If someone’s income is utilized to pay for food, shelter, and other basic expenses, and they’re just getting by, they don’t need their taxes raised, they need them lowered.
Fair taxation means that higher earners pay a higher percentage of their income for taxes. There were no billionaires when Eisenhower was president.
If someone’s income is utilized to pay for food, shelter, and other basic expenses, and they’re just getting by, they don’t need their taxes raised, they need them lowered.
Fair taxation means that higher earners pay a higher percentage of their income for taxes. There were no billionaires when Eisenhower was president.
The IRA means that wealthier people will pay at least their fair share, which they’ve skirted consistently. There are no faultless billionaires; they’ve all inherited money earned through exploitation of others, or they’ve exploited people themselves.
It’s not a taking, because that isn’t what a taking is. We need a purer progressive tax system (we had one but the GOP flattened it out substantially) and soon.
You and I have no argument on a progressive income tax. You know what the rates before the Kennedy Tax Cut were like, right? We've NEVER had a "pure" progressive system, but I'm all for starting. In fact, I think that it's absolutely necessary.
"There are no faultless billionaires; they’ve all inherited money earned through exploitation of others, or they’ve exploited people themselves." The problem with assuming that your political preferences are facts that don't require proof is that you can't convince anybody of them who doesn't already share them. that one is especially easy to debunk. As far as I know, Warren Buffett didn't have much of an inheritance, and didn't exploit anyone himself, unless you think that "exploit" is a synonym for "employ". He has made a lot of other people rich, though.
"There were no billionaires when Eisenhower was president." I'm not sure that's true, but if there were, there were far fewer. A billion dollars were a lot harder to accumulate then, not that it's really easy now. In purchasing power, the 2024 US Dollar is worth about 9.4 1960 CENTS, which means that $1 Billion in 1960 was equivalent to $10.55 Billion today.
Buffett is pretty much the exception that proves the rule. And, he’s had 93 years to get there. He wasn’t a billionaire when Eisenhower was in office.
I’m talking about Bezos and Musk and all the tech guys and the Saudi billions. The Waltons, the Sacklers, the Johnsons. I’m not a Marxist, but I have eyes. If you’re a Walton and you’re paying Walmart employees minimum wage, that’s exploitation. It doesn’t have anything to do with my political party. CEOs should make 100 times the salary of the lowest paid worker, not 10,000 times.
I would gladly pay more in taxes if Jeff Bezos had to pay his fair share.
My idea has always been progressive up to 70% for the top bracket.
These are the tax brackets that I'd like to see, and simple, with very few deductions. Of course, all of the dollar values need to be multiplied by 10 (see my last response for the reason), and there should probably be no tax below three or four times the poverty level:
I've never understood all the Bezos-hate on the Left. Nobody's forced to buy from Amazon, nobody's forced to work for Amazon, and minimum wages are set by elected representatives: if some people want them higher, it seems to me that it would be more constructive to organize to make that happen than to slander individuals, although I know that slander is a whole lot easier. Millions of people's lives are better every day because Jeff Bezos thought Amazon up; the lives of additional millions were not just better, but bearable during the pandemic thanks to Amazon. I don't just like Amazon, I LOVE Amazon, and I'm not ashamed to say it.
I hate Walmart myself; it's probably been 20 years since I've even been in one, and then I didn't stay long. But millions of people disagree with me, and far be it from me to say that they're wrong. If they don't think that the Waltons are giving them fair value for their money, they'll stop giving it to them. As for minimum wage, see above.
"CEOs should make 100 times the salary of the lowest paid worker, not 10,000 times." That is certainly an opinion -- but that's all it is. Until it becomes a law, it's no more or less valid than anybody else's opinion. I'd rather approach the subject through the tax brackets above, and include deferred income, rather than tell companies what they can and can't pay their executives. But that's just an opinion, too.
As for the Sacklers and Musk, and people you didn't mention like the investment bankers who caused the 2007-8 Crash, prosecutors as well as tax collectors should be after them, and the holes in our criminal laws that they sneak through need to be fixed.
The Bezos hate doesn’t come from buying from Amazon. That’s just a choice. The hate comes from the abusive working conditions and anti-union labor violations of the company.
I live in a big city. Maybe you do too. If we don’t want to shop at Walmart we have dozens of choices. If you live in an Ohio county in southeastern OH, though, you live in a depressed community in a food desert and Walmart is the only store for 40 miles because they put everything smaller out of business.
