What happens when we tax the rich.

[Admiral Rockwell Tory]

Most of the economy is unnecessary 'make work' just to keep people busy. Do we really need deodorants for our vehicles?

If you don't have one in your vehicle, you probably should. Most are made in China anyway.

 

[Admiral Rockwell Tory]

The trouble with the rich and the tax code is that the tax on wealth is low or non-existent, while the tax on income is high. Those who's labor provides their income are hit with the highest tax rates.

I prefer no tax on wealth at all and that all actual income be taxed equally, regardless of where the money comes from. I'm for a single tax rate but let's not discriminate one source of money over any other. If we've to level the field, it should be level in all regards.

For example, the federal tax liability should be no less for a person inheriting $90,000 than for somebody who has labored to earn $90,000. A tax base universally broad and wide provides the ability for the lowest tax rate needed for federal revenue.

Wrong. Wrong. wrong. Thank you for your input, Comrade!

 

[Woodznutz]

WTF? Do you not have kids? I suppose if you don't think attending to their education is important, my pragmatic response is so they can get jobs and buy houses and not sponge off me their entire lives. I have already decided what I am going to do with one of their rooms----a dry sauna---but I gotta get em out first.

I would (have) helped my kids through trade school if they went that way but college? Who can afford that?

 

[Woodznutz]

What happens when we shift the tax burden more onto poor and middle class people?

Did you know Trump made $1 billion dollars since January? You're worrying about him?

household debt, mortgage balances and credit card balances rose by $185 billion, $131 billion and $27 billion, respectively, in the second quarter of 2025.

Most people aren't in the financial stratosphere that Trump is.

 

[Woodznutz]

Money Talks, and That's All We Hear

If we tax away large inheritances, even the rich won't have to pay taxes. How can they mind paying taxes if they're dead? Don't be afraid of ghosts.

Quit this self-refuting reliance on strawmen by pretending that taxes only benefit people who don't work.

Taxes greatly benefit people who don't work.

 

[Woodznutz]

Owners Aren't Earners

Employees create the value of the investment. Profit is a tax on what employees produce. Those who bake the cake only get to eat the crumbs.

People don't become bakers to get rich. We used to hang out after school at a "Spudnut", coffee and donut shop. There were two employees, the owner and his mother.

 

[Woodznutz]

Workoholic penny-pinching zombies like that become bitter and dangerous freaks

Or they grow their business and become very successful. However, most business fail within five years anyway.

 

[Care4all]

Money is taken from people that produce goods, services, and employment and is given to people who don't.

The rich are NOT the people who produce goods....the laborers are the people who produce goods....and if the rich as you call them, paid those workers who produce for them a profit thru their excess from their own labor... more money and cover their once near full healthcare insurance benefit, or raise their incomes so they don't need govt assistance to survive or to make it to middle class, then govt assistance programs would NOT be needed for the working class, as it is now.

 

[Woodznutz]

The rich are NOT the people who produce goods....the laborers are the people who produce goods....and if the rich as you call them, paid those workers who produce for them a profit thru their excess from their own labor... more money and cover their once near full healthcare insurance benefit, or raise their incomes so they don't need govt assistance to survive or to make it to middle class, then govt assistance programs would NOT be needed for the working class, as it is now.

That's not how it works.

 

[task0778]

The rich are NOT the people who produce goods....the laborers are the people who produce goods....and if the rich as you call them, paid those workers who produce for them a profit thru their excess from their own labor... more and cover their once near full healthcare insurance benefit, or raise their incomes so they don't need govt assistance to survive or to make it to middle class, then govt assistance programs would NOT be needed for the working class, as it is now.

The problem with this is that the rich create the businesses that employ people who produce goods and services. They invest in startups and expansions, right? That doesn't happen if rich people don't put up the money in the beginning of the enterprise. No rich people investing => no jobs.

When a business goes bust, who pays the price for that? Mostly it's the rich guys who invested their money and got little or no return. You only look at the success stories without considering the losses.

