In a sick kind of way it will be pretty funny to watch.

This will be my first and last post in this thread, since debating with 12clicks cannot be, by definition, intellectually honest.

What that graph doesn't show you is how the wealth of the top 1% has grown in disproportion to the bottom 95% in that same period of time. The wealthiest Americans share of the total tax burden is disproportionately low compared to their share of our national wealth.

That graph also only shows income taxes. It doesn't take into account any other form of taxation. The reason it doesn't is because most other forms of taxation are regressive, and would show the argument that the rich pay more is a flat out lie.
Oh sure they may pay more in terms of raw dollars, but in terms of percentage of total income or total wealth, they pay a much smaller share than the middle class.

For instance Social Security and Medicare are 1/3 of our total federal budget. Yet social security taxes are capped at around 100K per year. Meaning if you make $1MM per year, you only pay Social Security tax on 10% of your income, while the guy making 50K per year pays those taxes on 100% of his income.
You also can't separate Social Security from the rest of the budget because it currently runs a surplus and those surplus dollars are used to pay for things like defense spending and interest on the debt.

Anyone with access to google and a little bit of intellectual curiousity can find out the truth about these things. 12clicks is not one of those people.
I have owned his sorry ass in many of these arguments before, but he just ignores the facts and continues with his insults and bullshit.

I'm sure a post will be coming soon with the words "son, rabble, idiot" or something similar soon. Whoopty fuckin doo.

Speaking of this "honest debate over the progressivity of the tax system", we already had that Ron. It was last November, and your side lost, by a significant margin.
I understand that you're a sore loser and want a do-over, but that ain't gonna happen. So kiss your offshore shelters and 35% marginal rate buh bye. :1orglaugh

What trash like snake doctor pretend isn't so is that the rich pay for what the poor trash like himself vote for.
We have this idiot system of taxation because the politicians realized that it was the best way to pander to the underclass whom snakesoctor is a part of.
Just as we wouldn't go to the grocery store and snakesoctor would get his bread for free because of his economic status and I'd pay $20 for the same bread, all Americans should pay the same amount for the services the government provides.

Snakesoctor pretends I'm intellectually dishonest so he can continue to get his government services for free, courtesy of his betters.

But then, he's a failure, it's not like he "could" pay his fair share.

Oh, and about the election.
It marked the tipping point where the handout vote is larger than the intelligent vote.
Snakeboy, you don't have a clue how bad that is for the country because your kind can never see past the shiny coin that is your handout. Obama banked on that

The world you live in must be so wonderfully simple. It's almost a shame it isn't the real one.

So in your twisted little mind it would have been more intelligent for someone to vote for a complete sell out (McCain) and his mental midget VP pick? I LOL'd.

This chart is USELESS.

Do you honestly not understand how that can appear to be more than it's is, or are you just hoping a sucker will believe it?

Let's analyze the total % of income the top 1% pay vs. those in the bottom 95%. That is what matters. Of course 10% of $30,000,000 is a lot more than 10% of $17,400.

Oh, that's right, it wouldn't support your right wing propaganda.

The irony is that the same people that bitch about taxes are the same ones that think Reagan the puppet was a genius. Guess what? Reagan started the outrageous spending! Nobody complains and his predecessors realized they could get away with it, too. Nobody slapped their hands for putting it into the cookie jar.

Says the guy who loves taking advantage of all the publicly funded things around him but has no interest in paying for them. In the real world, we call those people 'hypocrites.'

So like I was saying, about intellectual honesty. Here are a few simple facts.

The top tax rate during the Eisenhower administration was 90%.

During Nixon, 70%.

When Reagan cut taxes, it was from 70% all the way down to 50%.

Today the top rate is 35%, and capital gains taxes are at ridiculously low levels. Yet Obama's plan to let the Bush tax cuts expire, and have the top rate go back to 39.6%, that was the tipping point where the handout vote is larger than the intelligent vote

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

If all there is to debate is facts and public policy, you lose and you lose huge. Every single time.
You just start these threads so you can call people shitstains, or failures, or whatever. You can't win the argument honestly so you resort to personal insults.

