America's #1 Online Cigar Auction
first, best, biggest!

Enjoy!

stop paying farmers for bad fuel.....

Will hemp grow in Minot..??

More shovel-ready jobs and Ricky Martin for everybody!!!!

VIVA la vida loca!
w:d/ w:d/ w:d/ w:d/ w:d/ w:d/ w:d/ w:d/ w:d/ w:d/ w:d/ (supposed to be dancing emoticons)

the problem is we are too addicted to government spending. Look at Greece, we are doing the same thing they did 20 years ago. simply refusing to address the problem. even now, in the face of total collapse, they are rioting over the cuts and keeping the same socialists in office. go figure.

Deport the Anchor Babies!!!

Instead of seals...club the anchor babies!!!

They're little vampire thieves of Freedom!

With different wording your selections could have been
1. Use common sense
2. Punish others for failed liberal idology
3. Keep digging

The very first step to improving govenment is TERM LIMITS!!!!!! Eight years and OUT. Get rid of the dead-weight lifers.

3. Get the wealthy to pay their far share (this one will never really happen).
[/quote]


Giving 4 out of 10 dollars is not already enough?

I take it you believe that the wealthy already pay their far share.
Boy, have they got you FOOLED!

Define "fair share".

a fair share should be enough to support one anchor baby and it's family..... the really rich guys have to support the crack anchor babies tho.. they cost a little bit more to take care of and stuff....

Ok enough of "facts".

Just come out and say it, how much of MY money is "fair-share" enough to give to someone else?

Brewha,
I applaud you for asking the questions and making us think.

But sometimes you also have to be more specific.

How much (by percentage) should the wealthy pay for it to be considered their "fair share"?

I don't need catch phrases or general terms with zero substance (we often hear "Oh, that's just a write-off", or that the rich pay almost no taxes because of the "loop holes").
This is gibberish without specifics, and most people that cite them have no clue what they're even saying even if it is the truth.

But you seem to know where you're going with this.
So I'm sure I'm not the only one who is curious.

How much IS enough?

+1 on a flat tax, eliminate the IRS.

The problem is in defining "fair".

In all fairness – “fair” is a bit of a weasel word. I suppose will spend the rest of our lives (as a nation) debating what a “fair share of tax” is. Seems a lot of folks here believe that the wealth already pay a fair share (keep watching Fox).

I doubt anyone here is ‘wealthy’. Oh, you might be deep into six figures, have a second home, take may trips and even drive two cars. Well off perhaps. Maybe your wife and girlfriend both have b00b-jobs. Hell, some of you might even be ‘rich’. But no one here sits on the Fed or is a captain of industry. Real wealth isn’t about your reported income – Ya’ll are thinking taxes – I’m talking big picture. We are middle class, as in we work for wages. The wealthy don’t have wages as such.

Interesting that no one debates the cost of war or the businesses get tax breaks and subsidies. But everyone cracking down over $60k a year thinks their wealthy, and is afraid that their taxes will go up. And no – I don’t have a new tax code to propose. That would not stop the dept. It would just keep us arguing about how many M&M’s we get to keep while the revenue gets pissed away on another war and business ‘incentives’ for someone’s ‘special friend’. And that is not ‘fare’.

8% accross the board. no deductions no exemptions.

I don't mind the idea of balancing the budget by goring one class of people or even corporations. If the decision is made that all government spending is necessary, we are going to have to gore someone and we should get on with it.

We are 1.4 trillion in the hole for this year alone. President Obama's budget recommendations have us one trillion in the hole for the next 10 years. Based on this "keep spending & raise revenue" model, we have some ox goring to do.

Although the rich or wealthy (a complicated definition distinction) own the politicians, they are still the easiest to gore based on pitchfork and torch numerical superiority. Let's go after the top 2% which are those with income over $250K per year.

With this target, that gives us 1.7 million households to hit. Let's say we need to raise one trillion dollars a year from them.

We need to raise an average of an additional 588K USD per year from every household that makes more than $250K per year. Clearly it would need to be progressive taxed and a flat tax won't work.

We could broaden the target to the top 6% of households and that would be those over $150K per year. That would lessen the burden a bit.

Regardless of whether we gore the top 2% or the top 6% or even some other larger group is that to transfer that one trillion dollars to the Federal government, all that money now comes out of the economy. Keep in mind that the entire US economy is around $15 trillion (including government deficit spending) so when we extract the one trillion in economic activity to eliminate the deficit spending, that still subtracts one trillion from the economy. That means 6.6% of the economy vanishes.

Now I grant you that the top 2% or top 6% will be able to keep on living just fine after being gored and they aren't all going to pack off in masse to the Caymans or some other low tax location but one trillion dollars still just vanished from the economy. I don't know what they spent that money on.....cars, boats, vacation homes, tax-free muni bonds, CDs in banks that made SBA loans, new business ventures, etc. What I do know is that when 6.6% of the economy vanishes, there absolutely will be a trickle down affect.

I don't know what sectors will get hit the hardest. It will not be the case where all businesses simply contract by 6.6%. and lay off 6.6% of their employees. Some that are under the Obama Cone of Protection will be unaffected. Other sectors will be destroyed.

Democrats know they can't eliminate 6.6% of the economy to balance the books and preserve government size and spending. That is why they still want to borrow a trillion a year.

Republicans know they can't freeze the debt ceiling and cut one trillion in government spending without slashing every program including the military. Even if we eliminated one trillion per year in Federal spending, that still eliminates 6.6% of the economy.

My only point is when we seek to gore one segment of the population, inevitably we are going to gore a lot more than we expected. It is the Law of Unexpected Consequences.


Everybody is going to get gored one way or another. Get ready for the pain.

So

The USA definition of "poor", "middle class", "rich" and "wealthy" is highly skewed when compared to the world, even the industrialized world.

We have it pretty darn good here.

My bet would be #3...it worked like a charm for the USSR!!!

I really should have offered "default" as an option. A number of European countries have been seriously facing that choice because their foreign creditors dried up. Our only difference is our foreign creditors have not dried up.

Maybe we can tax the man behind the curtain.