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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOscarmonster13
(209 posts)definitely food for thought...and fuel for the rage against the 1% >
Auntie Bush
(17,528 posts)money and has been complaining about his taxes being high because the poor are Lazy etc. I've been sending him a lot of cartoons and graphs showing how it isn't the poor's fault that taxes are high. If corporations and millionaires paid their fair share of taxes we wouldn't even have a deficit and certainly wouldn't have to cut food stamps. We certainly need to change our tax code.
Journeyman
(15,023 posts)I suspect all our taxes are proportionally higher for this reason, rather than that the needy avail themselves of useful programs.
You might do well to tell your son that on the tower of Konigsberg's Green Gate, this legend was etched in gilded letters:
Vultus fortunae variatur imagine lunae: Crescit, descrescit, constans persistere nescit.
It means the face of fortune varies and knows not how to remain steadfast.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)LuvNewcastle
(16,834 posts)a kennedy
(29,603 posts)Gidney N Cloyd
(19,816 posts)allan01
(1,950 posts)hi, where can one get your graph? plseas pm me . thanks
Scuba
(53,475 posts)Additional tech support available at my standard rate of $175/hour, $1,000 retainer required.
Thank you.
There are a few people at work that need to see this.
treestar
(82,383 posts)The 1% probably have legal theories and lawyers to argue the questions. A breakdown of this 400 million might be in order, as it could well be a large number of smaller people. And what are they deeming evasion. The worst people for paying taxes sometimes is the smaller time self employed.
joeglow3
(6,228 posts)The 1% are rarely doing tax evasion. They have the attorneys for tax avoidance.
Mosby
(16,251 posts)I see them at the bank, making large cash withdrawls into the 5 figures. All the bank employees know what's going on. Meanwhile when I deposit more than 10K in cash from my store I have to show ID, provide my SS# and fill out a federal form.
People aren't going to like this but the government could take just a couple steps and make it much harder to pay people under the table, like requiring some sort of reporting when pulling more than 5K for example out of a bank. Eliminating 50s and 100s would also help, it would make it harder to move money out of the country. Eliminating cash altogether would be best, but I don't think most people would agree to that.
hue
(4,949 posts)niyad
(113,012 posts)99Forever
(14,524 posts)If not, there's something deeply wrong with you.
NBachers
(17,073 posts)I have close family that rely on reduced school lunches and SNAP.
When it's that close to home, it's hard to justify the lack of compassion from some who call for tax cuts and social cuts at the same time.
Thanx for posting.
Recursion
(56,582 posts)Though all that talk is still based on the incorrect right-wing premise that the richest country in the world somehow is "running out of money".
JayhawkSD
(3,163 posts)Don't blame them for filling out their tax forms in accordance with laws written by Congress.
Blame Congress for writing the laws that make theft from the American people legal.
Don't blame them for offering bribes to legislators.
Blame legislators for accepting the bribes and betraying the people who elected them.
demwing
(16,916 posts)Just because something is legal, doesn't make it ethical or moral.
Just a quick question - would you blame slave owners for slavery, back when slavery was legal?
JayhawkSD
(3,163 posts)If they owned slaves today I would certainly condemn them, but the bible permits owning slaves, and so did large parts of society at the time. Certainly other parts of society believed otherwise, but there were different religions too. The bible by which they lived did not condemn it, nor did the society in which they lived.
Paying taxes is not an ethical or moral question, it is a legal one. Writing laws is an ethical one, because law makers were elected to write laws benefiting those who elected them. They have an ethical obligation to represent the voter, whech they violate when they do otherwise. In paying taxes, one is only obligated to follow the prescription of law.
Do you refuse all exemptions on your tax form when you fill out the taxes? When your tax preparer says that you can deduct interest on the mortgage on your home do you say, "No, I want to pay those taxes. Do not take that deduction" to him? Do you volunteer to pay more taxes than the law requires you to pay?
Blaming and being angry may feels good in the short term, but what does it accomplish? You don't hurt them with your anger. They don't feel it. They don't know it exists. You feel it and it discolors your life. It detracts from the quality of your life.
demwing
(16,916 posts)Some folks recognized that slavery was unethical, long before it was illegal.
And paying your fair share of taxes when you're rich? 100% an ethical decision - unfortunately for me, I don't have sufficient income to have to worry about that dilemma.
JayhawkSD
(3,163 posts)President Obama thinks it is moral and ethical to kill people all over the Middle East and North Africa by firing Hellfire missiles from drones. I not only think that is not moral and ethical, I think it is downright criminal. President Obama and I will each have to answer for how we define "moral and ethical," but you are not the arbiter to whom we will have to make that answer.
