Presidential Race - Are We United?

[Phoenix 2]

So did bush and reagan not redistribute the wealth when they cut taxes for the top rate payers, you bet they did, but then bopper and a few others seem more concerned with making sure the already wealthy prosper than they are concerned for the welfare of their own family.

We are all paying more for state and local income and sales taxes because so much of each states share of federal taxes was cut, so as to ensure the wealthy got their tax cuts.

Guy's you have been conned, the biggest fear the republicans have is that the 30% of the people who support them but never receive any benefit from their policy's will some day pull their heads out of the sand and look at the reality.

Think its not true then explain why they always have to resort to dirty tricks to win, if they really had anything to offer the masses they could just lay out the facts and play it straight.

 

[wehjawhill]

I realized sometime ago you didn't comprehend some of the things I write. I'm not sure whose fault that is.

 

[68droptop]

So did bush and reagan not redistribute the wealth when they cut taxes for the top rate payers, you bet they did

So lowering people's taxes is redistribution of wealth. A tax cut...taking a smaller percentage of people's money from them... is the same as taking one persons money and giving it to another. And Obama understands how unfair it is to have tax cuts, when a lot of people don't even pay taxes and therefore don't get anything. People who don't pay taxes should get tax cuts too! We can call it a negative tax increase, or just a "check". I get it; from each according to his ability, to each according to his need...

A friend of mine in Florida sent me this:

Our tax system explained in terms of beer

A brilliant explanation of our tax system using actual percentages, the impact of a tax cut, and the public reaction that everyone should be able to understand.

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that's what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. 'Since you are all such good customers,' he said, 'I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.' Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes, so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men – the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?'

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so – The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings). The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 ( 22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings)..

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

'I only got a dollar out of the $20,'declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,' but he got $10!'

'Yeah, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth man. 'I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!'

'That's true!!' shouted the seventh man. 'Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!'

'Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in unison. 'We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!'

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier
​

 

[wehjawhill]

Phoenix 2, if you had your way we could take all the rich people's money and we could be like some of the countries in the Third World. They have few jobs, few of the normal things we have, water from rivers not purified, walk where ever they go and some of them still plow with a stick and an ox after 4000 years. Life expectancy of 40-50 years. I could go on forever but you know what I mean. No maybe you don't. Still want to get rid of those evil rich people? You want to trade with them? I have made a good living working at the kind of work I do in St Louis County and city and without those well to do people that wouldn't have been possible. Come to your senses and realize what you have. Stop waiting for your mommy government to make things easy for you by taking from others more ambitious than you.

So did bush and reagan not redistribute the wealth when they cut taxes for the top rate payers, you bet they did, but then bopper and a few others seem more concerned with making sure the already wealthy prosper than they are concerned for the welfare of their own family.

We are all paying more for state and local income and sales taxes because so much of each states share of federal taxes was cut, so as to ensure the wealthy got their tax cuts.

Guy's you have been conned, the biggest fear the republicans have is that the 30% of the people who support them but never receive any benefit from their policy's will some day pull their heads out of the sand and look at the reality.

Think its not true then explain why they always have to resort to dirty tricks to win, if they really had anything to offer the masses they could just lay out the facts and play it straight.

 

[Phoenix 2]

Weejawhill: you don't have a clue as to real world reality, you live in the space provided you by your keepers.

I don't mind paying for my own ticket and I don't even mind sometimes buying a ticket for someone else that doesn't have any money , but I'm tired of footing the bill for the wealthy.

 

[aceracing]

I would feel much better writing the check every month for ssi if it were going into the stock market. The plan was great, you did not have to put your ssi into it if you did not want to. You could be happy maybe getting back what you paid in and I would be happy getting a 5 to 10 percent return. Of course you libs would get jealous seeing me get more and demand "fairness".

just like they told us that if they make it a law to have auto insurance we would have lower rates we did Missouri a number of year back and my rates did not go down they went up. guess what I had insurance and a drunk driver hit me had the same insurance company as me he got a brand new truck I got the shaft . now tell me if i am better off hell if i would of had no insurance , I would have stood a better chance to get it to court.
now tell the private sector does a better job . they get the government to do this type of thing that the government could do better and the corporations screw the little guy.

 

[tstolze]

So, did you all hear Obama's '01 Chicago radio interview?


So, how do you Obama supporters explain this? Did he just not mean what he said, again? Or, is "Redistribution of Wealth for Social Justice" an honorable goal of yours?

