So people are b*tching about how much money Mitt Romney makes

[Alle_Gory]

The point of America is to be free. That includes freedom from those who feel themselves entitled to another person's money simply because they "can afford to lose it".

And freedom to take your money to pay for their losses. Don't want them to lose their 6th summer home now do you? Pay the bailouts citizen.

"Freedom" is very much a balancing act between chaos and regulation.

 

[Alle_Gory]

Regulation is the path to less freedom, not more.

Fair and light handed regulation is the path to freedom because it ensures that the big sharks in the tank don't eat everything else smaller than them in the tank.

Corporate socialism is the big sharks making deals with other big sharks to shake down the common man for money with taxation that only benefits them. You know what taxes are for? Healthcare, roads, parks, libraries, not to give some scummy corporation money to cover their losses in a game of greed they were too stupid to play. Not money to give some scummy corporation to grow corn at a loss to make ethanol and **** everyone's car up because it's corrosive to rubber and has less energy per liter than gasoline.

That is not acceptable. I don't work and pay taxes to see them stolen by the corporation. I work to benefit myself, I pay taxes to benefit myself and everyone else.

Socialism belongs nowhere in a country based on freedom. Not at the corporate level, nor at the citizen level.

Socialism ensures freedom to an extent because it gives the little guy a chance to live and contribute without being afraid of the big guys. How is it freedom when some corporation sends out their lawyers to shut you up and you can't afford to buy a voice even when you are in the right and they have wronged YOU?

Being successful does not mean your money should belong to the state or some other nebulous entity.

As far as I am concerned, all politicians can take advantage of the system for their own benefit. Congress is exempt from insider trading laws. You better believe they make money or help others make money with unfair information.

As far as I am concerned, their money belongs to the system which [should] belong to us. You make money off my efforts? Then I own a fair share of your money. You make money by yourself without any input from me? It's completely yours.

The answer to socialism is not more socialism.

Nothing battles socialism like more socialism. Corporations want corporate socialism? Well form more unions and clamp down on that. Corporations want more money for corporate welfare? Well citizens should demand more socialism and higher corporate taxes to extract that money back for useful things like roads.

 

[Julius_Seizeher]

Like I said, I'm a Libertarian and a huge Ron Paul fan, but I was very happy to see Ron Paul step up and defend Romney when Gingrich and Perry started attacking him for being successful. If you think Ron Paul and the Libertarians are "the hippies of the right", you are going to be sorely let down. We want laissez-faire capitalism and individual rights, which includes: individual responsibility.

Hasn't the world learned anything from the 20th century? Communism murdered at least 150M people and utterly destroyed every country in which it was tried, yet we keep hearing the same tired bromides: "We need a law...if only we pass another law, everything will be ok..."

Capitalism works, folks. Beautifully. But what we have is not capitalism, because the definition of capitalism requires a strict separation of economics and state. We've never had capitalism, it's always been a "mixed economy", which is a mixture of freedom and slavery. A "mixed economy" is a country in the process of committing a slow suicide.

Do you say that capitalism fosters corruption between bureaucrats and producers? In capitalism, with the separation of economics and state, there is ZERO incentive for corruption. In a mixed economy, the bureaucrats are granted the economic "divine right of kings" to arbitrarily regulate and choke productive activity unless, of course, you pay their ransom. So the regulatory state is, in fact, an extortion racket where a bureaucrat holds a gun to a producers' head (for our "common good", we are told) and the businessman is forced to pay ransomes so he can have the right to keep you alive and give you a job. Then, when they get caught, it is always the producer and capitalism (the skeleton in the basement) who takes the blame. GRRRRRR..........

A businessman is a metaphysical necessity of production; a bureaucrat is not.

Anytime you hear that catch phrase about "the common good", or any modern variant of it, know that you are receiving a sales pitch for slavery and self-abnegation.

 

[Ninja Dude]

F*ck all this p*ssy sh*t. Let's raise taxes on the rich to 70% like the old days and usher in another American Golden Age.

We would only need to do it for a limited time and it would destroy the deficit. Do the math folks:

The top 1% currently hold 43% of total annual US income (holy sh*t!) which is $5.6 trillion.

70% of that in taxes would be $3.9 trillion

The current deficit is $15 trillion, which means that we would see an economic surplus in less than 4 years time, JUST by increasing these taxes.

Slash the military budget by half (another $0.5 trillion/year) and we'd be out of the red in under 3 years.

