And now, a somewhat coherent answer...
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Originally Posted by Jaxian Yes, I understand that you support decreasing public spending, but my point is that doing that isn't so easy as saying it. I think we'd have to cut our spending more than in half to accomodate a 20% flat tax rate. Which programs will we cut? Cutting our taxes that much is the most complex and difficult part of your proposal: it isn't so simple as saying "We should cut taxes." |
clearly not. I actually wouldn't support cutting taxes currently because we are in a deficit. I wouldn't advocate raising taxes either. We should reduce spending by cutting military spending and "anti-terror" pork. For example, there are not 8000 terrorist targets in Wisconsin. I don't care what that report says, it's clear bullshit and flushing money down the drain.
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But again, even if we could cut taxes so much that everyone could have only a 20% tax rate, I'd still say it's a good idea for the middle class to pay maybe 15%, while the wealthy pay 25%, or something along those lines.
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There's no reason for doing that at all, except for the idea that the rich should be penalized for having more money.
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So which programs should we cut in order to accomodate the flat tax? Welfare? Police? Child abuse agencies? The FDA? The military?
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The Department of Homeland Security is completely unecissary. Welfare is already horribly broken, so I don't really see a problem with just abolishing it entirely. The War on Drugs is a waste of time and money, not to mention that about half of the prison population is there for drug posession, which shouldn't be a big deal. The FCC is completely unecissary, and certainly is of questionable value... I could go on. There's plenty of fat to be trimmed.
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I disagree with most of what you said here.
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Fair enough.
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First, the people who have the money are almost never producers. Let me use myself as an example: I am a producer. I sit at a computer and create computer software all day. I do most of the software design. The product strategist at our company evaluates the market and figures out what sort of product would be good to create. She then relays that information to me. There is also a tester, who tests the stuff I create, and there are sales people who sell it. We are all very good at our jobs, and we all get above-average wages for our jobs in the industry. But none of us are wealthy.
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I don't mean physical producers, necissarly. That's a very socialist way to interpret things. I mean people who make results in production and in organization. It's a misconception that that's not real work. People go to school for years to do that sort of thing.
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The wealthy people in our company know little more about our products than the names. They don't produce things, they simply decide corporate "direction" and give the company "diversity training" and that sort of thing. They don't produce a thing. The only reason they have any claim over the money our products make is because they paid us to create that project. You see, my software development team couldn't afford to create this software ourselves and try to market it. The only way we could afford to make it is if a very wealthy person pays us to create it.
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If you're that confident in your product, have you ever considered taking it out on the open market and finding a company that you respect more, and in turn, respects you more?
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Most wealthy people produce nothing, and most wealthy people are no smarter than anyone else. Though some wealthy people may be "using what they've been given", I'd say that most people who use what they've been given end up completely poor. I've been given a strong ability to program software, but if I want to be rich, I'll need to use something else.
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I think that if they lose what they've been given, then they deserve it, frankly.
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Most of the time, that which seperates the wealthy from the poor is that the wealthy were born wealthy. Sure, investing a lot of time and money into a business is a risk, but most of the time, they have that money to invest. And make no mistake about it, if I had that sort of money, I would attempt to start up a business as well. I don't mean that no one ever goes from middle-class to wealthy, but that is not what happened for the majority of wealthy people today.
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If you were to look at a list of the most wealthy men in America, most of them weren't born rich. Given, rags to riches is a rare story, but the riches end is a tiny minority anyway.
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So what is it that makes the wealthy more deserving of money? They don't generally produce a thing. They aren't generally smarter. And whether you're "using what you're given" plays little part in whether you become wealthy. But what if the wealthy were smarter, and what if they were "using what they were given"? Does that make them more deserving of wealthy than someone else who works hard? Does it make them more deserving of wealth than someone who is kind and generous? It does not.
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They deserve their money because they made their money. Taxes are on salaries, on stocks, on property... Anything you own can be taxed. Why does the government have a right to it? They don't. The government has no right to decide who deserves money, and who doesn't, and how much. Sure, there's "compelling state interest," but that can be used to argue almost anything.
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Capitalism distributes wealth in a fashion which encourages people to produce. That is the only criteria it uses for distributing wealth. Capitalism doesn't say, "This person deserves wealth, so he gets it." It says, "Giving this person wealth encourages people to produce, so he gets it."
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Capitalism doesn't "give wealth." It's not an entitlement system. People make wealth, or lose it. It's pretty fluid. The invisible hand, and all that.
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Let's look at my job again as an example. The software I create generates something like ten million dollars a year. The fair way of distributing the wealth this software generates might be to give everyone involved an equal share, which would give me something like a million dollars a year. A different method might be to distribute wealth based on involvement in the project, which would give me something like two million dollars a year. The most fair method might simply be to forget the concept of "property" all together and say that anyone can use the product I created, and I can use the products anyone else created, so long as they aren't already in use. But each of these methods goes against the principles of capitalism: the first violates the concept of contracts, and the second violates the concept of property. Each of these methods of distributing wealth, though fair, do not encourage production.
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OK, I agree with that. Have you ever considered suing your company, if you were that involved in such a lucrative product? Sure, there's the contract, but you could always say that you weren't aware that the product would be that lucrative, or somesuch. Say that your contract was misleading.
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There is absolutely nothing wrong with having money. But capitalism does not distribute money fairly. You say that "no one is entitled to a rich person's money", but I say that the rich person was not entitled to more money in the first place. You say "just because someone is poor" as though the workings of fate just happened to give the poor person less than the wealthy person.
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It is the workings of fate. Some people have things, and some people don't. It's more fair than just giving everything to everyone, whether they deserve it or not. At it's best, and in it's highest ideal, capitalism is about meritocracy. Granted, it doesn't always work out that way, but that doesn't mean we should abandon it for the government teat.
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That's not what happened: the poor person is poor because we insituted capitalism. That poor person might well be working two jobs at minimum wage and doing a darn good job of it, but even though he's likely working harder than a company CEO, he's getting practically no money for it. The poor person is poor because of capitalism, and the middle class person is middle class because of capitalism.
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Capitalism didn't do anything. It's just an ism, a system. It didn't make people poor anymore than it made people rich. It just is, and people use it.
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We, the government, instituted this economic system because we think it is the best economic system. But it is still our responsibility to recognize the downsides of this system and correct them as much as possible. One of the downsides is that a small minority of the people will control most of the wealth in the nation. It is our responsibility to correct that as much as possible.
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The downside of capitalism isn't that some people are rich. There's nothing to correct in that respect. The downside of capitalism is that not everyone has an equal opportunity to make themselves rich. That is the problem which needs to be corrected. We need to help people help themselves.
07-30-2006, 11:23 AM
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