Rich people and taxes

[Dr. Pfleschbach]

Originally Posted by lochinvar

Personal responsibility is a mantra of the Right, and to a point I agree with it--but only to a point. Sometimes you're just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sometimes you're just unlucky enough to have a president and congressional majority that sees nothing wrong with your engineering job being outsourced to India or China.

Which reminds me, I suddenly realized why the Republicans in congress have been so reticent about increasing education funding to train Americans for the "Jobs of the Future" that Bush keeps talking about - What's the point? Those are the jobs that are being outsourced. Let the Indians and Chinese pay for it.

[Philistine]

Originally Posted by gojujay

You're point being...

That a comparison of marginal tax rates at various times (currently vs. the 80's, for instance) still provides a roughly equivalent comparison of the effective tax rates at the same times.

--Philistine

[jeff]

Time for posting has been limited, so for once I'm the one running behind...

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Well, touché.

Thank you!

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Yes. And it behooves us to try them before throwing up our hands and moving on to the ( IMO ) defeatist option: We MUST have X dollars, so even if it's unfair we just HAVE to squeeze it from our society's most productive ( but unpopular ) citizens...

For the first part I agree: even if we can't win all the battles we're obliged to not be defeatist about our own country. Civics 101.

Do you mean the dead ones who created the estates and are no longer productive at all, or their heirs, who are looking eagerly for their money. How is unearned income, which you say below is what you're talking about, indicative of "the most productive individuals"? Trust fund kids are the most productive members of society? Hah. So, productive is flat wrong.

Unpopular too: everyone talks about how they would like to be Bill Gates.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Heh. And you call me a resident of Cynicville in the very sentence preceding.

If people who care about equitable and good government just give up in the face of exploitation, what result other than 'worst outcome' do you think would happen?

Originally Posted by Inquartata

No doubt. Still, if one reads certain authors on both the left and right it gets a lot of play. If it's offered as a serious argument, as by, say, the American Catholic Bishops Conference, it deserves to be knocked down at every opportunity.

They make their arguments, I make mine. Even Nixon talked about the dignity of common labor, FWIW.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

I'm still talking about taxes on unearned income there.

As to the estate issue: Why ought the builder of an estate, the earner of wealth through his own efforts, not be able to do any damned thing he wants with his own assets? Why is the government more qualified and in a better moral position to do it? No one would so much as intimate that he couldn't spends his own money on a stripper when he was alive; why is directing that it be spent on one afterward be any different?

Under your theory, perhaps the government should confiscate 100% of every decedent's estate? I mean, the heirs don't deserve it and ought to have to make it on their own in life just like your dishwashers. And anyway the government has much better uses for it, in pork projects far and wide...

Isn't that where your theory takes us in the end?

In brief, no. Hyperbole is fun, but everything taken to absurd proportions is merely absurd. Besides, the analysis is wrong. The builder of an estate is doing exactly what he or she wants by specifying who gets it. Bully for him. From the heir's side, it's new income.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

OK, I'm still confused. If it "stays in their trust funds and be invested", that's investment. How do we get from that to "not investing it"? Reducing taxes on the gains from such invested funds will increase the incentive to put the money to work thus, no?

The money is either going to be left in investment vehicles or spent - both are claimed to be good for the economy and used as reasons to not tax it.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Do YOU think it's our civic duty to pirate it?

Who was the guy with the lisp you quoted a few days ago about 'how did you come to that conclusion?" "Pirate" is a loaded word that presupposes the nature of the transaction. We're all subject to taxes. It's not piracy.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Especially when they're perfectly acceptable.

Your position ( and the government's ) is that it's fine to tax income at every change of hands. That's what the example derides. What does "net of zero" have to do with anything?

No, that's not my position at all. Just re-read what I said.

[jeff]

Originally Posted by Inquartata

See, I don't happen to think that one needs a rationale for letting people keep what they make, and doing anything they want with it ( within the law, of course ). It sounds like basic fairness to me. In that sense, you may be right that it "has nothing to do with reality". Alas.

That's an argument that can equally be applied to never taxing or imposing fees on anyone at any time. Not a useful position when we all live in a society where there's a government and bills to pay for benefits and services that accrue to all of us.

The point being here that the idea of removing estate tax on billionaires at the expense of higher taxes being levied on the rest of us is so distasteful to the American public that the proponents of the proposal had to dress it in a fabric of lies about how it was for all of us.