We haven't even factored in the impact of all these new jobs and increase in production/demand. The GDP would skyrocket. With the right planning this whole mess could be cleaned up in a year or two and we would enjoy another roaring 20's, and possibly 30's and beyond if we managed to keep the corruption at bay. The top 1% would recuperate their losses in no time - in fact history shows us that is exactly what happens.

Instead we have the rich enjoying all-time low taxes and pimping the system via tax shelters and all sorts of dodgy loopholes, while the poor and middle class are stuck with a bill they can never pay off ($50,000 per citizen!) The jackoffs who sunk the economy still roam free, richer than ever and probably planning their next big heist since no one dares to challenge their buying power

Madness I say...sheer madness

 

[Julius_Seizeher]

Allie, you are a fairy with no understanding of the factors of production, or really anything for that matter.

"The corporations stole my taxes"

"Socialism is good for wittle guys like me"

What a loser. No, the corporations did not steal your taxes, and socialism is not good for anybody. Socialism drags everybody down to the level of a miserable subhuman dreg, and this is the "utopia" you crave: a utopia where everyone is as small as you are.

You prattle about altruism and the "common good", like every dictator of the 20th century, as means to cover up what you're really after. Your desire is to control the men whose achievements you cannot match and to harness the minds whose intelligence you cannot equal, you feel impotent to deal with existence, your lust is to enslave, your craving is to kill.

There is no "common good", because human beings do not exist "in common", as a collective, like bacteria or insects. You want to drown the identity you do not possess in an unfastidious pile of human wreckage, you hold your intentions, your whining intentions, as a primary absolute and a perfectly good reason for you to enslave the earth.

Like every other socialist, you are a pretentious mediocrity who, lacking the self-esteem to take responsibility for your own life, prefer to claim to live for everyone else--to evade the individual self you have renounced.

 

[Bible_Belt]

The top 1% currently hold 43% of total annual US income (holy sh*t!) which is $5.6 trillion.

The problem with assessing the discrepancy between the rich and the poor is that rich peoples' money doesn't really exist in a cash form. It's in investments, the current value of which is determined by their prospective futures. If the government starts taking from the rich, investors get spooked and the value of investments plummets.

If we divided up all the wealth in this country per person, it comes out to something like $40 million for each of us. There never could be that much cash in existence, so most of that value is tied up in a promise about the future. Shake up the future, and that value ceases to exist.

Another reason that any sort of meaningful wealth redistribution will never happen in this country is that it would make our debt and equity markets unfriendly to foreign investment. Since the US doesn't produce any manufactured goods any more, selling away pieces of the country to foreign investors is the only thing keeping the economy going.

 

[Ninja Dude]

@Bible you are using the terms wealth and income interchangeably.

I am not talking about taxing people's assets or amassed wealth, but the income that is physically generated within a fiscal year.

Also it would be one thing if I was pulling a hypothesis out of my ass, but history shows that we tried this exact approach after WW2 and not only did it pull us out of a horrendous postwar recession, it catapulted us into a financial boom. What is being proposed is a TEMPORARY hike of taxes. Once the recovery is set in motion the rich can go back to previous rates. Sure things would be rocky with foreign investors for a while but the longterm (though it really wouldnt take that long) benefits would be worth it

Since the US doesn't produce any manufactured goods any more, selling away pieces of the country to foreign investors is the only thing keeping the economy going.

So rather than turning things around and using that 1% income to jumpstart demand/production you recommend we continue with this ruse?

 

[Bible_Belt]

fwiw, personally, I agree with you. But until I'm emperor, that doesn't really matter.

If Congress moved the top rate to 70%, I think the Dow would plummet by 1/2, maybe 3/4. Everything is so highly leveraged right now that it would be hard to make it out of the immediate financial collapse to get to the higher tax revenues later. Only 10% of the stock market is owned by the non-Romneys of the world, but that is enough so that they still care.

Most of the wealth in this country is intangible and valued at what market participants are willing to pay. We're basically a highly leveraged and empty shell that is supported by the ultra-wealthy, foreigners, and mostly ultra-wealthy foreigners. That's all we have left, and that's why it doesn't matter which party gets elected - their agendas will be the same, to preserve the investments of the wealthiest people.

 

[Alle_Gory]

Careful here, if you have been paid a wage that you agreed to, then you have already been paid your "fair share".

