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The Kennedy Sycophant's Guide To Oppressive Taxes |
Current rating: -2 |
by Isabel Lyman
Email: opinion (nospam) gazettenet.com (unverified!)
Phone: 413 584-5000
Address: 115 Conz Street, Northampton MA 01060 |
10 Jul 2003
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Does the Bush tax plan favor the wealthy? Well, yeah... Let the Democrats and their ilk pool their resources to subvert the Constitution and help "the people" build a Welfare State -- the rest of declare this taxation (read: legal plunder) to be oppressive. |
Democrats are wrong on taxes
Isabel Lyman, Daily Hampshire Gazette
Thursday, July 10, 2003 -- There once was a Democrat named John F. Kennedy, who had sensible economic ideas. In the early '60s, he noted that "an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget, just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits."
In the years following President Kennedy's proposed tax cuts, the U.S. economy grew at a healthy rate of more than 5 percent annually. The days of Camelot are long over. Now the citizenry is stuck with JFK's relatives and sycophants.
Take Patrick J. Kennedy. The Rhode Island congressman brought the notion of taxation with representation to a new low. The Washington Post reported June 27 that Kennedy told a gathering of young Democrats, "I don't need Bush's tax cut. I have never worked a [expletive deleted] day in my life." Get Pat a ditch-digging gig, and wash his mouth with soap.
Meanwhile, our man in Washington D.C. - Congressman John W. Olver - appears to have imbibed too much Karl Marx. He criticized President George W. Bush's tax relief plan because it disproportionately benefits the wealthy. Or, as he puts it, "Tax cuts are stripping the capacity of government to provide services to people."
Democrats sound so noble when they champion government services. Well, let them, and their ilk, act nobly. Let them pool their economic and material resources to help "the people" build a Welfare State while subverting the Constitution. The rest of us can then declare the current system of taxation (read: legal plunder) as oppressive.
One of the complaints in the Declaration of Independence, against the British crown, was about "imposing Taxes on us without our Consent." What would the Declaration's signers think about the approximately 40 percent in taxes that many contemporary Americans passively pay? Now about Olver's comment that the Bush tax plan favors the wealthy - well, yeah.
As James Miller, who teaches economics at Smith College, logically explains, "Since the rich pay most of the taxes, you would expect them to receive the greatest savings from nearly any tax cut." Adds Ken Robinson, a tax-code savvy attorney from Ware, "Ergo, the rich should receive the most tax relief, since they pay the most."
In 2000, the Internal Revenue Service reveals that those with incomes in the top 5 percent paid more than 56 percent of all taxes, while the top 1 percent - those earning $313,469 and above - paid 37 percent of all taxes. However, those in the bottom half - earning less than $27,682 a year - paid less than 4 percent in income taxes.
Can anybody say flat tax?
Making lots of money remains one of the top reasons that poor immigrants trek to the United States. The Declaration's signers were hardly destitute men if they pledged their "fortunes" to the cause of liberty. And, in a shaky economy, with growing unemployment, to monetarily penalize the play-by-the-rules wealthy with higher taxes amounts to voodoo economics. Here is my two-cents worth why.
First, millionaires and billionaires create choices for the rest of us. Their venture capitalism and big-ticket purchases produce jobs. The well-off also contribute to charities and churches, advance the arts and sciences, entertain and inform us, and take risks. Thanks to Ms. Moneybags Oprah Winfrey and her book club, less-known authors have prospered and found fame. Contributing $100 million, billionaires John T. Walton and Theodore J. Forstmann have assisted tens of thousands of low-income students through their Children's Scholarship Fund, which provides partial private-school vouchers.
Lew Rockwell, the prominent libertarian, notes, "[T]he prosperity of everyone in a market economy depends in good part on the rich. The capital they have earned and saved generates investments ... Their savings keep interest rates low. Their actions are philanthropic in every sense."
Second, constantly portraying the rich as evil villains sometimes causes them to flee. Forbes has reported that among the prosperous who have renounced their American citizenship are John Dorrance III, a Campbell Soup heir; Ted Arison, the Carnival Cruise Lines founder; and industrialist Michael Dingman.
Their reasons for becoming expatriates vary from wanting to protect their heirs from crushing inheritance taxes to a frustration with the changing tax code to annoyance at seeing their hard-earned dollars carelessly redistributed by the likes of John Olver. They have moved to islands like the Bahamas and St. Kitts to live in luxury and peace and to freely manage benevolent foundations. Our loss.
