Poor Americans Will Be Stuck With the Tab for Bernie Sanders' Generous Promises
Successful people aren't just skilled at making money, they're unequaled at keeping it, too.
![Large image on homepages | berniesanders.com](https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c800x450-w800-q80/uploads/2016/03/14579947027012.jpg)
Self-described socialist presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders wants to fund generous promises of cool stuff for everybody with equally impressive taxes that would soak… everybody. Increasing the size of the federal government by upwards of 50 percent doesn't come cheap—the Tax Policy Center estimates that Sanders' proposed tax hikes would cost $15.3 trillion over the first decade "thereby lowering average after-tax income by 12.4 percent." As befits a socialist, Sanders intends to soak the rich, and indeed he tries to hit them harder than he slams the rest of the population. The Tax Policy Center finds that "All income groups would pay some additional tax, but most would come from high-income households."
But researchers find that people who are more likely to succeed economically are also more likely to dodge taxes. And targeting them specifically increases the likelihood that they'll hide their money from the authorities. No matter what he intends, Sanders' proposed tax hike looks destined to fall most heavily on those who can least afford to pay the tab for his promised goodies.
Just by hiking taxes at all, Sanders and others who favor an expansive state face an uphill battle. "In almost all studies it has been found out, that the tax and social security contribution burdens are one of the main causes for the existence of the shadow economy," writes Friedrich Schneider, a professor at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, and expert on tax evasion and off-books economics. By "shadow economy," he refers to work and business conducted out of reach of tax collectors and regulators.
That shadow economy can be a pretty roomy place in which to go about your life, too. The Internal Revenue Service currently estimates that Americans pay 83.1 percent of all taxes owed. That may sound low, but it's actually about the highest level of compliance in the world (researchers found the rate in Britain closer to 78 percent, and 68 percent in Germany). Hiking taxes could be expected to drive more Americans to get creative with their tax returns.
But who would be most likely to keep their cash out of the government's grasping mitts? "[I]ndividuals who demonstrate high levels of ability or effort, who typically are rich, are much less likely than others to comply with taxation," says Raymond Duch, Director of the Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) at Oxford University.
Those greedy bastards! Of course they want to hold on to their moolah! You can already hear progressive pundits warming up their sharing-is-caring op-ed generators.
But Duch's research doesn't find that becoming rich makes people sticky-fingered. Instead, it seems that the same talent and drive that cause people to strive and succeed also make them proprietary about their earnings. "A causal mechanism contributing to tax cheating appears to be ability as opposed to wealth per se." By ability, Duch means exactly the sort of people you would expect to thrive by their own efforts: "very competitive individuals, successful entrepreneurs or investment bankers, or those who are very successful in the entertainment and the sports world."
There's no trigger level of taxation either—no magic threshold that sets off the talented and ambitious. People seem to resist handing over their money to the taxman no matter the burden. "The higher levels of cheating by able versus less able types persists in high and low tax regimes."
Higher tax rates are a spur to resistance according to Schneider and company. But that non-compliance is bound to be more pronounced among those with the sort of ability that drives them to be prosperous, as found by Duch and his fellow researcher, Hector Solaz of the University of Birmingham.
So… put the screws to the rich, talented bastards, right? If we know that we're going to resist, the only solution is to hit them harder!
But that leads to even more trouble. In a separate paper, Duch and Pablo Beramendi of Duke University tried to discover what sorts of tax systems lead to higher compliance, and which ones inspire revolts. What they found is that "[m]ore progressivity leads to less compliance."
But that effect isn't across the board. In fact, "when taxes are high, rising levels of progressivity and redistribution reduces the rates of tax cheating." But that compliance "is largely driven by the behaviour of the poor… For the rich, on the other hand, higher progressivity in the high burden tax treatment reduces their tax compliance."
The simple act of targeting high-income taxpayers leads them to fight back.
