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By: JOURNALNOW STAFF | Winston-Salem Journal Published: August 15, 2012 » 0 Comments | Post a Comment Clarifying
Suppose I said to someone, "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. Somebody else built roads and schools before you and made that happen."
Someone might respond, "Of course roads and schools were built before me, just as I am building roads and schools now for those in the future. But everyone has the same access to the same roads and schools as I had. So what's your point?"
And then I would "clarify my answer" by saying, "Just because you were successful and others were not doesn't mean that they didn't work as hard as you. And they deserve more. So the obvious solution to this inequality of life is simple: I must take what you have acquired and redistribute it to the not-as-successful. It's only fair. It's their entitlement. It's for the common good. And the not-as-successful will be forever indebted to me for doing that and will repay me with their vote."
And the successful will relocate their business to where I can't punish them for succeeding.
Oops. That's not what I wanted to happen. Never mind. I'll just label you as greedy and unpatriotic. That ought to do it.
LES PRESTON Winston-Salem
"Tax rates"
A recent letter to the editor ("A fair share," Aug. 7) complains that "a small percentage of taxpayers pay almost 60 percent of the taxes paid." This isn't because that small percentage pays at too high a rate.
Tax rates for the rich are at historic lows. Last year multi-millionaire Mitt Romney paid 13.9 percent, and he doesn't dare show the voting public how little he paid before that.
No, the rich pay most of the tax because they have most of the income.
Between 2002 and 2007, the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew 1.3 percent yearly in real terms, while the incomes of the top 1 percent grew 10 percent a year. In 2007, the wealthiest 1 percent captured 23 percent of our nation's total income.
The gap between rich and poor in the United States is the greatest that it has been since 1928, the year before the stock-market crash launched the Great Depression. The disparity has grown for more than 30 years and now is greater than in any other industrialized country. We are on a par with Cameroon and Côte d'Ivoire!
Republicans encourage this trend, demanding increased tax cuts for the rich and slashed services to the poor and vulnerable. I have a warning for the wealthy: If this trend continues until the "small percentage" of taxpayers gets all the income, they will have to pay 100 percent of the tax. How they will complain then.
The writer of the Aug. 7 letter "A fair share" asks, "So, liberals, what is a 'fair share?' "
Challenge accepted!
But first I'd like to mention his claim, "Almost one-half of taxpayers pay no income tax at all," which is a bit misleading. They may not pay federal income taxes, but they pay property taxes, state income taxes, payroll taxes, sales taxes and excise taxes, among others.
But back to the topic, who decides what is a fair share of taxes? Frankly, I'll admit that I don't have the answer and I don't know who does; it's something that we should have a national discussion about. At this point, it would be progress just to have conservatives admit that there's a problem.
We know that there's a problem because so many Americans are having a tough time making ends meet. College is unaffordable, houses are unaffordable, health care is unaffordable, salaries and benefits are stagnating or shrinking, the middle class is disappearing — and the top 1 percent is receiving millions by the shovelful.
One would think economic fairness would be a conservative cause. In the ideal conservative world, Mom would stay home with the kids while Dad goes to work. But most can't afford that. Mom and Dad both have to work, leaving kids to fend for themselves.
Wake up, America!
REBECCA MINOR Winston-Salem
"Good service"
I recently went to a Chick-fil-A restaurant here in Winston-Salem. They were very busy, but I was quickly waited on by someone who had a smile and an eagerness to help me with my order. In other fast-food restaurants in the area, I often get the feeling of curtness and sometimes that I am interrupting a conversation that the waitress is having with another employee. Maybe supervision needs to consider adopting some of the business practices of Chick-fil-A.
Good afternoon folks! LTE 1: Classic strawman argument. It kind of helps if you use and understand the full context of the quote instead of just what you heard on political ads or talk radio.
LTE 2, 3: Refreshing to see two people who understand the underlying issue behind "47% don't pay no taxes". The only part missing is the tax rate and code changes passed by Bush and Congress almost 10 years ago which made it much easier to reduce one's AGI to 0 or near enough to 0 to get everything back and then some. Furthermore, anyone who receives a paycheck from an employer has fed. tax withheld which goes into the general fund to pay the nation's bills. In essence, to say you want these people to start paying income taxes really means you want these people to get a refund that is less than the amount of fed taxes they've paid in. That can be accomplished by either allowing the current tax rates to expire which would throw the rates back to the Clinton era, reducing the standard and personal exemptions, or by growing the economy so that those "47%" are making sufficient money to place them in a higher tax bracket where they do not get everything back. It may not seem fair for a small percentage to pay 60% of the taxes, but how fair is it for 1% to make 23% of the income? Like everything, what's "fair" is in the eye of the beholder.
