SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - Here come the Democratic Taxes

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Im just copy and pasteing my second post here really.....

I think you are wrong Sea Demon.
In an enviroment where everyone is competative, not everyone can be a winner,
even if everyone is equaly as good.

If every person in the world worked as hard as he/she could you would not end up with
everyone being a millionaire. You would still need the same amount of people scraping
s*** of the floor of the public conveniences.

The way to get more money is not to work hard; this is evident when you compare the
work loads of the rich and poor. The way to get rich is to control the means of
production whilst exploiting the workforce and both exploiting and manipulating the
consumers.

Those who actually work hard tend to be in the lower social and economic groups and
have a tendency to die young of industrial related illness.

It is quite clearly exploitation and manipulation of others that gets money, not hard
work.
In Europe, the rise of unions and strict control of enterprise via regulation, tax and
fines as well as compulsory competition has attempted to both restrict the explotive and manipulative
power of corporations and counter it by allowing the customer and employee to
manipulate the cooperation to some extent.
Both business and personal, tax plays a vital role in this; both the extraction and
allocation of those tax funds.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Letum

It's not a case of a few people imposing morality on the rest because it is what has
been voted for by the majority in every social democracy in Europe.
Granted, that's a imposition by oligarchy, but that's democracy for you.

I can't and won't argue with that, and I'm not implying that people can't use their government for good purposes. While in America I feel that things like government-instituted health care are better kept at the lower State levels (I hear Hawaii's is very good) and don't want to see it at the Federal level, I agree that something can and should be done.

Here in Utah the main services are privately run (the Catholic church, believe it or not, is the main provider for the homeless [trust me on this one]).

I said taxes are necessary, but they're still evil. The opposite is also true: taxes may be evil, but they are still necessary. I just believe that if someone doesn't want to help, you have no right to force him to. If you can do that, try all you want to convince yourself, but you have no freedom. At all.

To Letum - I have yet to personally know a wealthy person (And there are a ton in my family and their friends) that doesn't put in massively long days and works their skin to the bone. That is how they got wealthy in the first place. Show me a CEO that doesn't work 12+ hours a day.

Rich people however are not wealthy people. They inherited their riches and will someday turn poor given they don't work to stay rich. So basically, your argument has a friggen big hole in it.

The point is, you simplify what is not simple and that is simply not possible. People do not get wealthy sitting on their *ss like you describe. Maybe in a communist nation they do, but not in America. You get out what you put in here. That is why everyone wants to come to this country.

http://forum.osnn.net/avatars/avatar3998_13.gif

-S

Quote:

Originally Posted by waste gate

Hillary Quote

What will a Hillary Presidency be like?

“We just can’t trust the American people to make those types of choices…Government has to make those choices for people” ~Hillary Clinton

If that doesn’t give you a good idea, this quote may help…

“Many of you are well enough off that … the tax cuts may have helped you … We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good. ~Explaining her opposition to President Bush’s tax cut in San Francisco (28 June 2004)

1 It has nothing to do with this tax topic.

2 It's hearsay , Rep. Dennis Hastert.

3 It's just one line out of a long quote. :down:

Disclaimer: I am not a Hilary Clinton adept.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DeepIron

Quote:

“We just can’t trust the American people to make those types of choices…Government has to make those choices for people”

I would think that is true now more than ever. Mr and Mrs Average Knucklehead are more interested in who got flushed off "Dancing with the Stars" than hearing candidates in a political debate. The media will take their slant and focus on whatever dirt gets them better ratings.

C'mon, Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton get more attention from the media and American public than Clinton, Obama or any other political hopeful.

Don't believe me? Stand around the water cooler sometime and just listen to what people are discussing... betcha it ain't politics bubba...

And you want the public to make "informed decisions"? :rotfl:

Read this. :smug:

Quote:

I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who's seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career.

And he often writes to me in response to something I might've written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether or not, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done and just how bad it might all be.
His response: It is not bad at all. It's absolutely horrifying.
My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.
Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don't spend enough time outdoors and don't get any real exercise and therefore can't, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new.
No, my friend takes it all a full step — or rather, leap — further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.
We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.
It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.
Now, you may think he's merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It's a bit like the melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there's been alarmist data about it for years, but until you see it for yourself, the deep visceral dread doesn't really hit home.
He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High. As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it."
But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it.
It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.
It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It's not the kids' fault. They're merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.
Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens.
Hell, why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws telling them that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo Burrito and be glad we don't arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.
This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism. For one thing, I've argued generational relativity in this space before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more dangerous than they've ever been, and that maybe some of the problem is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current generation absolutely convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just the way it always seems.
I also point out how, despite all the evidence of total public-education meltdown, I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about teens and youth movements and actions that impress the hell out of me. Damn kids made the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes. Revolutionized media. Broke all the rules. Still are.
Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?
My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America — and many more who aren't — now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace?
As for the rest, well, the dystopian evidence seems overwhelming indeed, to the point where it might be no stretch at all to say the biggest threat facing America is perhaps not global warming, not perpetual warmongering, not garbage food or low-level radiation or way too much Lindsay Lohan, but a populace far too ignorant to know how to properly manage any of it, much less change it all for the better. What, too fatalistic? Don't worry. Soon enough, no one will know what the word even means.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...otes102407.DTL

Quote:

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

I can post as many examples of poor people working to death for rich employers who
are not. Including a few relations of mine.
For the best examples see England before the late and post Victorian social reforms.
It is ridiculous to argue that wealth is a product of hard work.
In many cases hard work may be necessary for wealth, but that is very different.