Ultimately, this means that the cost of paying for generous programs will disproportionately fall on lower-income people, because they're less likely to evade the taxes intended to fund them.
Interestingly, Sanders has frequently held up Denmark's welfare state, with its necessarily high taxes, as a model to emulate. But a 2013 study found that in that country "about half the population purchases shadow work. In some sectors—such as construction—about half the workforce is working in the shadow economy." Unsurprisingly, Danes have been rethinking whether the expensive programs for which they've been skating on the bill are affordable.
At the end of the day, grandiose promises of massive government programs are cheap. But paying for them has a high price tag—and it will be shouldered by those with the fewest means to afford the cost.
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“But researchers find that people who are more likely to succeed economically are also more likely to dodge taxes.”
“No More Champagne, Churchill and His Money” (Lough).
Read the chapters after WWII. With a marginal taxation rate of 97.5% for his income level, it seems he never paid more than 25%.
Given his writing, you could argue that his time was better spent dealing with the tax-man, but in classic ‘broken-window’ job-creation, he kept many highly-paid agents and attorneys engaged in making sure he didn’t pay the marginal rate.
You think those with money an guanzi in the US do otherwise? I got some land in Florida just for you!
When people talk about the 50, 70, even 90 percent marginal rates that existed in the decades after the end of World War II, they either forget, don’t know or don’t care that the 1986 code resulted on an effective tax hike for a lot of higher income Americans, because it closed a ton of loopholes. Far more than the bullcrap ones pointed to for the “the CEO pays less taxes than his secretary” arguments.
Not like it matters. People will continue to believe they can get as much free stuff from the government as they want, and the other guy will be the one paying for it.
“Not like it matters. People will continue to believe they can get as much free stuff from the government as they want, and the other guy will be the one paying for it.”
Proggies who read that book will swear the marginal rate shoud’a been 99.5%! THEN he’d have paid it!
I got controlling interest on the north anchorage of a local bridge, and if you move fast, I got a real deal for you!
“People will continue to believe they can get as much free stuff from the government as they want, and the other guy will be the one paying for it”
Um… I got a $3,000 check from Bank of America because of an incentive plan set up by the government to promote short selling. That was a bad situation made a little better.
You get a social security check, right?
That $3,000 check – wasn’t exactly free though was it? You had to end up in a ‘bad situation’ for it to make things a little better. A bad situation set up by the very government that gave you the check.
Yeah, that SS check – unless you live to be 90 you’ll pay more into SS than you’ll get back in checks.
Not really a good investment.
” A bad situation set up by the very government that gave you the check.”
You mean a systematic and very ideological attack on banking regulations that led to a loosening of things like underwriting requirements and, you know, actually checking that someone had the money to pay a monthly payment. Yeah, there’s good and bad ideas in government. You’ve got me there.
And you just listed two of the *bad* ones to support your contention that government is good.
And keep in mind – the *bad ideas* that come from government, they’re forced on you at the point of a gun no matter how blatantly bad an idea they are.
” they’re forced on you at the point of a gun”
Out come the libertarian guns.
Don’t shoot! I’m just itemizing my deductions.
‘libertarian guns’? *We’re* not the ones that are going to shoot you if you don’t itemize properly and get that paperwork in on time.
american socialist|3.15.16 @ 1:34AM|#
” they’re forced on you at the point of a gun”
Out come the libertarian guns.”
Poor shitbag! Always having do duck and dodge when he’s called on his bullshit!
“Actually checking that someone had the money to pay a monthly payment” was what the racist banks used to fall back on to justify their racist redlining, you horrible racist you. That policy needed to go!
/progderp
Hey Ag,
Is your animus towards government based upon this or just to Black people getting Welfare?
What does the Sierra Army Depot have to do with any of this?
And what is up with your obsession for forcing ‘Black’ (sic) people on welfare?
My animosity towards government has far more to do with things like this
http://tinyurl.com/grwf9xa
and this.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/gne7g6r
And I don’t see how a government funded bike path in Manhattan Beach is helping those ‘Black’ people on welfare either.