Fair share is market value. That means if I am special and I have special skills and special knowledge I expect a special and substantial wage. If I am Joe Schlub from Schlub, Ohio I expect a low and fair wage. What some of these corporations pay is NOT market value. Case in point, programmers in Silicon Valley. Greedy bastards were colluding to keep wages fixed including Abobe, Apple, Intel, Google... etc. They worked out agreements to prevent employees moving in between companies in search of higher wages.

http://www.salon.com/2010/09/27/tech_collusion/singleton/

Pieces of sh*t. They expect employees to be loyal to them and does the company do anything in return? Do the people at the top do anything except try to steal?

This usually happens when a company becomes too large and filled with useless suits with all sorts of MBAs and other certifications daddy bought with his bank account. We need more startups and fresh competition, but they won't survive in a completely free market because they will be sued, bought out, or harassed into oblivion by the big sharks.

That is a road to ruin. Society will eventually grind to a halt as the .gov favors get bigger and bigger while the money doled out and promoting lack of work increases to the point of collapse. Then we all fall in one big socialistic mess where nobody can get ahead and nobody cares to.....well, unless you know the right (corrupted) official.

You sure we're not half way there? Upward mobility isn't all that great. Business competition is pretty bad. The lawyers and politicians (also lawyers) are winning.

Scale back .gov, and you kill the beast before the beast kills us.

I don't know. I'd rather get rid of all the [career] lawyers myself. That would remove at least half of the government and most politicians.

 

[Alle_Gory]

And how do you suppose they can get away with frivolously sue-ing or harassing?

A weak court system and public defenders more interested in PR and getting re-elected than doing their job. I suppose that yes, they can be bought through "lobbying".

But on the matter of corruption, why do you believe it happens?

No, the corporations did not steal your taxes

Why are roads crumbling when that money should be used to repair them? Why is there subsidized ethanol in every single gas station and gas mix ruining the rubber seals in my engine and causing premature wear and eventual premature death? They have not only stolen my taxes they are stealing from my pocket as well.

Socialism drags everybody down to the level of a miserable subhuman dreg, and this is the "utopia" you crave: a utopia where everyone is as small as you are.

Sweden, Norway, Finland. Seems to me like most of the dregs are at the bottom of the food pyramid in the "Land of the Free". It's a very wide and thick base for this pyramid filled with the most ghetto and uneducated people I've seen. I'm surprised some of them can read.

Yes there are smart and educated people. They are not the majority, not even close.

pretentious mediocrity who, lacking the self-esteem to take responsibility for your own life, prefer to claim to live for everyone else--to evade the individual self you have renounced.

Let's not assume you know me personally.

 

[Julius_Seizeher]

Capitalism calls for separation of economics and state. In a truly capitalist system, there is no incentive for corruption; you must understand that a "mixed economy", that is, a mixture of freedom and slavery, is a country in the process of committing suicide.

A mixed economy is, in truth, a bureaucratic extortion racket where producers are held up at gunpoint by looting bureaucrats. But capitalism (the skeleton in the basement) and the producers always take the blame for the corruption of the mixed economy and the bureaucrats who run it.

Freedom works, people. We just haven't had it in 100 years. Separation of economics and state is the only way to end the corruption.

 

[Alle_Gory]

Ok Julius, how do you prevent the little guys from getting swallowed up by big business? The innovators and the startups.

 

[Inquisitus]

It is framed badly because it implies that you should only have to pay if you make money. And the more successful you are, the more you should have to pay. Even worse, it implies that the money you make does not belong to you. The progressive tax-rate is a class warfare weapon used to bludgeon the property rights of those who have something to lose.

It punishes success and rewards laziness. It takes no genius to know what sort of world that reward system will bring about.

Again, I ask, who has contributed more to this country? The person that pays 0 annual taxes, or the person that pays millions? This is exactly why the "Fair Share" mantra is complete bull$hit.

If you don't make any money, how can you pay? So who has contributed more? The guy who grosses 50K annually and is taxed at 16% or the guy who makes 23million and gets taxed 15%? What if the 50K guy is the one who made the 23m guy's business run better and therefore earn him the 23mill? Can you expect a 50K guy to pay the tax bill for a 23mill guy?

To your point about the money you make not being yours, you get to choose what to do with your money after the taxes. It's not as if you're not getting anything in return. Something as simple as your roads, highways to national defense and passports. Where do you think the money from that will come from if you are not taxed by your government?

 

[Inquisitus]

Capitalism calls for separation of economics and state. In a truly capitalist system, there is no incentive for corruption; you must understand that a "mixed economy", that is, a mixture of freedom and slavery, is a country in the process of committing suicide.

What mechanism provides disincentives against corruption in capitalism?

