The janitor with kids should pay little to no taxes. However, the LSU professor and football coach should pay the same 20% rate. Using your example: Professor pays $20,000 in taxes Coach pays $800,000 in taxes. The coach makes 40 times more money than the professor and pays 40 times more tax. What can be more fair than that? Why should the coach pay a higher tax rate? The coaches life style and whether or not he thinks about his tax consequences is irrelevant. The coach could get fired, take a major loss in the stock market, become disabled in an auto accident, or lose money in a business venture. It's not the governments business to perceive what citizens are thinking and how they are living their lives as a means of determining what tax rate they should pay. (Unless we're talking about the working poor which should pay no tax.)
That's not to mention how many more public resources the ultra-rich use to make their money. Company execs have people driving to work for them everyday (or products being delivered for them) on publicly funded roads, the same way all those thousands of people get to LSU football games.
Because he can afford it and it doesn't hurt him at all--he's still filthy rich. When you get more out of the American democracy and economic system, then you should owe more back into it. The rich have a far greater interest than the poor in maintaining a stable government and economy. Current low tax rates for multi-millionaires are allowing the gap between the rich and the middle class to grow to obscene levels. This is not good for the country and ultimately not good for the rich either. Ask Marie Antoinette.
Blah me don't care. There are more poor people that can pay a % then none at all. Rather than taking a large percentage of those that are "richer" Not to mention those poor usually reap the benefits of what the select few have paid for. Boo
Fixed it for you. Sorry buddy, this is socialism at it's finest, and you can deny it all you want. It is in effect penalizing someone for being successful. In your model, a faster running back should have to wear weights so everyone has a better chance to tackle him. There is no initiative to do better. I would think the last 100 years of socialist experiments worldwide would have illustrated that quite well. Someone making millions of $ has a right to spend their $ however they see fit. If they want to start a soup kitchen, start a business, or blow it in Vegas, it is their business, because they earned it or were lucky enough to be born to it. Just as we were fortunate enough to be born in America. Who are you or anyone to decide what is "more than enough" for someone? Closing loopholes that reduce your tax rate is one thing, but raising it to punish you because you did well, that's just not American in any way.
No one made their millions (ooo i guess its "billions" now) completely on their own merit. the rich do owe and they should be effing grateful to pay.---the whole "eye of the needle" thing, right?
The rich are getting more out of the American democracy and they are also putting a hell of a lot more back into it. In my example the coach makes 40 times more than the professor and pays 40 times more in taxes. You say he's getting more out of the American democracy/economic system and then should owe more but 40 times more is not enough. Why is that not enough? If you are for redistribution of wealth then why not say so and stop claiming to be a moderate. -top 1% of taxpayers paid 40% of all income taxes in 2006 -top 10% in income paid 71% -the top 50% paid 97.1%
What does that even mean??? People have to make their $ in a vacuum? So if a boy growing up pays attention in class and becomes a self-made millionaire(oops, they don't exist), he suddenly owes more because his teacher taught him? And what about all the people that had the same teacher but didn't become millionaires? And what about the morons who couldn't understand the same teacher? Or the boy that thought spit balls were much cooler than learning trig? They benefited from the exact same education but the millionaire owes more to society then they do? If any stranger on the street looks at me and tells me I owe them something because I have and they do not, I know immediately what that person is. They are called panhandlers. If they are voting, they are called socialists. Get real.