BTW: Just read a summary of a Cato Institute study - a very conservative group, no? - saying that historically tax cuts have been shown to raise government spending and increase deficits. Counter-intuitive, maybe, but the tax cutters have not shown spending restraint (very visible this administration), and the effect of reducing the apparent cost of spending by reducing the levy (eg: a discount today on government spending at a cost of creating debt for the future) has made it easy to spend our dollars.

Think about that...

[jeff]

Originally Posted by Inquartata

I say again, it is two different things. The earnings were taxed to GE as income. Then the dividends paid to you are taxed again as income. Sales taxes are not a tax on income.

Let me give you an analogy ( which I'm sure you are already sure is "inapt"; sigh ).

You're arrested and tried for a crime. You are aquitted. You cannot be tried again for the same crime. This does not mean that you cannot be tried for another crime.

Taxing the same income twice is like being tried twice for the same crime. Sales tax is like being tried for another crime entirely.

I understand the point full well (tell me: which of us worked Wall Street 20+ years, huh? This is basic stuff) My answer is still "who cares?". The first income tax went to GE (which does a fine job, BTW, of avoiding taxation, so the question is close to moot. Or didn't you know that most large corporations avoid being taxed). The dividend paid to me is income to me and I pay tax on it. It may be the same dollar, but it's income to different parties.

Ultimately its still a distinction without difference. The bus driver who has to pay sales tax on necessities, on top of his income and SSI tax, still looks at the net left over from the taxation imposed from various directions. To say that sales tax is okay but tax on dividends is not is meaningless for real people actually paying bills. [/quote]

Originally Posted by Inquartata

It is bad for many reasons, but it is not a second taxation of the same income. Once the income is received it becomes a stock, not income. ( Dividends are the same income being passed through; they MUST be passed on. You are not required by law to transfer your earnings to another in return for goods and services. )

See above.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Nevertheless, it is still their money, and they have the right to keep it.

You miss the point. It's rounding error for THEM, but the primary income for the wealthiest individuals. Reducing tax on unearned income shifts taxation away from the wealthiest and onto those who primarily make their money from wages. Regardless of whether the tax is ultimately fair or not, shifting its rate shifts taxation different portions of the population.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

No. I'm arguing that taxes should be lowered in order to benefit everyone. I simply do not get apoplectic that someone somewhere may be benefitting more than I am. I do not have it in for those who are better at accumulating wealth than I am. I do not think it's fair to insist that they give up more of their money because they're more productive or even just luckier than me.

And I am arguing that this is not a zero-sum game, where every dollar returned to a shipping magnate or his ne'er-do-well heir MUST be extracted from your impoverished dishwasher to somehow make up the difference. Or from you. Or from me.

I'm fine with the first part. My motivation is not about envy of those wealthier than me. I'm in the high brackets myself. For the second part, well, you're flat wrong. The money does come from somewhere, and if you reduce the load on one group, others will have higher loads. This is not hypothetical: this is measured results over the past 20+ years.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Emphatically yes. It's called "budget-cutting". It's not in vogue these days, which is perhaps my greatest disappointment with the so-called "conservatives" controlling Congress these days. Still less is it ever in vogue with Democrats. But it is a viable alternative to what you suggest is somehow inevitable. Indeed the only moral alternative, IMO. The government does not have an inherent right to any particular level of revenue extracted from those who actually earned it.

See my previous post about reducing taxes increasing spending, from the Cato Institute study. In any case, it should be clear that the spend side is not closely linked to the tax side. Let's deal with reality, not with wishful thinking.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Taxes, like government, like money itself, shall wither away under the rule of the proletariat!

You bet, and around the same week the snowballs are in hell!

Originally Posted by Inquartata

It's an antique custom, I know. But then I too am antique!

I'll just have to find the 'sufficiently quaint' quotes for our mutual amusement, and to the dismay or incomprehension of the young'uns on the board.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Bah.

Bah, Humbug! (Scrooge) There, see - we already have new literary references.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Indeed we do not, but I dispute your attribution of the wellspring... :P

Eh? Rights to vote, to own property, to organise labor, to public education - all liberal programs. Regulating the stock market so it wouldn't be a snake pit (and thereby making it trustworthy enough to become the engine of capitalism) - from liberals. Worth a thread on its own.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Well, you may persist in emphasising gross numbers rather than marginal ones as you like... just as people persist in looking at the nominal size of the deficit and blanching instead of comparing it to the national wealth and relaxing

"things rank and gross in nature possess it merely" (Hamlet). The size of the deficit is not a non-issue one can relax over, for many reasons, not least of which being who owns the notes representing out debts. We cannot be Pollyanna about it.

