Posted on 02/25/2009 8:25:14 PM PST by St. Louis Conservative
President Obama has laid out the most ambitious and expensive domestic agenda since LBJ, and now all he has to do is figure out how to pay for it. On Tuesday, he left the impression that we need merely end "tax breaks for the wealthiest 2% of Americans," and he promised that households earning less than $250,000 won't see their taxes increased by "one single dime."
This is going to be some trick. Even the most basic inspection of the IRS income tax statistics shows that raising taxes on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $250,000 can't possibly raise enough revenue to fund Mr. Obama's new spending ambitions.
Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and "the wealthiest 2%." Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That's about 7% of all returns; the data aren't broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% -- about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 -- paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.
Note that federal income taxes are already "progressive" with a 35% top marginal rate, and that Mr. Obama is (so far) proposing to raise it only to 39.6%, plus another two percentage points in hidden deduction phase-outs. He'd also raise capital gains and dividend rates, but those both yield far less revenue than the income tax. These combined increases won't come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Mr. Obama is going to need.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Well we used to be before we turned our children over to William Ayres to educate. But you're right as of now, which is how 0bumma got elected.
That reads envious. Because of credit overuse by Wall Street bankers, crashing the credit card economy, you’re sold on the current wave of socialism? What is it you want to do to the rich Wall Street bankers?
The Vampire Economy: Doing Business under Fascism.
http://www.mises.org/books/vampireeconomy.pdf
Who is John Galt?
From the book. It begins to answer my question of where do you store wealth under socialism.
this industrialist
declared:
“I have a million marks to invest. If I could use this
money as I please, I would buy gold. This I would put
in a safe deposit vault where not even the Reichsbank
president could touch it. The gold would earn no interest.
I would lose possible profits. But I would be free
of the constant fear of losing my capital. I would not
have to worry about having to invest it where I can
never be sure of its worth from day to day. But I cannot
buy gold with my million marks. I must invest it as
soon as possible, since if I leave it in my bank account
too long, it may be confiscated by the tax controller,
the Party may demand a large contribution, or the
Party secretary may inform me that I am to be honored
as the founder of a new enterprise for the unprofitable
production of some ersatz product. Before I receive
some such suggestion, I must make up my mind about
the possibilities of investment. Two years ago I might
have decided to buy a new house for my family, or to
erect an apartment building. I would not have cared
particularly whether there were tenants or not, inasmuch
as I would at least have had some real property
that could not be wiped out by inflation, and that would
be at my free disposal. But today this is out of the question
without a special permit from the State. The only
way out seems to be to invest the money in extending
my own plant.”
That is the very one. It was written in the 1930s and includes a lot of anecdotal material to support the issues discussed in the book.
Bump
I feel the same way. I'm tired of carrying the water for everyone else. Simplicity is the way to go. I'd rather take a pay cut than let zero spread any of the wealth that I've worked hard for over the past 30 years.
Going after Capital Gains and Dividends.......
Now that will surely rev up the Stocks and Real Estate market by golly! With a tax increase like this, who needs financing? Most people will avoid Wall Street like the plague.
He plays the class warfare card well.
Not really.
After he drives most of us out of our jobs because business cannot survive, Americans will turn on him like a step child.
I think you dropped your sarcasm on the way to work.
That day can't come soon enough. Look how much damage he's done in only one month. It's so depressing
THE Berlin Stock Exchange still existsas a building,
as an institution with large offices, with brokers and
bankers, with a huge organization for daily announcement
of stock and bond quotations. But it is only a
pale imitation of its former self and of what a stock
exchange is supposed to be. For the Stock Exchange
cannot function if and when the State regulates the flow
of capital and destroys the confidence of investors in
the sanctity of their property rights.
The glorious days when millions of marks daily
poured into the Stock Exchange, when the bonds and
securities of foreign countries were handled, when new
concerns and trusts were promoted and exciting speculative
maneuvers were stagedthose glorious times have
long since departed, and even the doorkeeper who
vividly remembers the excitement of the “good old days”
does not believe that they will ever return. Yet the
decrepit machine still runs.
From the book on how the socialist germany was going to pay for things in 1939. Sound familiar today? Some of us are old wives............
ps. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded when I said you wouldn’t understand Thoreau. I meant just in this context.
I think we want the same outcome, but have polar opposite views on how to personally implement it. It’s a personal preference thing, I think. I want to retire and go live in the woods/mountains within the next 10 years. W/ tax increases on the way, may as well do it earlier and quit giving the government so much money. If someone loves what they do (work-wise), then by all means - work away and make as much as you can. And spend it before the dollar is devalued!
Why Obama is not worried about where he will find money. The same place socialist Nazi Germany found it.
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