It's so predictable and so pathetic, that I could log in as you, start one of these threads, and keep it going for days without anyone knowing it wasn't really you. You're just that much of a repetitive douche.
It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic.

Grow up.

Dear unintelligent halfwit,
Reagan did not have a republican congress supporting him. The democrats refused to stop spending. Reagan cut taxes, the democrats kept spending.
You're out of your depth and it makes you appear stupid.

Snakeboy, you're "facts" are irrelivent to this discussion.(it's so hard to tell when you're playing dumb)

%s from 30+ years ago are meaningless.
Today the rich pay for almost everything already. However, trash like yourself (the typical Obama voter) Still don't think it's enough. Your resentment of successful people has an outlet now!
As I said, you're not bright enough to understand the death spiral we're in or that the bottom will go first

Dear uneducated buffoon.

The legislative process requires both branches to cooperate. Otherwise there would have been a shutdown like there was with Clinton and the republican congress of the 90's.
The fact that you want to give Reagan credit for the good things of the 80's and blame the Democrats in congress for the bad things, shows just how disillusioned and intellectually dishonest you are.

Reagan signed all of those budgets.

BTW, the biggest item in the discretionary budget, by far, is defense spending. Which Reagan wanted increased by an order of magnitude higher than he actually got. (Over [Fiscal Year] 1980-85, real military spending would increase 39 percent)
http://www3.niu.edu/~td0raf1/history468/apr0401.htm

So this idea that he wanted to toe the line on spending is pure bullshit revisionist history.

Calling people shitstains and halfwits doesn't change the fact that you have no facts to support your arguments. Only rhetoric.

So what about Clinton. When he got elected in 1993 there was a democrat controlled house and senate. The next election saw the republicans take control of both and they held it for the remainder of his presidency. They did nothing to curb spending. Bush had a republican controlled house and senate for the first 6 of his 8 years. They did nothing to control spending. Spending is not a democrat or republican issue.

Here is the difference.

Democrats - tax and spend.
Republicans - cut taxes then spend and run up debt.

Oh and as for Reagan. There was a republican controlled senate for the first 6 of his 8 years. So the republican senate and president could do nothing to control the democrats spending? Of course they didn't they wanted to spend just as much money, they just want to spend it on different things.

neither party has any interest in spending less.

Sorry asshat, you're incorrect.
After Carter gutted the military and ruined the economy, Reagan did exactly what was needed. The only one revising history is you.

Congress controls the spending no matter how the mighty snakeboy pretends otherwise.

But I'd argue about Reagan too if I were you since you don't have a leg to stand on considering the top 1% pays for all of YOUR public services

Kane, you're wrong. Google Newt Gingrich

Good thing I am not in the top 1% or even the top 5%...fuck the rich people. LOL

What about Newt Gingrich?

Here are some highlights of his career:

He had a bunch of ethics charges brought against him. All but one of them were dropped, but that was a pretty ugly one where he supposedly lied about how money going to a tax free non-profit was being spent. "On January 21, 1997 the House voted overwhelmingly (395 to 28 ) to reprimand House Speaker Newt Gingrich for ethics violations dating back to September 1994. The house ordered Gingrich to pay an unprecedented $300,000 penalty, the first time in the House's 208-year history it had disciplined a speaker for ethical wrongdoing."

He was the guy who spearheaded the government shutdown in 1995. There are many who will say this was simply the republicans trying to curb out of control democrat spending and there might be some truth to that. Others say it was them playing petty games. Here is a quote from Tom Delay :
Delay writes in his book, No Retreat, No Surrender:[3]

"He told a room full of reporters that he forced the shutdown because Clinton had rudely made him and Bob Dole sit at the back of Air Force One...Newt had been careless to say such a thing, and now the whole moral tone of the shutdown had been lost. What had been a noble battle for fiscal sanity began to look like the tirade of a spoiled child..The revolution, I can tell you, was never the same."

He did help draft and pass the Contract With America. Most of which the Republican party themselves ended up not following. I understand that in some cases deomcrats fought them, but the republicans themselves could at least stand by many of these beliefs and act on them in their personal lives, but of course most of them don't.

So I guess I'm curious what makes Newt such a good guy?