You think the laws are not moral and ethical? Fine, then elect legislators who will pass different laws. Until then it is unfair and illogical to stand in judgement and condemn your fellow citizens who are following the law of the land.
hue
(4,949 posts)Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)DiverDave
(4,886 posts)god damned soulless r's will dismiss it as
"just the best way to earn more"
"oh, and just fuck the poor"
Evil.
Doctor_J
(36,392 posts)I also expect to have sex with Norah Jones tonight.
CFLDem
(2,083 posts)Is a tax cheat!
SomethingFishy
(4,876 posts)My neighbor was audited for 2 years. He's disabled, he's on Social Security and the IRS spent two years auditing him and found he owed them exactly $96. 2 years of paperwork and manpower to collect $96.
I owe the IRS some back taxes. I made a deal with them and have been paying for over a year now. Last week I got paperwork from them acting like they have no idea I have a payment schedule with them. They send out 6 certified letters all saying the same thing(I owe them money) and now both they and I are having to do everything from scratch, all the paperwork, all the meetings, it's like they never happened. Another colossal waste of time and money to do what has already been done.
The IRS is fucked.
Why do they come after people like us? Because they know we have no money, no accountants and no lawyers. Easy prey.
DesertDiamond
(1,616 posts)freebrew
(1,917 posts)ass are those televised ads for people owing "more than $10,000 to the IRS". If you owe that much, pay it.
And business must be booming, the ads recently to $15,000 or more.
And I know some of these people, they don't deserve a tax break.
allan01
(1,950 posts)time to end the wealthcare nonsense.
TrollBuster9090
(5,953 posts)the 1990s. The first people the IRS had to lay off were the highly paid auditors who specialized in complicated, high income returns. That made regular folks more likely to be audited than billionaires, and lead to billions in lost revenues. Gramm then quit his Senate job, and ran over to Switzerland to work for the Swiss banks who were RECEIVING a lot of that hidden money. Talk about a racket.
HughBeaumont
(24,461 posts)From Octafish, 2008:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x4055207
Years before Phil Gramm was a McCain campaign adviser and a lobbyist for a Swiss bank at the center of the housing credit crisis, he pulled a sly maneuver in the Senate that helped create today's subprime meltdown.
David Corn
MotherJones.com
May 28, 2008
Who's to blame for the biggest financial catastrophe of our time? There are plenty of culprits, but one candidate for lead perp is former Sen. Phil Gramm. Eight years ago, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown. Yet has Gramm been banished from the corridors of power? Reviled as the villain who bankrupted Middle America? Hardly. Now a well-paid executive at a Swiss bank, Gramm cochairs Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and advises the Republican candidate on economic matters. He's been mentioned as a possible Treasury secretary should McCain win. That's right: A guy who helped screw up the global financial system could end up in charge of US economic policy. Talk about a market failure.
Gramm's long been a handmaiden to Big Finance. In the 1990s, as chairman of the Senate banking committee, he routinely turned down Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt's requests for more money to police Wall Street; during this period, the sec's workload shot up 80 percent, but its staff grew only 20 percent. Gramm also opposed an sec rule that would have prohibited accounting firms from getting too close to the companies they auditedat one point, according to Levitt's memoir, he warned the sec chairman that if the commission adopted the rule, its funding would be cut. And in 1999, Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities firmssetting off a wave of merger mania.
But Gramm's most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industryfriends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional careercame on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered deadeven by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. "Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it," says a congressional aide familiar with the bill's history.
It's not exactly like Gramm hid his handiworkfar from it. The balding and bespectacled Texan strode onto the Senate floor to hail the act's inclusion into the must-pass budget package. But only an expert, or a lobbyist, could have followed what Gramm was saying. The act, he declared, would ensure that neither the sec nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (cftc) got into the business of regulating newfangled financial products called swapsand would thus "protect financial institutions from overregulation" and "position our financial services industries to be world leaders into the new century."
Subprime 1-2-3
Don't understand credit default swaps? Don't worryneither does Congress. Herewith, a step-by-step outline of the subprime risk betting game. Casey Miner
CONTINUED
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/05/foreclosure-phil
TrollBuster9090
(5,953 posts)lies almost exclusively with old Phil 'Slugman' Gramm.
SunSeeker
(51,502 posts)GoneFishin
(5,217 posts)3catwoman3
(23,939 posts)...than the alleged voter fraud the RWNJs are always bleating about.