PoliGAF 2012 Community Thread |OT2| This thread title is now under military control

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GaimeGuy said:
The problem is the more wealth you have, the easier it is to increase your income, but the more wealth you have, the less useful each additional dollar becomes.

One relationship is exponential. One is logarithmic.

Our economic system is designed around the flow of money, so a tax on wealth would be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Taxing the flow of money (estate transfers, sales, incomes) makes more sense. But because of the relationship between wealth, income, and marignal utility, in order to be truly fair, you need progressive taxation. Anything less than that will disproportionally burden the poor and middle class
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VAT?
 
Florida GOP Chapter Giving Donald Trump ‘Statesman Of The Year’ Award
“He’s a sage, skillful and respected leader” who is doing “all he can to take our country back,” Sarasota GOP Chair Joe Gruters told TPM. “At the end of the day, he’s one of the few people in the country who can command respect from people of all walks of life.”

A regular guest on Fox News and a prolific tweeter, Trump is never far from the headlines. A little more than a month ago, Trump revived his birther campaign, telling CNBC that “nothing’s changed my mind.” On May 29, hours before Trump was scheduled to hold a fundraiser with Mitt Romney, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer told the real estate mogul that he’s “starting to sound a little ridiculous.”

No matter. Gruters said he is “proud” to give Trump the award. No one issue led to Trump getting the prize, he said, adding that the birther matter is “irrelevant.”
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http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/trump-statesman-of-the-year.php?ref=fpnewsfeed

Well.
 
Kosmo said:
46% of Americans pay no federal income tax. (Cue the "but, but, but, they pay payroll taxes and other taxes! crowd). The tax cuts we are talking about are FEDERAL INCOME TAXES - so let's keep the discussion there.




The discussion is on taxing INCOME, not WEALTH. Now, you will bring up capital gains taxes, to which I'll say - that money was already taxed before.
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they SHOULD pay $0, or close to $0, in income taxes: Income is practically where all of the wealth for the bottom 50% comes from. Since they own less than 1% of the country's wealth, and their wealth is derived from income, and they are affected at the margins far more than anyone else, they shoud pay less than the less than 1% of the country's wealth their incomes represent.
 
ToxicAdam said:
lol

The Buffet Rule would raise about 5 billion a year. Generous estimates put it at 62 billion over a 10 year span.

If Obama makes the Bush Tax Cuts permanent (aside from the rich) it will cost the federal government 3 trillion dollars in revenues over the next 10 years.
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That is what cracks me up. The Buffett Rule is attacking the rich with no almost no benefit to a T. It isn't going to create some love-in by both the rich and poor, and it will barely generate any revenue whatsoever. That is the reason why it has been laughed out of congress at the mere thought. Raise taxes on everyone. I don't remember the poor being adversely affected in 1998 by paying slightly more than today...

GaimeGuy said:
they SHOULD pay $0, or close to $0, in income taxes: Income is practically where all of the wealth for the bottom 50% comes from. Since they own less than 1% of the country's wealth, and their wealth is derived from income, and they are affected at the margins far more than anyone else, they shoud pay less than the less than 1% of the country's wealth their incomes represent.
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Capital Gains should be taxed as income at the same bracket levels.
 
Since we are talking about taxes, then this article on Romney's finances might prove enlightening:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/08/investigating-mitt-romney-offshore-accounts

Romney’s personal tax rate is a particular point of interest. In 2010 and 2011, Mitt and Ann paid $6.2 million in federal tax on $42.5 million in income, for an average tax rate just shy of 15 percent, substantially less than what most middle-income Americans pay. Romney manages this low rate because he takes his payments from Bain Capital as investment income, which is taxed at a maximum 15 percent, instead of the 35 percent he would pay on “ordinary” income, such as salaries and wages.

In the face of such arguments, Romney’s defense is that he never broke the rules: if there is a problem, it is in the laws, not in his behavior. “I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more,” he said. Even so. “When you are running for president, you might want to err on the side of overpaying your taxes, and not chase every tax gimmick that comes down the pike,” says Sheppard. “It kind of looks tacky.”
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Mysteries also arise when one looks at Romney’s individual retirement account at Bain Capital. When Romney was there, from 1984 to 1999, taxpayers were allowed to put just $2,000 per year into an I.R.A., and $30,000 annually into a different kind of plan he may have used. Given these annual contribution ceilings, how can his I.R.A. possibly contain up to $102 million, as his financial disclosures now suggest?

The Romneys won’t say, but Mark Maremont, writing in The Wall Street Journal, uncovered a likely explanation. When Bain Capital bought companies, it would create two classes of shares, named A and L. The A shares were risky common shares, to which they would assign a very low value. The L shares were preferred shares, paying a high dividend but with the payoff frozen, and most of the value was assigned to them. Bain employees would then put the exciting A shares in their I.R.A. accounts, where they grew tax-free. With all the risk of the deal, the A shares stood to gain a lot or collapse. But if the deal succeeded, the springing value could be stunning: Bain employees saw their A shares from one particularly fruitful deal grow 583-fold, 16 times faster than the underlying stock.