The CEO earnings aren’t my opinion; that’s where things stood (roughly) until the eighties. And employers are allowed to pay MORE than minimum wage. If employers paid enough money to live on and raise kids, there wouldn’t have to be a minimum wage, but no huge corporation is going to do that. Apple is always going to have little children in China make its components. If they didn’t, cell phones would be $7500. So phones should either be $7500 or Apple should figure out a way to cut costs without involving small Chinese children.
Absolutely with you on the Wall Street stuff, Al. If you’ve not seen The Big Short, do. Steve Carell’s character embodies the moral disgust of the subprime mortgage market.
I don't have anything against Amazon or any other company practicing union avoidance, as long as they do it within the law. If they violate the law, they should be punished for it, and I'm glad that we have an Administration now that believes that, too.
From what I've been reading about the "hollowing out of America", I wonder whether Walmart is really a source of the injury in many of those areas or a band-aid, if an ineffective one, over it. Putting the only retailer with enough reach and depth to bring people in blighted regions the goods they want at prices that they can afford can't be the right answer.
"So phones should either be $7500 or Apple should figure out a way to cut costs without involving small Chinese children." I love that! It's the industrial side of something that I've mostly talked about, here and in Slow Boring, in the agricultural area: how we distort our economy and cause ourselves trouble by keeping prices unreasonably low on products that we can't produce economically or ethically anyway, whether it's lettuce and strawberries in the desert, or iPhones made with child labor. How does it make sense for us to create an ongoing environmental disaster by diverting the whole Colorado River to produce crops in a place where no crops should grow, and then import people and pay them starvation wages to pick the crops, when the people could stay home and we could buy the products from their countries with a lower cost of living where they can be produced at a living wage? Why do we tolerate consumer electronics made with child labor in Asia, when we could demand that they be made by adults in Asia, or better yet in Mexico, where supply chains are so much shorter and safer? Yes, prices will be higher, because they'll reflect a truer cost of production -- but not as high as $7500, probably. And the higher costs will be partially offset by not having to pay subsidies to farmers for growing things on a cost-plus basis, or the cut that all the middlemen take in getting goods to the US from Asia. These are international and interstate commerce areas in which Congress has full authority to act.
Congress is about to take up the Farm Bill, and that would be a very good place to start answering those questions. Except as we already know, the answer will be the same old-same old. *sigh*
If someone’s income is utilized to pay for food, shelter, and other basic expenses, and they’re just getting by, they don’t need their taxes raised, they need them lowered.
Fair taxation means that higher earners pay a higher percentage of their income for taxes. There were no billionaires when Eisenhower was president.
The IRA means that wealthier people will pay at least their fair share, which they’ve skirted consistently. There are no faultless billionaires; they’ve all inherited money earned through exploitation of others, or they’ve exploited people themselves.
It’s not a taking, because that isn’t what a taking is. We need a purer progressive tax system (we had one but the GOP flattened it out substantially) and soon.
You and I have no argument on a progressive income tax. You know what the rates before the Kennedy Tax Cut were like, right? We've NEVER had a "pure" progressive system, but I'm all for starting. In fact, I think that it's absolutely necessary.
"There are no faultless billionaires; they’ve all inherited money earned through exploitation of others, or they’ve exploited people themselves." The problem with assuming that your political preferences are facts that don't require proof is that you can't convince anybody of them who doesn't already share them. that one is especially easy to debunk. As far as I know, Warren Buffett didn't have much of an inheritance, and didn't exploit anyone himself, unless you think that "exploit" is a synonym for "employ". He has made a lot of other people rich, though.
"There were no billionaires when Eisenhower was president." I'm not sure that's true, but if there were, there were far fewer. A billion dollars were a lot harder to accumulate then, not that it's really easy now. In purchasing power, the 2024 US Dollar is worth about 9.4 1960 CENTS, which means that $1 Billion in 1960 was equivalent to $10.55 Billion today.
https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1960
Buffett is pretty much the exception that proves the rule. And, he’s had 93 years to get there. He wasn’t a billionaire when Eisenhower was in office.
I’m talking about Bezos and Musk and all the tech guys and the Saudi billions. The Waltons, the Sacklers, the Johnsons. I’m not a Marxist, but I have eyes. If you’re a Walton and you’re paying Walmart employees minimum wage, that’s exploitation. It doesn’t have anything to do with my political party. CEOs should make 100 times the salary of the lowest paid worker, not 10,000 times.
I would gladly pay more in taxes if Jeff Bezos had to pay his fair share.
My idea has always been progressive up to 70% for the top bracket.