In short:
It is totally impossible for everyone to achieve wealth through hard work in a system
where the means of production or service are, to all intents and purposes, owned by
a minority in a competitive system.

This isn't in it's self a bad thing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve

I said taxes are necessary, but they're still evil.

I can see the logic you have got there....

1) Taxes take money away from people.
2) Taking money away from people is evil.
3) Therefore tax is evil.

and

1) Taxes pay for [military/government/roads/whatever else].
2) [military/government/roads/whatever else] is necessary.
3) Tax is therefore necessary.

Conclusion: taxes are necessary, but evil.

That all makes sense.
"Taxes are bad, but they do good."

That would lead us to conclude that there is a balancing act to be made. At some point
the bad that taxes do will be equal to the good that they do and that is the point where
taxation should stop.

I don't disagree, but it still leaves the amount of taxation as more or less subjective
and I suspect it is the location of the point where the good outweighs the bad that we
disagree upon.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Letum

"Taxes are bad, but they do good."

That would lead us to conclude that there is a balancing act to be made.

The problem over here is that tax dollars are often used to buy votes and create goverenment dependancy. I suspect it may be similar over there unfortunately.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sea Demon

Quote:

Originally Posted by Letum

"Taxes are bad, but they do good."

That would lead us to conclude that there is a balancing act to be made.

The problem over here is that tax dollars are often used to buy votes and create government dependency. I suspect it may be similar over there unfortunately.

Well, you cant use tax...err...pounds to fun your election bid.
The money from that has to come from either the party's funds or personal funds.
A lot of the money comes from large private donations. Recently this has caused
contrivers because some of the benefactor's have got titles after a donation.

The indirect route to buy voters with tax is to sedgiest that those reviving money
might receive more. However, as those receiving are in a huge minority to tax payers;
this would be political suicide.

As far as government dependency goes, there are plenty of people dependant on the
government for food and housing as a result of high local unemployment, illness,
disability or full time dependants (.etc).
There is a logic to saying that if these people could not get help, then less of them
would end up in a situation where they needed help. (Clearly this does not apply to
all of them).
However, in practice the number of ill, unemployed and/or people with full-time dependants
(etc.) shows no good collection to the amount of social welfare projects when different
countries are compared.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Letum

I can see the logic you have got there....

1) Taxes take money away from people.
2) Taking money away from people is evil.
3) Therefore tax is evil.

and

1) Taxes pay for [military/government/roads/whatever else].
2) [military/government/roads/whatever else] is necessary.
3) Tax is therefore necessary.

Conclusion: taxes are necessary, but evil.

That all makes sense.
"Taxes are bad, but they do good."

That would lead us to conclude that there is a balancing act to be made. At some point
the bad that taxes do will be equal to the good that they do and that is the point where
taxation should stop.

I don't disagree, but it still leaves the amount of taxation as more or less subjective
and I suspect it is the location of the point where the good outweighs the bad that we
disagree upon.

Of course a government can't run without money. I also see government as a necessary evil. My original point isn't that taxes can't be used for good, it's that the people in charge of making them and using them often see that if some is good, then more is better. It's THEM I want to see taxes as evil, so they don't run amok with someone else's life.

Of course this applies to both, any and all parties; they all have their "If I only had enough, I could save the world types".

Or, as with Blue Oyster Cult: "Tax the rich, feed the poor, till there are no rich no more".

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

My original point isn't that taxes can't be used for good.

I have to disagree strongly.
I can name thousands of good deeds made possible by the tax from almost any
country in the world.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Letum

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

My original point isn't that taxes can't be used for good.

I have to disagree strongly.
I can name thousands of good deeds made possible by the tax from almost any
country in the world.

You misread me. "My original point isn't that taxes can't be used for good..."

As in "My point is NOT that taxes etc..."

I know they can; I've seen many cases as well. Reread the rest of the sentence. I don't trust people who honestly believe they know better than I do what's good for me.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

I don't trust people who honestly believe they know better than I do what's good for me.

First they came for your cigarettes;
Then they came for your alcohol;
now they are coming for your food.

The nanny state. Someone always seems to know what is best for you! The arrogance of the left. Lets face it it is a left/progressive paradigm.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Quote:

Originally Posted by Letum

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

My original point isn't that taxes can't be used for good.

I have to disagree strongly.
I can name thousands of good deeds made possible by the tax from almost any
country in the world.

:doh: So I did! Sorry!

Quote:

Originally Posted by waste gate

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

I don't trust people who honestly believe they know better than I do what's good for me.

I think you're not giving the right credit for their own paradigm. The military budget of the US that balooned in the days of Reagan and out does the other 12 largest budgets combined (figures from a few years ago that I remember so I'm not sure what the actual one is today) and which created a massive deficit, which was again brought on by Bush Jr. is a far greater waste of tax dollars than any of the leftist nanny state policies. And historically right wing governments have violated the creed of the balanced budget far more and in much greater excess than most leftist governments.