(Once one starts putting in the literary references it starts to come naturally...)

Originally Posted by Inquartata

If someone throws cash out of a window and I collect a few twenties while others, faster and more nimble, collect thousands, I am quite happy with my windfall. I may be envious of the others, but I do not advocate forcing them to give up theirs to share with me. And if a robber happens by and takes theirs, I do not silently applaud him.

As if this has anything to do with the situation at hand....

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Pardon: isn't that what you're advocating? That the tax rate on unearned income should be the same as that on other income? I mean, I can't imagine you're saying that you think tax rates on earned income should be raised in order to equalize the two?

Maybe it should. Or the two adjusted to meet in the middle. I don't have a "policy" on this yet.

However, what you were referring to was my note that "the overall percentage of tax paid by the top 1$ (and 5$) of households in the US has been steadily decreasing for the past 25 years.". That's important enough to repeat, along with the obvious corrolary that the bill has been increased on the rest of us. As much as you like to claim it's not a zero-sum game, the reality is that tax burden _has_ shifted exactly that way - middle classes pay more now than before. Reality beats hypotheses.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Yes. I don't like those taxes, either.

Good. Now follow back to why they're grown: it's because the taxation on high income segments has been reduced, and these tax forms has grown. This is public record.

Originally Posted by Inquartata

Do tell?

Yup. Shift in enforcement emphasis from rich to poor and middle class. Nice, huh?

More in a few days when I get a chance.

[Feltan]

Originally Posted by jeff

BTW: Just read a summary of a Cato Institute study - a very conservative group, no? - saying that historically tax cuts have been shown to raise government spending and increase deficits. Counter-intuitive, maybe, but the tax cutters have not shown spending restraint (very visible this administration), and the effect of reducing the apparent cost of spending by reducing the levy (eg: a discount today on government spending at a cost of creating debt for the future) has made it easy to spend our dollars.

Think about that...

Jeff,

Your last points are largely correct. Every tax cut has been followed by increased spending. I believe that is due to two things: 1) every tax cut since the Kennedy administration has resulted in a net increase to the treasury (which may seem counter-intitive to some, unless you have ever run a lemonade stand and realize you make more revenue selling a glass for twenty five cents rather than for five bucks), and 2) we are talking about politicians -- who see some more money, and then spend that and more.

Spending restraint is a laughable proposition when talking about Washington D.C. However, I take a different view than you about taxes being used for the public good. Agreed, some, even most, revenue is eventually used for the benefit of all; however, a sizeable amount is simply funneled into pet projects, or for the benefit of influencial congress members' districts.

Left on their own, congress will gleefully spend any money they can get their hands on, and deficit spend when actual funds are not availalbe. Giving them more tax dollars is simply like giving a drink to a person who has issues with booze.....there will never be enough dollars for them. Ever. Reducing the supply of dollars is the only hope, in my opinion, of curtailing their demand for more and more.

Congress has failed to restrain themselves -- both Republicans and Democrats are guilty. It is especially bad for Republicans since, supposedly, they advertise themselves as champions of fiscal restraint. B'ah! They haven't proved it, and the opportunity to do so has been theirs for the last several years.

I think this is one of the main reasons you see Bush approval numbers in the low thirties. Face it, 50% of the population isn't going to approve of him due to the contentious elections that got him into office -- if he is at 50% approval he is merely treading water. The delta between 50% and 33% is those who previously supported him -- they are upset about many things, but I suspect the leading canditates for upset are immigration and run away spending.

Regards,
Feltan

[gojujay]

Originally Posted by jeff

That's an argument that can equally be applied to never taxing or imposing fees on anyone at any time. Not a useful position when we all live in a society where there's a government and bills to pay for benefits and services that accrue to all of us.

An argument for never having an income tax, maybe. How is imposing fee for service taking someone's assets unfairly? If anything it's an argument for a consumption tax.

Originally Posted by jeff

The point being here that the idea of removing estate tax on billionaires at the expense of higher taxes being levied on the rest of us is so distasteful to the American public that the proponents of the proposal had to dress it in a fabric of lies about how it was for all of us.

It serves a dual purpose IMO. Yes, it serves the rich in that it allows them to distribute more of their money sans government interference. It also has an egalitarian purpose of ensuring EQUAL treatment under the law.