LTE 4: Happy employees generally make for a pleasant customer experience. I've had excellent customer experiences at companies that support a person's right to marry the person he/she loves as well.
I see in the paper today that a guy who operates drug rehab place has been busted for heroin dealing. He should have called Ivy House the Second Chance House, where participants could either elect to go thru rehad or to backslide. Of course, the authorities didn't think much of his business model, obviously.
This case brings up another question: apparently this isn't his first encounter with the law over illegal drug activity. How does someone like that get into the rehab biz?
He may have been in rehab himself sometime in the past and noticed how much it costs and how many others were there. Do a little research on the requirements to get a rehab center up and going, BS your way through, and you're in business. Hit 'em up for the rehab costs and sell them their addiction on the side...very unscrupulous, but effective means of making a mint. Glad he got caught.
In his 13 years as a Congressman Paul Ryan has only gotten two pieces of legislation passed. One was to rename his hometown post office. For that, the American taxpayer has paid him and his staff a total of $11.5 million dollars so far.
Hillary Clinton had an undistinguished Senate career, along with "considerable ethical baggage" (a quote from NY Times endorsement for her Senate candidacy) and she ran for President, receiving glowing plaudits from liberal quarters.
There's a flag on the play...indiscriminate use of the term "liberal". That's called "doing a B----y"...don't want to say the name, because, as my grandmother always said, if you call him he will come.
Ms. Clinton was most definitely the "center right" candidate in the 2008 campaign as compared to her opponent, our current left wing red commy/socialist foreign born Muslim President.
In fact, she has done pretty well as Secretary of State...3 years and 7 months and we haven't started a single war so far, have in fact ended one and on track to end another, caught and killed public enemy number one, assisted in overthrowing several dictators without killing a single US GI, so far restrained the Israelis from starting WW III, etc.
The US hasn't had such a string of foreign policy successes since Jimmy Byrnes and George Marshall had the job 60+ years ago.
Marshall and the State Dept. were slandered by Joe McCarthy (Eisenhower didn't have the balls in '52 to stick by his old boss); Huma Abedin was libeled by Bachmann et al in '12 (Bachmann doesn't have the balls to go after Hillary).
His other bill was about his hobby, bowhunting. It amended the Internal Revenue Code to impose a 39-cent tax per arrow shaft, instead of a 12.4 percent tax on the sales price. The bill also "includes points suitable for use with arrows in the 11 percent excise tax on arrow parts and accessories."
This is big time stuff...putting Ryan at the same level of statesmanship as Washington, Adams, Lincoln and FDR.
Be glad that he is so inept...he is one of the 60 or so co-sponsors of Ron Paul's "Sanctity of Life" bill, which is nothing more than a sneaky attempt to make an end run around Roe v Wade. Paul has been introducing this bill on and off since the 1990s.
If it were ever to pass, it would create real havoc, including the potential for a rapist to sue his victim to prevent her from aborting his child. Talk about swimming in the sewer.
As to the rehab scum selling heroin...I was involved in a study of such rehab programs some years ago.
Somewhere between a third and half of rehab counselors are former addicts. Most do an outstanding job under near impossible circumstances. But occasionally one backslides, often with disastrous results for their clients. This one went beyond disastrous.
One of the biggest questions that we asked was about oversight. Who is responsible for monitoring the counselors? Too often we found that the answer was nobody, primarily because virtually every drug rehab program is underfunded.
In this case, our scumbag got his clients from a single source, the courts, which makes them responsible for oversight. Instead of letting the fox into the hen house, they were sending the hens to the fox house. Pitiful on all counts.
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The Readers' Forum: Wednesday letters
By: JOURNALNOW STAFF | Winston-Salem Journal
Published: August 15, 2012
» 0 Comments | Post a Comment
Clarifying
Suppose I said to someone, "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. Somebody else built roads and schools before you and made that happen."
Someone might respond, "Of course roads and schools were built before me, just as I am building roads and schools now for those in the future. But everyone has the same access to the same roads and schools as I had. So what's your point?"
