No one really wants to pay higher taxes

[4est_4est_Gump]

When you computer is on and your lips are flapping.

stfu Communist.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Can you hear me now?


Idiota...

 

[RobDownSouth]

How's the job search going, Chief?

Can you hear me now?


Idiota...

https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn2/1236076_459866314112419_2131023281_n.jpg

 

[Saint Peter]

stfu Communist.

Good one!

Well, not really.




Just pay your taxes and shut the fuck up about it.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Worth reading the setup: http://www.nationalreview.com/node/377237/print

...

The Koch brothers have allegedly polluted politics with their ill-gotten cash; the Steyer brothers have not with their coal money. The revolving door is what right-wing operators do, not what a Tommy Vietor or Peter Orszag does. Affirmative action is necessary to stop “old boy” hiring and power wielding, but the sort of incestuous D.C. relationships that the Carneys or the Rhodes brothers have (Jay Carney’s wife, Claire Shipman, is a senior correspondent for ABC News; Ben Rhodes’s brother, David, is the president of CBS News) are not what we are talking about.

The issues per se are not so important. No prominent progressive really believes that his children belong in a public school with the “other.” He does not wish to live in an integrated neighborhood in order to promote his notion of high-density, non-suburban racial assimilation. A Che poster does not mean you want to live somewhere like Venezuela and wait in line for toilet paper.

The liberal is not immune from the material allurements of the 1 percent. Whizzing off on a private jet or climbing into a huge black ten-mile-a-gallon SUV limo is no problem. You do not necessarily denounce all racist stereotyping, given that sometimes attacking friendly bigots could be a headache. Taking the Google bus with like kind instead of the messy public bus or the uncertainties of the commuter train does not mean you are against mass transit for “them.” You surely don’t want the Coastal Commission enforcing beach-access rights for hoi polloi when who knows how many of the 99 percent wish to walk right by your deck in Malibu. It would be like ruining your beach view with a wind farm.

Liberalism offers a wise investment for a politician, a celebrity, an academic, or a journalist, by letting him take out inexpensive insurance against a politically incorrect slip of the tongue. Donald Sterling almost achieved exemption by his donations to Democratic candidates and the NAACP and his trial-lawyer billions; he lost it by keeping his ossified Republican registration while being an old, sick white guy who said the sort of reprehensible racist things that one hears sometimes in bits and pieces from some NBA players.

So, in medieval fashion, liberalism serves as a powerful psychological crutch: You can be noble in the abstract to assuage worries of not being so at all in the concrete. It adds a hip flourish to the otherwise mundane pursuit of power, lucre, and influence that plays out on the golf course, at the Malibu party, in front-row seats at NBA games, or in the tony Martha’s Vineyard summer home. About three decades ago, sipping a fine wine at a Napa bed and breakfast, or getting the right Italian-granite and teak flooring, became a force multiplier of being loudly liberal.

If a liberal has a really nice Chevy Chase estate or Upper West Side brownstone or Tahoe summer home, it is important to sound all the more liberal. Or maybe it is just the opposite: You cannot sound credibly liberal unless you first have the correct liberal address and square footage. The joke is on us. Having lots of stuff and lots of money, while deriding the system that provides it, is perverse, but perverse in a postmodern sense: You fools love the free market, where you didn’t do too well; we whose parents or selves did very well in it don’t like it all that much. How postmodern — like guffawing that lots of smoke came out of that Gulfstream ride, or lecturing about inequality from Rancho Mirage or the back nine at Augusta.

We are told that the Kennedys, the Pelosis, the Kerrys, and others like them are noble because they vote against their class interests. But they really do not; they vote for them. Liberalism is now the domain of the elite, and antithetical to the aspirations of the upper middle class that lacks the capital and tastes of the 0.1 percent. The higher the taxes, the more numerous the regulations, the greater the redistribution, so all the more the elite liberal distances himself from those less cool who breathe down his neck, and the less guilty he feels about the growing divide between him and the poor he worries about, but never worries about enough to associate with.

