Anybody participating in a tea party today?

I don't want your money. What I want is respect and a fair wage. I want you to pay your taxes at the same rate I pay mine. Why is that so hard for your republicans to understand?

 

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Republicans are the people who want the same tax rate for everybody. They call it a flat tax.

 

More then Republicans want the flat tax, there are ways to make it fair, basic example is most people think the flat tax means the person who makes $20,000 a year pays the same rate as the person who makes $500,000, but an easy example is you put an exemption up to a certain point on income that can be taxed, i.e. say everyone's income over the first $40,000 is taxes at 25%(just a vague example, not any kind of actual numbers) and the original $40,000 isn't taxed at all.

 

At least have the courage to admit that all you want is to hoard your money. To accumulate as much wealth as you can so you can exert as much control in your life as possible and wield power over other people.

 

Very good Balbus, thanks.

 

Or, conversely, a person could simply be content with letting a corrupt and tyrannical government take (steal) and hoard their money, to accumulate as much wealth as they can, so they can exert as much control over their system and wield power over other people.

Which makes more sense?

 

In Hiptastic's case, the former.

 

I wish I paid the same rate as you, in reality I pay a much higher rate, and you are asking for it to go higher.

Hoard it? You mean save? Would you prefer that I spent it?

Sure.

Not sure what you mean. Do you mean when I go to a restaurant I am weilding power over other people by making them cook food and serve it to me?

 

Oh yes, life in the USA is tryannical. If you ever meet someone who lived in the former Soviet Union, imagine the stories you could tell them.

 

It’s a matter of reasonable reward

I think all those that contributed to the recent financial crisis and received overblown financial gain from their activities should be basically stripped of that money to pay for the bail outs.

In my view their incompetence caused it and their greed pushed up there wages beyond any definition of the reasonable.

They should have been taxed at a higher rate before the troubles to curb such greed and now should be stripped of it as a lesson to future excess.

 

I'm just yanking your chain dear.

I think it's important, especially for Latin American countries and Eastern European countries who are heavily in debt to the IMF to make attempts to restrict capital flight, place key economic sectors under popular control, and establish alternative currencies and trade arrangements that point to the necessity of solutions beyond capitalism.

Because they are the countries severely impacted by this truly global catastrophe. And it is truly global. The IMF, WTO, and WB are behind in foreseeing this disaster, and quite frankly NOBODY is all that surprised. It clearly is an example of how these institutions are failures to stabilize exchange rates and develop those 'under-developed' countries.

It just goes to show how much of an impact the bailing out of the core will have on the periphery.

The BDI for commodities like coal and steel plummeted down some 92 percent from June to October 2008, and this reflects a global slow down of all trade. Export-oriented countries that have been designed through neo-colonial policy will be shouldering the burden of this slow down. And it's pretty disgusting what modern capitalism has done to these people of these countries.

I'm not sure how anyone can advocate the perpetuity of keeping this kind of free trade systems of capital and destruction, because it seems to be void of all human consciousness and removed from all moral responsibility.

Child labour, sweat shops, witholding pay, foreign control, Structural Adjustment Programs, limited spending on social programs, 23% APR on short-term 5 year 'balance-of-payment' farmers loans, havens for low tariffs and tax buckets...

We're going to witness the total collapse of country economies and basic industries like farming and mining - because of this system. Why wouldn't developing countries understand the system to be designed for their failure?

And if the only way for countries to resist the insistence that they're doing it wrong, and what they need is to simply become more attractive for foreign investments (when they've been doing this for CENTURIES), then I think it's high time that countries did take more protective measures to put their labour and their resources behind popular control.

The dynamics of the crisis are encouraging new rounds of capital concentration and, if people do not oppose this, we've already seen how likely that restructuring will occur solely to save privileged sectors.

Iceland, Pakistan, India, Mexico, Ukraine, Hungary, Turkey, USA etc. have all seen collapses or near collapses this past October.

In your opinion, what patterns should not be repeated and which patterns should to stabilize basic human rights?

 

The wealthiest 1% pay a third of all income taxes, yet you make it sound like they are getting away scott free

They have the best deal, by far, that anyone's ever gotten in all of recorded human history. And yet they still whine and bitch. Tax 'em till they bleed, bleed 'em till they die, and feed their corpses to starving children.

