Bitey said:
Also your “history” is quite skewed. Yes as a conservative you would have me believe that the taxing of the rich hurts the economy. This is true when the rich are actually spending money and creating jobs. When the rich do not spend money and are not creating jobs we need a higher tax on the rich to fuel the economy. Instead sending everything to China and other foreign countries to “cutback” on their “debt”.
Jobs are going overseas because our corporate tax rates are the highest on the planet. Literally. It makes no sense to do business in America when you can do it in China who has less than a 5% corporate tax rate. Couple near zero tax costs with the low-cost labor and what you get is a no brainer in the production world. I wouldn’t build a factory in America, and I’m about as pro-America as you can get.
Bitey said:
Industrialist Andrew Mellon led the charge to lower the tax rates on the wealthy in the 1920s. He claimed that doing so would increase overall tax revenues and stimulate the economy. The top rate was eventually cut from 73 percent in 1921 to 25 percent in 1926. Mellon alone saved $800,000 a year in taxes as a result.
Somehow I knew you’d claim that because he was rich that his sole motivator was to decrease his own taxes. Maybe it had something to do with him being a financial prodigy, turning failing businesses into profitable businesses and owning a bank before he was 30. No, his financial advice can’t be because he actually knew how the market worked or how business owners felt, it was solely because he was a greedy banker that wanted more money. He used his greedy banker hoarded money to fund the creation of businesses in oil, steel, shipbuilding, construction, metal refining, coal, and industrial waste. He also used his hoarded greedy gold to back several people later inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Yeah it had nothing to do with ANYONE else. You realize how big of a jackass that argument makes you look, right?
Bitey said:
Unfortunately, Mellon’s tax cut was a disastrous idea for most Americans. Income was distributed upward, into too few hands. The money was used for speculation in the stock market rather than the creation of jobs. The ultimate result was the Great Depression.
So let me get this straight. Cutting the tax on the poor down to .5% actually DECREASED the money they had? That makes absolutely no sense at all. Please, enlighten us to where that money went.
Interesting that you’d mention the stock market as the reason for the Great Depression because in April of 1930 the market had returned to where it was in early 1929. So all things being equal, the only people who actually lost money in the stock market crash were those who panicked and sold for pennies on the dollar. What really happened was people spent everything they had when they market started doing good and panicked and sold out for very little when it corrected. It wasn’t business losses in the market that caused the initial problems with the 1929 recession, it was loss of consumer confidence that caused the people to stop spending and investing their money and instead hoard it, like what you bash greedy bankers and businesses for doing. The lack of market investments caused the early 1930 gains to slide in later years and lack of spending caused many businesses to close. The Federal Reserve made many extremely poor decisions on the outset of the recession that caused it to turn into a depression and our international trade was severaly hurt when Great Britain went back to the gold standard with unrealistic pre-WW1 parities to the market value, essentially setting the trade value of $5 per £1. At the worst part of the current recession, the pound sterling never went above $2 per £1. International trade was completed killed after some dumbass thought they could get more revenue and passed the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act which led other countries to create retaliatory tarifs.
It was not the “rich” that caused the Great Depression. If anything it was the poor people having more money and acting like rich people that caused it. There’s nothing wrong with the poor or “middle class” acting like the rich but they *edited* well better have the backing to support it or an exit strategy ready.
Bitey said:
Tax rates were raised to help pay for World War II and they stayed high in the postwar years.
Tax rates were not raised to pay for WW2, they were raised in an attempt to increase federal revenue during the depression. Notice in my last post it mentioned that by 1935 the tax rate was at 80% again.
Bitey said:
From the end of the war until 1962, the top rate was 91 percent. Those tax rates, unthinkably high today, coincided with the longest period of prosperity in U.S. history, the creation of a middle class and substantial public investment in education and infrastructure.
Longest period of prosperity? Yeah ok. Here’s some reality for you, there’s been a middle class since at least the end of the Civil War, probably as soon as the War of 1812, if not sooner than that. There’s always been people who weren’t poor but at the same time weren’t considered “rich” or “ruling class”. To say that back then you were either a slave or a slave owner is dubious at best because we all know there were many who fell between those distinctions.
The substantial investment in education came as a result of the baby boom and the infrastructure increase was caused by the massive increase in available, and cheap, manual labor after WW2. Rather than see unemployment rise 10-15% they put them to work. I mean you CAN brag about them but it’s not really a valid brag because even the most conservative presidents would have done the same.
Bitey said:
There are a lot of facts in history about taxes and things, you say to look at the numbers so look at the numbers. The fact is if the rich are taxed higher the economy does better.
So our economy was terrible leading up to the Great Depression then. That contradicts 99% of historians but I’m sure you know best…
So taxes on the rich have been steadily increasing the last few years, notice how the stock market is magically not getting any better? Everyone at work was really excited when the market hit 11,000 a while back and I’m like “yeah it was 14,000 when Bush was in office” and the office got silent. When the song was “taxcuts for the wealthy” the market was doing great but when it changed to “tax hikes for everyone making over $250,000 $200,000 $150,000 $225,000 ?” well, the market has been tanking ever since. I mean I love the low market, I’m investing like crazy, but it’d be nice if you’d let up on the rich taxes so the market can go up again.
Bitey said:
Now what I will agree with Mr. Mellon about is that having higher tax does encourage the rich to dodge these taxes and look for loopholes. Steve Jobs for example is getting paid $1 a year by Apple for being CEO since his return in ’97. Where he makes his money is in dividends, he holds the biggest share of Disney stocks there is, about 138 million of them and hasn’t sold any. He pulls in about 48 million per year from that, and since this is technically a “Corporate” type of income he only gets taxed about 15%.
Thanks for agreeing with me that if taxes were lower more rich people would pay them.
Bitey said:
My proposal is to find a happy medium, clearly right now it isn’t good enough because the nation is still in debt and we still have people that are obnoxiously wealthy. It’s like we are sitting on a *edited*ing gold mine, but we are all like, “Mmmm, you know what let’s not go into that.”
Well see here’s the problem. Obama has not once, but twice, increased the debt ceiling for the federal government. When he took office, Obama instantly tripled the yearly deficit left by Bush and in his first 2 years will have spent 11% more than Bush did in his 8 years. Lowering the debt or creating a fair tax system isn’t going to happen under this guy so you can pretty much kiss goodbye any idealism you’re holding on to for at least another 2 years or until after the next revolution if Obamacare isn’t abolished.