Oh, and that last link – that ought to give you a shiver down your 2nd amendment hating spine. Think of all the criminals that have fully automatic assault weapons because your government couldn’t be bothered to do an inventory, spot check the guys who do the inventory, or any of the other things that any conscientious person does to ensure that pilferable property doesn’t walk off.
I dislike the government because, in the end, I’m still pretty sure you can’t think of a smart way to spend $3000.
I spent it on cocaine and mdma. Ok with you, libertarian?
Are you still talking about black people, racist?
Just kidding. I put the money in my toddlers’ 529 account. It should have rightfully gone into the pockets of some BofA VP, I know.
Yeah, because a man with a family should never have to actually pay attention to what’s going on around him and what he can and can not afford.
So you got a 3k check – how much did you lose and how long was it between when you lost it and got that check?
Let’s see: the BoA VP was stupid for lending to people like you in the first place. You were stupid enough to borrow the money in the first place. And people willing to walk away from their house payments after their drop in value added to the spiral downward. Who’s more at fault?
Hmmm. This is tricky. We already had a pretty highly regulated banking system at the time (never enough for the latest crisis of the century of the decade, I know), so, really, shouldn’t the government fix it, at that point?
Clearly more regulation is needed. I would have proposed that the government and the fed more quickly bought the toxic assets, saving the bank’s balance sheets (really, in a modern socialist economy, you can’t just let banks fail: spending goes down, consumption goes down, so have to do something). Then, the Feds could turn around and recoup the money by a special tax problem on all the deadbeats who walked away from their mortgage. This would have both raised revenue for the government (cha-ching!) and staunched the flow of toxic assets, by reducing the dead beats from walking away from houses just because they didn’t feel like writing checks for it anymore.
There’s really nothing good regulations can’t fix. Are you with me, comrade?
Its actually sad that he got into the situation he was in *because* of INCREASED government regulation.
See, giving loans to people based on their ability to repay meant that some geographical areas (where those with low-incomes had been concentrating) were seeing a higher than average loan refusal rate or were getting loans for less than the average.
That *must* have been caused by discrimination, best case scenario it was *structural* discrimination – but that’s still discrimination.
So the bank regulators stepped in and forced the banks to change their policies regarding minimum down payments and percentage of income in order to destroy that discrimination.
And then people took those loans, low and behold those ARMs sent the loan rates sky high when the market crashed, and lot’s of people found that the home they could barely afford in 2007 was a home they absolutely couldn’t in 2008.
But hey, you got a coll $3 grand check after losing $150k on your house, right? That’s what counts. That’s government looking out for you.
Don’t forget the people that did all you said and then took out equity loans for cool stuff like boats and SUVs, which further complicated their problem.
Or maybe the government should have used eminent domain laws to force banks and investors to renegotiate mortgage contracts. Then, use racketeering laws that were in place to put the entire top management of the banking industry behind bars. Maybe some of these guys would have learned about the dangers of moral hazards.
Or maybe the government should have used eminent domain laws to force banks and investors to renegotiate mortgage contracts./i
But the government wanted the banks to lend money to the “disadvantaged”. I’m really sorry that loaning money to people with poor prospects for paying it back didn’t work out.
Or maybe the government should have used eminent domain laws to force banks and investors to renegotiate mortgage contracts.
But the government wanted the banks to lend money to the “disadvantaged”. I’m really sorry that loaning money to people with poor prospects for paying it back didn’t work out.
Or maybe they should have done that to *you*.
Since you certainly didn’t learn about the dangers of the moral hazard you jumped into with both feet.
Then, use racketeering laws that were in place to put the entire top management of the banking industry behind bars.
Except, they all went to work for the Obama administration.
Like….Summers!
