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whatevergirl
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As Christians, shouldn’t we think the best of people until they prove us otherwise? It isn’t Buffet’s doing that the taxation system is built to incentify the mega-wealthy.
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whatevergirl
Guest
I think that everyone has to start somewhere. Hopefully, through hard work, that person will receive promotions, will be able to start building some side nest eggs from either investing in stocks himself, or through an employer sponsored plan. Everyone starts somewhere. Unless you were born into mega wealth, expect to start from nothing, and build up.
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He_Man
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The minimum wage job was never intended to be used by people who had families to support. It’s like an adult man riding a kid’s tricycle - of course it is difficult, because that isn’t waht it was intended for. it is aimed at those with the lowest needs in society - children, namely.
Anyone else is abusing it.
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vern_humphrey
Guest
By seeking more responsibility and upgrading their skills.
We do not have a caste system in this country – people can go up the ladder readily, if they have the will and gumption. They aren’t locked into one job for life.
My wife, for example, trains Certified Nursing Assistants – who make just above Minimum Wage. She encourages them to go on and become Licensed Practical Nurses or Registered Nurses. Several of them have done so (she “volunteers” me to tutor them with math and other subjects.)
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Teflon93
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Buffet’s the one demagoguing it.As Christians, shouldn’t we think the best of people until they prove us otherwise? It isn’t Buffet’s doing that the taxation system is built to incentify the mega-wealthy.
After all, Buffet could pay his secretary as much as he wants, couldn’t he?
Indeed, by his own reasoning, paying her gobs and gobs of money would alleviate her tax burden.
So why doesn’t he?
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Teflon93
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Hard working minimum wage earners don’t stay at minimum wage for long.
They get promoted as their skills develop and as their loyalty deserves.
The notion of the perpetual minimum wage earner is a myth. There is considerable movement between the bottom-quintile of earners and the top. The former tend to be at either end of working life. Most people earn their most in their 40s, and there are very few people as a % of the job force in minimum wage jobs during these years.
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ribozyme
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vern_humphrey
Guest
Well, it’s like this – when people who **don’t **have jobs express contempt for people who do have jobs, and demand the latter be taxed more, what other motive can there be?
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cynic
Guest
‘encourage’, read punish. You still can’t answer how someone on a low wage can afford $460 a week in tax. But then you just pick out convenient parts of others posts and ignore the rest.
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Teflon93
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cynic
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whatevergirl
Guest
Maybe you have read somewhere that I personally know Buffet.
lol I don’t know–I’m taking guesses as to why he doesn’t give back to government.
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vern_humphrey
Guest
You have confused yourself. Where did “$460 a week in tax” come from?
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Teflon93
Guest
Many do, although the taxes are dishonestly called “lottery tickets for public education” and the like.
I’ve been poor—my dad was a bricklayer who raised five kids. I myself subsisted on $60 a month while attending a service academy, which, despite providing for shelter and food, didn’t go very far.
My wife’s earnings were very small for most of her adult life.
And still we made do, as most do.
We are comfortable financially now and able to support our parish and a number of charities as well as an enormous tax burden laid upon us by our fellow citizens, many of whom receive more from the government than they have ever put in.
Now, we are blessed and obligated to support our brothers and sisters as we can. It’s a little much though to be moralized to by many who a) don’t give to charity at all and b) don’t pay income/ social security taxes at all and c) are perfectly capable of working and supporting themselves. I am a third-generation American, the son of a bricklayer who was himself a son of a bricklayer going back several generations. Their hard work and drive to get to this wonderful country has made my life possible. Had I not applied myself, it would remain a possibility.
There are many Americans whose roots in this country are far, far deeper than mine but who have lost sight of the salient fact that if you work hard and do the right thing, you will advance in this great country.
If you don’t think that’s the case, talk to a new immigrant. They have a much more accurate perception of this country’s promise than we native-born Americans can.
Hope is one of the cardinal virtues because it is all too easy to wallow in misery. There is unfortunately no shortage of people who prefer “woe is me” to “let’s roll.”
