Posted on 11/17/2012 4:56:15 PM PST by moneyrunner
Let's discuss raising us some revenue without hurting the little people.
With the re-election of Barack Obama, I feel compelled – in the spirit of coming together for the common good – to get on the tax raising bandwagon. Here’s my proposal .Let’s raise taxes to 50% on people making more than $1 million dollars a year. How much will that raise? Warren Buffer says that the top 400 earners in the US made $90 billion, so that means $45 billion to the treasury. Plus it will satisfy Chuck Schumer.
·Let’s have a 100% sales tax on the sale of movie tickets, CDs, videos and all other entertainment. These are purely luxury items and will not affect the ability of the poor to live. Movies tickets, CD rentals and DVD sales alone should raise $30 billion.
·Let’s have a 100% sales tax on newspapers and magazines. Circulation revenue for newspapers is $10 billion, let’s assume the same for magazines. That’s $20 billion in new revenue for the government. Reporters and editors have been calling for higher taxes and surely they would not mind doing their fair share.
·Let’s have a 100% sales tax on advertising in all media. Advertising is not only irritating but it is the way in which evil corporations get us to spend our money on frivolous and unnecessary goods and services. We should get about $100 billion just from the major networks and that isn’t counting newspaper and magazine advertising which could double that number to $200 billion.
·Let’s tax all foundations with assets over $100 million with a 10% tax of their assets each year. Some of the biggest foundations have been funding programs that increase taxes on the little people. Since they are in the business of philanthropy, they should welcome doing their fair share. And while we’re doing that, let’s limit the highest paid person working for the foundation to a salary of $75,000 annually. If they refuse to comply we’ll revoke their tax exemption. The hundred largest foundations have assets over $236 billion dollars, and that only includes those with assets over $600 million. Total foundation assets are about $500 billion. A 10% tax would produce nearly $50 billion per year.
·Let’s also tax endowments with assets over $100 million with a 10% tax on their assets each year. They, along with foundations, should welcome doing their fair share. The Yale endowment alone is worth over $16 billion dollars and what do they do with that? Not much that I can see. Does Yale need that money more than the people of the US? No! And while we’re doing that, let’s limit the highest paid person working for the foundation to a salary of $75,000 annually. If they refuse to comply we’ll revoke their tax exemption. Endowments total $250 billion; a 10% tax could raise $25 billion to help our government balance its budget.
·We should investigate the accounting practices of the movie industry. There is something seriously wrong with an industry that claims that Forrest Gump never made a profit. We don’t know how badly this industry has cheated the IRS, but let’s assume that $30 billion is a lowball number.
In keeping with President Obama’s position that we will do no “dynamic scoring,” we have already identified $400 billion in new revenue to help close the deficit gap while only raising taxes on 400 people! We have simply put in some much needed sales taxes and are asking those who have been most vocal about the need for everyone to do their fair share to come to the table. Surely no one could deny the reasonableness of these proposals.
Now, if anyone wants to tax the income of people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett or the buffoon who suckered thousands of people to fill his pockets by taking Facebook public, people who already have all the money they could possibly spend in their lifetimes at, say 100%, you would hear no objection from me.
Well they HAVE taxed just about everything else. Generally, I am against new taxation of any kind, but in the interest of FAIRNESS.....
Someone please add up all the new revenues from these sources and tell us how long (minutes? hours? days?) it will fund government at current spending levels....
I love it! Is there’re a Pubbie in the House with the nuptials to put this on the table?
I say let’s go over the cliff. I will save the incremental amount of additional taxes I pay with savings to charity I always funded in the past and have decided to withhold. Let’s all share this burden together.
Quick math since a trillion is a 1000 billion and we spent 1.2 trillion last year 400 billion would be gone after 3 months.
“Yea!” for higher taxes.
It’s time rich liberals start paying their fair share. :)
You’re getting into the spirit. I passed an Obama voter ringing a bell for charity today. I wanted to tell him that Obama will take care of all the poor and he should just go home. I didn’t want to spoil his night.
Not sure, but I bet the DUmmies would go ballistic if these were implemented, LOL!
You could pass this along to your congresscritter.
I’ll see you, and raise you.