Originally Posted by jeff

BTW: Just read a summary of a Cato Institute study - a very conservative group, no? - saying that historically tax cuts have been shown to raise government spending and increase deficits. Counter-intuitive, maybe, but the tax cutters have not shown spending restraint (very visible this administration), and the effect of reducing the apparent cost of spending by reducing the levy (eg: a discount today on government spending at a cost of creating debt for the future) has made it easy to spend our dollars.

Think about that...

I do, every day. It just makes me want a balanced budget amendment more and more, flexibility be damned. It seems that's the only way to get those fools to do their job.

[gojujay]

I have a problem with this notion that investment income, no matter who made the initial investment, is unearned income. How do you figure it's unearned? The investments must be managed in order to capitalize on market changes. Someone has to watch the market and prognosticate about upcoming changes. If the "rich" hire someone to do this and this person is successful, haven't the rich earned, by dint of making a wise choice in money manager, their investment income?

Originally Posted by jeff

Eh? Rights to vote, to own property, to organise labor, to public education - all liberal programs. Regulating the stock market so it wouldn't be a snake pit (and thereby making it trustworthy enough to become the engine of capitalism) - from liberals. Worth a thread on its own.

From classic liberals, not the bastar*ized definition of today's era. I agree, it's worth a thread of it's own how the definition of liberal has been usurped by those of the leftist view.

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by lochinvar

Spoken by one who is NOT poor--and dead wrong.

I HAVE been poor, though, and my memory is still functional. I stand by the assertion.

I will grant that some are poor because of personal choices and lifestyles. Others are poor by virtue of plain bad luck.

I still stand by the assertion. The choices made are not, I should add, necessarily bad ones---just ones not best suited to the accumulation of wealth. For example, having children is quite contrary to that goal. Marriage might be another example ( unless one is Anna Nicole Smith or John Kerry ). Having expensive recreational choices or choosing leisure time over work.

This is not a normative judgement on my part, BTW. I do not say that staying single and childless and choosing to work 90 hours a week and to take frequent business investment risks makes for a "better" life than having a family and a life outside the office. But if we're talking about becoming wealthy, that and ONLY that, then many common choices are counterproductive and explain the lion's share of the nonwealthy. ( OK, that and natural endowments, as of intelligence ).

I did everything right. I got a good college education, worked for a good company, did meaningful work, never got into trouble with the law, etc., etc.

Yet, I am poor--laid off, and unable to find other work for two years now.

Clearly, then, you did NOT do quite everything right.

Engineering jobs in my field are not available.

And here perhaps is one possible culprit. Is engineering really a discipline connected with becoming rich? Speaking as an economist I can tell you that engineering is a field which has long been known to fit nicely into the "Cobweb Theory" framework. Briefly, this means that the field goes through periods of over- and undersupply. There are not enough engineers, so wages rise, attracting large numbers of entrants to the field, which drives down wages, which leads students to go into more lucrative fields, which drives down the number of engineers, which drives up wages, etc. ( Employment can be a substitute for wages in this case. ) I strongly suspect that especially with the globalization of industry we are now in a period of oversupply, hence your predicament.

I used to say, "Well, I'd push a broom if I had to if nothing else came around." Guess what? I can't even get hired pushing a broom. They take one look at my education and previous paycheck and I never hear from them again.

Then isn't the solution to refrain from advertising your education and work history?

Is this a "personal choice"? A "lifestyle" problem? I think not. In the meantime I still have bills to pay and a family to support.

And here again, choices. "A family". That is in itself a choice, is it not? If the aim is accumulation of wealth, is success alone, that is a counterproductive choice to make, no?

But I am not saying that you have made "bad" choices. You've made choices consonant with your own preferences and predilections. I am saying that if one has as ones single-minded goal "becoming rich" there are some life options that are going to retard one's progress.

Sometimes you're just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

At the extreme, perhaps. One can make Alex P. Keaton choices and still get hit by a bus and left a vegetable. But for the most part, success is a matter of choices.

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by jeff

Do you mean the dead ones who created the estates and are no longer productive at all, or their heirs, who are looking eagerly for their money.

I'm still on about taxation of unearned income and the inference that making it heavier is somehow a good move either economically or morally. The estate tax issue is almost wholly a moral one: IMO the state has no right to dictate what a person does with the fruits of his labor, even after his death. It is not entitled to decide who "deserves" to get what the earner wants them to get. It has no standing to step in and take it for itself instead.