You paint a caricature of the free market and classical liberal philosophy as harmful to the poor and minorities. Have you taken the time to read and understand the reasoned and rational arguments that support liberalism and the free market? If no then please do. If you truly care for others and want to do the best for them and you, then understand how the free market works and put these principals into practice. I can understand the misgiving when it is due to a lack of understanding. However, if you are apprised of the philosophy, and still espouse the coercive state, then you are simply a tyrant and you do not respect the rights of man. So, if that is the case, then fuck off slaver.
American Socialist is a hack. He isn’t a tyrant though. He is the type of individual that would surrender all individual liberty to someone else that would be a tyrant.
The word your looking for is coward.
I remember back when people were blaming the CRA for the subprime mortgage crisis, the big excuse was, no, banks fall under the CRA, not mortgage companies, but practically all of the subprime mortgages came from mortgage companies, who didn’t fall under the CRA.
So, when we’re talking about the culpability of the CRA: banks had nothing to do with it.
Next thing you know, people are talking about throwing all the bankers in jail, like the mob.
Sorry, maybe you didn’t get he memo, but the same mob you want to use eminent domain is the same one regulating the banking industry, and in bed with the banking industry. It’s the industry that’s too big to fail because socialists will wet their pants if someone doesn’t do something.
Yeah, sure: maybe one day, he mob itself will go after the mob. Never stop dreaming.
BofA didn’t originate very many of these loans. They came from Countrywide that they purchased. You can argue that BofA didn’t do enough due diligence in that purchase but it wasn’t BofA that brought about the housing crisis.
Just kidding. I put the money in my toddlers’ 529 account.
What kind of socialist are you?
Clearly the next step is the government confiscation of savings, so he was putting it away for the Top Men to take back.
529 plans are such a tool of capitalist oppression. But don’t worry, Sanders would likely make sure that the only option you have is to put your money into the pockets of some BofA VP; it’s the way advanced European societies do things.
You failed to ingest it all in one sitting.
He had to pace himself. He’d just lost his house, and who knows when the government would give him $3000 for being a retard again.
A retard again? Does he ever stop?
american socialist – end your racist war on drugs !!!
Multiplier Effect!
What about Trump?
Hey, Playa! I took a cut-off from north-bound Grapevine to Santa Maria recently and went through Frazier Park.
Been there? Very strange in that the grocery truck must have started from Bakersfield or Santa Clarita. Heaven forbid you forget the butter.
And the ride over the top was ‘interesting’ too; looked like several hundred feet of drop over that edge right there with no guardrail.
I didn’t play boy-racer.
I’ve driven by many times, but never through.
It’s right neat the Big Bend in the fault, though. Big quake in the 1800s, I think it was called Fort Tejon.
*right near
1857. I didn’t know this til I looked it up, but I guess the main shock was around Parkfield, not Fort Tejon. 7.9. While in the San Juan Bautista Mission, I remember reading about a bad earthquake in 1800 that knocked the Mission down, and it isn’t in the wiki list of CA earthquakes.
Y’all are way overdue for another big one. Not as traumatic as the Cascadia’ll be when it lets go, but it’ll be bad all the same.
And, ironically enough, on those most likely to *receive* the goodies.
The government Top. Men. know better than they do what that money should really be spent on. Just ask the douchebag commie upthread who decided he didn’t want to continue paying his mortgage because EVUL BANKSTERS forced him to buy a house he couldn’t afford…
It’s a bad deal, since the government skims a large percentage off the top.
I’m sitting in the airport waiting for a delayed flight, and can’t avoid hearing the CNN channel they’re blasting in the background. There’s a black Bernie Sanders supporter on there saying that he was at the canceled Trump event in Chicago last week, where he went to ‘exercise First Amendment rights — which Mr. Trump sadly chose not to do.”
He said that he was constantly shouted at by the angry racist pro-Trump crowd, who over and over yelled at him “We’re going to make America white again!”