Corruption is outside the purview of economic systems. In the most basic definition of capitalism, the state is still responsible for protecting property rights.

 

[Alle_Gory]

Paging Julius Seizeher! Mr. Seizeher you haven't answered my question in 2 days.

 

[DJ Logic]

What mechanism provides disincentives against corruption in capitalism?

One word. TRANSPARENCY.

If industries are taken to task on their practices, and these become an integral part of their marketing strategies, they will have economic incentive to do the right thing. We already have energy efficiency ratings and carbon footprint ratings. What we need are human rights, toxicity, and fair trade ratings, so consumers can see right on the tin what they are buying into.

To any business man who would scorn such an open, democratic model of doing business, I urge you to listen to what Richard Semler has to say on the topic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxeosFrLFH8

 

[Alle_Gory]

The little guys don't have to sell their business. Of course, in many cases they actually desire to sell out. What would force them to be swallowed up?

Threats and unkind actions from the larger competitors to shut them out of business by ruining their supply lines or purchasing politicians to write laws.

Much like the modern day.

 

[Truman181]

Romney is about as "unemployed" as any freelancer - he still generates upwards of $10 million"

Not a good comparison. Romney IS "unemployed" in the sense that he doesn't have an employer. He works for himself.

Today we find ourselves in an even bigger financial crisis and the rich are crying about how even raising their 35% a tiny bit will ruin them financially

Who cares what the rich are crying about? The problem with raising taxes on the rich is it destroys investment and job growth.

Historically we know this is bull**** - the millionaires of the late 40's did not go bankrupt. In fact they ended up making MORE money in the long run for investing in America's job market and middle class.

That was a different time and the world was different. That's pretty much irrelevant to our current world economy.

It is NOT class warfare to raise taxes on the rich.

Yes it is. Raising taxes on the rich is the government playing Robin Hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor. Problem is the rich are the one's who do the employing. Attack the rich and there are far fewer jobs in the economy.

It IS class warfare to let the rich do shady **** that destroys 300 million jobs overnight, and not only fail to punish them, but BAIL THEM OUT. Romney is in bed with these *******s. His top financiers are Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, etc (same as Obama)

I completely agree with you on bailouts. I'm a libertarian and Ron Paul supporter myself. My problem with this statement (and some of your earlier statements) is you lump all rich people together as being shady. Most of the people you lumping into the category of "rich" are small business owners such as mom and pop operations that are unlucky enough to fall into the higher income tax brackets. These people aren't millionaires and Wall Street moguls, yet you seem to want them to pay higher taxes which will destroy jobs.

In fact the only discernable difference between Romney and Obama is that one wants welfare for the rich and the other wants welfare for the poor. Neither will honor the will of the American people, nor will they remedy the financial problems we are facing, because they subscribe to the same Keynesian, fiat money, scam economy that got us in this mess.

Romney is a far cry from Obama. Granted, Romney has ties to Wall Street. However, he, unlike Obama, knows how the economy works. The economic policies that got us into this mess is big government spending. And the housing bubble caused by the Nancy Pelosi led congress prior to the 2010 election in which the Republican's took back the House. Sure, Romney is a moderate. But together, with the Republican House (many of whom are Tea Partiers) and the Senate (hopefully with a Republican majority after the coming elections), Romney will be far more inclined to pass economically sound legislation and cut spending more-so than Obama.

Ron Paul is the only sane choice if we really want to change things up. The rest are all corrupt and firmly lodged up the rectums of lobbyists and bankers. That said it will take a miracle to get Paul elected. We've already seen voter fraud in two states and the media is doing everything possible to marginalize his popularity

I agree about Ron Paul. As I said, I'm a supporter. However, I wonder if you really even understand Ron Paul's message? Ron Paul is 100% against income tax, even on the rich.

 

[BigJimbo]

Threats and unkind actions from the larger competitors to shut them out of business by ruining their supply lines or purchasing politicians to write laws.

Much like the modern day.

I give it up to you. You get it. That is real world stuff you posted. It happens in EVERY country on this planet. The problem is that Americans think that they are DIFFERENT. B.S. Total B.S. America is like every single other place on earth. People are people. Remember that.

Some of you think that I bash America. Not true. I simply know that America is filled with people. Not special people. Just people. Americans are not bad people. They are not good people. They are just people! Same goes for all the other countries.

 

[Amo]

Shrink the welfare and defense budgets, tax the rich a little bit more, and use the resources for infrastructure and making sure everybody stays honest.

America would be back on its feet in no time.