Secondarily, in many cases the estates carefully constructed and arranged by the productive amasser will still be itself productive after his demise: it continues on as an entity, and breaking it up or attenuating it may well reduce its productivity.

Analogy alert!

Imagine that I build a water pump to irrigate some farmland from a well, when most of my neighbors are using manual sluices relying on surface water ( and are more susceptible to drought ). Then I die. The pump goes on working, the water still flows, the land still gets irrigated. It still produces better than that of my neighbors. Which is better, to let the pump go on working or to "part it out" for a few bucks and prevent my heirs from using it, on the grounds that they don't deserve it?

How is unearned income, which you say below is what you're talking about, indicative of "the most productive individuals"? Trust fund kids are the most productive members of society?

You keep implying that these are synonymous. They are not. The largest recipients of unearned income outside government is probably the mutual fund industry. I do not think that most mutual fund shares are held in trust funds. It would surprise me very much if anything like the bulk of capital gains and dividends go to this favorite bete noire of yours. ( Were you once picked on by Thurston Howell the III or something? )

Unpopular too: everyone talks about how they would like to be Bill Gates.

Not in my experience. Oh, people would like to have his money, but otherwise he's the butt of jokes and venom.

If people who care about equitable and good government just give up in the face of exploitation, what result other than 'worst outcome' do you think would happen?

I have no idea, but I am unwilling to state unequivocally that we'd go straight to perdition but for the noble resistance of the, uh, resistance.

They make their arguments, I make mine. Even Nixon talked about the dignity of common labor, FWIW.

Yes. The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

In brief, no.

So, not 100%, but more than 0%. Suddenly a Churchill barb comes to mind...

If heirs are undeserving of passed-on wealth, why not 100%? On what grounds do you find that objectionable? And how much would be proper? 90%? 80%? 70%?

You know, there have been testators who deliberately obtained the result we're talking about---complete disinheritance of heirs---on the grounds I've mentioned. Why ought that not be made the general rule, and enforced by the state? If a citizen wants to be wealthy, they must do it on their own: no one may simply get lucky in their choice of parents, that's anti-American.

Could it be because there are certain economic advantages to long-lived fortunes, and even the state recognizes it?

The builder of an estate is doing exactly what he or she wants by specifying who gets it. Bully for him. From the heir's side, it's new income.

I cry sophistry. It's exactly the same money. If the state interferes in its distribution it is overriding the wishes of the person who created it.

The money is either going to be left in investment vehicles or spent - both are claimed to be good for the economy and used as reasons to not tax it.

OK. I fail to see the flaw in the reasoning. Both ARE stimulative to the economy. Albeit investment is probably the better use in terms of long-run economic growth.

Who was the guy with the lisp you quoted a few days ago about 'how did you come to that conclusion?" "Pirate" is a loaded word that presupposes the nature of the transaction. We're all subject to taxes. It's not piracy.

Like "trust fund kids", I guess. ( Insert horrid forbidden fifth smily here. )

However, we are NOT all subject to taxes, and certainly not to all forms of taxation.

Just re-read what I said.

I never look back, the Devil may be gaining on me....

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by jeff

That's an argument that can equally be applied to never taxing or imposing fees on anyone at any time. Not a useful position when we all live in a society where there's a government and bills to pay for benefits and services that accrue to all of us.

True. Which is why I think taxation ought to be approached rather like amputating one's own leg in order to escape a trap: a last resort and to be sedulously restricted to the barest minimum of limb which will obtain release.

My position is not that there should be no taxation but that that to talk about the state "needing" more money in the current bloated situation is absurd.

The point being here that the idea of removing estate tax on billionaires at the expense of higher taxes being levied on the rest of us is so distasteful to the American public that the proponents of the proposal had to dress it in a fabric of lies about how it was for all of us.

The premise you advance---that a tax not paid by the rich must be paid by someone else---is wrong. Any conclusion built on faulty premises also collapses.

You are right in that it probably would have been the main argument disingenuously advanced by the left to demonize the proposal had it been made straighforwardly. I do not blame the proponents for doing an end-run around that sort of prospective political campaign.

BTW: Just read a summary of a Cato Institute study - a very conservative group, no?

Why would that matter? Tsk!

- saying that historically tax cuts have been shown to raise government spending and increase deficits. Counter-intuitive, maybe, but the tax cutters have not shown spending restraint (very visible this administration), and the effect of reducing the apparent cost of spending by reducing the levy (eg: a discount today on government spending at a cost of creating debt for the future) has made it easy to spend our dollars.