So, did you listen to the interview, or just read the text? I listened and the text obviously said things that Obama didn't.

 

[bopper]

Unless of course your ssi is in the stock market when it goes boom. Like it is doing now. Forgive me for thinking this Bopper, but the statement that anything the government can do, the private sector does better really doesn't hold water. I think a more accurate statement is anything the government can do, the private sector would love to get into for the profit margins.

I lived through the privatization of the water, gas, electric and public transportation system in Britain. It wasn't pretty. All the utility bills tripled over the first two years, the companies that bought the utilities raked in obscene profits, many workers deemed excess to the bare minimum needed to get the job done were terminated, and the actual quality of every single service went down.

For a more relevant example to every resident in Illinois, what happened when the state relinquished regulation of the price of electricity? My bill tripled on one month. How soon people forget.

The ONLY thing that privatizing government run programs or entities does is make them cash cows for investors. It doesn't do a single thing for the consumer of those services, apart from drive prices up and quality down.

You cannot even begin to debate this with me, because I have already LIVED it. And I would not recommend it to anyone. People seem to think I talk based on what the tv or news media report. I don't. I lived through a lot of similar changes proposed by our lovely Republican lawmakers already, and believe me, it didn't make the country I was living in better.

As one politician put it after the sell off and privatizing of state run institutions in Britain put it, Maggie Thatcher knew the price of everything, and the value of NOTHING. She will go down in British history as the Prime Minister who destroyed more than she ever built.

I keep seeing these dire warning about Obama being the worst thing that could possibly happen, and we all better act before it's too late. Believe me, those words could not ring truer about McCain. I sincerely hope this country takes advantage of the opportunity to get these people out and in a position of no influence before it really is too late and they turn our country into a sweatshop nation.

......................................................The problem I see here is no competition. If you have no competition you have to have higher government regulation. The easier government makes entry in to business the more competition you will have. Insurance is a great example. Me and 8 or 10 of my buddies looked in to self insurance. We were going to start our own insurance pool. It would have been easy for us to just pool the money and come out way ahead. After we talked to a lawyer the goverment hoops we had to jump thru stopped us from making the deal work. Thus once again government is the problem not the solution. We stood to save a great deal of money on this idea as we all are very low risk people insurance wise. One of the reasons insurance is so high is because the companies are to large and clumsy. They are very inclined to waste and fraud....................Electric companies also do not have enuff competition. I am working on putting my own generator to run my motel and gas station. The electric company charges me 13 cents per kilowatt and wants to give me 4 cents for any extra I generate.................................Water bills are so high because the government requires an engineer firm to research every little project a town wants to do. Many times the engineer bill is higher than the actual project cost. There is no common sense in goverment. My uncle worked for the village of Pocahontas and wanted to replace a very small bridge. He said he could put a large concrete pipe in and redo the road in 3 to 4 days.........to easy, he had to get an engineer firm to study it. 2 years later and 15 times the cost we had a new bridge. Every body should work a time and material road job to see some real goverment waste. I did make some great money on that one. The list goes on and on.

 

[t.nie]

Bopper, just out of curiosity, how much was your electricity bill when the state cap was lifted on the electricity companies? Going by what you stated you pay, and comparing that to the tripling of my bill when that cap was lifted, if you were paying at the same rate I was, you would be paying 39 cents a kilowatt and 3 cents for every additional one. Now play that out in your business, and tell me you wouldn't feel the pinch fast.

Like I said before, my experience of watching government sell off state run entities to the private sector certainly didn't lower the cost of anything, all it did was cause everyone's bills to go up 3 and 4 fold within months. Profit is ALL it's about in the private sector, so you can flat forget any reduction in costs or improvement in a damn thing the government does now by moving it out of the government's control and into private hands.

By the way, who built the bridge in the end? Did the state go with your uncle's plan in the end, or did they get someone else in to do it?

 

[t.nie]

Phoenix 2, if you had your way we could take all the rich people's money and we could be like some of the countries in the Third World. They have few jobs, few of the normal things we have, water from rivers not purified, walk where ever they go and some of them still plow with a stick and an ox after 4000 years. Life expectancy of 40-50 years. I could go on forever but you know what I mean. No maybe you don't. Still want to get rid of those evil rich people? You want to trade with them? I have made a good living working at the kind of work I do in St Louis County and city and without those well to do people that wouldn't have been possible. Come to your senses and realize what you have. Stop waiting for your mommy government to make things easy for you by taking from others more ambitious than you.

