America's Tax Burden To Rise

Man, is this really how you get off on a Saturday night?

Rereading the discussion, it was pretty clear that Jet meant 60% of their salary in taxes. Then you come in, combine your salary tax with your investment tax, conveniently not mention that you've combined multiple avenues of taxes into one, compare it to only one avenue of income, thus allowing you to put out an outrageous statement, waiting for people to call you out, then jump on them while playing the innocent victim.

On a gaming forum.

That's pretty pathetic, even for you.

This is their primary failing. They are conditioned to see "money" as something they are entitled to for being born and doing "something". They get money every week / month as wages and then go out and spend that money like the good little consumers they were programmed to be.

The really funny part is that the ultra wealthy, the ones these posters are wanting to wage a war against, are wealthy because they keep their money invested in non-liquid investments like property, business's or some funds. Just because someone's net worth is 10M USD doesn't mean they have 10M sitting in a bank account they can spend. They could be broke as f*ck and have their entire worth invested into a business or some real estate. That's how you make real money, it's also how you can lose a ton of money overnight.

I can't really disagree with at least half of that.

When you 'do something', as you put it, you are 'entitled', again as you put it, to compensation.

Is earning money through work now a dividing factor between our two sides?

¯\(°_o)/¯

My eyes have glazed over a bit after reading this drivel. What are we really arguing about again?

You never, ever, "earn" money. Money is not earned it's traded. This is a very bad way to look at economics.

Business's don't exist to give you money, they exist to make money for their owners / investors. In order to make money they need manpower to do the work and provide the services that they sell. So immediately the frame between worker and owner is about enable the company to make money. The amount of money they compensate you for your services is based entirely on how rare your skill set vs how much of it they need. If you have a rare skill set and your employer has a dire need for that skill set then you can demand a higher compensation for it. If your skillset is common, easily replaceable and / or your employer doesn't need it then you'll be in a bad position to demand high compensation. Forcing compensation higher then supply / demand allows just ends up with less demand and fewer positions.

Anyhow you aren't entitled to jack sh!t. You only get what you can negotiate for. You are only worth what someone else is willing to pay you. You have no intrinsic value.

I think I get what you're trying to say, you just articulating it poorly the first time around. The way you phrased it before makes it seem as if you're playing with semantics. But there's definitely some truth in those words, especially for people of higher income.

But the problem with it is that not everyone falls into that category. What you said holds true when looking at it solely from the perspective of the free market, but there's more to an economy than just the market(believe it or not). There's the -people-, who all have this annoying tendency to want to eat every day. While it does sound appealing that everyone should be paid based on their skillset, there are tens of millions of people who don't have all that great a skill set, yet still want things in their mouths from time to time.

For those people who sit at the bottom of the ladder, there should be some external entity from the outside that ensures that their minimum needs are met, so they can, ya know, live.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that you're alluding to the minimum wage laws.

I lol'd.

Free market laws existed long before modern economics, they are the results of natural human nature. Humans seek to maximize their personal pleasure while simultaneously avoiding discomfort. This results in generally selfish behavior towards others. Why should I compensate you any more then I have to?

As for the rest, it's non-feasible. The resources your "giving" those non-producers must come from somewhere. They aren't free, they don't magically appear from somewhere. Ultimately your stealing resources from the producers and distributing them to the non-producers, aka wealth redistribution. In small measures this isn't a big problem as the luxury afforded by that results of smart decisions will still provide for sufficient motivation. In large amounts it destroys the motivation to improve on-self anywhere beyond the minimum required to live. You can't legislate morality or remove Darwinian pressures. You can't defeat human nature by writing words on a piece of paper that you read off a podium. The best you can do is work around human nature.

Which is why I prefer the Korean tax system which is ingenious. They are one of the lowest directly taxed nations yet they have a welfare program designed to take care of the poor and unfortunate. They do it by heavily taxing luxury goods while providing a subsidy to domestic food production and cheap domestic goods. A pair of non-branded jeans costs $20 USD at a small clothing shop about 100m from my apartment. A pair of levi's at a department store costs $200 USD. A domestic economy car is cheap, a luxury car is super expensive. Food at a domestic market is cheap, a family chain restaurant (Outback / TGI / ect) is $30~50 per person. People who make a good living want to show they make a good living by displaying products with labels. Wealthy people want to drive expensive luxury cars and live in large apartments with all the accessories that go with it. Poor people just want to live and eat.

Of course such a system actively discourages excessive consumption and consumerism. That's a discussion for a different day.


Because they are ineffective and simply serve to treat a symptom of a problem vs curing the root cause. All they do is regulate the floor of what an employer can pay for full time, but you can't force an employer to hire someone. The result is the employer pass's the cost of that increase to the customers in the form of higher prices. Now who are the primary customers of the places that predominately hire minimum wage law workers? Your raising the prices of the places that poor people shop at but not at the places that wealthy people shop at. The business owner could also cut hours or lay off workers to compensate for the increase without raising prices too much. Yet again who is the primary demographic that works at minimum wage jobs? Skilled workers won't be there, only poor unskilled, barely skilled or easily replaceable workers. That just results in more people on welfare.

