The Rich pay more then their fair share in taxes.

The rich have their accumulated wealth work for them to make more wealth and are taxed only 15% on just the net gain in wealth(Long term capital gains).

The poor and middle class that spend 100% of their income to survive are subject to a double tax. They pay income tax and sales tax using post tax dollars on expenditures of their income.

Imagine if the rich had an investment tax = sales tax and were taxed 8.25% on each of their investments. Next eliminate the reduced long term capital gains rate and have all of their net gains taxed as ordinary income.

Imagine being able to defer the payment of taxes for all income deposited in your bank account until you actually withdraw the funds. If you hold off withdrawing the deposited funds for 1 year your withdrawal gets taxed at 15%. These funds can be invested by the bank for your own benefit and the gains can be withdrawn and used tax exempt.

This is essentially a microcosm of the rich tax system. Their income is tax deferred and never gets tapped while the gains are gamed as business expenses.

 

Unearned, and Taxed Unequally
Whatever happened to “unearned income”?

That used to be the normal term for income from investments — dividends, interest and capital gains.

For some, that term produced images of “coupon clippers,” another term you don’t hear much anymore. The coupons in question were not the kind that get you 25 cents off on Jell-O at the grocery store. They were the ones that came attached to bonds in a precomputer age. To get your interest payment every six months, you literally had to clip off the coupon and take it to your bank.

More than half a century ago, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed taxing dividends at lower rates than wages, Representative John W. McCormack, a Massachusetts Democrat who later was to become speaker of the House, was outraged.

“The Republican tax bill is indefensible in that portion which gives great benefits to corporations and constitutes a bonanza to stockholders, the larger ones in particular,” he said in 1954. “It is unjust and in my opinion morally wrong to make a person with earned income pay considerably more in taxes than persons with unearned income from dividends.”

That tax fight ended with a benefit for small shareholders, who would escape tax on the first $50 a year of dividends. But annual dividends above that amount remained fully taxable at ordinary income tax rates, which ranged up to 91 percent. Mr. Eisenhower’s proposal to cut the rates on such payouts was rejected.

Not until 2003 were dividend tax rates reduced below ordinary income tax rates. Then they were cut to 15 percent, the same as the capital gains rate.

For most of the history of income taxes in America, long-term capital gains — defined at different times as investments held for minimum periods of as little as six months and as long as 10 years — have been taxed at substantially lower rates than top ordinary income tax rates.

There was, in fact, only one time that capital gains were taxed at the same rates that were paid by people who earned their money by working. That was during the years 1988 to 1990, as a result of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 — a law championed by President Ronald Reagan.

To be sure, he changed his mind about unearned income in 1988. After Vice President George H. W. Bush, then campaigning to succeed Mr. Reagan, endorsed lowering capital gains taxes, the president allowed that might be a good idea. Mr. Bush and the Congress did lower them after he was elected.

These days, the conventional way to look at taxes on investments is to think they should be low to stimulate investment and thus help the economy. It is a view that has much more support in economic theory than in economic history.

Correlation is not causation, of course, but the economy has tended to do the best when taxes on unearned income were high. Economic growth was great during the 1950s, when dividends were taxed at very high levels and capital gains rates were 25 percent, much higher than they are now. Since 2003, tax rates on unearned income have been at their lowest levels ever, and economic growth has been sluggish.




http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/b...antages.html?_r=2&ref=business&pagewanted=all

 

Yup.

What do people like Romney really risk? They use, often borrowed money, to make to make more money and if doesn't work out the business goes bankrupt. They are shielded from true risk behind corporate legal defenses.

And I know investments are needed for businesses to succeed, but just using money to make more money seems less worthy than someone who actually produces goods and services, like farmers and firemen. Naive? Perhaps. But the system has been rigged by the privileged to favor the privileged. We have the best plutocracy money can buy.

 

You got it about half right.

Why don't you strive to become one of the rich... AS IS OPEN THE OPPORTUNITY TOALL AMERICANS WHO POSSESS THE ABILITY AND DRIVE. Then, you won't have to complain.

 

You gotta be brain dead to want to put more money into the hands of an evil, abusive, despicable group of money-grubbing thugs.

Why would anyone want to do that???

Makes no sense, whatsoever, to me.

Oh well, guess I just love liberty, freedom, and lack of government intrusion too much.

What's wrong with me???

 

The Koch brothers? Murdoch? Big Oil? Be more specific.

 

For this reason, whoever desires liberty, should understand these vital facts, viz.: 1. That every man who puts money into the hands of a "government" (so called), puts into its hands a sword which will be used against himself, to extort more money from him, and also to keep him in subjection to its arbitrary will. 2. That those who will take his money, without his consent, in the first place, will use it for his further robbery and enslavement, if he presumes to resist their demands in the future.

(Lysander Spooner)

(Lysander Spooner lived from 1808-1887.)

 

i wonder why it is that all the places in the world where there is no effective government are places you would not want to live?

 

There's a difference between effective and oppressive but I guess that's too subtle for you to grasp.

 

i wonder. with people like you is it the fact that government tries to be secular that fosters irrational fears of oppression?
seems kind of irrational since an atheist could never be elected in this country.