And I am correct about the spending.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/budget.php

This site shows the budgets put forth by every president since 1930. It shows how much they put in outlays, how much they brought in in receipts and what the deficit/surplus was. Since 1930 there have only been 7 times that there was a budget that was actually smaller than the previous year and the last time it happened was 1948. Since 1980 the federal budget has grown from 517 billion to 3.1trillion. During that same time period the population has gone up by about 33%. So if it increased around 33-40% you could understand that, but it has increased 500%.

How exactly is that not just politicians spending money?

I had dinner with Newt Gingrich many moons ago when I lived in Georgia. He's a cooler guy than you would think.

I don't know anything about him personally and there have been times that I have met politicians in the past and they have seemed like pretty cool people, but I wonder what he means when he says Newt is proof that every administration doesn't just spend money and they politicians don't really care about reeling in the budgets.

the fact that he's president of my country is all the proof i need that he's probably lying about everything.

You poor deluded imbecile.

Just because Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity say something is true, doesn't make it so. With so much information available on the internet, it's sad that you keep embarrassing yourself by not being accurate on simple things like how bills become law.

Not a single budget that was passed during the Reagan administration was done via a veto override. That means Reagan signed every single one of them.

As for your stupid chart that shows the share of income taxes paid by the top 1%, why doesn't it show the explosion in income of the top 1% during that time period?
In 1980, the average CEO made 40 times the income of the average worker. In 2000, the average CEO made 300 times the income of the average worker.
So the top 1% see their incomes rise by a multiple of 10, while middle class wages actually drop, and the response to that is to come up with graphs about how now the taxation of those people making 300 times the income of the average worker is unfair, even though their taxes have been lowered during that period???

ZOMG, I make 10 times as much money, and now I have to pay 10 times more in taxes than I used to.....why that just doesn't make sense!!!! :helpme

Excuse my while I get a box of kleenex so I can cry a river for those poor CEOs.

You're a pathetic excuse for a human being whose stupid arguments can't stand the heat of a simple fact check. So of course, you'll just call people names.

It must be really sad to be you.

As relevant? Of course he is. Because he is super-rich doesn't disqualify him from that grouping, it in fact helps to illustrate the point.

Why does everyone think taxing the rich is such a good idea? Because it means taxing the poor less and that means votes. If you piss off the guy that makes a lot of money, you have lost one vote. If you piss of the guys (plural) that don't make as much, you have lost a whole demographic. Simple voting principles. There is nothing Fair about taxation at all. There is no equality.

Did anyone read that Buffet/Berkshires tax return was 8900 pages long? 8900 fucking pages! Harry Potter book 7 was 800 pages long and that was a big book. 8900 fucking pages! Doesn't that seem a bit out of whack to anyone? Where is the logic in saying it should take an army of people to prepare that documentation (yearly) and an army of people to review it? I know it's not popular amongst the poor or less well to do, but what's wrong with taxing every dollar/transaction in America at the same rate and budgeting with those numbers? Why different rates depending on how you earned it? What portion of your income it was part of (your first 15k in earnings? did it put you above 125k? 300k?)? It's just silly. It to support things that people want rather than to cover what people actually need and telling them that government isn't here to solve all of your problems.

8900 pages. Mine gets to 20 and that pisses me off royally. It should be 1 page long. I earned XXXX dollars last year, here's what I paid. For each dollar I earned, you get 10-15%, no deductions, no adjustments, no bullshit. Corporations treated identically. Everyone that visits America or works here treated identically. Simple. Make the IRS and enforcement agency.

Snakeboy, loser, it doesn't matter how succesful the rich are. You, life's loser, could not now live the life the successful provide for you. But being the low life scum you are, you're not grateful to your betters for giving you a life you couldn't afford yourself, you bitch, complain, and vote that your betters don't pay enough.

How pathetic to be you

The signature on the back of that is not the signature that people are looking for. That is a stamp from the State of Hawaii (the official in charge of records creation) stating that the document is certified by the State as official (in this case being an official Certification of Live Birth), it does not indicate anything about the doctor who delivered nor the location where delivered. That's what people want to see. They also argue that the Certification of Live Birth is not a Birth Certificate.

