pal_of_poor
VIP Member
- Aug 14, 2009
- 193
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" I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it."
-- Benjamin Franklin, November 1776
Just maybe, if the poor were taxed more heavily than the wealthy, it would encourage them to better their position in life so that they could avoid paying so much in taxes.
The government frequently taxes things to discourage it. Things like tobacco and alcohol come to mind. The cap and trade will be a tax to discourage certain types of energy usage the government doesn't want.
Because, of course, people choose to be poor, right? We all know people get jobs, and their boss says, hey, I'll pay you fifteen dollars an hour, then those damn poor folks say, No, NO, please, don't pay me so much. I want to be poor, so how about minimum wage, yea, that's all I want. I want to be poor, it's my choice.
I so get a kick out of people who think poor people choose to be poor. I don't know how one develops that kind of delusion, but I've always suspected that it has something to do with making themselves and their conscience easier to cope with.
I might add that taxing the poor would in this bad economy, be a final straw, because unlike the tax cuts for the richest who've already accumulated more wealth in the last 30 years than since just before the last Great Depression, the poor spend every bit of their income after taxes. If you slap a tax on soft drinks, then you take money right from the pockets of people who actually spend it, thus helping the economy.
If there were 300 million jobs out there that had CEO pay, then your point may be valid. But no matter how well trained, if we have jobs out there that pay so little as to create a huge segment of poverty (13.2 percent), and one-sixth of the country with no insurance, then we will always have poor people, because we've designed the system that way, because the rich bribe the congress and president, though republicans tend to not need to be bribed.