It's hard for the poor to pay less. The only thing that the majority of people making 50k a year or less pay is 1/2 of their social security and Medicare. I'm all for taking that away and putting more money back in their pockets, but most (AARP?) aren't. "In other words," make the cost of the government smaller. Don't keep it ratcheted at unsustainable rates and raise taxes so that you can justify spending it.
Unfortunately, SS benefits are determined by how much you paid in withholding over the years. To change it so there's no withholding would be extremely messy at best. If possible at all.
I meant, get rid of the program for people under a certain age. Say, 50 or so. Or have it graduated so that those 35-50 get 1/3 of what they normally would've received, and those under 35 get a credit for what they've put in and then man up and take care of themselves. We can be the Accountability Generation. But you're right...never gonna happen. So those making 20-45k will continue to pay 6.3% in order to get a small (if any) check when they grow old and the right to pay for old people sinking this country into another 700B+interest into debt every year through overrun Medicare.
Even harder for them to pay more though, while it's certainly no hardship at all for billionaires and millionaires to pay another 10%, 20% or even 50%. They'll still be filthy rich in comparison to 99% of Americans.
The "rich" include all the businesses that employ the poor so stop fucking with them. Everyone should pay their fair share which is an equal percentage of their income.
You have no concept of the meaning of fair. When businesses pay each worker an equal percentage of the business's income, when each worker has the same standard of living as the business owner, then taxing incomes equally would be fair. Otherwise it's simply an owner/slave relationship designed to benefit only the owner.
There is nothing like an owner/slave relationship. Workers don't take risks, their deal is a paycheck in exchange for their labor. The other guys are the idea men, and they put up their capital with the risk of losing it all. And there's nothing stopping a worker from finding a different job or starting their own business except obamanomics.
Only the workers take risks, some of them life-threatening on a daily basis. Owners sit their fat arses in leather swivel chairs and count their money. Their ideas usually come from employees and the money they risk is almost never their own. I've known enough people of all economic levels to have ascertained that intelligence, daring and creativity have little to no bearing on one's success in the world of business. Most currently successful businessmen were born and raised in prosperity and gifted their careers when they came of age. There are of course notable exceptions. Dave Thomas comes to mind. But even he would never have amounted to anything without his thousands of employees faithfully representing his ideology of superior customer service. For the most part, owners are easily replaceable. It's a "job" pretty much any adult could do, "given" the chance.
Only 400 people could fill the jobs of the top 400 basketball players in the world. Hundreds of thousands of rich people* could fill the jobs of the 30 owners. NBA owners are much more replaceable than players, without lowering league quality. *Edit: And tens of millions of excellent managers around the world who aren't rich.
Your post is full of falsehoods. Only government jobs where workers take life threatening risks, are the workers not paid extremely well. There are 6M companies that have employees. Of those, 3.6M have 1-4 employees, and another 1M have 5 to 9 employees. Startup business failure rates:
You're a cheerleader for Obama and his policies, in particular the one where the banks got bailed out but main street folks didn't. Let those main street people eat cake, eh? I've called you out on this line of thinking a few times now.
What risks? If you're big enough (as many financial institutions seem to have become) and then end up shitting the bed, you'll be deemed too big to fail and get a big injection of free money so you can make sure your executives get their fat ass bonus this year. Now if you are talking strictly about entrepreneurs starting small "widget making" companies then I agree you are describing the relationship accurately, but do we actually make anything in this country anymore? Maybe I'm way off the mark but we seem to have become more of a financial services driven economy and if you are part of that engine, you've been insulated to a large degree from your own greed and mistakes. My personal opinion was to let the brokerage houses fail. We almost certainly would have been thrust into a depression (or at least a severe recession) but we wouldn't be postponing the inevitable larger cratering that it seems we're setting ourselves up for because none of the actual bastards that got us into this mess have been purged from the financial industry -- they're probably going right back to doing the same stupid shit that will push us into another greed and stupidity fueled clusterfuck.
Good post. I have NEVER advocated corporate welfare. As a rule, our national decline is directly related to welfare of all kinds. It was a matter of time once the people and companies figured out they could vote (or lobby) themselves tea and circuses. Believe it or not, the USA is the #1 manufacturing nation in the world, though we have a small % of the world's population. What would have happened if we let the "too big to fail" entities fail? It would have been a breakup on the order of AT&T back when. The banks go into bankruptcy where their assets get auctioned off to the highest bidder - likely the banks that were sound, and newly formed banks. Instead of the govt. taking on all the toxic assets, they'd have been wiped from everyone's books. The govt. could have become a creditor by issuing loans to people to buy the homes they live in at auction prices.
I think that was a Bush policy, and I don't know that I'm such a cheerleader for it. I think you are making an incorrect assumption that because I'm against your crazy idea of just standing idle and watching the economy implode, I must be in favor of the particular steps that were taken. Sorry, I guess I didn't notice. barfo
Obama spent half the money. The implosion is going on in front of you but you refuse to acknowledge it. If the TARP money was given to home owners to pay down their mortgages: 1. There would be far fewer foreclosures. 2. The banks would have gotten those same dollars. 3. Far fewer home owners would have underwater mortgages. 4. Housing prices would have stabilized a long time ago. 5. Lower mortgage payments mean more dollars to spend, spurring some needed demand. But you're in good shape. Let them eat cake!
Would it really be a good thing for housing prices to have stabilized where they were? By everyone's estimation, housing was vastly overpriced. Giving money to homeowners wouldn't have changed that. You'd just ensure the pricing bubble would've lingered on for several more years, pricing many potential homeowners out of the market. A lot of people bought houses they couldn't afford while I bought something in my budget. Why should my tax money go to subsidize the irresponsible into retaining their much more expensive homes? On top of that, if you give money to homeowners, what's to ensure they actually spend it on repaying their mortgages? A lot of that money would never be repaid, as many of these homeowners have clearly proven that paying for stuff they owe on isn't always a big priority. The feds send them a fat check, and they turn around and buy a new car and a big TV and a vacation in Cancun. Do you want to devote a lot of our federal government's resources into making sure that doesn't happen? Because monitoring that shit is expensive too, and the feds will still fuck it up. Of the $245 billion given to US banks, $169 billion has been repaid, including $13.7b in dividends/interest. Think homeowners would've been that good about repaying the Feds within 3 years? These banks had lots of reasons to be responsible borrowers (unlike homeowners) to get themselves out of this deep fucking hole. For one, if they didn't they knew they were out of jobs. I was plenty pissed off about the bailouts. But in hindsight I'm starting to understand the logic behind it. I still feel outraged that we didn't negotiate more penalties, that we haven't implemented serious regulatory reform, and that nobody has gone to jail. And I'm putting my money where my mouth is--I'm shifting my personal and business banking out of a major bank to a local credit union because all this bullshit still pisses me off. But I have to admit it worked out better than I thought it would, given the disaster we were facing.