Funny, Dirt Hound posted a link to the World Unemployment figures earlier in this thread. Many of those third world nations have lower unemployment than we do. Grass huts and all....

 

[dirt hound]

how do you they are grass huts plus duh I guess they would have lowwere unemployment rate less people geesh egads holy cow do you know away to to lower the unen ployment rate CLOSE THE BORDERS TO ILLEGALS

 

[81128]

First of all, t.nie, Joe the Plumber (geesh, I'm sooo sick of that name!) could have told the media to get out of his yard while holding a shotgun and you know as well as I that they wouldn't have budged! They aren't going to back down without getting their "scoop"! And that alone is a whole other thread.

Second, as for the unemployment rate in the third world countries...well no crap they are lower!!! Wouldn't take a genius to figure out why. They HAVE to work for food and supplies. They know the government is not going to just HAND them what they want or need. They aren't spoiled. They were taught to work for what they want and need. They don't HAVE to have all they crap that Americans HAVE to have to be happy. And yes, I already know that you are going to say "but they AREN'T happy!" Well, I would be willing to bet that most of them are truely happier that most of the money hungry, spoiled brats in America! And as far as our "poverty level" goes, do you realize that "poverty" in America means that we only have one TV in our home, one used vehicle in our drive...

 

[bopper]

Bopper, just out of curiosity, how much was your electricity bill when the state cap was lifted on the electricity companies? Going by what you stated you pay, and comparing that to the tripling of my bill when that cap was lifted, if you were paying at the same rate I was, you would be paying 39 cents a kilowatt and 3 cents for every additional one. Now play that out in your business, and tell me you wouldn't feel the pinch fast.

Like I said before, my experience of watching government sell off state run entities to the private sector certainly didn't lower the cost of anything, all it did was cause everyone's bills to go up 3 and 4 fold within months. Profit is ALL it's about in the private sector, so you can flat forget any reduction in costs or improvement in a damn thing the government does now by moving it out of the government's control and into private hands.

By the way, who built the bridge in the end? Did the state go with your uncle's plan in the end, or did they get someone else in to do it?

.......................electricity is hard to get competition in, I think they need some one to own the grid and at least 2 or 3 different sources of power. Right now they have the inefficientness of government and the profit taking of business which is bad combination................................my bill probably averages $3500 per month and almost doubled in the last 2 years...............................I seem to recall that someone else did the job on the bridge. I will have to ask him for the details I remember most about it is him being mad about it. He is one of a very few govt workers that actually care about the taxpayer.

 

[t.nie]

I'm sure their definition of wealthy isn't a well funded public school sized 160 room mansion, indoor/outdoor heated olympic sized swimming pools, a fleet of cars, tennis courts, spas, hot tubs, a staff to wait on them hand and foot, a private jet or two complete with 24 hour aircrews on call, chauffeurs, million dollar country club memberships, etc either.

 

[bopper]

I'm sure their definition of wealthy isn't a well funded public school sized 160 room mansion, indoor/outdoor heated olympic sized swimming pools, a fleet of cars, tennis courts, spas, hot tubs, a staff to wait on them hand and foot, a private jet or two complete with 24 hour aircrews on call, chauffeurs, million dollar country club memberships, etc either.

...................................................................Why are liberals so jealous of that stuff? Look at all the jobs created from your short paragraph. The economic engine is not a zero sum game, wealth creates wealth. Look at south africa since they went socialist. That country was a thriving wealthy country now it is a mess of people that can't even grow crops to feed themselves.

 

[t.nie]

Who says I am jealous? I was just posting that so that there would be, in addition to the comparison of poor Americans and the poorest of the poor in the world, a comparison of what our richest enjoy as well. All I was saying was that in third world nations, poor is starving in a grass hut, but rich might be a car and a tv in your home and food on your table. If you are going to start comparing people at the bottom in our country to other countries, then make the comparison at the top, too.

Why is it that whenever someone comments on extravagant wealth, the right always accuses them of jealousy?

Give me a list of the jobs that person creates, Bopper. I want to see what you are thinking in terms of job creation based on that list.

 

[Phoenix 2]

Its not that anyone is jealous of those more wealthy, its that we are tired of playing in a card game where the deck is stacked.