BTW, I read about this the other day (it's accuracy I have yet to check, but it sounds reasonable). Obama's Sister, Maya Soetoro, has a Certificate of Live Birth from Hawaii as well (same designation as the Prez, rather than an official Birth Certificate). She is known to have been born in Indonesia, not in Hawaii. If that is accurate (which I assume it is), there is nothing about the Certificate of Live Birth that in any way makes it as accurate as a Birth Certificate.

He may have been born in Hawaii, he may not have been. The documentation he has shown to date, does not appear to me as enough proof regardless of the State of Hawaii certifying it. My understanding of the procedures to obtain a Certification of Live Birth at the time make it differ immensely from what I have in my possession of my own Birth Certificate which shows a great deal more information.

You can't just call people idiots and sheep for looking at things and saying, hey, something looks fishy here. Especially when he (the Prez) appears to be making every effort possible to keep those records from being reviewed. Don't we have those records on every president, except for him? I may be wrong, but I don't think so. Why keep them from public view? What's the purpose of not showing people your background? What in those documents is not appropriate for public consumption? There is nothing regarding my birth, my education, my history, that if I became President, that I would hesitate to share publicly. Even the fact that I am a professional photographer of naked women.

When you are the president, you belong to the people for your term. The people (all of them), deserve to have full disclosure regarding who you are. You represent ALL the people, not just a group, and absolutely not just yourself.

The fairest tax scheme is a flat tax with ONE exclusion for all taxpayers.

1) Every person, whether they earn 1 billion dollars in a year or 22,000 dollars in a year get's the first 50K tax free. You pay 0% on the first 50,000 dollars you earn.

2) Every penny, no matter how much or how little, above that 50,000 gets taxed at one flat rate (most economists believe that rate would be around 15-17%). There are no other deductions or exclusions.

In that scenario:
Earn 0-50K you pay 0 taxes
Earn 100K you pay 15% taxes on 50K
Earn 1,000,000 you pay 15% taxes on 950,000
Earn 1,000,000,000 you pay 15% taxes on 999,950,000

That means every poor citizen gets to live tax free BUT everyone else is getting the same 50K tax free that poor people get. The middle class, upper class and barely rich would all have their tax bills lowered by a significant percentage as well.

It is NOT poor people who are against a flat tax, it is VERY wealthy people who are against it. If you are worth a billion dollars thanks to an inheritance, you can simply invest that principle amount in tax free municipal bonds and live in luxury off the interest without ever paying a single penny in taxes. There are all kinds of ways to shelter money, but most don't work if you are poor, middle class or barely rich... they work if you are wealthy.

In the tax plan I stated above, people who are worth 1 billion dollars and who earn 30 million a year or more in tax free 'interest revenue' would suddenly be paying 4.5 million a year each instead of paying zero. That is why it never gets passed.

Very wealthy people pay far less than 15% on average. Many pay close to zero... and they don't want anyone fucking that up for them just so barely rich people can pay less than 30-50% of their income. The guy with a billion couldn't give a rat's ass how much some webmaster making six figures a year has to pay.

* The one thing you misstated in your analysis is the idea that one person gets one vote. That it patently false. Your vote does not count as much as the vote of a billionaire. It's not even close. For example, Rupert Murdock owns Fox News and gets to influence millions of voters (and he's Australian), Michael Bloomberg gets to speak out as the Mayor of New York and gets to shape the public perception of governmental policy through his Bloomberg news service, Oprah gets to tell idiot housewives from the midwest how they should vote. You get one vote and MIGHT be able to influence a handful of others. Wealthy people get one vote, get to influence the masses AND get to make huge campaign contributions that buy them significant access to politicians far beyond anything a normal citizen might ever get. :2 cents:

Far from overwhelming???????? You/people only say that because you look at the remainder of the dollars they have and say....... oh goodness, they have enough left over, so what's the big deal?

Look at it as the value of an individual dollar, rather than as a whole collection of money. How would you like to pay 35-40% tax on the dollars you earn? If you are in the 15K bracket, there is no tax, the next bracket is like 10%. No one in those brackets pays even close to what the high earners do.