It's no mystery why Democratic lawmakers belittle the rich and tax cuts which also benefit the middle-classes. Demagoguery works. Stirring class envy earns votes, grows government to gargantuan proportions, and furthers cronyism. In this thoughtless scramble for power, the economic legacy, left by leaders like John Hancock and John F. Kennedy, has been regrettably squandered. |
See also:
http://www.gazettenet.com/07102003/columns/7357.htm
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Speaking Out: Working Poor, Dropped From Tax Cut At Last Minute, May Be Helped After All |
by Ronald J. Sider
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 3
10 Jul 2003
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Biblical principles of justice support a graduated, progressive tax system in which those with more wealth pay a larger share.
Guess who lost their tax cut? The working poor and their children.
At the very last minute, in the House Conference Committee, 11.9 million poor children lost $3.5 billion while the 200,000 households earning over $1 million per year got about $90 billion in tax cuts.
The tax bill just passed will increase the child tax credit from $600 to $1,000. As a result, middle- and upper-income families will get a check in July for $400 per child. But not poor working families. Because of this last-minute decision, 11.9 million poor children in working families with incomes from $10,500 to $26, 625 lost their $3.5 billion. Why? To keep the total tax-cut package to $350 billion.
Of course, there would have been other ways to save this $3.5 billion for the working poor. Reducing the capital gains/dividend tax cut (which goes mostly to the richest 15 percent) just a little less—by a mere 2.3 percent—would have preserved the $3.5 billion for the working poor. This tax cut goes overwhelmingly to the rich.
Don't be deceived by statements that "91 million tax payers will receive, on average, a tax cut of $1,126" (Treasury Department). The tiny group (one-fifth of a million) of people who make over $1 million a year get an average tax break of $93,500 from this bill. On the other hand, the average tax cut for households in the middle fifth of all households is a mere $217—and 53 percent of all households (73 million) get less than $100!
When he signed the bill, the President said that 12 million elderly tax filers would receive an average tax cut of $1,401. But the elderly rich get most of it: 63 percent of the elderly get less than $100.
Fortunately, there is a bit of good news. After widespread negative publicity, the Senate voted 94-2 to restore the $3.5 billion child credit for the working poor, and President Bush—thanks in part to strong urging from the religious community—has strongly endorsed this development. Unfortunately, Republican leaders in the House want to tie this $3.5 billion for the working poor to still more, vastly larger tax breaks for the richest Americans.
The full tragedy and moral outrage of all this becomes clearer in the context of developments over a longer time frame.
For decades, the richest 20 percent (especially the top 5 percent) of Americans have received a larger and larger share of the nation's total income and wealth. American society today is more unequal than at any time in decades, and more unequal than all other industrialized nations. The top 1 percent has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent!
The long view
From 1989 to 2000, total GDP grew by 40 percent. But the after-tax income of the top 1 percent grew by 69 percent, while the bottom 95 percent saw their after-tax income increase by only 9 percent. From 1979 to 1997, the richest 1 percent saw their after-tax income grow by 157 percent–$414,000 per household! According to Business Week, the ratio between the pay of CEOs in our 365 largest companies and the average pay of their workers was 42-to-1 in 1980. Now it is 500-to-1!
President Bush has already given this rich minority a huge tax break. The final law was a slight improvement, but his original proposal in 2001 to cut taxes by $1.6 trillion would have given 40 percent of the total benefit to the richest 1 percent while the bottom 40 percent got a piddling 4 percent.
Some argue that the rich should receive the biggest tax cuts because they pay the most taxes. It is true that in 2000, the richest 1 percent paid 37.4 percent of all federal income taxes (the top 5 percent paid 56.5 percent). Two comments are crucial. First, when you count all federal taxes (payroll, excise, etc.), then the top 1 percent paid only 23 percent (the top 5 percent paid 39 percent). If we counted state and local taxes, which are far less progressive, the share of total taxes paid by the rich would be even less.
More important, however, is the fact that taxes should be based on ability to pay. Biblical principles of justice support a graduated, progressive tax system in which those with more wealth pay a larger share.