The Romneys won’t tell us how, or even if, they assigned super-low values to the A shares, but there are a couple of ways to do it. One is to use standard options models to price the shares—then feed inappropriate assumptions into those models. Romney could alternatively have used a model called liquidation valuation, which Kleinbard says would have been “completely inappropriate.” Without seeing the assumptions used on Romney’s tax returns from the years when those lowball A shares were squirted into his I.R.A., we cannot know how he did it. Whatever methods he used, however, the valuations were, according to Andrew Smith, of Houlihan Capital in Chicago, “pushing the envelope.” (Andrea Saul retorts, “Why should successful investments be criticized?”)

Mitt’s and Ann’s I.R.A.’s have also been receiving profit interest from (mostly Cayman Island–based) Bain Capital funds that were set up long after he had left the company, in 1999. For example, the 2010 return reveals a profits interest in a Cayman-based fund called Bain Capital Partners (AM) X LP, which was transferred to the Ann D. Romney trust in October 2010. An attachment to the return says the Ann D. Romney trust is “performing services” to the partnership, which is boilerplate language for these kinds of filings. Her blind trust could receive lightly taxed income from Bain Capital for years to come, well into the presidential term her husband hopes to win.

But administrative guidance says you can do this kind of thing only if the compensation is in recognition of past services you have provided. “This should not mean retired from the mother ship 10 years out and getting profits you had nothing to do with,” Sheppard says, adding that Romney can get away with it because of excessive “administrative indulgences” that have allowed a “perversion of the law in favor of a small class of overcompensated investment managers.”
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A report by Bain and Co. itself, looking at the period from 2002 to 2007, concluded that there is “little evidence that private equity owners, overall, added value” to the companies they took over: nearly all their returns are explained by broad economic growth, rising stock markets, and leverage. Josh Kosman, who researched the subject of private equity for his book The Buyout of America, singles out Bain Capital in particular. “They take pride in pushing the leverage envelope [i.e., use of borrowed money, which magnifies returns, while off-loading the risks onto others] more than their peers,” he says. “I have heard that from limited partners in Bain’s funds. I have heard that from bankers who lend money to finance their leveraged buyouts. Bain always prided itself on ‘We’ll push leverage more than the others.’ They brag about that, behind closed doors.”
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Chumly said:
I'm not the one with an irrational fear of government .
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What's the entity that can beat the shit out of me, shoot my hypothetical dog and flashbang my hypothetical daughter to death for not having a plant because it's the wrong address and then not face consequences?
 
Kad5 said:
Can someone give me a chart showing Obama's job creation since he took office?
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afghanistan_withdrawal.png
 
Kosmo said:
46% of Americans pay no federal income tax. (Cue the "but, but, but, they pay payroll taxes and other taxes! crowd). The tax cuts we are talking about are FEDERAL INCOME TAXES - so let's keep the discussion there.
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You understand that money is fungible, right? If we're only talking about federal income taxes, then the question of "paying their fair share" is completely meaningless, because the federal government makes money from more sources than federal income tax.
 
ToxicAdam said:
Those are the jobs a President is actually responsible for. Not ones that happened to occur while he was in office.
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He should only get credit for enlistments while he was in office. No way has every soldier deployed to Afghanistan signed up since he was elected.

Your snark-fu was poor to very poor.
 
benjipwns said:
What's the entity that can beat the shit out of me, shoot my hypothetical dog and flashbang my hypothetical daughter to death for not having a plant because it's the wrong address and then not face consequences?
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This is your justication that the "private" sector is somehow better? Rofl. Enjoy getting boned by that free market of yours.
 
Chumly said:
This is your justication that the "private" sector is somehow better? Rofl. Enjoy getting boned by that free market of yours.
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No, it's his rational reasoning for having a healthy mistrust of government. Clearly it is not an "irrational fear." I don't know how one can complain about things like gay marriage bans and still say fear of government is irrational. It's a perfectly rational fear.
 
Chumly said:
This is your justication that the "private" sector is somehow better? Rofl. Enjoy getting boned by that free market of yours.
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His argument isn't very good, but neither is your counter. The government does have accountability issues. The question is: who do we appeal to? When a private entity needs to be held accountable, we appeal to the government. When the government needs to be held accountable, who do we appeal to? It should be other branches of a hopefully balanced government, or, if that fails and things like that example are allowed to happen then we should appeal to the source from which the government derives its authority: ourselves.

Long story short: people should get angry en masse and demand change. And work to change the government into something they don't mistrust. Some people think that means taking a slash and burn strategy, I'm more of a reform guy myself.