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Teflon93
Guest
Indeed, that would be $23,920 per year in tax alone. At a 25% tax rate, you’d have to be pulling in $95,680 to pay that much.
I don’t suppose that anyone would consider such a person to be poor.
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cynic
Guest
:yawn: and I’ve given my take on this in a previous post. Vern wants to tax people at the same cash amount, not as a percentage of income. He has said that a 40 year old of average intelligence should be earning at least twice the mean wage. Twice the average American wage is around $120,000. A 20% tax rate on this (for eg) is $24,000, which is $460 a week. So according to this tax system almost everyone near the age of 40 would be paying $460 a week in tax, including bricklayers. He refers to this as an ‘encouragement’ to be more productive.
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cynic
Guest
…or he would take the average earnings within an age bracket, say 35-45, apply a tax rate to this, and make everyone in this group pay that amount in cash, no matter how little they were earning.
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Teflon93
Guest
I must have missed this exchange, but Vern can clarify.
There is a strong experiential component to salaries. The mean U.S. salary (the median is more useful, but we’ll use the mean for this example since that’s what you referenced) is simply the sum of all wages divided by the number of workers. This includes unskilled workers just entering the work force at close to minimum or minimum wage and seasoned professionals at the apogees of their careers.
We’d have to calculate the mean wage of people in their 40s in order to know whether it was sufficiently higher than the mean of those < 40 for such a scheme to be reasonable.
It also misses the point, however.
The tax system exists to produce sufficient revenue for the government to function, not to “redistribute” wealth. The ability of the tax code to promote certain behaviors through tax breaks and discourage others through taxes and fees is a byproduct of this purpose. Because the American Left has distorted this purpose to disastrous effect (see Marvin Olasky’s “Tragedy of American Compassion” for a thorough review of the devastating impact on the poor and the churches who serve them as a result of secular governmental policies and their “crowding out” effect), the Right may be tempted to distort it the opposite way by, in effect, “taxing poverty”. This would be equally disastrous.
Better to stop playing games with the tax code to benefit whatever interest groups the majority favors at the time and tune it to maximize revenue at minimal societal impact. A flat tax would achieve this in the near term; this is why so many economists recommend it.
It would also rebut Warren Buffet’s demagogic “concern”.
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vern_humphrey
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I never said raise the tax on the bricklayer, me lad. In saying everyone should pay the same tax, you will note, I stressed comparing people of equal intelligence, health, and so on. If the bricklayer cannot pay the millionaire’s tax, let the millionaire pay the same as the bricklayer.
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Teflon93
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Certainly, the principle that the burdens of government ought to apply equally to ALL citizens is time-honored and sound.
Let’s run some numbers and see what the practical implications might be.
2008 Fiscal Budget of the United States
Total 2008 federal budget = $2,784,267,000,000
2008 estimate % of budget revenue from income taxes - 46.8%
2008 estimate % of budget revenue from SS/retirement - 34.8%
2008 estimate % of budget outlay from national defense - 20.9%
2008 estimate % of budget outlay from human resources (incl SS, education, Medicare, social services) - 63.1%
2008 U.S. Population (est)
Total 2008 U.S. population (est) = 303,598,000
If we break the budget down by U.S. population, no other revenue source allowed, it would come to $9,170.90 per person.
If we use the historical breakdown of revenue, the income tax bill would be
If we preserved all other sources of revenue, the per person breakdown would be $4,291.98 and the SS contribution would be $3,191.47.
On a per week basis, the family of four would pay $575.65 in taxes ($29,993.81 total annual). The % of income would obviously be highly variable.
This presumes no deficit, of course.
As attractive as the notion of all citizens paying equally for the burden of government, Big Government has simply grown too big for this to be practical at the moment.
Note that the key driver of Big Government’s bigness is not national defense, as some critics would have it, but social services which were ballooned by the Great Society programs of the 60s.
Even Social Security takes up a much smaller segment of the budget than this.
Indeed, were we to judge what the purpose of Big Government is from its expenditures, we’d have to include that the federal government of the United States exists to provide education, healthcare, and welfare benefits first and foremost, then retirement benefits, then national defense.
That formulation is what would have the Founders spinning in their graves.
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