I always wonder why in the age of cell phones, where no one can blow their nose without someone recording a video of it, that no one is ever able to get the slightest recording of any of these reported nonstop racist taunts, whether they be in DC during Tea Party events, the Wisconsin state capitol during Scott Walker sit-ins, or now at Trump events.
But the guy said it on TV, so now it’s a fact that it happened.
And now they have to disprove it.
The whole “Trump is a racist!” thing seems entirely contrived. It’s as if there is an entire generation of the political left who sees things entirely in racial terms. Since they have been trained that the only issue which drives people’s politics is race, if somebody disagrees with them, they conclude that person must be a racist.
I don’t see much reason to think he’s personally racist. Some of his supporters, on the other hand…
So it sounds like the ideal taxation system would be a flat rate with a minimum income exemption then.
The ideal taxation system would involve woodchippers and extreme noncompliance.
The woodchippers would be used to shred invoices from govt agencies, of course.
I thought this article was going to be about how $15/hr was a socialist plot to keep the poor man down, but– alas– no. Instead, its all about how poor people will pay less taxes if we decrease the tax rate on rich people. Is this like the notion that tax increases decrease revenue and doing the opposite does the opposite– or something?
I smell a wet fart.
Weren’t you the one that was bragging to me about how the government had built a nice shiny new bike path past your well-heeled digs? I guess we’re all the beneficiaries of dollars spent by the dreaded government.
Unless you happen to not live near the bike path that your money was used to build. Or don’t ride a bike. Or both.
I don’t see why its so hard for you to understand that just because the government takes your money and tosses some scraps back that that is not the same as being a ‘beneficiary of government spending’.
Or when the government goes out of its way to exclude other providers and then provides a ‘service’ itself that that is *not* an example of ‘the good things government does’.
http://www.seattletimes.com/se…..2-percent/
Yup. Minimum wage doesn’t have any negative impact at all. It’s all just neo-liberal mumbo jumbo, you commie piece of shit.
http://nypost.com/2016/03/12/h…..edium=site buttons&utm_campaign=site buttons
Wrong article posted below.
This is bad?
How the $15 wage is already killing Seattle jobs
From the link:
The AEI study, worked up from Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly surveys, shows that, between April and December last year, Seattle saw the biggest employment drop in any nine-month period since 2009 ? a full year into the Great Recession.
The city unemployment rate rose a full percentage point.
Before the minimum-wage hikes begin, Seattle employment tracked the rest of the nation ? slowly rising from the 2008-09 bottom. But it started to plunge last spring, as the new law began to kick in.
The law will be a huge boost to robotics mfgrs.
The funniest part is, they all bought this “law of supply and demand doesn’t apply to labor” BS based on studies showing that small changes to minimum wages don’t measurably affect unemployment. They took that to mean that minimum wages never affect unemployment.
Even the authors of the original studies have come out saying, essentially, “Uh, I said small changes to minimum wage. Not just picking whatever high sounding number you like best. This is unprecedented, and none of the previous studies are applicable to it.”
Do they listen? Nah. They’re too busy implementing smart policy. They just know, deep down, that employers are screwing people, when there’s really no competitive alternative to a $15/hr person with no skill.
Hey Brian,
The unemployment rate in Seattle in 12/31/2014 and 12/31/2015 was 3.8% and 4.2%, respectively. This is the great sea change in employment you are talking about? I’m unimpressed.
Look at the trend. It is how you figure which way to bet.
I think there’s already a possible downward trend in the data, and the full $15/hr hasn’t even kicked in yet.
I think it’s too early to estimate what the full effects will be, but we already have the opinion of he same experts behind this misapplication of their studies, explaining that these raises to the minimum wage are well beyond anything they studied.
It’s no surprise that you’d like to raise the minimum wage, look up a few seconds later, and still say “See? No second coming of 10% unemployment. Law of supply and demand bitch-slapped!”
Does it help or hurt the argument to know that the $15/hr doesn’t take full effect until 2019?
http://www.seattletimes.com/op…..xperiment/
Well it certainly helps by giving employers time to automate and to find higher-skilled workers.