EDIT: Blech, not my most articulate post by a loooong shot. Hopefully what I meant got across
 
eznark said:
No, it's his rational reasoning for having a healthy mistrust of government. Clearly it is not an "irrational fear." I don't know how one can complain about things like gay marriage bans and still say fear of government is irrational. It's a perfectly rational fear.
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I fully understand the government has problems and we need to work to fix it. We should always be working to eliminate corruption from government but making less government does not magically fix the problems we have especially when corporations are not there to benefit the citizen.
 
benjipwns said:
What's the entity that can beat the shit out of me, shoot my hypothetical dog and flashbang my hypothetical daughter to death for not having a plant because it's the wrong address and then not face consequences?
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Local government?

Seriously, though, you do realize that the Western world had democratic revolutions a few centuries ago? This is not to suggest that even democratic states are not very powerful entities, but--except when the democracy has been corrupted--the state is merely the embodiment of the people's will, the people being sovereign. Now, one could argue (and I certainly have), that the US's democratic foundation is corrupted rendering it undemocratic, and thereby justifying higher fears of it. But the solution to that is to reclaim it for the people.

The irony here, of course, is that if the US government is a corrupted non-democracy, it has been corrupted by exactly the people who you are strenuously protecting. It's not like it has been corrupted by foreign powers or the poor or the middle class. So your fear is totally incoherent, because you defend the very powerful anti-democratic forces that are at work in the society.
 
Chumly said:
I fully understand the government has problems and we need to work to fix it. We should always be working to eliminate corruption from government but making less government does not magically fix the problems we have especially when corporations are not there to benefit the citizen.
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Then why would you say fearing the government is irrational? Corporations and Governments are made up of the same people. None of them give a shit about you nor do they particularly care about your well being.
 
empty vessel said:
Local government?

Seriously, though, you do realize that the Western world had democratic revolutions a few centuries ago? This is not to suggest that even democratic states are not very powerful entities, but--except when the democracy has been corrupted--the state is merely the embodiment of the people's will, the people being sovereign. Now, one could argue (and I certainly have), that the US's democratic foundation is corrupted rendering it undemocratic, and thereby justifying higher fears of it. But the solution to that is to reclaim it for the people.

The irony here, of course, is that if the US government is a corrupted non-democracy, it has been corrupted by exactly the people who you are strenuously protecting. It's not like it has been corrupted by foreign powers or the poor or the middle class. So your fear is totally incoherent, because you defend the very powerful anti-democratic forces that are at work in the society.
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This is one of the best summaries of the situation I've read, much better then the barely coherent response I had above.
 
The_Technomancer said:
His argument isn't very good, but neither is your counter. The government does have accountability issues. The question is: who do we appeal to? When a private entity needs to be held accountable, we appeal to the government. When the government needs to be held accountable, who do we appeal to? It should be other branches of a hopefully balanced government, or, if that fails and things like that example are allowed to happen then we should appeal to the source from which the government derives its authority: ourselves.

Long story short: people should get angry en masse and demand change. And work to change the government into something they don't mistrust. Some people think that means taking a slash and burn strategy, I'm more of a reform guy myself.

EDIT: Blech, not my most articulate post by a loooong shot. Hopefully what I meant got across
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I apologize for not fleshing out my argument but they government does need to be held accountable and should be by the citizens (voters) but unfortunately that doesn't seem to happen. I strongly feel that somehow giving more power to the very people corrupting the government (corporations/rich) is not going to solve any problems
 
The_Technomancer said:
This is one of the best summaries of the situation I've read, much better then the barely coherent response I had above.
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Not really as it doesn't speak to the foundations of the skepticism, which are power. Mistrusting the government doesn't preclude you from mistrusting powerful corporations. I think you'll find there is a significantly more prominent "fuck Google/Facebook" streak among free thinkers than you party plebes.
 
Chumly said:
This is your justication that the "private" sector is somehow better? Rofl. Enjoy getting boned by that free market of yours.
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The_Technomancer has a good answer despite his desire to edit it. And maybe even if he disagrees, it's still a good answer.

The government inherently has the ability to violate one hard. Voluntary action allows us to pursue an end that says we want this.

Who is we? The individual, not the state.

I think my point about the state oppressing most is non-partisan.

Fair disclosure: If you support the drug war I consider you an abhorrent human being.

Also, central planning is a fools game.
 
eznark said:
Not really as it doesn't speak to the foundations of the skepticism, which are power. Mistrusting the government doesn't preclude you from mistrusting powerful corporations. I think you'll find there is a significantly more prominent "fuck Google/Facebook" streak among free thinkers than you party plebes.
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Oh I don't blithely trust power. But I recognize that it isn't going away. If we significantly cut government down that power vacuum isn't going to sit there unoccupied. So sure, you may not trust the government. But who do you mistrust the least?
 
