@south70 – I’ve seen it more than once. And I DO find the tea party vile. This isn’t people protesting “taxation without representation”, this is people protesting the fact that they should have to pay any taxes at all. What’s uninformed is the Conservatives who buy the rhetoric that the solution to all our problems is smaller government and lower taxes. That’s all well and good if you’re one of the haves, but not if you’re among the have nots. About a sixth of our population lives below the poverty level and about a sixth of our population can’t afford health care. 10% of the population doesn’t have a job (and that doesn’t even count the people who are underemployed or who are no longer drawing benefits), and of people who make the least amount of money that’s more like 30%. The middle class is shrinking, the lower class is growing, and the standard of wealth is getting greater and greater. A few years back, being a billionaire was no longer enough to get you on the list of the 400 wealthiest people in the world. There’s a small group of super wealthy people who convince people to go out and join things like the Tea Party.
And they do it like this. They talk about Federal tax rates like those are the ONLY taxes people pay. That’s what they fight against, they don’t like that it’s a progressive system. You get the Joe the Plumber mentality which basically goes something like this. “Maybe some day I’ll make $250k a year, but if MY taxes go up after 250k, why shouldn’t I stop working once I’ve made 249k. I’d be working harder and bringing home less money because my taxes went up.” This is based on three fundamental misunderstandings that have been foisted upon the ignorant who’ve been all too eager to eat up this pablum.
First off, progressive taxes mean from dollar 1 to dollar 30,000 you pay 10%, then from 30 to 50k you pay 15% and so on. So, when Obama campaigned for raising the highest marginal tax rates on incomes over $250k (which is an EXTREMELY small number of people), it was lowered from Clinton’s 39.6% to Bush’s 36%...Obama wanted it to be 38%. But 38% would ONLY apply to money earned over and ABOVE $250k. It’s not like the first 250k is going to be taxed more heavily, so if you earn $250,001, it’s still better than $250,000…that one dollar is taxed at 38% instead of the 36% it would have been taxed at. And that’s really what this is about. There’s this vast amount of wealth sitting at the top on the very few people who do so well under our capitalist system that they make obscene amounts of income, yet are given a myriad of ways to avoid taxes on it.
The second intentional misunderstanding is the fact that Federal taxes are not all there is. You have state taxes, city taxes, county taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, gas taxes, utility taxes, you’re paying taxes on your internet and phone and cable and everything you buy and property you own. All these taxes really don’t go up if your income goes up. Yes, to some degree if you make more money you spend more and spend more on sales taxes, but someone who makes 20 grand a year is going to spend every penny they make, all that money is taxed in the form of sales taxes on everything they buy. But you make 20 million, maybe you spend 2 million of it, 18 million of it is saved or invested (often in ways that allow the person to take a tax break on it and lower their Federal taxes as well), now only 10% of their income is subject to sales taxes while 100% of the income of someone in poverty is subject to these taxes. But if I make 20 grand a year or 20 million, and I buy high speed internet, that’s going to be 50 bucks a month plus tax either way. And yeah, maybe the rich person buys more expensive food, but it’s not in proportion to income…in other words, if you make 20 grand, you might spend 200 a month on food, you make 20 million, even if you eat out 3 times a day at fancy restaurants that cost $100 a meal, that’s 10 grand a month…wretched excess by anyone’s standards. But that’s 50 times as much for food, but 1,000 times the income. These non Federal taxes come out 20 times as high for the poor than for the rich.
Then the third lie is that it will hurt small businesses, but they use REVENUES to say that most businesses “make” more than 250 grand. Yes, they bring in more than 250 grand in revenue, but very few small businesses make 250 grand or more in PROFIT, and it’s PROFIT that is taxed, not REVENUE.
