Those at the bottom are being helped. Tax cuts are fueling the expanding economy. Employment is at its highest point in years. You can not find a job, you are not looking. As for payroll taxes, cut them too. More capital in the pockets and bank accounts of more people is a positive. I see this story as the pie getting ever bigger. Want a piece? Get it yourself, don’t whine and cry for the government to get it for you.

likwid: Even those groups have the opportunity while they are American citizens, as a condition of their citizenship.  It is up to them to take advantage of that opportunity, though.

No, you’re wrong…I’m glad to see that you can find better sources than your favorite serial liar. (BTW, I wish you’d stop projecting your own "my party=perfect, opposition party=the devil" thinking onto me)

You’re still only looking at income taxes, and not total taxes. Your typical WalMart employee makes less than $12,000/year and loses 20% of that to taxes.

The top 50% of wage earners pay about 95% of the taxes.

I’m all for tax cuts, but this tidbit is somewhat misleading.  After all, how are you defining taxes?  Do you include FICA?  Or the various sales taxes?  Or do you simply mean the federal income tax?  If that is the case then you are leaving out over 50% of the taxes that the federal government collects.  A little under 20% of the taxes paid come from the income tax on businesses, which are ultimately paid by you and me either as shareholders (lower share price profits) or as consumers.  Are you including that sort of stuff as well?

Anyway, reducing the federal income tax is never going to really help middle-income and low wage earners much, as most of them pay more in FICA than they ever will in income taxes.  Indeed, its in FICA that we have seen the real growth in taxes in the U.S. (as far as the federal government is concerned) over the past fifty years.  Thus getting that under control is really the area that folks of less lofty incomes should be concerned about.

Sorry, puzzlefeet. I can direct my comment to anyone in politics. They all suffer from the same problem.

Summation of Don Myers’ comments:

Insult.

A "no shit Sherlock" point plus innuendo.

Insult plus a reiteration of the previous "no shit Sherlock" point plus more innuendo.

Patting himself on his back.

More innuendo and an appeal to authority.

Next up from the one trick pony: more insults.

 the top one percent might pay 22 percent of the taxes but they own 40 percent of all wealth. This has doubled since the late seventies. Greenspan made a comment a while back saying something along the lines of the income gap threating democratic capitalism.

Steve, you’re wrong about taxes—they aren’t just the day-to-day operating funds, they are an investment in the future.

Because our parents paid their taxes we have things like schools and hospitals and interstate highways. Our parent’s taxes paid for rural electrification—you’re welcome, Rob—and built an economic infrastructure second to none. Because our parents paid their taxes we have the Internet and the computer revolution.

We pay taxes today in order to make sure our children and grandchilden befefit from this investment they way that we did.

When a corporation makes a PO box in the Caymans their headquarters, they are unpatriotic—they take the benefits of past investments while ducking their own responsibilities.

Graeme: What distinguishes free people making free choices is mobility, both upward and downward.  The top one percent in the late seventies is a group populated by different individuals than it is today.  Statistical groups only exist on paper.  In real life, anyone has the opportunity to become prosperous if they want to do so, and do what is necessary for that end.  No hereditary class system or govt mandates hold you back in our system.  Success is available for those who wnat it enough.

"Steve, you’re wrong about taxes—they aren’t just the day-to-day operating funds, they are an investment in the future."

IE social engineering and redistribution of wealth.

I kind of like it when a company goes to the Caymans because it really pisses people like you off. Why do they leave, Don? Outrageous tax rates, maybe?

Re payroll taxes, maybe poor people shouldn’t have to pay them. Then people like you can raise them on the rich people like me so the poor can have a big fat retirement check.

 Blah blah blah.

Somehow we became the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world, while we had a progressive income tax.

We should 2% flat tax wealth, start at $2 million  then most of us would not even pay taxes.

 that is simply not reality robert

I kind of like it when a company goes to the Caymans because it really pisses people like you off. Why do they leave, Don? Outrageous tax rates, maybe?

That doesn’t make a lick of sense, Bat. Don’t you want everybody to pay their fair share?

And while we’re at it, how about a source for that contention that the average Wal-Mart employee only makes $12,000 per year. 

Simple math. Federal minimum wage is $5.15 times 32 hrs/week (fulltime at WalMart) times 52 weeks = $8570. If they manage 40 hours, never take a day off, and never get sick, that can rise to a whopping $10,700.

