Losing Our Way

[mookiemookie]

Originally Posted by tater

Wealth redistributed upwards. LOL.

Redistribution means taking money (with threat of force/jail) from one party, and giving it to another. You can argue that rich interests benefit from government spending. I'll grant it for the sake of argument.

OK, so we have the rich, political class writing government checks to themselves (gov contracts, etc).

There is redistribution for you. I agree.

Upwards? Sorry, but the bottom doesn't pay in a statistically significant amount. There is no way this largesse passes upwards, since even if we grant the lower end is over taxed (due to payroll taxes, not income tax which they don't pay), the total amount collected is still a meaningless amount. Debt? Again, the gov gives money to rich interests with borrowed money. The press reports this as if it's XX,XXX dollars for every American, but only the top 20% will ever get sent the bill, so it's really a multiple of that figure for every "rich" person, and ZERO for the rest.

There is no way to redistribute meaningful amounts of money upwards, since the poor don't have meaningful net worth.

You're myopically focused on income taxes. Think bigger. Tax cuts lead to increased deficits, lower purchasing power, a weaker dollar. Interest rate cuts eat into those reliant on fixed income portfolios. Bailed out Citigroup gets $38 billion in tax abatements. Bailout recipient GE pays no income tax. They actually received $3 billion back from the government. By the Republican "the answer to everything is to cut taxes" model, they should be hiring people hand over fist. Are they? I've already been over this in my previous post which you obviously didn't read in a rush to "hurr hurr LOL" about, but yet you think this is all about personal income tax.

Corporate profits are at record highs but so is long term unemployment. You can LOL about it and call it a coincidence all you want but you're living in the dark.

I'm like Ducimus on this - this stuff pisses me off to the point of being irrational, name-calling and whatnot, so I think I'll just bow out here.

[tater]

I specifically excluded income taxes for the poor, I said for them, payroll taxes.

GE had money redistributed to them. The money did not, not enough to matter, come from the poor.

A weaker dollar has actually been a goal of US policy for ages. It's the goal of most countries, actually.

The bottom line is that redistribution requires a state actor. You've posted before about "the rich" owning 90% of the wealth. There is no possible way they could have had that redistributed from the poor, because the sum total of everyone else in the wealth department is therefore 10%. It's not like a large % of wealth passes through the hands of the poor before going to the rich.

If the rich get money "redistributed" to them, where, pray tell can it come from except people that have the money in the first place.

You made it about taxes, since taxes is where government money comes from. No taxes, no redistribution.