This post started out tied to a racing theme, and since most of us are racing fans, doesn't everyone agree that a level playing field provides for better racing.

In that same vain a level playing field provides everyone a chance for a better life.

Just recently this country reached the point that statistically a child born today into a lower economic enviroment has only a 10% chance of ever rising above that level.

This trickle down concept has created a world where instead of providing opportunity for advancement it has created hopelessness and a class system whereas where ever you are born is where you stay.

 

[bopper]

Who says I am jealous? I was just posting that so that there would be, in addition to the comparison of poor Americans and the poorest of the poor in the world, a comparison of what our richest enjoy as well. All I was saying was that in third world nations, poor is starving in a grass hut, but rich might be a car and a tv in your home and food on your table. If you are going to start comparing people at the bottom in our country to other countries, then make the comparison at the top, too.

Why is it that whenever someone comments on extravagant wealth, the right always accuses them of jealousy?

Give me a list of the jobs that person creates, Bopper. I want to see what you are thinking in terms of job creation based on that list.

.........................................
The pilot, butler, maid, some one built the house pool etc,...................I read that as a bad thing that some people are very wealthy instead of a comparison, my fault for misreading.

 

[bopper]

Its not that anyone is jealous of those more wealthy, its that we are tired of playing in a card game where the deck is stacked.

This post started out tied to a racing theme, and since most of us are racing fans, doesn't everyone agree that a level playing field provides for better racing.

In that same vain a level playing field provides everyone a chance for a better life.

Just recently this country reached the point that statistically a child born today into a lower economic enviroment has only a 10% chance of ever rising above that level.

This trickle down concept has created a world where instead of providing opportunity for advancement it has created hopelessness and a class system whereas where ever you are born is where you stay.

.............................very well written post, I think everyone thinks from their own perspective. I was raised very poor although I did not know it because nobody told me. I am glad they didn't because I may have been bitter. I was off and on raised by my grandmother who is a diehard democrat. She had no running water in her house until I was in high school. She raised 9 kids there also by herself. I just think that if I can succeed that anyone that wants to can also. My parents did not care if I did well in school or not but for some reason I did and went on to college. They did not pay 1 dime for my college and I never qualified for any grants but I worked my way thru until I ended up buying the gas station that I worked at. I never completed college but I took courses that applied to what I wanted to do. I did a little too much partying also! I believe in this country without government intervention ANYONE can succeed. High government intervention and barriers to entry of business drives up costs and makes it harder for the "little guy" to succeed. I once read a very convincing article that shows democrats are much more for big business than republicans because it is easier for them to control and get donations from big business than small business like me.

 

[t.nie]

.........................................
The pilot, butler, maid, some one built the house pool etc,...................I read that as a bad thing that some people are very wealthy instead of a comparison, my fault for misreading.

No problem, I didn't make it clear what I was referring to either.

My point with the job creation question is just how many jobs can one wealthy person create through their personal spending? Not how many jobs do the corporations they lead, etc, create, but how many jobs does 1 billionaire create through personal purchases? And the answer you gave pretty much illustrates my point, and that is a very limited amount.

What I am driving at is one wealthy person building one mansion, does not equal the amount of jobs 100,000 middle class people building smaller new homes will. Not by any stretch of the imagination can one billionaire employ that many people through their personal purchases.

This is why I think that concentrating ever larger amounts of wealth within a very small group of people does nothing for the rest of the country. The middle class needs money to buy stuff, and they will buy more and more stuff the more money they have. And no billionaire in the world can consume as much in a lifetime as 100,000 middle class families will in a year. So when you hear Obama talking redistribution of wealth, he isn't arguing that we take from the rich and give millions of dollars in freebies to the poor, he is arguing that middle class America needs more money in our pockets to fuel the entire economy, rather than just a few billionaires to fuel the economy.

Bopper, I would bet that at your business you have predominantly middle class customers. So would it not make sense that you would enjoy more business if they had more money to spend?

And another thing, when I am referring to the wealthy Bopper, I ain't referring to you. You may be doing just fine, and I believe you have done well for yourself, know you work hard and use your head and have common sense when it comes to your business. But you do not fit in the category of affluent in our nation by any means. So don't ever think I am saying you should be paying more in taxes, because you are really not in that upper stratosphere of the super rich who need to be putting a little more back into the system rather than just taking everything out year in and year out.