We moved from Virginia to Florida in the mid-1990’s. Florida did not have a state income tax at the time (still doesn’t) but, to raise revenue, there was this creation called an intangibles tax that was levied on all personal financial assets. Each year, you toted up the value of your cash, savings and checking accounts, stocks, mutual funds, bonds, and any other monetary instrument (retirement savings were exempted) and paid a percentage of that amount. While the percentage was low (around 1%-2%), it was odious nonetheless because it was a tax on wealth. The system was done away with a few years ago due to enforcement difficulties.
I propose imposing a similar assessment, but with a much higher percentage (say 25% annually), on dillweeds like Buffett and Gates. They don’t have much in the way of real income, so they can piously (and hypocritically) talk about raising income taxes on others. My guess is they’ll start singing a different tune once their wealth is targetted and they actually have some skin in the game.
You know... I see where we could compromise, excellent compromise proposal there. Someone should get this to the boneheads in Congress.
:p
If the GOP were smart they would give Obama his tax on the rich, but exempt small businesses and S corporations who file their business income on their personal returns. Obama will get his tax on the millionaires and billionaires but won’t be killing small businesses. That would catch Obama between and rock an a hard spot. However, I have little faith that the GOP court eunuchs will do nothing but give the Emperor what he wants.
Then base on 3200 billion a year 400 billion will give us 1.5 months of operating capital.
To put this in perspective if you stack $1000 bills on top of each other like a ream of paper 1 trillion dollars would be 67.9 miles high.
If we shoveled money into a furnace we couldn’t go through it this fast.
Let’s discuss raising us some revenue without hurting the little people.
Didn’t make it past that. Raise any ones taxes and it will in turn affect “the little people”
I’m familiar with the intangibles tax. They had one in NC. My point is that if taxes are going to be debated, let’s talk about all taxes, not just the ones that keep people from becoming wealthy but taxes on wealth. I was shocked to see the number of foundations with hundreds of millions in assets, even tens of billions that are totally exempt from taxes. Gates and Buffet set one up together and received an incredible tax benefit for doing so. And a lot of these foundations are set up to give very high incomes to the children of the ultra-wealthy, and at the same allowing them to use these assets to affect social policy hidden behind tax shelters. The Yale and Harvard endowments would allow them to operate their universities without charging any tuition to any of their students; that’s obscene! Let’s go after them! Keep in mind that no congress is bound by the laws of their predecessors.
Nuptials? Probably not because most of them seem wedded to the status quo.
Raise the Capital Gains Tax on any gains over $10 million per year, and you'll hit Soros while leaving small businesses untouched.
Slap a 75% tax on entertainment-derrived income over $10 million per year, and you'll get the rock stars and A list movie stars as well.
Perhaps its time to cut the pay of the part time politicians and set term limits. Don’t guess that’ll ever happen so I’m out of Ideas.
Let’s keep the GOP’s feet to the fire during this tax raising season. The first “tax loophole” that should be put on the table is the tax advantages to any governmental taxes and debt. This means:
1) there should be taxes levied on all government bonds, local, state, and federal. Governments compete with private enterprise for financing, but they get the unfair advantage that interest on their bonds is tax free. Why in the world should conservatives, libertarians, and the GOP want to allow that?
2) why should local and real estate taxes be tax deductible? Just because local taxes are high in California, why should that reduce the tax revenue to the federal government? Residents of high tax states should feel the squeeze for living in such states.
I’m not suggesting this is a replacement for current revenue, but as a supplement. I’m not sure what your issue is. Do you object to any of these tax proposals? If you think that these $400 billion is not enough, feel free to make other suggestions. I’m just saying that the president and congress will be talking about “revenue enhancement.” These are the ones that will hurt the average person least. At least that’s if you live like me. I don’t make a million dollars a year, rarely go to movies, I don’t buy CDs, I don’t have a foundation or an endowment, I don’t buy magazines and would enjoy seeing the Virginian Pilot have to charge a 100% sales tax on subscriptions and advertising, I think that the movie industry cheats on its taxes big time. You?
Sure, let’s be FAIR....
All those in the 47% have to pony up too...
No pass on taxes for YOU!!!
Perfect timing for this post. A Wisconsin University system English professor Bradley Butterfield just wrote an opinion piece regarding this topic in our local liberal paper.
Here is Bradley Butterfield’s opinion (mega barf alert):
Today’s conservatives have succeeded in turning a myth invented by The Heritage Foundation and President George W. Bush’s budget director, Joshua Bolten, into a commonly accepted “reality,” namely: that entitlements are the principle cause of our nation’s financial problems, and that raising taxes on the rich and cutting military spending wouldn’t even come close to solving these problems.