Interesting question: if people are willing to work for 'X' compensation, then why should a business pay more than 'X'? Answer is, they don't. But you know what happens? That business becomes super profitable and that attracts new businesses to get into that particular sector of the marketplace. The end result is that more jobs are created.

You know what happens when another rich person is created? You have another investor who wants to increase his/her wealth and they want to invest in something that'll do that. But higher labor costs kinda puts a damper on it, risk goes up for failure and reward goes down in terms of profit.

So yeah, it'd be great if we all made a ton of money and everything was equal or close to it. But guess what, that ain't reality. If you want new innovations and inventions, as a society you gotta pay for it. Investors have to take risks for that to happen, and that means the profit motive has to be robust.

I know, things ain't perfect and there is plenty of inequality and injustice out there. But I think when you go after the rich too much, you are in effect strangling the golden goose.

 

[my2¢]

I believe in treating all taxpayers the same. The main problem with the system is that people equate income and wealth, while the system treats the two entirely different. And those who don't see which side has more control over the 4,000 pages of U.S. tax code are blind.

 

[sealybobo]

Money is taken from people that produce goods, services, and employment and is given to people who don't.

What happens when we tax the rich?

After the Republican Great Depression, FDR put this nation back to work, in part by raising taxes on income above $3 to $4 million a year (in today’s dollars) to 91 percent, and corporate taxes to over 50% of profits. The revenue from those income taxes built dams, roads, bridges, sewers, water systems, schools, hospitals, train stations, railways, an interstate highway system, and airports. It educated a generation returning from World War II. It acted as a cap on the rare but occasional obsessively greedy person taking so much out of the economy that it impoverished the rest of us.

JFK pushed through that tax increase to take us back toward FDR/Truman/Eisenhower revenue levels, and we continued to build infrastructure in the US, and even put men on the moon. Health care and college were cheap and widely available. Working people could raise a family and have security in their old age. Every billion dollars invested in infrastructure in America created 47,000 good-paying jobs as Americans built America.

But the rich fought back, and won big-time in 1980 with Reagan.

Reagan promptly cut income taxes on the very rich from 70% down to 27%. Corporate tax rates were also cut so severely that they went from representing over 33% of total federal tax receipts in 1951 to less than 9% in 1983

The result was devastating. Our government was suddenly so badly awash in red ink that Reagan doubled the tax paid only by people earning less than $40,000/year (FICA), and then began borrowing from the huge surplus this new tax was accumulating in the Social Security Trust Fund. Even with that, Reagan had to borrow more money in his 8 years than the sum total of all presidents from George Washington to Jimmy Carter combined.

In addition to badly throwing the nation into debt, Reagan’s tax cut blew out the ceiling on the accumulation of wealth, leading to a new Gilded Age and the rise of a generation of super-wealthy that hadn’t been seen since the Robber Baron era of the 1890s or the Roaring 20s.

And, most tragically, Reagan’s tax cuts caused America to stop investing in infrastructure.

In the years since then, mind-boggling wealth has risen among fewer than 20,000 people in America (the top 0.01 percent of wage-earners), but their influence has been tremendous. They finance “conservative” think tanks (think Joseph Coors and the Heritage Foundation), change public opinion (Walton heirs funding a covert effort to change the “estate tax” to the “death tax”), lobby congress and the president (who calls the “haves and the have-more’s” his “base”), and work to strip down public institutions.

The middle class is being replaced by the working poor. American infrastructure built with tax revenues during the 1934-1981 is now crumbling and disintegrating. Hospitals and highways and power and water systems have been corporatized. People are dying.

And Bush, following closely in Reagan’s footsteps, is making things worse. As Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out at recent hearings for the confirmation of Bush’s new nominee for the Office of Management and Budget:

Since Bush has been president:

• over 5 million people have slipped into poverty;
• nearly 7 million Americans have lost their health insurance;
• median household income has gone down by nearly $1,300;
• three million manufacturing jobs have been lost;
• three million American workers have lost their pensions;
• home foreclosures are now the highest on record;
• the personal savings rate is below zero - which hasn’t happened since the great depression;
• the real earnings of college graduates have gone down by about 5% in the last few years;
• entry level wages for male and female high school graduates have fallen by over 3%;
• wages and salaries are now at the lowest share of GDP since 1929.

