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Old 11-02-2008, 10:46 PM  
kane
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Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: portland, OR
Posts: 20,684
Quote:
Originally Posted by TwinCities View Post
I keep hearing people say that Obama and democrats in general are about redistribution of wealth. Taxing the rich and giving to the poor. Aren't taxes by their very nature designed to redistribute wealth from ANYONE that pays taxes? What funds welfare for example? Don't ALL administrations tax citizens and send it to poor countries? Is this really only democrats that do this? Isn't "redistribution of wealth" done by ALL administrations for decades and decades?
Technically taxes are a sharing of the wealth. The top 5% of income earners in this country pay 80% of the taxes (total tax dollars collected). These dollars are then used to pay for things like the military, roads, schools, police, fire, rescue and many other things. Many of these things are used by everyone on a disproportionate level. For example. A guy making 45K a year who is married and has 3 kids will not pay that much in federal taxes. But his kids will get free educations up through high school, they will all drive on good roads and have a police force and military to protect them. These are all things that alone they could not afford.

Sure you can argue that most people can't afford to employ their own police force or military so even if you leave that out the average cost of private school in this country is around $3,100 a year per kid so that guy would have to come up with around $9,300 a year for private school for his kids. The average cost per kid in public school is around $6,800 a year per kid. So in the end you can argue that this guy is getting somewhere between 9K and 18K worth of education for his kids each year and even if he doesn't own his home or have any write-offs the guy is only going to pay around $2000 a year in taxes. So you could say for sure this guy is getting far more from the system then he is paying into the system and that is a sharing of the wealth.
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