And then I would "clarify my answer" by saying, "Just because you were successful and others were not doesn't mean that they didn't work as hard as you. And they deserve more. So the obvious solution to this inequality of life is simple: I must take what you have acquired and redistribute it to the not-as-successful. It's only fair. It's their entitlement. It's for the common good. And the not-as-successful will be forever indebted to me for doing that and will repay me with their vote."
And the successful will relocate their business to where I can't punish them for succeeding.
Oops. That's not what I wanted to happen. Never mind. I'll just label you as greedy and unpatriotic. That ought to do it.
LES PRESTON
Winston-Salem
"Tax rates"
A recent letter to the editor ("A fair share," Aug. 7) complains that "a small percentage of taxpayers pay almost 60 percent of the taxes paid." This isn't because that small percentage pays at too high a rate.
Tax rates for the rich are at historic lows. Last year multi-millionaire Mitt Romney paid 13.9 percent, and he doesn't dare show the voting public how little he paid before that.
No, the rich pay most of the tax because they have most of the income.
Between 2002 and 2007, the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew 1.3 percent yearly in real terms, while the incomes of the top 1 percent grew 10 percent a year. In 2007, the wealthiest 1 percent captured 23 percent of our nation's total income.
The gap between rich and poor in the United States is the greatest that it has been since 1928, the year before the stock-market crash launched the Great Depression. The disparity has grown for more than 30 years and now is greater than in any other industrialized country. We are on a par with Cameroon and Côte d'Ivoire!
Republicans encourage this trend, demanding increased tax cuts for the rich and slashed services to the poor and vulnerable. I have a warning for the wealthy: If this trend continues until the "small percentage" of taxpayers gets all the income, they will have to pay 100 percent of the tax. How they will complain then.
LARRY ROTH
Germanton
Germanton
DeleteDeciding on a fair share
The writer of the Aug. 7 letter "A fair share" asks, "So, liberals, what is a 'fair share?' "
Challenge accepted!
But first I'd like to mention his claim, "Almost one-half of taxpayers pay no income tax at all," which is a bit misleading. They may not pay federal income taxes, but they pay property taxes, state income taxes, payroll taxes, sales taxes and excise taxes, among others.
But back to the topic, who decides what is a fair share of taxes? Frankly, I'll admit that I don't have the answer and I don't know who does; it's something that we should have a national discussion about. At this point, it would be progress just to have conservatives admit that there's a problem.
We know that there's a problem because so many Americans are having a tough time making ends meet. College is unaffordable, houses are unaffordable, health care is unaffordable, salaries and benefits are stagnating or shrinking, the middle class is disappearing — and the top 1 percent is receiving millions by the shovelful.
One would think economic fairness would be a conservative cause. In the ideal conservative world, Mom would stay home with the kids while Dad goes to work. But most can't afford that. Mom and Dad both have to work, leaving kids to fend for themselves.
Wake up, America!
REBECCA MINOR
Winston-Salem
"Good service"
I recently went to a Chick-fil-A restaurant here in Winston-Salem. They were very busy, but I was quickly waited on by someone who had a smile and an eagerness to help me with my order. In other fast-food restaurants in the area, I often get the feeling of curtness and sometimes that I am interrupting a conversation that the waitress is having with another employee. Maybe supervision needs to consider adopting some of the business practices of Chick-fil-A.
V.H. DENTON
Winston-Salem
LTE #1 - BALDERDASH!
ReplyDeleteLTE #2 & 3 - SHAZAM!
LTE #4 - BK, BK, BK…BIGOT!
Another Chick-fil-A-hole.
ReplyDeleteSomebody must've eaten Wes's pie; he's in a bad mood today.
Deletelol, I mean I did spell it Chick-fil-A-whole after all
DeleteGood afternoon folks!
ReplyDeleteLTE 1: Classic strawman argument. It kind of helps if you use and understand the full context of the quote instead of just what you heard on political ads or talk radio.