The debate about whether or not to roll Bush’s tax cuts back to Clinton’s modest mid-30% rates is absurd. It’s time to roll back the horribly failed experiment of the Reagan tax cuts. And use that money to pay down Reagan’s debt and rebuild this nation.

Roll Back the Reagan Tax Cuts | Common Dreams

Our bridges are falling apart (among other things), and its Ronald Reagan's fault. A few hours before the bridge collapsed in Minnesota, a news release landed (among hundreds) in my email inbox. It was from the right-wing "Heartland Institute" and a Minnesota conservative group calling itself...

www.commondreams.org

 

[Care4all]

The problem with this is that the rich create the businesses that employ people who produce goods and services. They invest in startups and expansions, right? That doesn't happen if rich people don't put up the money in the beginning of the enterprise. No rich people investing => no jobs.

But for a second, go back to square one....how did we pay for things we needed in a community or in our individual lives, when coin money was not created until around 600BCE? We bartered and traded labor or the fruits(goods) of our excess labor. The land's resources were ours, to gather and reap from ...with our hard labor, and if you help me to build my wood house, I'll help you make the bricks for your masonry house kind of thing. No money involved....for thousands of years!

Even when bartering lead to trading, money didn't exist but commodities were used as a kind of value for building up wealth...for example salt was a greatly needed commodity back then to preserve food, so when you had more trees and wood cut through your own labor than you needed, you would trade it to a guy in town that needed cut wood, and he would trade for it with salt that he had accumulated or even mined himself, and later workers were paid in salt for their labor, and the word salary, is derived from the word salt I've read....

Where man began to become rich at the beginning was laboring hard, and producing more from their own labor or bartered labor than they needed to provide for themselves, like wood for fires or fish or deer needed to feed family or whether it be finding some good trees in a forest, or digging in a great spot for the red clay for bricks etc.in barter for their other family survival needs.

But their excess gain from their own labor...is what made them rich.... The connection between very hard labor of ones own doing... and being rich, was DEEPLY connected.

The rich didn't shit on the laborer because they themselves were the hard working laborer... Imo.

In the case of which came first, the chicken or the egg? The laborer came first in this case, and labor is superior to Capital....money.

Even today, our pay is held for a week or two before the owner or business pays you for your labor while you are producing each day, what he sells at minimum, that which pays for your hours worked along with the cost of materials, and hopefully more in the business's mind...long before you get your first paycheck...

And even the people they pay for the materials to make the goods produced, they negotiate what is called 'dating', which basically work on the payment terms the businesses have, before they have to pay for the materials they just bought....it's usually worked to 30 to 60 days after receipt, in a good negotiated deal for the payment terms by the business....

So it reaches a point where the healthy business is never using their own money to keep the business going....the worker doing the labor and not being paid for another week or two for it, and the materials not being paid until a month after receipt which are used in making things that are usually already sold to retailers and they are simply producing what is fulfilling orders....the littlest of risk as possible with their money is their goal...at least it was for the few corporations I have worked for....

Sorry for the long drawn out response, but basically, I disagree that capital is more important than labor, and I agree with Abraham Lincoln that labor is superior to capital...a laborer made the capitalist their capital...without them, they would have never accumulated capital off their worker's laboring backs....imo.

All I'm saying to the capitalist is share a little bit more of what the worker produces for you in gains...(in pure profit and already accounting for risk) with them instead of keeping it all to themselves, or all the upper echelon and CEOs in corporate management...

 

[Woodznutz]

After the Republican Great Depression, FDR put this nation back to work, in part by raising taxes on income above $3 to $4 million a year (in today’s dollars) to 91 percent, and corporate taxes to over 50% of profits. The revenue from those income taxes built dams, roads, bridges, sewers, water systems, schools, hospitals, train stations, railways, an interstate highway system, and airports. It educated a generation returning from World War II. It acted as a cap on the rare but occasional obsessively greedy person taking so much out of the economy that it impoverished the rest of us.