The Bible teaches in hundreds of verses that God has a special concern for the poor. The Old Testament specifically provided for poor people to bring less expensive offerings for worship. The biblical teaching on the land in Israel (an agricultural society where land was the basic productive capital) shows that God wants everyone to have access to the productive capital so they can earn their own way and be dignified members of society. Progressive taxation provides the resources to implement this biblical understanding of justice.
Benefit cuts
Poverty in the United States is growing: by 1.3 million in 2001 and almost certainly more in 2002. Effective federal programs to help the working poor need more dollars, but, because of ballooning federal deficits, Bush is cutting most of these programs while giving more huge tax cuts for the rich.
None of us likes taxes, but they sometimes pay for good things. Federal Pell grants pay college expenses for children from poorer families so they can work hard to gain skills to escape poverty, but their value keeps dropping. In 1965, Pell grants covered 85 percent of the cost of four years at a public university; in 2000, they covered only 39 percent. If we want more Pell grants for poor college kids, a living wage for all who work responsibly, and health coverage and Social Security for everyone, we cannot keep cutting taxes. And contrary to what many believe, a median family of four in 2001 paid a smaller share of their income in federal income taxes than at any year since 1957.
President Bush claims to care about the poor, and I believe his faith-based initiative offers a historic opportunity to empower the needy. However, the poor need both effective faith-based social services and fair economic structures. They need a living wage, health insurance, educational opportunity and social security—and all that costs tax dollars that are rapidly disappearing as Bush gives one huge tax cut after another to a rich, tiny minority.
Ronald J. Sider is the President of Evangelicals for Social Action.
http://www.esa-online.org/
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ |
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Another *pick On Democrats* Obfuscation |
by anti-neo-con
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 5
10 Jul 2003
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So I see you posted this all over Indymedia. Thanks, you shill. Hope the reward to you is worth your effort
1) the $30K per year income earners on down class pay MORE in taxes than the top percent because taxes include far more than just income taxes; the neoconservative and conservative liars would like you to think we have a progressive tax system;
2) the calls for flat tax will increase over the next decade because it's part of the neoconservative strategy to have a planned fiscal train wreck that forces the reduction of government. The flat tax will do away with the only part of our tax system that even tries to be progressive -- income tax as we know it. It's a head-fake. All the other taxes like sales taxes (or a newly introduced value added tax) will be extremely regressive. This is all about the rich getting richer, and the middle class getting less in way of services and doing away with a Commonwealth vision to an individualistic vision.
Most conservatives absolutely love Teddy Roosevelt. Well, if you folks had any idea what he'd say about you, you'd piss in your pants. You're not conservatives. You're radicals.
The other point that these fake conservatives toss out the window is that JFK's tax cut was a progressive tax cut, stuffing a ton of money into the middle class and poor as well as the rich. There's a friggin huge difference. That kind of tax cut actually is spent more in consumption because the poor and middle class, by definition, spend most of their income (or in this case, tax credit) on consumption.
These two-bit newspaper columnists and neo-conservative (reactionary) and conservative pundits *NEVER* bring up this fact and totally distort history. JFK would have called Bush's tax cut a failed economic plan. |
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It's Those Damned Libertarians Again... |
by anti-libertarian
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 5
10 Jul 2003
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...with their childish fantasy that wealthy philanthropists will balance the inequities of the poor an needy.
'Lew Rockwell, the prominent libertarian, notes, "[T]he prosperity of everyone in a market economy depends in good part on the rich. The capital they have earned and saved generates investments ... Their savings keep interest rates low. Their actions are philanthropic in every sense."'
Right, the rich run the economy and everyone else should be grateful. Okay Scrooge, see you in hell. |
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Facts Versus Conservative Rhetoric |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
10 Jul 2003
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Some useful links for those who are not ideologically impaired by greed:
$300 BILLION DEFICITS, AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE
http://www.cbpp.org/7-2-03bud.htm
WAR, TAX CUTS, AND THE DEFICIT
http://www.cbpp.org/4-29-03bud.htm
HOUSE CHILD CREDIT LEGISLATION NOT FISCALLY RESPONSIBLE
Bill More Likely to Harm Children than to Assist Them
http://www.cbpp.org/6-11-03tax.htm
GOVERNMENT BENEFIT PROGRAMS CUT POVERTY NEARLY IN HALF, ANALYSIS FINDS
http://www.cbpp.org/snd98.htm
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