Posted on 03/13/2015 11:11:27 AM PDT by Jim Robinson
Let's just get it over with and go for a guaranteed income for all. If you work and earn less than the guaranteed income, the government will pay you the difference. If you don't work, the government will pay you the guaranteed amount anyway. After all, a living wage is a human right. As is healthcare. The government should provide it. As is housing. Food. Clothing. Cell phones. Internet. Transportation. Vacations.
But we must all pay our fair share.
Those earning less than the guaranteed income will receive a check from the IRS. Those earning more than the guarantee up to, say $100,000 will pay a 50% tax. Earnings over $100,000 to $250,000 will pay a 75% tax and anything over $250,000 pays 90% tax. Fair is fair and there should be limits on how much wealth a person should be allowed to accumulate. You do not earn your income on your own. Your income is earned on the backs of the poor and disadvantaged/underprivileged and it's our responsibility to provide for them.
Unfortunately we have a boatload of low information voters that are all in the democrat/liberal/progressive party that believes that to be a good plan! LOL.
Why not 20 dollars an hour? or maybe $25? OR $30. BUT no illegals can be hired—only those who served in the military get first dibs on these new plush jobs.
Jim’s channelling e-warren
scary thing is, the entire left would whole heartedly agree
:o)
“It is written: ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.’” .........
Absurdity, Sarcasm, Satire to most – Dead Serious to the scary few.
But then we know (besides religion) the real enemy of human rights is capitalism. Capitalism enslaves the masses and benefits the capitalists. We must kill capitalism and implement socialism. Then workers will not be working their tails off to further enrich the wealthy capitalists. They can all work freely for the state. And seeing as how the state benefits from all labor, no taxes will be required.
Jim you have confused wealth with income. Your proposal only tackles the problem of income inequality. We need to do something about wealth inequality. Wealth is not taxed. Income from wealth is taxed at a very low rate. You have done a very good job analyzing the situation to make income disparity disappear but we will need to do something about wealth disparity.
Maybe if you have more than $10,000 in the bank, take 90% of it? After all, we will need that money to help pay the minimum income guarantee. Either that, or maybe we top up everyone’s savings account to $10,000 if they have less than that, and take the rest if they have more. That should keep it fair. But we have to be sure that you can’t spend that money without approval because you may not spend it right.
And homes? It is crazy that there are situations where one or two people live in a large single family home, while at the same time there are families of 5 or 6 or more who live in apartments. I think we should do something about that too.
Gee, that sounds fair to me.
/sarc
Great point! A man should be allowed to accumulate only so much wealth. Any excess automatically belongs to the state.
There was an article I read yesterday (I can’t recall where) detailing the subsidies some of the developers are being offered to build very expensive new residences. They want the jobs building and they want to lure the ultra rich. But, they are giving massive property tax subsidies so that people who dump $100 million into a luxury high rise condo in New York actually pays less in property tax than a middle class family a few miles down the road. Not just less percentage, but less dollars. Imagine if you spent $100 million on a condo, you would pay $2 million or $3 million a year in property tax if you were taxed like everyone else. That is “unfair”, I guess. So they are given a tax break.
I am not a fan of the property tax so don’t get me wrong on that point, but this is just one example of how screwed up things are, in too many ways to enumerate. Once they start screwing with the market they can’t stop and it results in an endless series of subsidies and exemptions for special classes of people and various interests including the “government’s interest”.
Except that near half our population thinks it attainable & desirable social goals.
And a disturbing fraction of our side are pushing notions which unwittingly facilitate those goals (Fair Tax, National ID, etc).
I often talk about Venezuala with both Dems and Repubs. I am constantly amazed that we all agree that the average life of a Venezualen is horrible, yet very few understand how it got that way.
I understand your frustration, and as a result I read your post with well earned sarcasm. Sadly, many an American agrees with it, yet don’t understand that it will create a Venezuelan lifestyle!
So have I--probably within the last two weeks or so. I didn't take a good look at it, though, and I don't have a clear memory of where I saw it.
A little searching online does yield proposals along the lines of a "minimum income," "basic income," "guaranteed income," "guaranteed minimum income," "guaranteed basic income," and other variants.
When I search for such threads here, I find a good number of results, especially with "basic income."
Some recent threads:
"Minimum Guaranteed Income" for 700,000 persons (Greece) (October 2014)
How to Fix Poverty: Write Every Family a Basic Income Check (December 2014)
Why the Tech Elite Is Getting Behind Universal Basic Income (January 2015)
And nobody seems to notice it’s part of the Fair Tax plan (a la “prebate”). Maybe not quite minimum livable income, but just a bill & signature away.
Considering the source and the content, no label was needed!
If you add up all the different welfare and healthcare benefits, then add to those the gov’t employee salaries and pensions and their healthcare benefits for each and every program that distributes those benefits, it could be cheaper. But that would leave all those gov’te employee paper pushers with nothing to do, and we can’t fire them so we wouldn’t save money because they would just draw a paycheck for doing nothing a full eight hours a day.
Thanks. I was thinking of the communist manifesto or some such when I wrote the previous post.
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