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Author Topic: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread  (Read 1291608 times)

Karlito

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Re: PoH's Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #3165 on: September 25, 2012, 06:40:15 pm »

The Federal government ran a sizable surplus and had a booming economy back before it had an income tax.

You mean before 1913?
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GreatJustice

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Re: PoH's Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #3166 on: September 25, 2012, 06:47:38 pm »

The Federal government ran a sizable surplus and had a booming economy back before it had an income tax.

You mean before 1913?

Yes, before 1913. It also managed with a very low income tax covering basically no one up through the 20s and also generated a sizable surplus.
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MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: PoH's Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #3167 on: September 25, 2012, 06:50:52 pm »

1913? As in, 1913 when we were a partially agrarian economy and most people were very poor? When smallpox and polio were still around? When there were no computers and very few electrical devices? That 1913?
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Karlito

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Re: PoH's Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #3168 on: September 25, 2012, 06:52:42 pm »

The Federal government ran a sizable surplus and had a booming economy back before it had an income tax.

You mean before 1913?

Yes, before 1913. It also managed with a very low income tax covering basically no one up through the 20s and also generated a sizable surplus.

Yes, because there were no entitlements and no military.
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GreatJustice

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Re: PoH's Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #3169 on: September 25, 2012, 06:54:22 pm »

1913? As in, 1913 when we were a partially agrarian economy and most people were very poor? When smallpox and polio were still around? When there were no computers and very few electrical devices? That 1913?

Because the income tax industrialized the economy, made people rich, eradicated smallpox and polio and invented the widespread use of electrical/electronic devices
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The person supporting regenerating health, when asked why you can see when shot in the eye justified it as 'you put on an eyepatch'. When asked what happens when you are then shot in the other eye, he said that you put an eyepatch on that eye. When asked how you'd be able to see, he said that your first eye would have healed by then.

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MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: PoH's Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #3170 on: September 25, 2012, 06:58:53 pm »

Perhaps you missed the memo, but it was the creation of social programs which lead to disease eradication and military encryption projects that led to computing.

Furthermore, while the income tax did not cause industrialization, the middle class, and high technology, it is a consequence of them. The government of 2012 cannot survive without an income tax unless you want to dismantle the armed forces and leave people to live or die on their resources alone.
« Last Edit: September 25, 2012, 07:01:21 pm by MetalSlimeHunt »
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Leafsnail

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Re: PoH's Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #3171 on: September 25, 2012, 07:42:00 pm »

Frankly, if you advocate a flat tax, it should be a flat tax of 0%.
Yeah, I guess if you're going to cause a massive collapse you might as well make it quick.

Also yes, income taxes were partially responsible for a lot of those things by getting the economy out of its terminal slump.  I don't see how you can regard comparing present day to 100 years ago when America was much poorer and more poverty stricken than it is today as remotely valid.
« Last Edit: September 25, 2012, 07:44:11 pm by Leafsnail »
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Truean

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Re: PoH's Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #3172 on: September 25, 2012, 08:23:29 pm »

So, income tax pays for all the things that make income possible: roads, schools, civilization in general (or the best we've managed I suppose). And, it's in proportion to the income you have (in theory), so you pay for what you take out.
« Last Edit: September 25, 2012, 08:25:50 pm by Truean »
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ggamer

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Re: PoH's Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #3173 on: September 25, 2012, 09:54:24 pm »

Man, I am so fucking sick of politics.

I am a republican, but holy shit Mitt Romney has somehow warped a small-business and individual focused party platform into WOHAY LETS LET CORPORATIONS DO MORE CRAZY SHIT.

And then Obama decides that the best course of action once accepting presidency was "Oh yeah, that whole bipartisan thing? Fuck that." and started to act like just as much of an asshole as the tea party movement was being.

Man, this entire fucking election has been a disaster. I mean, in my eyes the best candidate was Ron Paul and his platform was "Okay, I can be bipartisan, but fuck I need lots of weed to do that".