Liberalism professes a leftwing ideology, but these days it has absolutely no effect on the lives of those who most vehemently embrace it. In other words, being liberal is professionally useful and psychologically better than Xanax, but we need not assume any more that it is a serious belief.

Victor Davis Hanson, NRO

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Good one!

Well, not really.




Just pay your taxes and shut the fuck up about it.

We pay more taxes than you do, trust me...

Can you hear me now?

*chuckle*

 

[Saint Peter]

We pay more taxes than you do, trust me...

Can you hear me now?

*chuckle*

I doubt that.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The 1 percent fetish is also not really ideological. Elizabeth Warren, one of its greatest supporters, is not just a 1 percent but a 0.1 percent grandee. Her house, habits, household income, past corporate consulting, and net worth all reflect a desire for profits and refinement not accorded to most Americans. Her life is about as much a part of the 99.9 percent as she is Native American. She is not worried about welders getting some work on the Keystone Pipeline or farmworkers put out of their jobs in Mendota, Calif., over a baitfish.

Ditto Paul Krugman. He is eloquent about inequality and about the sort of insider privileges that give so much to so few. But nothing about his own circumstances suggests that he lives the life he professes, as opposed to professing abstractions that psychologically make the quite different life he lives more palatable. Certainly, Krugman’s liberalism means that few care that he once worked in the Reagan administration, that he was a paid adviser to Enron, or that he has just taken a part-time $225,000 post-retirement job at City University of New York — one that, at least initially, requires no teaching. Given what CUNY is said to pay its exploited part-timers, the university could have offered 75 courses with the salary it will be paying Krugman. Or, put another way, Professor Krugman will make the same as do 75 part-timers who each teach one class — and thus one class more than Krugman will teach. Bravo for Professor Krugman to have marketed himself so well and to have earned all the compensation that the market will bear — and too bad for the part-timers, who don’t understand market-based economics, where there are winners like Krugman and losers like themselves who can’t earn commensurate hanging-around money. One last question: Is part-time teacher Krugman going to study the inequality inherent in the modern university’s exploitation of part-time teachers?

Such hypocrisy taxes Krugman’s supporters to find ingenious arguments for the idea that noble ends justify almost any means, and so they argue that Krugman’s advocacy for research into income equality trumps this minor embarrassment, or that he can be very rich and still fight the 1 percent, or that the salary in the metrosexual world of the Boston–New York–Washington corridor is not all that high. Of course, the CUNY billet is likely just a small stream that feeds into Krugman’s other sizable income rivers. Indeed, he more likely belongs not just to the 1 percent, but to the same 0.1 percent as Senator Warren, which he so castigates. When President Obama exclaimed that at some point one needs to know when one has made enough money, Krugman would have agreed. He could now put that agreement into action by donating his salary to double the meager wages of 75 part-timers, who, unlike himself, are contracted professors who really do teach and are not “generously” compensated.

VDH, NRO

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I doubt that.

You gonna call me a liar too?

Can you hear me now?

 

[Saint Peter]

I doubt that.

You gonna call me a liar too?

Can you hear me now?

You talk about your fortunes like killswitch does.

Go Team!

 

[RobDownSouth]

How's the job search going, Chief?

We pay more taxes than you do, trust me...

Can you hear me now?

*chuckle*

Yep, you're unemployed but you pay more taxes than Petey.

Like miles, your squaw must make a lot of money to be able to subsidize your checkered work history (bouncer, iron worker, college professor, rock group roadie, programmer, martial arts instructor).

It's almost like U2 was thinkin' of you when they sang "..and I still haven't found what I'm looking for..."

 

[girlsmiley]

Well duh. I think in the history of the world the number of people who'd say they
.

Well duh?

Not really.

The federal budget is upon us and they're talking about cutting a pension increase. That's disappointing. Couldn't the Australian government take money from the mining sector? Mining tax. What happened to mining tax? I'll tell you what happened. Too much money.


Australians need to realise we're in debt. Billions of dollars in debt. And I'd rather the government and people who caused the debt pay the debt. Harsh, but fair. But good for the country. And our future.

