How are we going to pay for all this shit?

[VitaMan]

The title of thread is how we are going to pay for......


The answer is the same it has always been: taxes and fees


What is USA population now - 350 million ? One of the wealthiest countries on earth. Plenty of taxpayers.


Ever since currency went off the gold standard, it has become easier for the government to spend.

[adav8s28]

Originally Posted by Tiny

There are more efficient and fair ways to tax.

These efficient ways of taxing that you are referring to, will they generate 12 Trillion dollars over a time span of 20 years? The USA can handle a rolling debt of 20 Trillion. It can't handle a rolling debt of 35 Trillion that is growing. Senator Warren's proposal may not be fair to billionaires but it will at least reduce the whooping amount of rolling debt the Federal Government has. A 2% wealth tax that is temporary will not hurt your average billionaire in the long run.

[Texas Contrarian]

History is replete with bad ideas concerning the question of "how to pay for all this shit." But Elizabeth Warren's so-called "Ultra-Millionaire Tax" is one of the most boneheaded of them all.

She's been pontificating on this ridiculously scammy idea for a number of years now, but seems hell-bent on demonstrating that she has no intention of making even the most rudimentary effort to understand the issue. Had she done so, she would have learned that the plan was implemented in France, Germany, and all the Scandinavian countries, but quickly dropped when people found how damaging it was to capital formation and prospects for economic growth, while raising only a fraction of the revenue projected by its supporters. Outside the Piketty/Saez/Zucman camp, it has no supporters.

Were this plan to be implemented, we would be required to submit annual balance sheet information to Treasury, on pain of criminal penalty if their army of enforcers deems any information submitted to be in error. Is anyone really okay with doing that, in addition to all the income data we're required to submit?

From the viewpoint of middle class savers with 401k and other investment accounts, perhaps an even worse feature of her plan would be that it would chase trillions of dollars of investment capital out of the publicly-traded markets and into the private equity space. It shouldn't be difficult to understand that a primary consequence of this is that the "next Nvidia" (whatever that may be) will be much more likely to be financed within the private equity space, robbing non-wealthy investors of opportunities to participate in the capital gains enjoyed by founders of what they deem to be the most promising tech investments and other innovative enterprises. Speaking of Nvidia, don't forget that Jensen Huang only owns about 3.5% of the outstanding shares; most of the equity is owned beneficially by middle-class savers in pension funds, 401(k)s, and the like.

Therefore, middle-class Americans who think they might be big supporters of such "fair-sounding" tax plans would do well to be careful about what they wish for.

[westwardho]

Foolish people always think the "other guy" should be made to pay for the stuff they want. Teach on Contrarian!

[txdot-guy]

Originally Posted by westwardho

Foolish people always think the "other guy" should be made to pay for the stuff they want. Teach on Contrarian!

Poor people die destitute. Usually earlier than they should. Rich people die and pass on generational wealth.

Who exactly should we be taxing?

[westwardho]

A lot of poor people die through poor life choices. Reread Contrarian' post. Squashing capital formation will will never make poor people more wealthy.

[westwardho]

It should be "early and poor".

[westwardho]

By the way, I was born into a poor family. By making good choices and being a little lucky I will die rich.

[txdot-guy]

Originally Posted by westwardho

A lot of poor people die through poor life choices. Reread Contrarian' post. Squashing capital formation will never make poor people more wealthy.

If you change the word “choice” to “event” I would agree with you. Poor life events tend to derail more people than poor life choices.

But that doesn’t change the reality of our low tax high spend government policies. A wealth tax may not be the answer but taxing at higher rates the people who actually have the money is the only solution for overcoming our debt problems. That along with corresponding spending cuts.

The money we’ve spent deploying military in the middle east over the past four decades comes to mind. Our military industrial complex is out of control and has been since the eighties.

[westwardho]

I am not an expert on the way the US spends money but I would venture a guess we spend more on medicaid and other welfare programs than we do on our military.

[lustylad]

Originally Posted by The_Waco_Kid

According to the latest available IRS data for the 2022 tax year, the top 1% of earners—those with an adjusted gross income (AGI) of $663,164 or higher—paid 40.4% of all federal individual income taxes.

The concentration of the tax burden among high-income earners reflects the progressive nature of the U.S. federal income tax system. Additional context on the tax contributions of different income groups includes:

The Top 10%: This group accounted for 72% of all federal income taxes paid in 2022.

The Bottom 50%: Taxpayers in the bottom half of the income distribution (those with an AGI below $50,339) contributed 3% of all federal income taxes.

Originally Posted by txdot-guy

Every time I see this particular piece of information used to justify tax cuts or income inequality it just makes me want to scream.

Hey txdot, we have something in common!

Every time I listen to Bernie Sanders or Liz Warren or AOC deliver another demagogic class-warfare screed, it makes me want to scream too!

[txdot-guy]

Originally Posted by westwardho

I am not an expert on the way the US spends money but I would venture a guess we spend more on medicaid and other welfare programs than we do on our military.

At least twice what we spend on our military is spent on medicare, medicaid and other healthcare related services.