The primary cause is the lack of system to convert unskilled, barely skilled workers into skilled workers. There are plenty of jobs for highly skilled / experienced workers, my company has dozens of positions in my specialty alone that they desperately need filled. University was supposed to be this but it's been turned into a progressive training camp and the graduates quickly find that their degree's is worth less then toilet paper as that expensive education system never provided opportunities for experience.

Did you notice that you didn't actually address my post, rather, you just repeated yourself and added fluff at the end?

I can repeat myself also if that's what we're doing. More to the economy than the free market and tens of millions of people have a tendency of wanting to eat every day, which means we can't have an economy where people are paid solely based on their skill set.



I don't know man





That red line looks like a pretty good place to start.

And this is why you can't argue with progressives, they refuse to acknowledge basic economics and insist everything revolves around feel-good emotional crusades.

Here's the hint, raising the minimum bar does absolutely nothing to the problem. You need to find ways to lower the local costs of living (housing + food + clothing).

Furthermore giving people fish every day only ensures that they'll line up to get fish from you every day (which is the real goal of the progressive establishment). Establishing a work center to teach people how to fish ensures they can go out and catch their own food without having to line up and pay homage to you.

And wow talk about a "class war", you really do want to go around raiding and stealing from wealthy people. Your advocating whole sale theft for no other reason then your jealous of it.

Yeah *click* *block*.

Yes, we've all heard this talking point before, and it sounds nice in theory, but even nice sounding theories needs to stand up to reality.

http://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/america.htm

Take a look at that map and you'll notice that states that are doing better tend to have high minimum wages. States that have no minimum wage laws tend to be the poorest.

Like I alluded to before, reality is something to be acknowledged, not justified. If you look at the actual reality, you'll see that your understanding of economics doesn't really hold up, at least on this issue.

There is a reason why states that subscribe to your way of thinking take more from than federal government than they give; and states that subscribe to my way of thinking tend to give more than they take. Your understanding of economics doesn't actually work in reality.

Before the early 1980s, productivity rose at the same rate as wages, but ever since corporate personhood, productivity has gone up, worker wages have stagnated and the pay that goes to the top have increased exponentially.

The problem you don't understand is that their pay shouldn't have been that high to begin with. Jealousy has nothing to do with it, other than a nice cope out for the right-wing who don't want to think about it too deeply. I'm still puzzled how some people think paying 0 taxes off billions in profits is ok.

Huh. That's weird. Look at CNBC's rankings for the top states for business in 2013. Funny how those high minimum wage states almost all appear at the bottom. You'll have to define what "doing better" means to you.

Source:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100824779

I know the list is subjective, but provide something concrete to prove your point.

Reminds me of this



Numbers don't lie but the person making the chart can easily manipulate them. Take CA for example, CA is the mecca for information technology and the host for a ton of business that's not related to minimum wage work, same with many of the states mentioned on that chart. Places like Mississippi are some of the poorest in the nation, there is nothing there to bring in big money. Minimum wage labor is represents a minute amount of the US economy, most of which is fueled by big business who pays big business wages to highly skilled people (relative to unskilled people).

The proposed MW increase has nothing to do with getting poor people out of poverty, it won't do a damn thing for them in aggregate. It's about reducing the gap between unskilled poor and skilled middle class in wages. The wealthy, that he wants to drag into the streets and put to the guillotine, while plundering their wealth so he can afford that nice car, earn their wealth through non-wage based income, stuff like business investments and property. The functions of those are something that progressives can't even fathom as it requires basic understanding of "evil inhuman" economics.

I really feel sorry for these guys, they will never attain success or be anything other then a spectator watching and yearning for the lives of others.

I mean GDP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP

And you can argue against GDP as a measure of a state's wealth if you like, but then again, I could argue against slapping a number next to 'Business Friendliness' and pretend it means something also.



Also about getting them off government assistance

I always found the right-wing kinda strange in this regard. You guys go on and about about how people on welfare are leeches and takers, etc, attacking them endlessly; but on the other hand, you would rather they be on welfare (read: hand them our tax dollars) than have the companies they work for pay them a living wage. I don't understand that.

Fair enough, but the correlation is tepid at best.

And I really do have to question a chart that puts Wisconsin's economy over California's, especially since they don't really show the data behind the chart. If California was its own country, it'd be the 8th largest in the world, and Wisconsin is ...well, Wisconsin.

A couple things here. One, raising the minimum wage doesn't appear to reduce poverty rates. Two, I'm not even bothered by states raising minimum wage. I'm bothered by the federal government trying to apply a one-size-fits-all wage to the entire nation in a midterm election year for the purpose of garnering votes.