Just from taxes from the rich? I don't think so.

JFK pushed through that tax increase to take us back toward FDR/Truman/Eisenhower revenue levels, and we continued to build infrastructure in the US, and even put men on the moon. Health care and college were cheap and widely available. Working people could raise a family and have security in their old age. Every billion dollars invested in infrastructure in America created 47,000 good-paying jobs as Americans built America.

JFK fought for lower taxes across the board, which happened after his death. The economy flourished.

FDR's "New Deal" was complicated. Lot's of money was borrowed. Guess who bought the federal notes, the rich. So, the rich helped end the depression by buying federal notes.

They also likely turned in the most gold, which put $Billions (in today's money) into the economy in fiat Federal Reserve Notes.

The jury is still out on the New Deal, as it morphed into Fed borrowing for the war, borrowing that literally created a new economy out of thin air (read, more borrowing).

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

They add the extra tax cost to the product/services they provide and/or cut costs by reducing staff's hours etc..

Command Economy by Plutocratic Parasites

When they get a tax cut, do they lower prices? What happened to consumers' demand determining prices? Why do people choose these lying Scrooges as their father figures?

 

[task0778]

Sorry for the long drawn out response, but basically, I disagree that capital is more important than labor, and I agree with Abraham Lincoln that labor is superior to capital...a laborer made the capitalist their capital...without them, they would have never accumulated capital off their worker's laboring backs....imo.

These days you gotta have capital or you don't have a business. I didn't mean to say that capital is more important; these days we see computerization and automation reducing the value of human labor, but the capital requirement is still there. For startups and expansions but also to stay in business, cuz if the business isn't profitable enough or even loses money then the business does not survive. I don't think it matters what used to be, this is pretty much the way it is now.

All I'm saying to the capitalist is share a little bit more of what the worker produces for you in gains...(in pure profit and already accounting for risk) with them instead of keeping it all to themselves, or all the upper echelon and CEOs in corporate management...

Point taken, BUT - what happens during the lean years when the business isn't making much of a profit or none at all. You still gotta pay the workers and other expenses when times are tough, so why shouldn't the owners and investors reap bigger profits when times are good? If you raise taxes or increase regs that cost more to implement and follow then you are going to squeeze more businesses to close.

I think businesses that do not share the wealth or enough of it will eventually pay the price in terms of inexperienced and valuable workers that leave the company for another job that pays better. Highly profitable enterprises generally attract competition, which can lure away your employees if you're not doing right by them. And that goes for the management people as much as the workers.

It's hard for me to feel that bad for the worker bees that don't take the necessary steps to make themselves more valuable to employers. For sure there are inequities, some of which is truly deplorable but sometimes the work being done doesn't justify a higher wage no matter what the bigwigs are paid. Experience means something, and a smart business will pay enough to keep their best workers and if they don't then they'll lose good people and subsequently pay a price for that.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

I would (have) helped my kids through trade school if they went that way but college? Who can afford that?

Cut Them Off at Age 18 and They'll Be NPCs

The Eweniversity has always been designed specifically for the RichKid Reich. They are the wolves pretending to be student sheep.

It's even been recognized that, because other students have to do menial jobs to pay for room and board, only the Preppy Progressives have the time to run student groups and determine the agenda.

 

[citygator]

Money is taken from people that produce goods, services, and employment and is given to people who don't.

Thank you for your concern. I saved so much in taxes under Trump I bought a beach house last term. I am thinking mountain home this term.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

Taxes greatly benefit people who don't work.

Fraternity Swap

Preppies don't work; they rule, sitting on their pampered asses at the top. Quit listening to their lies that they are the opposite of Statists.

After the French Revolution threatened their extermination, they split into two groups with opposite ideas on how to ensure the survival of Birth Class Supremacy. They own the entire Left and the entire Right. Notice that Communist Party membership is always hereditary, proving what the Marxist worldview really is and where it came from.

 

[The Sage of Main Street]

People don't become bakers to get rich.

They become bakers to make the idle rich richer