But will there be cherry-picking robots?
http://www.theatlantic.com/pol…..ge/416880/
Yes. And they will test the fruit by sight and smell to pick it at the optimum time.
Shit bird up above is ignoring the data from the AEI which is updated to as of last month. The trend has continued.
There is a perfect match between the minimum wage starting, and unemployment rising. It’s gone up a full percent. To which American Socialist will surely reply so what, that’s nothing. Only, you are talking about bleeding tends of thousands of jobs in the Seattle area.
The people hardest hit are the ones who can least afford it. Most jobs likely haven’t felt any impact yet from the increased minimum wage. The ones that have are low paying, low skill labor. The bottom of the barrel in terms of competitiveness in a market.
He doesn’t care. I imagine he expects these people will get three thousand dollar checks from the government to make up for the thousands of dollars of income they’ll lose.
The only thing worse than minimum wage is being told you’re not worth it.
Employment rate is the right number to look at; unemployment isn’t a good measure.
The AEI study looks at this: http://tinyurl.com/gntaxhe
If Seattle raised its minimum wage to $200/h, then there would be very few jobs in Seattle, but the unemployment rate would probably not be affected that much: anybody who couldn’t afford to live there and couldn’t commute to an outside job would simply leave.
It never ceases to amaze me how uncaring leftists are for the people affected by their policies.
Artificially raising the minimum wage reduces the demand for unskilled and low-skilled labor. It just does. No degree in economics is required to understand this. It’s the same thing that would happen if the government mandated a doubling of the price of a hamburger–people would just buy fewer of them. Nothing complicated here, yet leftists refuse to acknowledge not only the law of supply and demand, but also the bare facts in front of them.
A $15 minimum wage creates a few lucky winners and a lot of lucky losers who must then become dependent on the state. Where, in this, will your run of the mill leftist see any downside?
If people make more, we can tax them more.
You are smart AS.
american socialist – end your racist war on drugs !!!
Predictable shit head is predictable.
“I thought”
Sure you did.
i asked a sanders supporter if she supported bernie’s appreciation for bread lines as good economic policy.
after struggling with the question a couple of times, her answer amounted to asking why i didn’t want the poor to have bread.
i’m the cause of hunger in america apparently.
There really isnt anything else we need to know about the guy. He wants us all to stand in bread lines. It doesnt matter if his sentiment if out of malice, naivety, or insanity, that piece of shit is evil.
It’s not that he *wants* bread lines but that his policies or ideas can lead to such but he doesn’t *believe* it’s possible because he’s the right person to implement his plan.
I think it goes something like that anyway.
He said that “bread lines are a sign of a healthy economy”. So presumably he actually wants bread lines.
i see it as talking to someone who thinks 1+1=6. it’s not that they’re evil necessarily, just that they’re economically challenged. so when you talk common sense, or say 1+1=2, they simply think you’re a republican and want poor people to die.
This the magic of the Sanders campaign. He merely points out a perceived problem and says “there ought to be a solution” and his supporters applaud his humanity. But the nagging truth is that for most of his longish life, Sanders has been in a position to “do something” about the very problems he now complains about yet he is running for an executive position that does not have the power to legislate solutions. If he really wanted to do something he could have been doing so all these many years.
Guy has never even gotten a bill of his passed.
He’s just a ne’re do well malcontent. If he somehow gets to the WH, he will fail miserably while blaming all of his failures on others–surely most on the republican congress. I can’t help but wonder how many of his supporters are similar failures who hope to soak the rich to pay for non-solutions to their self-created problems.
I can’t help but wonder how many of his supporters are similar failures who hope to soak the rich to pay for non-solutions to their self-created problems.