Social Security is funded by payroll taxes, Increasing those taxes by a few percent and making other revenue changes would keep that program solvent for the next few decades.

Medicare and Medicaid are another matter. I’m not sure what it will take to reform those programs.

I’m not sure however that it is in our best interests to continue to be the world’s policeman anymore. It’s nuclear guarantor maybe.

[lustylad]

Good ol' Bernie hasn't had a fresh idea pop into his head since he read the Communist Manifesto in college over 60 years ago!

Here's one of my favorite WSJ columns. It's 16 years old. I'd like to dedicate it to Rooster, since he is an avid WSJ reader, and txdot, as an antidote whenever he feels the urge to scream.

Bernie Sanders was already stirring and spewing the same old shit back in 2010. I urge everyone who spends more time hating and envying the rich than they do pursuing their own road to happiness in a way that adds value to society and enlarges our national economic pie to read it carefully:


'Billionaires On the Warpath'?

The GOP needs to address the class-warfare argument in moral terms.

By William McGurn
Updated Dec. 14, 2010 12:01 am ET


Say what you will about Bernie Sanders. During his Senate "filibuster" on Friday, the gentleman from Vermont asked a good question: When is enough enough?

The object of Mr. Sanders's ire was the deal between the White House and Republicans that will keep the Bush tax cuts in place. "The billionaires of America are on the warpath," was his explanation. "They want more and more and more."

In his nearly nine-hour remarks, excerpts of which are now going viral on the Internet, he framed the lack of a tax hike for the rich as a surrender to greed. In so doing, he inadvertently raised another question: How come Republicans have such a hard time speaking just as forthrightly about the moral underpinnings of their side of this argument?

In general, Republicans tend to answer these class-warfare screeds with purely functional arguments. How, for example, higher tax rates aimed at "millionaires and billionaires" have a habit of hitting quite a few others (the Alternative Minimum Tax anyone?). How such taxes seldom produce the promised revenue bounty. Or how our real problem is not tax revenues but government spending.

These are all good, solid points, and they have an important place in a debate about policy. Yet they can sometimes convey the impression that the only issue here is about maximizing the return to government.

By contrast, think back to when Barack Obama told Joe Wurzelbacher that he wanted to "spread the wealth around," and the Ohio plumber noted how at odds that high-tax vision was with his pursuit of "the American Dream."

What might a more robustly moral argument look like? For one thing, it would address head-on the rhetoric of greed.

One of the Seven Deadly Sins, greed is usually described as an insatiable desire for wealth. If that is true, when taxpayers who want to keep their hard-earned money are compared to politicians who want to take it from them to feed their uncontrolled spending, whose appetite better warrants the word insatiable?

In fact, the desire for higher taxes often seems to justify itself solely by the motive to level down. Mr. Obama suggested as much during a televised campaign debate in April 2008. ABC's Charlie Gibson asked the candidate why he wanted to raise capital gains tax rates even though the experience of the past two presidents - Bill Clinton and George W. Bush - showed that "in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased; the government took in more money."

Mr. Obama's answer: "Well, Charlie, what I've said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness."

That's the way with most tax-the-rich rhetoric. For all the talk about "fairness," Mr. Obama, Mr. Sanders and their fellow Democrats never really tell us what the magic number for fairness is. Is it 35% of income? 50%? 75%? Though they never commit themselves to an actual number, in each and every case we get the same answer: Taxes should be higher than they are now, for their own sake.

Americans are a more hopeful and less envious people than that. We are now hearing from them. Thus the heart of the tea party's objections to the Beltway status quo is fundamentally a moral one: that Washington is arrogant about how it takes and spends our money.

The American people understand this. It's not just tea partiers or those who work on Wall Street. Many years ago, the activist Michael Harrington - he, like Mr. Sanders, a self-declared socialist - wrote about the experience a friend of his had while campaigning in 1972 for George McGovern among the mostly black and Latina workers of New York City's garment district.

Harrington told his friend that he must have had an easy time selling the candidate, given Mr. McGovern's proposal for a 100% tax on every dollar over $500,000 of inheritance. This, Harrington thought, must have especially appealed to garment workers laboring for very low pay.

The friend informed Harrington how wrong he was: "Those underpaid women... were outraged that the government would confiscate the money they would hand down to their children if they made a million dollars." No matter how he tried to tell these garment workers how unlikely they ever were to see a million dollars in their lifetimes, they couldn't get past the idea that the government would take it from them if they did.

As Mr. Sanders reminded us this past weekend, the politics of higher taxes now rests almost purely on stoking resentment. If Republicans hope to regain the moral high ground, they need to remind citizens that the argument for lower taxes and government that lives within its means is not an argument about numbers or federal revenues. It's an argument about the ability of all our citizens to realize their dreams and opportunities.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001...17851441620350

[westwardho]

Earned social security and medicare is one thing. Medicaid, Snap and all the other unearned bulletin is quite another. I think that is the main thing that differentiates a conservative from a liberal. Conservatives believe in personal responsibility and liberals apparently do not.

[westwardho]

Bulletin should be bull shit.