’s methods are pretty straightforward. Blahous starts with current projections about how much the country will spend on health care between 2022 and 2031. From there, he adds the costs associated with higher utilization of medical services and then subtracts the savings from lower administrative costs, lower reimbursements for medical services, and lower drug prices. After this bit of arithmetic, Blahous finds that health expenditures would be lower for every year during the first decade of implementation. The net change across the whole 10-year period is a savings of $2.054 trillion.

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/07/30/mercatus-study-finds-medicare-for-all-saves-2-trillion/

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  • hayden_horn changed the title to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez


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