From what I’ve seen, all of them except for the celebutards like Spike Lee who have endorsed him. And I’m sure Spike’s personal accountant has some clever ideas on how to make sure Spike never has to actually pay “his fair share” for Bernie’s free shit, so Spike and the other rich celebrity tardos who have endorsed that prick can pat themselves on the back for “caring” so much about the poor.
the nagging truth is that for most of his longish life, Sanders has been in a position to “do something” about the very problems he now complains about yet he is running for an executive position that does not have the power to legislate solutions.
…yet. Just wait, I’m sure comrade Bernie will have a simple solution that “problem” too.
About Sanders’ legislative ineffectiveness: http://tinyurl.com/htl25ya
You know who else promised he would help the common people if only he wasn’t hindered by parliament?
Question for you reason – why did this get moved above the brickbat in the page order? It’s the older post of the two.
The market?
“He took action and in doing so demonstrated extreme heroism lack of situational awareness because it was his actions that allowed officers to take a position where they could intervene and neutralize the threat mistakenly shoot his ass,” Chief Hank Stawinski said about the fallen officer.
Are you kidding me?
Amazingly, they aren’t white militia members.
That is some spin there. Wow.
I don’t know anything about Colson. He might have been a good guy or not but he shouldn’t have died like that. I can’t criticize his actions in the firefight either. You would be amazed by the stupid things people do when the shit hits the fan like that. Most people’s brain just turns off. You will see hung-ho macho supermen just freeze in terror, nerdy wimps step up and do amazing shit, and normally smart people do incredibly stupid things.
The big take away here is that he was killed by panic fire from his own men.
I am very suspicious of the claim that the shooting was about nothing. I am going to call bullshit on that. I am going to go out on a limb and say it has something to do with the religion of peace.
If only there was some sort of training required to become a cop, right? ^_-
Ayn Rand is correct about this. The filthy rich can only spend so much on fur coats, exotic vacations, servants, and toys. The vast majority of their wealth is tied up in capital. There might be a valid question regarding why those few own so much of the capital, but taxing capital is always a bad idea. It’s more short-sited than a paycheck advance.
The filthy rich can only spend so much on fur coats, exotic vacations, servants, and toys.
And that money creates jobs for people who provide those goods and services.
The vast majority of their wealth is tied up in capital.
Most people don’t understand that money is not wealth and that wealth is not money. They hear that so-and-so is worth X dollars, and figure that the government can come in, steal X dollars from that rich person, and use it to feed a bunch of hungry children.
This still leaves Mark Zuckerberg unexplained. Here you a vast amount of capital in the hands of guy who helped put together a crappy web site, the best of which belongs with Unix in the public domain.
How else was the government supposed to put together vast international network of facial recognition?
/tinfoil
Because they are good at managing it and investing it in places where it grows. If they weren’t, they’d be losing it.
http://blogs-images.forbes.com…..ckets5.png
Bernie’s desire to tax the rich has nothing to do with money. Like Barry ‘POS’ Obumbles it is about fairness, if by fairness you mean spite.
Also, I probably won’t be around for AM links so I am posting this now. Some have been asking me how the flood situation is going. An acquaintance of mine sent me this video this morning.
See for yourself. I am going to go pour myself a ‘Floody Mary’.
https://www.facebook.com/iknowmyrights/
You posted a link to facebook.
You are dead to me.
My apologies. It pained me to do so. He has not posted to youtube yet. That is all I could get.
It is worth watching.
It’s a pretty awesome Facebook page.
Wow I’m sorry I missed the biker thread last night. You guys were fired up.
The Internal Revenue Service currently estimates that Americans pay 83.1 percent of all taxes owed.
The voluntary compliance rate ? the percentage of total tax revenues paid on a timely basis ? for tax year 2006 is estimated to be 83.1 percent.
Emphasis added. Not that it makes a hill of beans.
Own your own business and buy your bourbon as an entertainment expense. Never hire anyone, just 1099 them. Save no money for your kids’ college tuition. Don’t retire and don’t work your ass off. Get a wife/husband/mate but don’t get married. Rules for Radicals, 2016.
someone linked to an article the other day where the author, a pinko moron, said (paraphrased) that Bernie’s numbers didn’t add up but they didn’t want to be held back by numbers. I see.