As for the percentage of taxes they pay, here you go, dude. I’m sure you’ll agree that a Nobel laureate in economics probably knows more about taxation that a serial liar radio host, right?

http://www.pkarchive.org/column/120302.html

It is.  Not even Stalin or Mao could produce equal outcomes, no matter how many people they slaughtered to try to create the "perfect society".  My idea of perfection is that effort is rewarded, not some ideological concept.

Unequal outcomes is the reality of human beings.

Robert says: In real life, anyone has the opportunity to become prosperous if they want to do so, and do what is necessary for that end.  No hereditary class system or govt mandates hold you back in our system.  Success is available for those who want it enough.

Graeme says:  that is simply not reality robert

And I find myself wondering how Graeme could be correct? 

Robert, correctly, lays out the societal model that the country succeeded upon and Graeme say that’s not reality.  How?  What is the reality? 

I see Robert’s definition all the time.  People succeeding everywhere… when they want to.  The people who fail actively do things to help themselves fail…   How can you deny this? 

"The govt never invests;  govt is an expense to the public’

Wonder where all those roads and bridges came from?

Don: You parrot the serial lies of the left about economics.  The govt never invests;  govt is an expense to the public.  The money we pay to the govt is unavailable for investment.  Private enterprise always spends its money more efficiently than govt does.  You, like all good socialists, don’t trust the rest of us to do what you want with our own money; fortunately for us, we live in a free country where it is NOYB how we spend our money.  It works, but you are welcome to move to a socialist country, say, France.  Bon Voyage!

Inefficient use of our tax money.  Some govt expense is OK, even if it is inefficient, like national defense, border security and basic infrastructure, like roads and bridges.  The other two-thirds, the social engineering and entitlements, are a total waste of our money.  We get nothing in return for that money.  It is definitely not an investment.

Steve, I was simply repeating the President’s own words and his promise to the poor of this country.  don’t shoot the messenger.

Seth Yantiss said, And I find myself wondering how Graeme could be correct?

Ahhh! robert108 said that "anyone has the opportunity to become prosperous if they want to do so". We know that is not true because some people die before they get a chance. Others are born mentally retarded and don’t have the opportunity to become prosperous as a result. And still others, related to the retarded, are those we call Marxists and communists who refuse delivery of reality and thus prematurely banish any chance of prosperity because they are too busy arguing what is "fair" and what is not.

So in the end, graeme is correct. robert108 wasn’t describing reality. He forgot about the dead, the mentally retarded, and the Marxists such as graeme.

Epi: I thought the conclusion was obvious, but here are the details.  First, I don’t agree that we have to address the tax situation piece by piece.  Reducing the overall tax burden is always good, since money paid to the govt, or at least two thirds of it, is, IMO, simply wasted.  Reforming SS into an investment plan would reduce FICA immediately, since FICA taxes were jacked up(tripled, I believe), about thirty years ago in anticipation of the demographic problem we have now.  Not only that, but the presence of that amount of money in the Market would stabilize it and rasise the rate of return in general.  Business taxes simply distort the market and should be abolished.  The real key to all of this, IMO, is that govt needs to spend a lot less.  With citizens keeping more of their money, many govt services would become unnecessary.  Bottom line, we need to demand less from our govt and behave like the free people we are.  How’s that?

puzzlefeet, you illustrate the problem of taxes perfectly.

Taxes aren’t meant to help anyone. They are to fund the day to day operations of the government. Social engineering and redistribution of wealth are not valid uses of taxes.

Don, you must be referring to payroll taxes, right?  Social Security, medicaid, etc.

Epi:  I never "attacked" you at all.  You seemed to pit FICA reduction against income tax reduction, and I don’t think it is necessary to do that.  In other words, I was agreeing with you about FICA, and adding income tax reduction to the mix.  This thread was about income tax reduction and the leftie spin on that subject, btw.  I don’t think you can assume that means FICA is insignificant. 

My point about the MSM is simple:  The lefties control the public dialogue through the MSM, so that distorts the political situation toward the left, more than the electorate wishes it to be.  It has nothing to do with victimization;  it is the truth of the present situation.  

I made no connection between the judiciary and SS reform, but if the GW bill had been passed, we would very likely have seen it, through constant investigations and legal challenges.

I wasn’t attacking you, and I didn’t feel good about the gradual approach to SS, but my point was that it was better than nothing.  You had previously called for a serious plan from DC, and that was more than anyone else has done since FDR.

Calm down, I’m not your enemy. 

robert108,

Since when did I argue merely for piecemeal reform (though I’ll take that if that is all that possible at the time)? 