LTE 2, 3: Refreshing to see two people who understand the underlying issue behind "47% don't pay no taxes". The only part missing is the tax rate and code changes passed by Bush and Congress almost 10 years ago which made it much easier to reduce one's AGI to 0 or near enough to 0 to get everything back and then some. Furthermore, anyone who receives a paycheck from an employer has fed. tax withheld which goes into the general fund to pay the nation's bills. In essence, to say you want these people to start paying income taxes really means you want these people to get a refund that is less than the amount of fed taxes they've paid in. That can be accomplished by either allowing the current tax rates to expire which would throw the rates back to the Clinton era, reducing the standard and personal exemptions, or by growing the economy so that those "47%" are making sufficient money to place them in a higher tax bracket where they do not get everything back. It may not seem fair for a small percentage to pay 60% of the taxes, but how fair is it for 1% to make 23% of the income? Like everything, what's "fair" is in the eye of the beholder.
LTE 4: Happy employees generally make for a pleasant customer experience. I've had excellent customer experiences at companies that support a person's right to marry the person he/she loves as well.
I see in the paper today that a guy who operates drug rehab place has been busted for heroin dealing. He should have called Ivy House the Second Chance House, where participants could either elect to go thru rehad or to backslide. Of course, the authorities didn't think much of his business model, obviously.
ReplyDeleteThis case brings up another question: apparently this isn't his first encounter with the law over illegal drug activity. How does someone like that get into the rehab biz?
He may have been in rehab himself sometime in the past and noticed how much it costs and how many others were there. Do a little research on the requirements to get a rehab center up and going, BS your way through, and you're in business. Hit 'em up for the rehab costs and sell them their addiction on the side...very unscrupulous, but effective means of making a mint. Glad he got caught.
DeleteI hope he is looking at 20 long at least. 30 would be better, take away more of the best remaining years of his life, just as he has done to others.
DeleteIn his 13 years as a Congressman Paul Ryan has only gotten two pieces of legislation passed. One was to rename his hometown post office. For that, the American taxpayer has paid him and his staff a total of $11.5 million dollars so far.
ReplyDeleteHillary Clinton had an undistinguished Senate career, along with "considerable ethical baggage" (a quote from NY Times endorsement for her Senate candidacy) and she ran for President, receiving glowing plaudits from liberal quarters.
ReplyDeleteHi cuz...
DeleteThere's a flag on the play...indiscriminate use of the term "liberal". That's called "doing a B----y"...don't want to say the name, because, as my grandmother always said, if you call him he will come.
Ms. Clinton was most definitely the "center right" candidate in the 2008 campaign as compared to her opponent, our current left wing red commy/socialist foreign born Muslim President.
In fact, she has done pretty well as Secretary of State...3 years and 7 months and we haven't started a single war so far, have in fact ended one and on track to end another, caught and killed public enemy number one, assisted in overthrowing several dictators without killing a single US GI, so far restrained the Israelis from starting WW III, etc.
The US hasn't had such a string of foreign policy successes since Jimmy Byrnes and George Marshall had the job 60+ years ago.
Marshall and the State Dept. were slandered by Joe McCarthy (Eisenhower didn't have the balls in '52 to stick by his old boss); Huma Abedin was libeled by Bachmann et al in '12 (Bachmann doesn't have the balls to go after Hillary).
DeleteIt's funny how history plays out in patterns.
His other bill was about his hobby, bowhunting. It amended the Internal Revenue Code to impose a 39-cent tax per arrow shaft, instead of a 12.4 percent tax on the sales price. The bill also "includes points suitable for use with arrows in the 11 percent excise tax on arrow parts and accessories."
ReplyDeleteThis is big time stuff...putting Ryan at the same level of statesmanship as Washington, Adams, Lincoln and FDR.
Be glad that he is so inept...he is one of the 60 or so co-sponsors of Ron Paul's "Sanctity of Life" bill, which is nothing more than a sneaky attempt to make an end run around Roe v Wade. Paul has been introducing this bill on and off since the 1990s.
If it were ever to pass, it would create real havoc, including the potential for a rapist to sue his victim to prevent her from aborting his child. Talk about swimming in the sewer.
As to the rehab scum selling heroin...I was involved in a study of such rehab programs some years ago.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere between a third and half of rehab counselors are former addicts. Most do an outstanding job under near impossible circumstances. But occasionally one backslides, often with disastrous results for their clients. This one went beyond disastrous.
One of the biggest questions that we asked was about oversight. Who is responsible for monitoring the counselors? Too often we found that the answer was nobody, primarily because virtually every drug rehab program is underfunded.
In this case, our scumbag got his clients from a single source, the courts, which makes them responsible for oversight. Instead of letting the fox into the hen house, they were sending the hens to the fox house. Pitiful on all counts.