I don’t want gravity to hold me back from my dream of being able to fly like superman.
‘…they didn’t want to be held back by numbers.’ Just like a rocket scientist who does not want to carry-out Pi beyond the decimal point, so he just uses the number 3 instead and then wonders why that rocket he helped design didn’t do so well.
Obviously the solutions is simple: round up the wreckers, kulaks, and greedy capitalists and send them off to the Gulags re-education camps happy fun time camps. Problem solved, eh comrades!
I was told that the TPC doesn’t know what they’re talking about…
I swear, these #BernVictims are downing paint chips like Doritos at this point.
FYI, that is larger than the number of unemployed people in the US right now.
Public Sector jobs injecting new money into the economy, eh? Silly me, I thought they were paid out of taxes!
The rich can afford good accountants and tax attorneys. The rest of us can barely afford Turbotax.
Did anybody else see the CNN thing over the weekend about each candidates taxes? Basically is showed what each candidate made and how much they paid in tax, and from that heir effective rate.
Sander’s effective rate, on $206K in earnings, was 13%, largely because he had $56k (!) in itemized deductions (loopholes??) that brought his taxable earnings down to $140k.
“But researchers find that people who are more likely to succeed economically are also more likely to dodge taxes. And targeting them specifically increases the likelihood that they’ll hide their money from the authorities.”
The economically successful do not even need to evade taxes. They can legally avoid them ? and not through the use of ‘loopholes’ ? just through a basic knowledge of the tax code. Most economically successful people do not have only one source of income or wealth; besides wages there is interest, dividends, rents, royalties, and capital gains to name the most common. Increase the tax on one type of income and they can decrease that type of income and increase their income to a different less-taxed source. They usually also have a choice to postpone a taxable event to a lower-tax year as in the case of capital gains. The less economically successful have mostly only one source of income ? wages from working ? whether self-employed or working for someone else. Other than choosing not to work, they are always at the mercy of whoever is writing the tax code.
I’m not sure if “rich people are good at avoiding taxes” is an argument that would carry much weight with Socialists… eh, Democratic Socialists. If they can’t get at the money, then they can at least make sure everybody else is as miserable as they are.
Denmark doesn’t have a minimum wage law, yet the least most people get paid is equivalent to $20 an hour. Yup, fry cooks at Burger King get paid $20 an hour and a Whopper meal costs about $15.
But their take home pay after taxes is less than half that $20 an hour. Then they have the typical other bills of life for water, electricity, rent etc.
So they aren’t any better off, perhaps worse off, than what the lowest paid are in the USA.
But they get “free” health care!
So go on, raise the American minimum wage to $15. Governments will just raise taxes and the push up to all wages will increase prices on almost everything – same as has happened with every increase in the minimum wage since New Zealand and the USA first enacted it back in 1938.
“According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American fast food worker makes about $9 an hour. Compare that to the $20.70 paid in Denmark. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average tax burden in Denmark is 38.2 percent, while in America, it is 31.3 percent. So taxes are about a fifth higher. Most people, if given the choice, would accept a 20 percent hike in taxes in exchange for making twice as much.” Also, they get in Denmark at McDonald’s 5 weeks paid vacation. And what do you think health coverage would cost an American burger flipper? Finally, the low cost of education/training there leads, I suspect, to upwards mobility.
I neglected to mention “The Big Mac costs about $4.80 in the US and $5.60 in Denmark, according to the Times report.” Just 80 cents more! Oh, one more thing Danish burger flippers get paid sick leave.
You don’t need to do anything illegal to reduce your tax bill: there are plenty of legal mechanisms people can use to avoid getting taxed. Unfortunately, a lot of them have a high cost of entry (lawyers, specialized skills, etc.), so they only make sense for people with higher incomes and lots of assets.
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