 

The top 1% hold 33% of the GDP. They should be paying at least a third of all income taxes.

The top 1% have a combined wealth greater than the GDP of Japan, Germany, France and the UK COMBINED.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Story?id=4872105&page=2

 

INSIDE WASHINGTON: Taxpayers to get rude surprise

Stephen Ohlemacher, Associated Press Writer
On Thursday April 30, 2009, 6:55 pm EDT

Buzz up! Print WASHINGTON (AP) --

Millions of Americans enjoying their small windfall from President Barack Obama's "Making Work Pay" tax credit are in for an unpleasant surprise next spring.

The government is going to want some of that money back.

The tax credit is supposed to provide up to $400 to individuals and $800 to married couples as part of the massive economic recovery package enacted in February. Most workers started receiving the credit through small increases in their paychecks in the past month.

But new tax withholding tables issued by the IRS could cause millions of taxpayers to get hundreds of dollars more than they are entitled to under the credit, money that will have to be repaid at tax time.

At-risk taxpayers include a broad swath of the public: married couples in which both spouses work; workers with more than one job; retirees who have federal income taxes withheld from their pension payments and Social Security recipients with jobs that provide taxable income.

The Internal Revenue Service acknowledges problems with the withholding tables but has done little to warn average taxpayers.


http://finance.yahoo.com/news/INSIDE-WASHINGTON-Rude-apf-15091434.html?.v=1

 

i'm a little late on this, but here's my two cents:

i have no problem lowering taxes, but to do that, you have to cut spending drastically. as long as we are spending 341 million per day in iraq, we can't cut taxes at all. the whole ronald reagan idea that we can somehow cut taxes and still spend as much as we want to is absolutely ridiculous. also, the trickle down theory is total bullshit, as anyone that hasn't been living under a rock has noticed. as much as fox news would like you to think, the recession/depression did have a lot to do with greedy big business and nothing to do with jimmy carter and bill clinton. yea, in theory the trickle down theory would work, but i don't trust any of the corporate heads as far as i can throw them, and that's justified in my opinion. the trickle up theory has more merit than trickle down, and even that's not perfect. the reality is, as long as there are greedy people, capitalism won't ever work and we are going to keep ending up in the kind of economic situation that we are in right now.

 

If you really think the recession had nothing to do with Clinton you need to go read some economics and history.

And yea, as long as there's greedy people Capitalism won't work, but nothing else will either, at least capitalism takes into account human nature and greed

 

um, dude i think you've been getting your history from sean hannity, clinton pulled us out of the almost recession from the first bush administration. clinton had as much to do with causing the recession as i did.

 

Right, so the housing bubble burst that began the recession had nothing to do with Clinton pressuring Freedie and Fannie to make high risk sub prime loans in an effort to make owning a house a right under some vague idea that these companies were in fact backed up by the government, or the repeat of the Glass Steagall Act in 1999

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass-Steagall_Act

 

according to your wiki article, it looks like the glass steagall act was in 1933. and yea, the housing crisis had nothing to do with clinton, it wasn't bush's fault either, but it had to do with banks giving loans to anyone that asked for one. their thinking was that since the market was good (under clinton i might add) that they could collect a few payments from these people that they knew would not be able to pay off their debts, foreclose on the house, and sell the house to somebody else. clinton had nothing to do with it, even if he did "pressure" fannie and freddie to make high risk loans, the reality is that they would have done it anyway, it made them money.

 

The glass steagall act was created in 1933 in response to the depression, it was repealed in 1999 which gave banks the power to sell mortage securties, and when shit hit the fan and banks started to collapse the losses were mind blowing as those sub prime lendees could no longer make payments. And yes the housing crisis has plenty to do with Clinton, urging Freddie and Fannie to make high risk loans to families that shouldn't have had house loans under the assumption that these companies were backed up by the government is bad economics, and Bush just fed into the original problem by creating a bigger housing bubble to prop up an ailing economy back when he first took office to fend off the internet bubble burst. And no these companies wouldn't have done it, despite what people think it's actually financially not in a banks interest to have to forclose in a house. The word sub prime was barely even in the English language before Clinton pushed for homes for everyone and Bush fed into it.