Tea partiers confuse the issue, they don’t realize that a) they’re fueled by people who could afford to pay FAR more in taxes, but who can afford to spend money to keep their tax burdens as low as possible, nor b) the reason that we have a progressive tax is to even out the burden so that a as percentage of the money you make, theoretically overall we should all pay an equal tax rate on our disposable income. But it’s not like that. For the most part, the rich pay far less as a percentage of their overall income than do the poor. But Conservative talking heads like to confuse this point as well. They’ll tell you that something like 90% of all Federal taxes were paid by 5% of taxpayers. What they don’t mention is that a) as mentioned before, Federal taxes are a small part of the big picture, and b) that 5% makes well more than 90% of all income.
Then the other big scam is that people who make a LOT of money generally don’t make it via a salary like your regular Joe. Most people who make a LOT of money make it by investing. This means that their income is not “earned income” and as such subject to a maximum 36 or 38% tax (and remember, we’ve had marginal tax rates as high as 95% in our country and that didn’t keep people from getting rich), it is subject to a maximum of 15% “capital gains” tax, and that’s just the tax you pay when you cash it in, if you roll it over into an investment, no tax until you’re claimed the income. So, you can make money hand over fist for 50 years, building wealth on top of wealth without ever having to pay the taxes on it until it’s cashed in. And of course this allows the wealthy to play around with what to do from year to year (unlike most people who have to spend all their money).
So, the system is rigged, and tea partiers are only serving to make sure that it STAYS rigged in favor of the haves. The problem then is that in order to keep cutting taxes for the rich (even if we DO also cut Federal taxes for the poor as well, because Federal taxes aren’t what eat up much of a poor person’s salary, it’s meaningless), we have to keep cutting the size of government via social welfare programs. Our Constitution states that the government exists to provide for the “general welfare” of its people. But the wealthy use the idea that welfare is a handout to lazy people to incite this anger. It’s another big lie that most people who receive some form of assistance really don’t need it and would be able to get by if they were just willing to work. The Conservative movement aims to demonize the victim, and therefore they bear a double whammy in the form of higher taxes and lower benefits.
In my world view, it’s not the size of government that’s important…we have a huge country with a huge population, we friggin’ should have a huge government to serve the people…it is after all a government OF, BY and FOR the people. But the ideals espoused by people like Beck, the right wing in general and especially the Tea Partiers serve big business and the wealthy, it’s a Robin Hood in reverse philosophy, and to reinforce what they want people to think with hot button fear tactic words like “Socialism”. I believe we should tear the whole damn tax system out, revoke the right of anyone BUT the Federal government to collect taxes, and have the tax amount collected be distributed to local governments. And what the amount of taxes we need to collect would not be based on what we’ve done before less a certain percentage….we would look at what are the needs of the people, the ones administered by the Federal government and by smaller government authorities…how much do we NEED to keep our roads in tact, our schools strong, our streets safe, our people out of poverty and employed. Then we’d look at what does it cost to live safely and in good health, meeting the basic needs and providing a person with some human dignity, and we should say, THAT is the minimum standard we should live with in the richest country in the world. Now what is the total amount of money we need to meet the needs of the population, and if we allow an exemption for the first $x of income (x being the minimum standard of living (which would also be tied to minimum wage based on 40 hours a week under the theory that if you’re willing and able to work full time, you should be able to make a living). We’d look at all the money made in this country, minus that exemption for each and every person, divide the amount we need into the amount we have to tax (that would be disposable income), and whatever that percentage might be…whether it be 10% or 40%, then THAT’S what we should do. THAT would be fair.
But what we have now is a system that is unfair to the poor and preferential to the rich, and people like Beck co-opt a historical term like tea party, which actually meant something the first time around, and use it for propaganda to try to rig the system even more in their favor.
That is vile. And I’ve seen enough from Beck to know that sure, he’s not always wrong, very few people are, sure he has good ideas from time to time, everyone ever born has had a good idea from time to time, but what he stands for in terms of Federal policy is antithetical to my core beliefs, and as such, I don’t write him off just because I saw him once in passing, I ignore him because if it weren’t him, it would be some other blowhard talking head whipping up the ill informed masses with misinformation.