As Bruce Bartlett, adviser to president Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush has pointed out, this supposed reality is “factually wrong.”
In the words of economist Jeff Madrick, “America’s biggest fiscal problem is not spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; it is our almost complete unwillingness to tax ourselves sufficiently to maintain a modern state.”
Meanwhile, as Joel Slemrod and Jon Bakija write in “Taxing Ourselves,” there is no relationship between high taxes and reduced rates of economic growth. U.S. citizens are taxed at an average of 26 percent of their income, while prosperous Sweden, Norway and Denmark have tax rates of 49 percent and higher.
Given their anti-government ideology, conservatives have long had it in for entitlement programs, hence the myth of Social Security’s insolvency. But Social Security could be made solvent either by raising the payroll-tax cap, which limits withholding to incomes below $110,000, or by eliminating the cap altogether.
The same holds for our other entitlement programs, including “Obamacare.” America’s budget shortfalls are due to the Bush tax cuts and unfunded wars, not our entitlement programs. We have a revenue problem, not a spending problem.
Link:
I oppose taxes on principle but I would love to see this being proposed. lol.
I hear what you’re saying. But I’m suggesting we go for the tax breaks that affect the wealthy, not the average homeowner or small investor. Let’s focus our efforts on the class that have been telling us that we need to be taxed more: the billionaires like Warren Buffet, the Hollywood fat cats, the tax exempt foundations and endowments that give the ultra-wealth an unfair advantage, the media that stand ready to support every tax increase that any Democrat proposes. Let’s have them pay their “fair share.”
I oppose taxes on principle but I would love to see this being proposed. lol.
Now you’re getting in the spirit. I’m thinking that the value of an ObamaPhone, unemployment benefits, public housing assistance, food stamps, etc. could be counted as income and taxed. Probably would have to be some kind of withholding since I would not trust the recipients to keep good records.
Tax on Movie tickets, DVD’s. Newspapers, magazines, wealth tax over 100 million, cars over 40K, TV network ads, all high end clothes stores, end retirement funds for elected federal officials, remove provided vehicles for elected federal officials, end special health plans for all federal officials
Since the liberals love to tax guns and ammo let tax printing presses, books, movies, computers and printers used by registered media agents, access to the whitehut, etc. They wanted a $1 a round for ammunition, so let’s make it $1 a page for every magazine and newspaper, $1 for every movie ticket, etc.
I will - my critter is Chris Smith and although pro-life, there’s very little Conservative in him.
The fellow certainly likes to name-drop, so it's no surprise that he drops the names of Sweden, Norway and Denmark (all of them constitutional monarchies, by the way.)
Note that we're not invited to look under the hood, for:
Ummm I’m not disagreeing with you. I lived in VA for a little over a year and agree with your view on the Pilot btw. Someone asked how long $400b would last and you corrected me. I was replying to your correction.
only those living within the United States
the mentally handicapped should never be allowed to even discuss tax proposals
“However, I have little faith that the GOP court eunuchs will do nothing but give the Emperor what he wants.”
I suspect that on the upcoming tax “compromise” bill we will find out which Republicans have thick FBI files and which are not vulnerable to persuasion due to their moral lapses.
Perhaps its time to cut the pay of the part time politicians and set term limits. Don’t guess that’ll ever happen so I’m out of Ideas.
How about a excessive earnings tax on Federal elected and senior appointed officials equal to 75 percent of all income above their base pay as a Federal employee or officer? They are receiving pay from the people to do the people's work, and that amount keeps rising so as to keep up with inflaction.
How about a 30 percent tax on campaign donations?
I believe $400 billion pays the annual interest on the national debt or close to it.
If you REALLY wanted to cause a financial collapse, raise capital gains taxes.
It would stick it to old Warren real good, but everyone else would suffer.
You just hit the nail directly on the head. Among Dingle Barry’s many tax proposals for fairness is the increase on dividends from 15% to 43%-—this applies to all dividends not just stocks and bonds.
People are not thinking creatively enough. My proposal would tax capital gains, dividend income and other tax favored income in excess of some number, like $1 million, at 50%. For everyone else, it stays the same. Problem solved. Plus, it has the advantage of simplifying the tax code. It's a win-win!
See, there are some creative ideas out there that we can all agree on as long as everyone is willing to share in the sacrifice. I know it's tough, but for the good of the country these are sacrifices I'm willing to make.
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