Posted on 07/11/2011 7:23:27 PM PDT by markomalley
Ben Stein, an economist, actor, and conservative writer, said taxes should be raised on millionaires and billionaires to help reduce the federal deficit.
“I am in favor of greatly raising the taxes on very wealthy people, millionaires and billionaires. I wouldn't raise the taxes on people making $250,000 a year,” said Stein in a June 29 interview on The O’Reilly Factor, guest-hosted by Laura Ingraham.
Earlier, on June 25, Stein had told Cavuto on Business, “We've got to raise taxes. There's just no way around it. The deficit situation is so serious that while I wish we did not have to raise taxes, we just can't cut spending enough. I wish we could. We can't. We have to raise taxes.”
“Mr. Obama is going to have to do it,” said Stein. “I don't know if the Republicans in the House will go along with it. If they don't, there will be a genuine crisis, and I am frankly frightened about it. I'm extremely concerned about it.”
In the interview with Ingraham, Stein defended his position, saying, “Look, it's a basic arithmetic thing; it's not an ideological thing. We are spending an enormous amount of money that we're not covering with tax revenue; we're borrowing it. At some point we're going to have so much debt that there's going to be a crisis and there will have to be austerity measures here just as they were in Greece.”
Congress has the right to raise taxes on the rich and the president can sign it into law, said Stein, who added that the very wealthy are “not paying enough.” He also said that one “cannot correlate low taxes with high productivity.”
Ingraham remarked that the federal budget is nearly $4 trillion and the national debt is over $14 trillion. She then asked Stein, “Do we have a spending problem? Is the spending a bigger problem than taxing the rich, yes or no?”
Stein said, “The spending is a huge problem, it depends on how you calculate it,” adding that, “We're not going to be able to eliminate Social Security, we're not going to be able -- going to be able to eliminate Medicare. We've got to do both. We've got to cut spending and raise taxes on the rich.”
Ben the Crazy Uncle has been saying this for years, to anybody who listened. He was just as wrong then as he is now.
I think it's time to return to our Founders standards in that regard.
They will have to change and they will. The best thing we can do is cut off the spigot and force the hand of the political class. They all talk about preserving those programs but eventually the window for reforming them will come. Why is it that Republicans have no balls? The left go to the line for the most outrageous radical things but Republicans act as if they have no choice in things even when the polls are with them. Yes they do have a damn choice and if they aren’t willing we will send them back home and replace them with the willing. The time for niceities is done. The time for ever bigger govt and spending is done. We who do not want a debt hike are in a super majority. We are not surrendering and Jeff Sessions and those like him had better see the writing on the wall or the writing will someday be written in blood because we the people won’t sit and wait forever.
So, if I have the foresight to self-finance my retirement, I get to get screwed out of the SS I've been forced, against my will, to pay into my whole life? You're making retirement planning a little tough there. I wonder how much income I'll have when I have to stop working. Maybe I should just work my whole life? Would that be good for you, too?
Either Medicare and Social Security as we know it are eliminated, or the country collapses. It’s that simple. Taxing the rich is just a short term solution that does more damage in the long run.
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Just so we are clear on this Shadow44 Medicare and Social Security are NOT ENTITLEMENTS just like all are mandated to pay income taxes so is one mandated to paid for SS insurance not of my choice, but government mandatory as well as Medicare over the life time I worked!
This was promised to be kept in a safe box none of us seniors broke into that box!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsC8cKxSjfk&feature=related
Was just about to post it:
Flashback Of Peter Schiff Vs. Ben Stein & Friends
Schiff was right. Stein, Art Laffer, Charles Payne and others were dead wrong. And not only were they dead wrong, but they laughed at and mocked him.
Which is why the government can’t be trusted to “hold onto the money”. They’re not holding onto it, and it’s just exacerbating government spending. They need to phase out the system with privatized retirement accounts like Chile and other countries have. It’s not fair that the federal government is holding people hostage with their own money while they use it as a slush fund.
“which is why tax should be based on net worth”
This would lead to government gradually eliminating wealth. Obama is starting that now, by making housing worthless, or so underwater it can’t be used as “wealth”.
I think that manufacturing is the best way to get income, and I include mining in that. Along with greatly curtailed spending. How much does one Auntie Zetuni cost, and how many are there? Do we still allow noncitizen parents of naturalized citizens to get medicare and Soshakurity? Do we still allow naturalized citizens to get soshakurity benefits after working less than natural born citizens?
Then, mine manganese nodules from the sea floor, and open up our mines, the ones that foreign-aided environmentalists have shut down (like our rare earth mines).
I saw through Stein’s act 10 years ago. I was not at all surprised that he supported funny boy’s fraudulent election.
The means-test concept infuriates me too. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care what you make — it’s their their damn money to decide who gets it back and who doesn’t.
What I wouldn’t give for a candidate with the balls to talk about nuking that bastard FDR’s bullsh*t ponzi once and for all.
I knew some one would respond that way. But fear not, a 1% tax on wealth above $10 million would require over 100 years to wipe out the entire wealth.
Same song, different verse. Raising taxes only means the government continues overspending. 1.5 trillion dollars - $4,800 for every person in the nation. That’s almost 10 percent of all earnings per capita, and that’s just the overspending. That doesn’t even come close to start digging into reduce the national debt.
It is impossible to tax your way out of this type of deficit, there’s no way to capture ten percent of the nation’s GDP on top of all the rest of the taxes without destroying the very economy you’re trying to harvest from.
There is a singular solution - cut spending. The Federal government is spending a third again as much as it takes in, which simply means that we need to cut a third of all federal spending. In a whole lot of cases, that means a huge number of programs just go away, along with departments and hundreds of thousands of federal employees.
And no one in Washington is even close to prepared to start talking real cuts. They won’t even cut their own gold plated benefits, massively ballooned office budgets, or any of the other perks they’ve given themselves over the years. If they can’t even take the public’s money seriously in managing their own compensation, how can we ever expect they’d respect the nation’s money in cutting the rest of the federal budget?
I take it back - there’s more than one real solution here, and alas, the one that will hurt quite a bit - devaluation of the US dollar. The overnight reduction of all wealth to simply maintain the beast that is trying to consume us.
“would require over 100 years to wipe out the entire wealth.”
The original income tax was a 1% tax on the top 2 or 5% of incomes. It has gone up a little since then.
And if your 1% tax took 100 or 150 years to eliminate wealth, then what do you do? What do you tax next?
I’m wondering if it is too late.
I’d rather have Queen Elizabeth and Kate Middleton in Washington rather than my idiot senator and Obama.
Ben has promoted his “tax the rich more” idea for decades.
If you recall his show “Ben Stein’s Money” where he gave away much of his own wealth, you might conclude that he feels some guilt about his riches.
So, it’s not difficult to extrapolate that he believes others have an obligation to share.
Trouble is, he believes the government should be the agent of charity.
They are NOT!
They are a bunch of wasteful, self-serving, vote buying, socialists, who do very little good for anybody. Not to mention they usually make matters worse and encourage bad behavior.
It’s enough to frost a man’s testicles.
“A high income does not mean you are rich.”
A low income does not mean you are rich either...
Didn’t Ted Kenney have an income of 80k a year or some such nonsense that he declared?
I have done work for people who were loaded like I could never imagine, who had very little “income” but were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They owned nothing personally, their LLC’s owned everything.
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