Quite. Couldn't agree more.

The process has never been carried forward to the point where budgetary cuts would have become unavoidable. Always the economic cycle, the political cycle or both has brought the advent of some justification for raising taxes again, before too much pain has been felt.

[Inquartata]

Originally Posted by jeff

My answer is still "who cares?".

To which my answer is, "Me. And any economist worth his X axis. And anyone who cares more about the basic fairness of the earner of a dollar getting to use it than about the poor state being deprived of its prospective revenue".

The first income tax went to GE

GE meaning "Government Excess"?

( I know what you meant. )

(which does a fine job, BTW, of avoiding taxation, so the question is close to moot. Or didn't you know that most large corporations avoid being taxed).

Hmm.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=GE&annual

I see a figure of $3,854,000 for "income tax expense".

The dividend paid to me is income to me and I pay tax on it. It may be the same dollar, but it's income to different parties.

In any economic sense, irrelevant. The pertinent fact is not who is getting a dollar, but tha the dollar is being spent. Otherwise we come back to my erstwhile example of my loaning you $20, then you paying me back, being both taxable events.

If you can't get to the ATM and your wife gives you lunch money, do you report that as income because a new individual receives it? And when you pick up her dry cleaning, does she consider the bill you paid income to her?

Ultimately its still a distinction without difference.

Not economically it isn't. There are indicators such as the velocity of money which can be skewed by unduly hampering transmissions.

Did you really think that double taxation was just a meaningless buzzword dreamed up by tycoons to fool the rubes or something? And somehow no crusading liberal had noticed and exposed the chicanery in the last 50 years?

The bus driver who has to pay sales tax on necessities, on top of his income and SSI tax, still looks at the net left over from the taxation imposed from various directions.

Indeed.

To say that sales tax is okay but tax on dividends is not is meaningless for real people actually paying bills.

And I never said that. I decry the multiplicity of taxes, too. But where in any of that is the rational justification for raising THIS tax, because ANOTHER is thus and such?

In the end, though, taxes often attach to activities which have different effects on the economy, or effects of different magnitude. It is not the case that tax A is always interchangeable with tax B...or that tax A ought to be "the same" as tax B.

See above.

If only that were all that were needed. But since "above" is flawed where first you used it, as it first saw the world, it roareth still...

You miss the point. It's rounding error for THEM, but the primary income for the wealthiest individuals.

I'm not sure I believe either part of that statement. I believe you believe them, but...

Reducing tax on unearned income shifts taxation away from the wealthiest and onto those who primarily make their money from wages. Regardless of whether the tax is ultimately fair or not, shifting its rate shifts taxation different portions of the population.

Not an inevitability. Perhaps rather than assume this and allow an injustice to go by on the theory that it cannot be remedied but only the pain more evenly spread around, we should work rather to attack the basic problem? That is, the tendency for government to assume that a given level of revenue is its due and that it MUST get it from SOMEone? Because that is the whole foundation of the "tax shift" hypothesis ( which I think is sad and pernicious ). No?

For the second part, well, you're flat wrong. The money does come from somewhere, and if you reduce the load on one group, others will have higher loads. This is not hypothetical: this is measured results over the past 20+ years.

Ah, perhaps here is the root of your error! You still think the world is flat ( wrong ).

Even discounting the option of reducing spending, no, revenue "lost" from one tax source does not have to be "shifted" to another. There is still growth to take into account. As the incomes of a given source grow, the total intake from a tax upon them can grow as well. Indeed,it can grow even if the tax rate is actually reduced...

The world of money is not as narrow and pent in as you seem to believe. Are you sure it was Wall Street you worked on, and not behind Pink Floyd's Wall? ( Add bandwidth-devouring fifth smily here )

See my previous post about reducing taxes increasing spending, from the Cato Institute study. In any case, it should be clear that the spend side is not closely linked to the tax side. Let's deal with reality, not with wishful thinking.

The one has a way of transforming the other. And without the one, the other only grows worse.

I prefer to continue pointing out that the government is harming us and demanding that it desist, rather than simply crying "Not the face!"

You bet, and around the same week the snowballs are in hell!

Snowballs are instruments of the bourgeoisie and will have no place in the paradise of the People. And Hell is a a constituent of religion, the opiate of the masses...

I'll just have to find the 'sufficientl