News media isn't helping. Several popular magazines (Including TIME, though they have been expanding efforts to be a tad bit more bipartisan) Are obviously, not so much leaning, but more fucking collapsing to the left. Right publications/media aren't any better (COUGHFOXNEWSCOUGH)

And now I can barely argue with anybody anymore unless I completely steer clear of religion because as soon as it comes out that i'm christian everyone goes "WOAH NOW DONT WANT TO GO ARGUE WITH SOME BIGOT WHY DONT YOU GO LYNCH SOME GAYS YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE. HEY EVERYONE, THIS GUY IS A TERRIBLE PERSON" And i'm just sitting there all like "Man ffs give me a break here"

I mean I just want an actually bi-partisan news thing or something to get news from.

So much of that was entirely just kind of a mean thing to say so sorry but I don't want to delete it so fuck it. If it's that big of an issue then when I get back home tomorrow I'll delete it before people work themselves up into a tizzy.

darkrider2

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Re: PoH's Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #3174 on: September 25, 2012, 10:03:11 pm »

Believe it or not you're already ahead of what I was expecting you to say immediately after proclaiming being a republican on these forums (which is troll us).

The republican party seems to be losing bits and bits of its base lately, it doesn't seem to stem from the democrats doing things as far as I can tell, but more of internal party affairs and trying to railroad everyone onto the mitt train.

That's a TVtropes link btw, be careful.
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Solifuge

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Re: PoH's Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #3175 on: September 25, 2012, 10:03:37 pm »

Yes, this is a long post. If you'd like to learn something of why the Flat Tax (though something I support) is not a panacea for our problems, bear with me.

Just think, for a moment, about how long a second is. Now consider that a billion seconds makes up about half of your expected lifetime. Consider that, a billion days ago, our earliest hominid ancestors still hadn't begun to walk on two feet. 1 billion is an impossibly immense number.

Knowing that, realize what is truly meant when you see that the government is spending roughly 1,500 Billions of dollars on the military in one year. If dollars were seconds again, that would be 750 modern lifespans. Thats enough for you to have lived since long before recorded history began. If you had 1,500 billion seconds to live, you could have personally taken part in the building of Mesopotamia, and still be living today, with tens of thousands more years of life to look forward to.

1,500 billion dollars in a year... and what did it buy? Consider the following figures. 50 of those military billions fund an agency which today spies on, interrogates, and imprisons American citizens without a trial, in direct violation of everything that is legal and constitutional... the Department of Homeland Security. Consider, too, that 100 of those Billions were spent just to pay off roughly half the yearly interest on our past war debts- not paying back the debt at all, mind you, but paying off part of the interest our debts build every year. That's so it only increases about half as fast as it would if we didn't pay it at all... and yes, in case you were wondering, that is war debt which was somehow not covered by the billions we have already been spending on war. Most of the rest, some 700 billion or so, is spent on all our military operations across the globe, which of course covers military assets, such as the gear, training, and supplies used by our soldiers. These assets go on to kill foriegn leadership we dislike (for instance, Hussein and Bin-Laden), to train and supply rebels to overthrow those we can't easily touch, and to build and garrison bases on foriegn soil, to remind them of the ever-present threat of military action if they "get out of line". We have been, and continue to use military forces to mold the world and its cultures into forms that better suit us. Can you imagine how it would be if a foriegn country built a military base in your hometown? Is it as shocking to you as it is to me, when you consider the place of American in the world stage in that light?

The ethical concerns of this aside, all these things are done in the name of our best interests, despite that it continues to bankrupt us at home, and consume the majority of our Government's funding. We can see where this cost has gotten us as well, just looking at these past 10 years... our neighbors in the Middle-East are still divided by civil wars, the corpses of their people and our own continue to pile up daily, its infrastructure remains in tatters, and the price of imported goods from the region (such as oil) are on the rise. Ignoring the cost in human life, how's that for the payoff on a $1,500 billion a year investment? Actually, it looks like we lost there too.

And yet, we keep doing this year after year, without change. What we do instead is propose cuts to our funding elsewhere... 5 billion from the National Science Foundation, 10 from the Department of Education, and so on. They've cut NASA's funding down to a meager 3 billion dollars, which is supposed to cover the launching and maintaining our global satellite network, as well as all of NASA's technological research and development. At this point, their funding was cut so far that they had to look to citizens for donations, just to get their latest probe to Mars. And when the organizations they propose cutting from have total budgets like 10 or 15 billion dollars, cutting the programs entirely wouldn't even put a drop in the bucket of the $1,500 we devote to military spending.

