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Originally Posted by Mikado
We're still stuck on the "because you can afford it" arguement. I agree that our government funded agencies need the taxes they collect each year to operate and keep society functioning. I agree that as user of such services we should continue to help fund them by paying our taxes. However, we all use these services. Rich or poor. We should all be responsible for helping to fund them every year. There shouldn't be a stipulation that says "because you can afford to, you have to pay more than everyone else." With a tax rate equal for everyone, I do pay more because I make more. But me paying 35% to someone else's 10% because I can afford to, I don't agree with. I need money from my clients when I sell them an insurance policy. Everyone within the company needs health coverage, but I don't ask for more money from people who can afford it when they are getting the same services.
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I don't agree with the "because you can afford to" either. But I have raised an alternative explanation, along with a couple other posters, that you haven't addressed, yet.
As an owner of capital, your business uses more resources than a worker/consumer. You must pay a tax rate commensurate with your capital--not income--in order to meet the yearly expenses of running the nation. That's the only way people who don't work and corporations able to shove their income around the globe--both of which I argued own the vast majority of the nation--will pay what they
owe, not what I or anyone else thinks is
fair; rather compensation for using resources as a disporportionate level than the average worker/consumer.
On the other matter, frankly, I couldn't care less whether you can afford to pay your share. If you can't, your business isn't profitable enough to deserve to keep running. Right now the largest share of tax redistribution is in the form of wealthfare--not wellfare. Corporations and the upper crust receive a disproportionate amount of tax dollars back to them. People seem to have this notion that the wealthy pay in huge amounts of money (they do) and it funnels down to the poor (it doesn't). What happens is that the wealthy pay vasts amounts of money, but it isn't enough to service this nation's expenses. Rather than increase the amount taken in, the people who own the wealth (who are, or are connected to, the same people who control the decision making in this nation) argue to drive down necessary services for the working class and poorer in this nation who drive the economy. You can think in your mind that the rich really make the wheels turn if it appeases your conscious, but the people who keep it rolling are the people who produce and consume. That's what capitalism is all about--production and consumption.
Decades ago there was an era when the filthy rich were spending extravagently while the poor were literally dying in the streets. At the time, and still recently, people argued that various wellfare programs were inching toward socialism. More astute analyists, however, now argue that those programs actually
saved capitalism when it was about to die. If you look at the timeline, you'll notice that shortly thereafter is when socialism in this nation was all about extinquished when people actually began to believe the fiction that everyone had an equal chance at making it. When those safety nets were imposed the people responded and capitalism began to extract new legitimacy from the working classes. Moreover, the programs initiated that created a huge middle class (things like school funding, military payment for houses and schooling, and first time business loaning programs) started the economic boom that we've been feeling the residuals from for decades. Now that wave is ebbing, but there is no new movement to create another middle class. If you desire that, fine, but don't kid yourself--as the middle class shrinks it creates economic desolation in its wake, with little to no opportunity for the next generation of US citizens. Instead, those opportunities are shooting overseas literally faster than those economies can handle them. In short, the whole damn pizza is burning in the oven and capitalism's facade is starting to unravel.
We get responses like 9-11 as a direct result of global capitalism--which has been described as the 4th world war, in case you didn't know, by none other than James Woolsey.
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"On September 13, 2001, the New York Times' Tom Friedman wrote: "Does my country really understand that this is World War III? And if this attack
was the Pearl Harbor of World War III, it mea ns there is a long, long war
ahead."
More sophisticated minds have since challenged this declaration as
numerically incorrect. While sharing the pro-war consensus, former CIA
Director James Woolsey is on the lecture circuit asserting that the global
crus ade against terrorism is World War IV--the Cold War having been III.
"This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either
World Wars I or II did for us," Woolsey told a group of UCLA students in
April. "Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War."
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http://www.worldwar3report.com/comments.pl?sid=77&cid=7
The entire article is too long to put here, but an extremely important piece of the larger picture I am describing--please read it.
If you think you are paying too much, consider that if you reduce services to the people at the low-level production/consumption chain, you will strip the things that make this system of governance and resource distribution legitimate. The richest people on this planet know this and actively seek to not do it. Other richest people on this planet are just plain greedy, or underestimate the function of services to the poor, or just think it's the natural order of the world--survival of the fittest or whatnot.
This isn't about whether you
can afford to foot more of the bill as much as it is about you
must afford it if you want the nation to keep abreast of its bills and if you want capitalism, in the long-run, to survive.