 

[RobDownSouth]

You talk about your fortunes like killswitch does.

Go Team!

Did someone say.....AJ's Portfolio?

AJ's portfolio is quite diverse:

• Chinese panda coin - 1/4 ounce $517.00
• Money market fund - $117.83
• Pacific Rim mid-cap fund - $315.00
• Gold nugget - 1 ounce - $1195.00
• Princess Di Beanie Baby, New With Tags - $20,000.00
• Spider-Man #1, VGC condition - $4,500.00
• Glenn Beck Freedom Seeds - $399.99
• Franklin Mint Limited Edition Elvis plates (1999) - $17,200 (est)
• "Tonto, The Lone Ranger's faithful Indian companion" metal lunch box (1961) - $85,000 (est)
• Millennium Barbie Y2K Edition (used) - $1,100
• Swank Men's Magazine collection (1967 - 1971) - $201
• Mein Kampf - First German Edition, Autographed - $15,599 (est)
• Postage Stamps of the Third Reich (complete) - $17.47
• Vintage 1971 McDonalds Uniform ("AJ" embroidered on right pocket) - $110.00
• McDonalds "Five Years Service" pin - $6.00
• The Clash "Rock The Casbah" 45 RPM record - $25.00
• The Cars "Candy-O" 8 track cartridge - $10.00

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

You talk about your fortunes like killswitch does.

Go Team!

Uhhh...

My wife works 50-60 hours a week at well above most Union Scales and I spent the last year working 40-50 hours a week at a very healthy rate of pay, so go fuck yourself, we paid more than you.

You might want to talk to Adre, who can buy or sell me many times before breakfast, but like most Liberals celebrated the ACA because now his pre-existing condition could not break him, even though he's in the 1%. It didn't even phase him that the rest of us got our premiums raised in order to pay for him. He doesn't think taxes are high enough either; as pointed out earlier in the thread, most of you Democrats and Liberals assume higher taxes are going to fall on someone else.

Well, someone else is getting pissed.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Uhhh...

My wife works 50-60 hours a week at well above most Union Scales and I spent the last year working 40-50 hours a week at a very healthy rate of pay, so go fuck yourself, we paid more than you.

Who was homeschooling little Soon-Yi?

 

[girlsmiley]

Uhhh...

My wife works 50-60 hours a week at well above most Union Scales and I spent the last year working 40-50 hours a week at a very healthy rate of pay, so go fuck yourself, we paid more than you.

You might want to talk to Adre, who can buy or sell me many times before breakfast, but like most Liberals celebrated the ACA because now his pre-existing condition could not break him, even though he's in the 1%. It didn't even phase him that the rest of us got our premiums raised in order to pay for him. He doesn't think taxes are high enough either; as pointed out earlier in the thread, most of you Democrats and Liberals assume higher taxes are going to fall on someone else.

Well, someone else is getting pissed.

You take 1% off the cream. It'd be like taking 25% off the rest of the country.

Your country is nuts. Take the 1% off the cream. There's no need for that kind of wealth.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

You take 1% off the cream. It'd be like taking 25% off the rest of the country.

Your country is nuts. Take the 1% off the cream. There's no need for that kind of wealth.

I am not following you.

Need for wealth is a subjective valuation.

It takes pools of Capital to create even more wealth.

Wealth envy gets you only mediocrity, stagnation and poverty.

 

[girlsmiley]

I am not following you.

Need for wealth is a subjective valuation.

It takes pools of Capital to create even more wealth.

Wealth envy gets you only mediocrity, stagnation and poverty.

Subjective?

Mate, when you can afford to drop a $500 dollar bill with every step you take, you can afford a decrease.

For the good of a nation.

 

[girlsmiley]

Just like how pensioners can go without an increase.

For the good of a nation.

 

[Adre]

Uhhh...

My wife works 50-60 hours a week at well above most Union Scales and I spent the last year working 40-50 hours a week at a very healthy rate of pay, so go fuck yourself, we paid more than you.