The entire point to my statement was that merely looking at the federal income tax leaves out much of the overall picture, especially from the stamdpoint of the average wage earner.   

 Tax Rates vs Tax Receipts

The crusade for "a living wage" that will enable a worker to support a family proceeds without the slightest interest in finding out whether most people who are making low wages actually have any family to support — much less seeking out the facts about what actually happens after the government sets wages.

We have a Market Based Economy. An individual gets paid what they are worth in that market. If some individual had not chosen to learn in school or to acquire skills at work, and thinks they should be paid according to the needs of their egos rather than the productivity of their labor, they are likely to fail.Contrary to the notion that deficits have resulted from reduced tax receipts by the federal government, those receipts in fact reach new record highs annually along with the GDP. The idea that tax cuts for the rich or otherwise were responsible for the deficit flies in the face of easily obtainable statistics. Spending increases simply outstripped the rising volume of tax receipts, even though hundreds of billions of dollars more is pouring into Washington than ever before. Of course there is no amount of money that cannot be overspent.It was "tax rates" that were cut. As for "the rich", even if we accept the popular definition of them as people currently above some given income level, those in the top income brackets pay larger sums of money in taxes. What bothers the liberals is that "the rich" pay a smaller percentage of their rising incomes. But the hard data indicates they still pay more than middle income labor does.Do some "rich" cheat on their taxes? Yes. Do some "poor"  also cheat on their taxes? Yes. Take cash gartuity for example.Actual federal spending on entitlement has increased annually. What has declined is appropriations – the legal authorization of future spending. In other words, hypothetical money declined but hard cash increased. Most cutbacks in social programs were reductions in projected levels of future spending.Are the rich getting richer? I sure hope so. Because without them the rest of us will have to pick up the tab.

robert108,

That’s a fine sentiment as far as it goes, but my point is that the Bush "reform" went down the entirely wrong road to greater government centralization.  You argue that the government portion of the program would have eventually sloughed off, but that is not my vision of how government either grows or works.  Much like the California energy market "deregulation" wasn’t really deregulation (or a very good way to even regulate the market there) Bush’s SSI program wasn’t really reform – it was merely adding a layer of government to an already overly bureaucratized system. 

I’m happy with piecemeal reform (in other words), but it has to be real reform.

Here is some info. on living wage  results, Mickey:  http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/bp170

Who decides what a "living wage" is?  For me, it’s at least $100,000 a year.  I await your contribution to my living wage, P.

We also have a growing shortage of skilled labor in this country.

I do have empathy for anyone whos situation is hard. I was there myself . Thirty years ago I worked in jobs that are filled by illegal immigrants today. I know minimum wage.

We have a nation where roughly only 25% have any formal education beyond high school. That in itself sets one up for a hard road ahead.

But that’s another issue.

ss: It isn’t, and they don’t.  This thread is about tax cuts, not taxes imposed.  It is certainly logical that "the rich" pay more in taxes, dollarwise, than "the poor".  The question is:  How much more is just?  Even if the rates were equal, the rich would pay more.  The real issue is that the rich pay a greater portion of their income in taxes than those who earn less.  In one way of looking at that, it’s unfair;  others think it’s fair.  It’s an open question.

Don, How can the AVERAGE Wal-Mart employee earn MINIMUM wage?

I don’t remember much from math, but I think I recall something about how you get an average…  Even if every single employee, save the CEO, made minimum, you still couldn’t get that for an average…

What song did that "straw man" sing? Oh, yeah… 

BTW, Rob—you’re only taking about income taxes, not payroll taxes. The idea that the poor are "lucky duckies" who pay no taxes is a complete fallacy.

Can’t deal with the facts so you have to attack the source, eh Don?

Well, how about the Empire Center of the Manhattan Institute which states that the top 1% of wage earners pay 22% of the taxes? How about the Congressional Budget Office which had the top 5% of wage earners paying approximately 50% of the taxes in 1999 (raw data available here)?  Or how about the Tax Foundation which states that this last year the "poorest" 41% of wage earners paid no federal taxes at all?

There is probably nothing I can link to that will make you believe this, Don, as I’m sure you’ve already made up your mind not to believe it…but your obstinance aside there is no denying the fact that the rich pay the taxes in this country. 

Puzzle, the President is talking percentages while the article is talking dollar amounts.  If I’m a millionaire and you make $35,000 a year 3% of my income is going to be more than 10% of your income because I make way more money.

When the spread on the tax rates is so lop-sided, as I pointed out in the post, when you cut taxes you cannot help but benefit the "rich" more.