Dr. Pangloss said:
Since we are talking about taxes, then this article on Romney's finances might prove enlightening:
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What better way to prove that the tax system needs to be reformed than showing how much money you save by taking advantage of loopholes that only rich people or super smart accountants know about?
 
eznark said:
Then why would you say fearing the government is irrational? Corporations and Governments are made up of the same people. None of them give a shit about you nor do they particularly care about your well being.
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I consider fearing the government to the point where you want to put the power into the hands of corporations as irrational. We should work to reform government since we are a democracy and can put changes in place. If corporations and government are the same people how does giving more power to corporations somehow solve this problem? We should be working to eliminate their power over government.
 
Skiptastic said:
What better way to prove that the tax system needs to be reformed than showing how much money you save by taking advantage of loopholes that only rich people or super smart accountants know about?
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Who do you think wrote those into law in the first place?
 
empty vessel said:
Local government?

Seriously, though, you do realize that the Western world had democratic revolutions a few centuries ago? This is not to suggest that even democratic states are not very powerful entities, but--except when the democracy has been corrupted--the state is merely the embodiment of the people's will, the people being sovereign. Now, one could argue (and I certainly have), that the US's democratic foundation is corrupted rendering it undemocratic, and thereby justifying higher fears of it. But the solution to that is to reclaim it for the people.

The irony here, of course, is that if the US government is a corrupted non-democracy, it has been corrupted by exactly the people who you are strenuously protecting. It's not like it has been corrupted by foreign powers or the poor or the middle class. So your fear is totally incoherent, because you defend the very powerful anti-democratic forces that are at work in the society.
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I think there is probably some kind of misunderstanding or disagreement, probably both here.

I don't know if we can reconcile it. I've mentioned that I love your posts on multiple topics.

I do not really know how to explore the situations with you through, though I would be glad to, if only to read your thoughts.

I do not think I'm of the mindset you might ascribe but I will abscond to help the others who fight for liberty.
 
Chumly said:
I consider fearing the government to the point where you want to put the power into the hands of corporations as irrational. We should work to reform government since we are a democracy and can put changes in place. If corporations and government are the same people how does giving more power to corporations somehow solve this problem? We should be working to eliminate their power over government.
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We're at a fundamental disconnect here.

Eliminating the monopoly of government does not necessarily demand the empowerment of a private entity.

If I can collect the libertarians for a moment, it's that we hate the monopoly.
 
Some fun comments from a Romney fundraiser:

A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. "I don't think the common person is getting it," she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. "Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.

"We've got the message," she added. "But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies -- everybody who's got the right to vote -- they don't understand what's going on. I just think if you're lower income -- one, you're not as educated, two, they don't understand how it works, they don't understand how the systems work, they don't understand the impact."

"It's not helping the economy to pit the people who are the engine of the economy against the people who rely on that engine," Michael Zambrelli said as the couple waited in their SUV for clearance into the Creeks.

At the evening fundraiser at the estate of Julia and David Koch on Meadow Lane in Southampton, the suggested contribution was $75,000 per couple — with funds going to Romney's campaign, the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-hamptons-fundraiser-20120708,0,2162850,print.story
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benjipwns said:
We're at a fundamental disconnect here.

Eliminating the monopoly of government does not necessarily demand the empowerment of a private entity.
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Yup, this is the point of disconnect. If you eliminate the powers of government over private entities then there are entities with enough wealth, influence, and general power to take advantage of their new freedoms in ways that are detrimental to the general population. Mind you, I don't think for a moment that the existence of entities that work for private interest are a bad thing on general principle. I think cultivated capitalism is a great financial system.
 
The_Technomancer said:
Yup, this is the point of disconnect. If you eliminate the powers of government over private entities then there are entities with enough wealth, influence, and general power to take advantage of their new freedoms in ways that are detrimental to the general population. Mind you, I don't think for a moment that the existence of entities that work for private interest are a bad thing.
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From our point of view you're arguing that the elite should be allowed to dictate this entity and control its monopoly rather than leave it to the populace.
 
benjipwns said:
From our point of view you're arguing that the elite should be allowed to dictate this entity and control its monopoly rather than leave it to the populace.
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I don't see how the populace can have that control without some entity encouraging and discouraging certain behaviors. Its going to consolidate into the hands of a few, this is basically a trend in financial history. You don't get unregulated even distributions of wealth.
Better that its the hands of a few who are accountable to that population then to a few who aren't.
 
Ooh...Romney campaign to start calling Obama a liar

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/romney-set-to-counterattack-on-bain

In a conference call Monday morning, senior staff said Romney's surrogates would stop shying away from the word "lie" in responding to Democrats' attacks on his business record, and plan to go on TV to call Obama a "liar," the source said.
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Coming from the campaign that is actually not afraid to lie and repeat lies at all. Rich.

Media will help them though.
 
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