Also, California being rich doesn't automatically make it have a good economy. If that were the case, the U.S. would also have a good economy.

One, the minimum wage isn't supposed to reduce poverty rates. Poverty line is around 10k for one person, which is about 5.5/hr or or about 11k/year if you work full time. So yes, going from 7.25 to 8 won't do anything for the poverty rate in that scenario. It's supposed to put more money into the hands of consumer so they can, one, get off government assistance, and two, continue to fuel our consumer based economy.

Two, I don't really care all that much about what bothers you.

If I was as petty as you, you know what I would complain about?


And we have a pretty good economy. It used to be better, yes, but it's still pretty good, and only getting better.

It's getting too late for this.

Calling me petty? Ha, you're good. Let me refer back to your argument with KN. Lovez to see me some pot calling the kettle black.

They always devolve into petty insults.


By definition it can't. Raising the minimum wage can never increase the long term quality of life, otherwise we could make it $1,000/hr and make everyone "wealthy". Everyone thinks everything will be better if "only I had more money". Thing is, every human is in competition with the rest for resources. There is no such thing as "enough money", it's all a matter of perspective. Instead what you get is a short term boost to consumer spending as it forces extra money into circulation in poor area's as the poor go out and use that "extra" money to buy luxury items they couldn't afford previously. Then within a few years the costs of living in those poor area's rise's to catch up with the additional money, specifically housing and food prices go up. This has a secondary effect of raising the costs of living on the middle class who do spend some of their income at the same places the poor people do.

And yes any MW laws should be a purely local thing as the costs of living in Los Angles is different then Redmond which is different the Atlanta, New York, Portland, New Orleans and Caribou. A "living wage" in any big city area would be significantly higher then a rural or small city which is easily expressed by property prices. It's so f*cking funny cause the poverty line moves, any MW that would put you over it, in theory, would just force the line up and over.

Anyhow the real purpose behind this is to buy votes by making the Dem's out to look like hero's. I mean who wouldn't want a 39.3% Pay Raise. They might as well run an ad that says "Vote for us and we'll write a check to you for 39% of your income". They know good and well that it would never pass the house, it can't even pass the Senate where they hold a majority. If a state wants to raise it then there is nothing stopping them from doing so.

Specifying a federal minimum (to some degree) reduces one factor in the race-to-the-bottom competition between states, by establishing a uniform ground level.

Having some degree of stability is a good thing, despite what many in the finance industry claim. Just as having some degree of volatility/flexibility is also necessary.

Although I'm intimately familiar with the ways that people find to screw themselves regardless of how much or little they make, I do want to point out that poverty is determined in part as a function of the federal minimum wage, so it's kind of pointless to say that raising it (or lowering it!) will ever meaningfully impact poverty rates.

So then, is it worth risking job losses with a raise in the minimum wage to help a smaller number of people have more money that likely won't use it to rise above poverty anyway?

I just want to point out that graph is somewhat misleading. Productivity (trust me on this, I work in manufacturing) is an umbrella term. Generally, it means the ratio of labor hours to gross sales dollars. At least that's how it's being used here. However, in actuality, productivity is actually total labor cost over real (or net sales). The way it's calculated actually puts the labor on both ends of the equation and factors in other costs. The formulas for calculating it are rather varied and that graph doesn't account for any of that. Accounting and production methods have changed significantly in the last 50 years, it only makes sense that productivity has increased. And I don't know if that graph is adjusted for inflation either.

It may seem like semantics, and I agree that less people are being asked to do more work for less money than they were even 10 years ago when I graduated from college, but I've seen our production benchmarks go from 253 sales dollars/labor hour to 151 real dollars/labor hour and it has been a drastic decrease in workforce and increase in production. It's all in how you calculate it.


Poverty and minimum wages aren't the same thing, at least they shouldn't be. Raising the minimum wage always has a positive impact on reducing poverty rates, the problems is that it is raised modest amounts about a decade after it should be.

And you are sure that it is minimum wage, and only minimum wage, that contributed to reducing poverty rates, and not economic growth or stability?

The saying goes: A rising tide floats all boats. But, no, that's not even close to what I said, and stop trying to twist other people's words into your elementary understanding of economics.

No, I was making sure you didn't have an elementary understanding of economics.

But I disagree with you in your idea that raising minimum wages has a positive impact at all. There is a weak correlation between the two, but other proven factors play a key role in decreasing poverty. In fact, it also has been proven that raising minimum wage does nothing more than increase the wage that defines the poverty line, and by definition increases poverty, both in the short and long terms.

Well, if Glenn Beck says it, it must be true, care to point toward some of that proof?

BTW, you are the last person to be qualifying other's credentials when you claim to be an accountant but can't even wrap your head around legal forms of tax evasion.