These are the tax brackets that I'd like to see, and simple, with very few deductions. Of course, all of the dollar values need to be multiplied by 10 (see my last response for the reason), and there should probably be no tax below three or four times the poverty level:
https://www.tax-brackets.org/federaltaxtable/1960
I've never understood all the Bezos-hate on the Left. Nobody's forced to buy from Amazon, nobody's forced to work for Amazon, and minimum wages are set by elected representatives: if some people want them higher, it seems to me that it would be more constructive to organize to make that happen than to slander individuals, although I know that slander is a whole lot easier. Millions of people's lives are better every day because Jeff Bezos thought Amazon up; the lives of additional millions were not just better, but bearable during the pandemic thanks to Amazon. I don't just like Amazon, I LOVE Amazon, and I'm not ashamed to say it.
I hate Walmart myself; it's probably been 20 years since I've even been in one, and then I didn't stay long. But millions of people disagree with me, and far be it from me to say that they're wrong. If they don't think that the Waltons are giving them fair value for their money, they'll stop giving it to them. As for minimum wage, see above.
"CEOs should make 100 times the salary of the lowest paid worker, not 10,000 times." That is certainly an opinion -- but that's all it is. Until it becomes a law, it's no more or less valid than anybody else's opinion. I'd rather approach the subject through the tax brackets above, and include deferred income, rather than tell companies what they can and can't pay their executives. But that's just an opinion, too.
As for the Sacklers and Musk, and people you didn't mention like the investment bankers who caused the 2007-8 Crash, prosecutors as well as tax collectors should be after them, and the holes in our criminal laws that they sneak through need to be fixed.
Also, I’m not the Left. I’m a centrist, left of center. The Left aren’t Democrats.
I know that you're not Left, just left of me ... and not that much. 😃
The Bezos hate doesn’t come from buying from Amazon. That’s just a choice. The hate comes from the abusive working conditions and anti-union labor violations of the company.
I live in a big city. Maybe you do too. If we don’t want to shop at Walmart we have dozens of choices. If you live in an Ohio county in southeastern OH, though, you live in a depressed community in a food desert and Walmart is the only store for 40 miles because they put everything smaller out of business.
The CEO earnings aren’t my opinion; that’s where things stood (roughly) until the eighties. And employers are allowed to pay MORE than minimum wage. If employers paid enough money to live on and raise kids, there wouldn’t have to be a minimum wage, but no huge corporation is going to do that. Apple is always going to have little children in China make its components. If they didn’t, cell phones would be $7500. So phones should either be $7500 or Apple should figure out a way to cut costs without involving small Chinese children.
Absolutely with you on the Wall Street stuff, Al. If you’ve not seen The Big Short, do. Steve Carell’s character embodies the moral disgust of the subprime mortgage market.
I don't have anything against Amazon or any other company practicing union avoidance, as long as they do it within the law. If they violate the law, they should be punished for it, and I'm glad that we have an Administration now that believes that, too.
From what I've been reading about the "hollowing out of America", I wonder whether Walmart is really a source of the injury in many of those areas or a band-aid, if an ineffective one, over it. Putting the only retailer with enough reach and depth to bring people in blighted regions the goods they want at prices that they can afford can't be the right answer.
"So phones should either be $7500 or Apple should figure out a way to cut costs without involving small Chinese children." I love that! It's the industrial side of something that I've mostly talked about, here and in Slow Boring, in the agricultural area: how we distort our economy and cause ourselves trouble by keeping prices unreasonably low on products that we can't produce economically or ethically anyway, whether it's lettuce and strawberries in the desert, or iPhones made with child labor. How does it make sense for us to create an ongoing environmental disaster by diverting the whole Colorado River to produce crops in a place where no crops should grow, and then import people and pay them starvation wages to pick the crops, when the people could stay home and we could buy the products from their countries with a lower cost of living where they can be produced at a living wage? Why do we tolerate consumer electronics made with child labor in Asia, when we could demand that they be made by adults in Asia, or better yet in Mexico, where supply chains are so much shorter and safer? Yes, prices will be higher, because they'll reflect a truer cost of production -- but not as high as $7500, probably. And the higher costs will be partially offset by not having to pay subsidies to farmers for growing things on a cost-plus basis, or the cut that all the middlemen take in getting goods to the US from Asia. These are international and interstate commerce areas in which Congress has full authority to act.
Congress is about to take up the Farm Bill, and that would be a very good place to start answering those questions. Except as we already know, the answer will be the same old-same old. *sigh*
I was going to like this but the “like” button disappeared. We used it up!