So, to bring this all back to the discussion at hand. Even if we taxed all Americans equally at a flat 10%, rather than allowing tax breaks for those with the most wealth, that would still only be equal to about 1.5 trillion dollars, which would barely be able to cover our military spending alone. For comparison, however, a 10% Flat Tax would cover every non-military bit of our federal budget 3 times over. The flat tax is a good idea, and one I support as a method to prevent more and more wealth from being bled out of economic circulation, and into the hoards of the impossibly wealthy. However, we need to consider our behavior as a nation, and changing it as a solution. Sadly, every politician is bound to a sort of popularity contest, due to the nature of popular elections, and thus fears cutting military spending lest they be accused of "making us look weak" on the national stage. So, as a result, they continue to run the economy into the ground, and raise the debt ceiling to postpone dealing with the crisis, making us look shortsighted, powermongering incompetents to the rest of the world instead... and ignoring the debt crisis and its obvious solution is like plugging your ears and singing as the building crumbles down on top of you.

Note that after gathering revenue, the Federal Government doesn't have a surplus left over anymore, which feeds our growth... we have a defecit, an ever-growing debt which we ignore as though it's completely unrelated to our financial problems. Is this not somehow insane?







...

Anyway, this is reminding me of why I can't look at our national budget figures. It upsets me. In fact, I think if the average person stopped and really looked at what was going on, they'd be up in arms.
« Last Edit: September 25, 2012, 10:10:04 pm by Solifuge »
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MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: PoH's Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #3176 on: September 25, 2012, 10:15:08 pm »

And then Obama decides that the best course of action once accepting presidency was "Oh yeah, that whole bipartisan thing? Fuck that." and started to act like just as much of an asshole as the tea party movement was being.
You may have missed the memo on this, but Obama tried bipartisanism. Do you know what happened? The GOP locked down and refused to do anything if it was proposed by him, even if it was something they would otherwise not object to. Bipartisanism requires two willing parties, and while Obama was willing the GOP was not.
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Man, this entire fucking election has been a disaster. I mean, in my eyes the best candidate was Ron Paul and his platform was "Okay, I can be bipartisan, but fuck I need lots of weed to do that".
Ron Paul isn't very bipartisan. He's extremely committed to his political beliefs.
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And now I can barely argue with anybody anymore unless I completely steer clear of religion because as soon as it comes out that i'm christian everyone goes "WOAH NOW DONT WANT TO GO ARGUE WITH SOME BIGOT WHY DONT YOU GO LYNCH SOME GAYS YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE. HEY EVERYONE, THIS GUY IS A TERRIBLE PERSON" And i'm just sitting there all like "Man ffs give me a break here"
Oh yes, you poor oppressed Christian. How maligned your religion is in mainstream American culture, it is just an atrocity.

Didn't you say you lived in a heavily religious area? Come on now.
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Descan

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Re: PoH's Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #3177 on: September 25, 2012, 10:16:04 pm »

I think Occupy Wall Street is, in no small part, the average person having stopped, looked at what's going on... and going up in arms.
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Sirus

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Re: PoH's Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #3178 on: September 25, 2012, 10:23:13 pm »

@ MSH: I'm pretty sure he meant mentioning that he was a Christian online, not IRL. Face it, some people are assholes online, and on some websites mentioning that you are religious in any way earns nothing but scorn.
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EveryZig

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Re: PoH's Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread
« Reply #3179 on: September 25, 2012, 10:23:33 pm »

@ Solifuge
Umm, that was a good argument against our immense military spending, but I don't see how that connects back to a flat tax. You say at the end that a flat tax is good for keeping wealth from being hoarded by the wealthy, but a flat tax is not the only way to do that.
IIRC, theoretical tax structures run from regressive (the rich pay a lower %) to flat (rich pay the same %) to progressive (the rich pay a higher %). When moving away from a regressive structure, why stop at flat?
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