Posted on 09/20/2006 7:46:02 AM PDT by A. Pole
Sure, rub it in. My Hooverville is down to dividing one baked bean a week.
It's called a free market. People can either stay at a Hilton or somewhere else...personally I don't stay at too many Hilton's due to price.
I am not sure. I guess it is hard or maybe impossible to draw a clear border.
But it is clear that the wealth of Paris Hilton is not earned while the wealth of many others is.
Yet another misunderstanding of the real world. Read a copy of "The Millionaire Next Door". People who earn their wealth understand how it was produced. In general, those who inherit wealth from a prior generation fail to hold on to it for more than one or two generations. The reason is that they don't understand how it was generated. It doesn't take government interference with estate taxes to destroy or confiscate the wealth created by a given generation of a family.
The travesty of estate taxes is the way it causes family farms to be sold for taxes. Families are unable to continue farming a piece of land due to the greed of the socialist politicians. The farms are frequently turned into nature conservation preserves, developed with houses or snapped up by a large corporate agricultural entity. The farmers are hardly "rich".
I pose a similar question to you: is it good to import an endless flow of uneducated and unskilled people from all over the world to live on the dole? There is an endless supply of people who would love to come to this country and sit on their asses while the taxpayer cares for their every want and desire.
Yes, I am -- in a very specific form. All inheritances should be taxed as if they were sales of capital assets -- with any tax consequences that would result from it. There is no reason why a person who sells $1 billion worth of his assets the day before he dies should have a maximum tax exposure of 20% (the top capital gains tax rate), while the one who passes his assets on to his heirs should pass on a 50% tax burden to them.
BTW, how the previous generations of Kennedies earned their wealth?
Most of their wealth was generated illegally -- through the sale of liquor and the operation of speakeasies during Prohibition.
Kind of ironic, isn't it? Whether they're running speakeasies or running government, there's a sh!t-load of booze behind everything they do, eh?
Fine, so what about the brave knights who risked their life, who displayed the nobility of character and defended their nation from deadly enemies. Did they deserve to preserve their privileges and status to their descendants?
The stupid bleached blonde slut does some work (TV shows,) in that sense her wealth is more earned than that of many others who keep low profile.
I am not sure if this is a good analogy. Wealth can be wasted by prolifigate descendants. A title of nobility was a lifetime privilege.
True
There's a simple reason why the highest quintile of almost any group of people -- under any form of measurement you wish to use (income, vital statistics, etc.) -- will increase faster than the lowest. It's because for most measurements there is no practical limitation on how high the measurement in question can go, but there is usually a practical limitation on how low it can go.
For example . . .
If you were to compare the change in life expectancy for the top 20% of the U.S. population (i.e., the 20% of the population that lives the longest) to the change in life expectancy for the lowest 20% of the U.S. population (i.e., the 20% of the population that dies earliest), you'll likely find a similar trend. This is because the distribution of the population based on age at their deaths is not a true "normal distribution" bell curve . . . people can live incrementally longer over time (someone who died at the age of 50 a century ago might live to the age of 60, 80 or even 100 today), but the lowest end of the curve is constrained at the age of 0 and cannot decrease over time.
The contention that the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is based on figures from 1979 - 2001. I believe the Bush tax cuts have changed things - especially since the poor and middle class got much bigger tax cuts than did the rich.
This may have been true at one time, but not anymore. Farms are specifically exempted from estate taxes under certain conditions. One of the conditions is that the heir or heirs must continue to occupy and run the farm, and this is what ultimately causes many of these farms to be sold off. The heirs simply don't want to run the family farm like their parents did.
Of course, the phrase, "My father left me the family farm but I had to sell it due to the greed of the socialist politicians" sounds a lot better than, "My father left me the family farm but I had to sell it because I have no interest in running it."
I don't know any "brave knights", but paris hilton spends tons of her inherited money, which is spread throughout the economy, and taxed many times over. This is far preferable to the government confiscating inherited wealth only to throw it into the treasury where it disappears. Personally, I hope the stupid bimbo dies broke.
Some Conservatives recognize that when things get too far out of wack, an FDR comes along.
What privileges and status? Wealth, mansions, etc.? Yes. Political power? No.
Twenty-five years ago you were more likely to find households with one wage earner, now for most people in most areas, its commonly accepted that it takes two wage earners to support a family.
When you add all of the costs associated with having a second income in a family (second car, work clothing, child care, stupid government programs that are nothing more than expensive day care, etc.), you often find that a second spouse who works for a salary of $60,000 per year is actually working for less than the minimum wage.
And why the wealth is to be preserved while political power/position not? What is the difference?
Unearned wealth? I guess you can take the A.Pole out of Marxism but you can't take the Marxism out of A.Pole.
I've got a better tagline for you, (A.Pole: "Socialism is good for you!")
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.