Wealth Distribution in the USA

I hadn't, but I'm willing to give it a try. If you can find 1000 conservatives who share this view, and each of whom will donate 10% of his income to me, then I in return will spend the money on doing rich-person things. You will have the satisfaction of having increased the number of rich folks to the tune of 1, and I will have the satisfaction of knowing that according to the all-wise pundits of conservatism I shall be bringing immeasurable joy to all around me and indescribable benefits to the economy.

I was. It is seriously orthodox conservative doctrine that rich people somehow make everyone wealthy through the magic of "trickle-down". Well, if everyone who voted Republican in the last election joined a scheme such as I proposed in my previous post, then they could produce 60,000 more rich people, thus magically making everyone richer, including themselves. One wonders why they don't. Are true wealth and false wealth both the same shade of green and equally accepted by retailers? Well said, comrade. When do we start expropriating the expropriators?

That is not a reply to anything I actually wrote. Nor is that.

One of the things that we hear from conservatives is that higher taxes on millionaires will take away their incentive for working, and so they'd stop working, thus stopping them from showering on us the incalculable benefits that they currently do.Of course, some of them don't work, and some of those who do don't do any good for society, but let's think about those who do benefit society. By the conservative account they must be an odd bunch of people.Suppose I were to say: "I will do no work unless I get ten million dollars a year after tax. Nine is not enough, and if you offered me that I'd decline to work."You would then think I was:* Lazy. When millions of Americans are willing to work for minimum wage, apparently I won't get out of bed for less than ten million a year.* Greedy. For the same reason.* Incredibly stupid. Because nine million dollars is better than nothing.So according to conservative ideology, it would seem that the rich are lazy, greedy, and stupid. And yet these lazy greedy stupid people are absolutely essential to our economy, so much so that if you raised their taxes and they stopped doing whatever it is they do, they could not be replaced by people who are less lazy, greedy, and stupid, and who would be willing to do the same job for a mere nine million dollars a year.The curious thing about this rule is that it's scalable. After all, some millionaires do work for a measly nine million dollars a year after tax. But they would stop working if they only got $8,100,000 after tax. And the guy who works for a mere million net dollars a year? He'd stop working if he only got $900,000. It seems that what influences their decision to either earn huge amounts of money or to earn nothing is not the net dollar amount that they would earn by working, but the proportion of their gross income that will go to things such as education, federal highways, or national defense.Like I say, they're a funny bunch. I could hardly imagine that they exist, but fortunately conservatives, who have more imagination, can. It's good that we have conservative ideologues around to imagine these things for the rest of us.Meanwhile, conservatives are outraged that the poorest Americans, the notorious 47%, pay no federal income tax. You'd think they'd applaud this as giving people incentives to work. But no, apparently this applies only to millionaires. Poor people are best motivated by poverty.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

But the trouble is that you can't do both. You can't at once simplify the tax forms, and introduce an extra section in them that gives tax breaks for community involvement.I remember in the last election, or possibly the one before that, someone asked Obama if he could pledge to make taxation fairer and simpler. I forget what he answered, but I thought: "No. Because every time someone makes taxation more complicated, they're doing it in an attempt to make it fairer (at least as they see it)."In any case, how complicated are tax forms? I've filled 'em out, they don't take that long. They're a few pages, but most of what I have to do is tick the boxes that say "this doesn't apply to me, I am not a self-employed farmer", and "this doesn't apply to me, I am not a disabled veteran" ... and so on, I can't actually remember what the boxes are. Once a year one has to look through a few pages, tick a few boxes, fill in a few figures, and sign one's name a few times. And yet every time there's a discussion of tax reform, there's always someone who'll imply that it would be a significant boon to the life of the nation if, once a year, we each had to cope with ten minutes of bureaucratic tedium rather than fifteen.

That would depend on what these hobbies actually achieve. If they're really worthwhile, then those people aren't so much having their lifestyles subsidized as being employees of the federal government. If they aren't, why pay them for it?

Why? People have hobbies anyway. If we have that much spare money, why not use it to abolish polio instead of paying some guy to build a scale model of Notre Dame out of matchsticks. I will decide that for a small fee.

Well, as with Coyote's idea for improving the economy, I volunteer to be the first and possibly the last beneficiary of the New Order. Please would you and Jon send me any spare money you have, and in return I shall pursue my hobbies, something that I was going to do anyway.

OK, in answer to your question, I would say that we probably don't have enough money to fix all the actual problems in the world and pay people to have hobbies, so if we have to choose we should probably concentrate on the former.

Well, just in case, shall we do that first? I had forgotten that only sophomores object to polio; a fleeting antipathy which in mature individuals vanishes in one's senior year. Well, it's an example of something else we could do with the money.

Yes, but I'm going to guess you ate yesterday. Pride is one of those luxuries you can afford.

Because that doesn't always produce the best outcome. If, for example, taxation was a purely voluntary transaction, then this post would be written in Russian, and you would be a stalwart member of the Communist Party of the American Soviet Republic.

Well, this is confusing and equivocal. Perhaps instead of saying "the value of the employee's labor", you could say "the value of the employee's labor to the employee". Or better yet, since you apparently wish to refer to his wages, you could use the word "wages", reserving the word "value" for the concept "value".

In my lingo, we call that his wages.

Let's be clear about what NoNukes is really saying. He's really saying something different from the stuff you've made up. As one can find out by reading his posts, where he really says the things that he's really saying.