You might want to talk to Adre, who can buy or sell me many times before breakfast, but like most Liberals celebrated the ACA because now his pre-existing condition could not break him, even though he's in the 1%. It didn't even phase him that the rest of us got our premiums raised in order to pay for him. He doesn't think taxes are high enough either; as pointed out earlier in the thread, most of you Democrats and Liberals assume higher taxes are going to fall on someone else.

Well, someone else is getting pissed.

Ah, good morning Leader of the Whine and Jeez contingent. Yes, I have paid my taxes for many years without crying about it. As you know, but seem to ignore, I have also paid my own health premiums for years rather than having them subsidized by other taxpayers by receiving them through an employer who gets to write that off. And I pay for them now through the exchange, even though hypocrites like you seem to think I should be penalized for having a condition that could make me uninsurable. I'm sure your whining cohort will be along soon to cheer you up.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Subjective?

Mate, when you can afford to drop a $500 dollar bill with every step you take, you can afford a decrease.

For the good of a nation.

Who can afford to drop a $500 bill with every step, because I want to follow them around for a while...



The good of the nation is the wealth of the nation and the wealth of the nation relies on Capital Accumulation for investment and expansion. If you want to seize and redistribute every pool of Capital that you can find then you are going to not only destroy the wealth of the nation, but you will bring great harm to the children and grandchildren of the nation just to placate the the misplaced and, frankly, economically uneducated wealth envy of the middle-aged children of the nation. As our adored Democrat President once reminded us, a rising tide lifts all boats.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Ah, good morning Leader of the Whine and Jeez contingent. Yes, I have paid my taxes for many years without crying about it. As you know, but seem to ignore, I have also paid my own health premiums for years rather than having them subsidized by other taxpayers by receiving them through an employer who gets to write that off. And I pay for them now through the exchange, even though hypocrites like you seem to think I should be penalized for having a condition that could make me uninsurable. I'm sure your whining cohort will be along soon to cheer you up.

You can afford it. You brag about how much wealth you have, and as such, you are making the point of the thread. As soon as you got out of your "tax obligation," you celebrated that you were able, by voting for Democrats, to push your costs on to the rest of us by raising our insurance premiums.

Are you ashamed to admit that you are a closet Republican?

 

[RobDownSouth]

Ah, good morning Leader of the Whine and Jeez contingent. Yes, I have paid my taxes for many years without crying about it. As you know, but seem to ignore, I have also paid my own health premiums for years rather than having them subsidized by other taxpayers by receiving them through an employer who gets to write that off. And I pay for them now through the exchange, even though hypocrites like you seem to think I should be penalized for having a condition that could make me uninsurable. I'm sure your whining cohort will be along soon to cheer you up.

Don't mind the Chief, he's obviously sufferin' from a classic case of wealth envy.

...lots of unemployed guys have that problem.

 

[Ishmael]

The truly wealthy are not 'punished' by an income tax system, they do not have 'income' in the conventional sense of the word. You only punish the up and coming wage slaves with such a system. If you want to really sock it to the wealthy you have to implement a tax based on net worth, and when you do that they flee the country and take their wealth with them (See France).

There are all sorts of perfectly legal means of protecting 'assets' (assets are what the truly wealthy have, not income). One of the companies I started was formed in a manner that was not tax friendly, ie. the infusion of capital came prior to the corporate formation and as such my stock immediately had value. The company purchased my stock for me in the form of a loan, and then forgave the loan which became a taxable event. Soooo, we then had the company pay the tax on the loan in the form of another loan which was also forgiven, another taxable event. I did have to pay that tax. I paid a percentage of a percentage, a mere pittance. That's how you protect assets.

Ishmael

 

[RobDownSouth]

You can afford it. You brag about how much wealth you have, and as such, you are making the point of the thread. As soon as you got out of your "tax obligation," you celebrated that you were able, by voting for Democrats, to push your costs on to the rest of us by raising our insurance premiums.

Are you ashamed to admit that you are a closet Republican?

Oh NOE! Raised insurance premiums! Teh horror.....