The bottom line is whether you want a society resembling those with a few noble elites and almost everyone else in dire poverty, or you want one with most middle-class.
The right simply doesn't understand a lot of issues on economics and society. They don't understand the problems of high concentrations of wealth, the fact that democracy is killed by those concentrations, the inequalities in opportunity, the unfairness in much of how wealth is gained, the contribution of the citizen beyond taxes to society,the morality of caring about human needs and not only looking at 'economic efficiencies'.
They mistakenly equate income and wealth with productivity. Anyone rich is rich because they deserve to be. Anyone poor deserves it. What's the problm you liberals are on about?
In short, the right has a false, defective ideology on the issues, that leads them to wrong and inhumae conclusions with the best of intentions.
I've written about this before on the idea of 'ownership'. Who is the real 'lazy bastard'? Who works harder, Warren Buffet or the family running the local restaurant?
Another of the right's fallacies is that they look at 'average working people' and 'lazy poor people', and group the billionares with the 'average working people' like they're the same, when in fact the 'hard-working average citzen' and the 'lazy poor person' have a lot more interests in common against the rich. The proper groupings are 'the rich' and - versus- 'everyone else'.
I've used the analogy of an old west town to try to illustrate an issue with wealth. Imagine a nice small old west town, with a store, a hotel, a stable, farmers. Niow in one version of that town each citizen is 'making a living' from the others in a nice healthy economic cycle of trade. In a second scenario, though, there's one more figure - the owner of everything in the town. The same businesses exist, the same people do the same things, but they all pay rent to 'the owner'. He has the best house in town. He doesn't have to do anything for the town. He's 'the owner' and that justifies his getting a big cut of the economy. Which is the better situation?
The confuses 'the owner' of each small business in the town - a good thing - with the excess of one guy who owns the town - a bad thing.
The right is so ignroant and confused about issues of economics and wealth that they just blindly pursue the false ideology to terrible problems. When it's true of someone as knowledgable as Alan Greenspan, who admitted after decades that his ideology that the market is best run without any government interference was wrong, can get it wrong, what chance do average Americans, fed the ideology daily, have?
The 41% of citizens who pay no income taxes - if you look at a coal mine with a few owners, a few managers, and thousands of men who go down and dig the coal, doing the hard and dangerous work, if you set up a tax structure where the few on top pay all the income tax and the miners pay none, does that make the miners lazy bastards who don't pay their fair share, deserving of sarcastic threads like this? No. How much are they paid? Their low pay is a form of their 'paying their share'.
A progressive tax system is a counter to an unfair system where income will get concentrated - and lead to extremes and masspoverty if unchecked. Taxes are the check.
You can justify it if you like - I can point you to many countries filled with hundreds of rich who own 99% of the land and resources, and millions of poor who serve them.
That's 'a system', and the rich have all kinds of ideological rationalizations to say why it's how things shoudl be.
You can choose that. If you do, we're done with the discussion, and disagree. I think another choice - not one based on the straw men of 'exact equality' and the economic harms of trying to get it, but one with a thriving middle class and moderate inequality - is better.
Historically, IIRC, CEO's might make 20x the average worker; in Japan, I heard recently, the figure might be closer to 7x. Is 20x the income not enough incentive for running a company? Does the right have any concept of linking the pay ratio to to the contribution above what someone else would do as CEO? They instead simply - simplistically - assume that it's all 'correct' and fair. If the ration becomes 400 to 1 - as it has - that isn't a problem with their being parasites manipulating the system, it's all 'fair'.
It's hard to have any discussion with the right because they are so far off. It's like trying to defend war profiteering to the Amish. There's not going to be agreement.
In theory there should be come common groud, wantint to reduce poverty and such, but the right has been spoon fed answers that put them on the wrong track.
Rich too rich? Doesn't hurt anyone, rises the tide for all boats. Poor? Their own fault, work harder you lazy bums. Financial manipulations extracting wealth? It's their money.
People have a choice, a serf-based society, or one with a strong middle class, but they don't realize they have the choice, that the right-wing choice moves towards serfdom.
They don't understand the threat that concentrated wealth poses to democracy when they are inherently at odds eventually, democracy tolerable to the rich only insofar as it doesn't actually do what it's supposed to do and lets the rich exploit the rest. They don't understand how we're on the berge of the rich handcuffing democracy, making systemic changes that bar democracy from ever having the power to limit the rich in the future, turning democracy into the harmless local city council for uninportant issues.
Go ask Chinnese people how well they can get their political rights, can defeat the corrupt ruling communist party. How far will we keep moving in that direction?
Which presidential candidate in the last election was the one who had any chance of wining, and would NOT appoint Goldman Sachs people to top financial positions?
And you say things aren't that bad, when the answer is 'none'?
The way to gut democracy is to disable it to the point that the people no longer see it as being their tool for a fair share of power, but rather as some mythical notion not really happening, corrupted, so that they don't really value it, and let it be dismantled for some bribe. It's supposed to give the people the power to force the distribution of wealth and power in a way that is good for the society as a whole, not to be co-opted to let a few run things for their own benefit.
This thread's nonsensical notion that the 41% who contribute with work are undertaxed compared to the richest whose incomes have gone up several hundred percent is an indication of the delusions the right has with their ideology, as they demand the continued policies pushing the middle class down, without realizing it. And a few threads here are not seeming enough to do much about that problem.
A little perspecive from Warrent Buffet, who I picked on earlier, reminding us that 'the rich' are not the only people, they're little without the rest of society's work for them:
I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I'd been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can't run very fast. I'm not particularly strong. I'd probably end up as some wild animal's dinner.
As to the thread's topic, Buffet has long said that he's undertaxed. That's a much more sensible position that this thread's that the poor should pay more taxes.
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