It pisses me off when people take the argument that wealthy people should be happy to pay more as they have more available to them to work with. Fuck that! All it is, is the wealthy paying for the usage by others. That's called welfare. That's called charity. Figure out something fair, but at this point it's just plain old theft, that's it, disguised as law.

If you and I earn a dollar, to be fair, we both should share the same amount for the common good. What makes the idea that I can earn 100,000 times more than you mean that my dollars require me to contribute more than you on a per dollar basis anything remotely even close to fair or making sense?

Politics, voting, demographics... it's all a scam

First of all, you don't know me, you have no idea how much money I make, or how much I pay in taxes. Yet you just assume that anyone who voted for the Democrat must not be in the top bracket.
News Flash dickhead, Obama won a majority of the wealthy vote also.

Of course I was right, you can't win on substance, so you resort to personal insults. Now all of a sudden I'm the scum of the earth leeching off of someone else because I back up my arguments with facts and figures and you only back up yours with your personal belief that you're better than everyone else.

Check and mate. :321GFY

I thought he was the lesser of 2 evils.


:Oh crap

Trashman, Obama didn't win the wealthy vote (also known as the intelligent vote, the successful vote, etc.)
the underbelly of each wealthy state, including my own voted for Obama. Confusing you, the idiot into believing that the intelligent were part of the Obama vote.

Oh, and trust me, dear trash, I know exactly who you are. Your idiot arguments, your bitterness towards your betters, and the small mindedness of your thoughts about other peoples' money identifies you very clearly as part off the rabble.

Successful people NEVER spend time thinking about how they can take someone else's money.
But please chump, go on pretending your not the rabble.

Kevin, you hit the nail on the head.
While the rabble believe that "they" under the false mantle of "America" give successful people the opportunity to earn big dollars, the thruth is that successful people pay for a lifestyle that losers like snake boy would not realize on their own, don't deserve, and could not attain without their betters providing it for them.
His kind are a drain on successful people that does nothing but hold us back.
Imagine a world where the rabble actually contributed to society.

Really? In reality that is often the only thing successful people DO think about.
Cross sells are sold by many 'successful' people and some are ethical. The 'moral argument' is a tough one to win when you are suggesting that pre-checked cross-sells are somehow more noble than tax payments allocated to universal health care. I am in favor of honest cross sells... I'm also in favor of universal health care.

Maybe you would find it more palatable if your 1040 had a pre-checked cross sell box at the bottom allocating a few percentage points to universal health care and a hidden cancellation link on the form like the ones used by many 'successful people' to 'earn' someone else's money. :1orglaugh

I guess the way I understand it is that he has shown the copy and that the original has been examined. If the president took time out of his day to satisfy every conspiracy theorist ideas he would do little more than that. The way I feel is that if the guy knew he wasn't born in the US and might not be a legal citizen and he had decided to run for president he might make sure he had such a convincing cover and the documentation to back it up that there were no questions about it.

About 10 years ago I needed to get a copy of my birth certificate so I could get a passport. I live Oregon, but was born in Southern California. I called my mom and she told me what hospital I was born in. I called that cities records agency and they told me how to go about requesting a copy. The version I got looks a lot like Obama's.

The way I understand it the version of it that was released is a short form copy. It is what many states will give you and is not an exact duplicate of the birth certificate, but it is what you need to get a passport or any other state documents. The state of Hawaii doesn't release the full form. I don't know why and they won't say why. This means one of two things have happened. Either 1. This is their policy and they aren't going to change it and make a scanned copies of the certificate to satisfy everyone who wants one. Or 2. Obama has somehow convinced the entire records division of the state of Hawaii to lie for him in a massive cover-up. Which sounds more likely?

I don't even know why you think you know what you are talking about... because you don't.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15471.html

People who doubt Obama's birth certificate should realize that the validity of The United States Constitution is a much bigger concern!

Did you know These FOUR Important Facts?!

1) The US Constitution is not notarized by a public notary?!

2) The US Constitution begins by stating "We the people..." any yet not every person was consulted ahead of time... therefore that statement is vague at best!

3) The US Constitution is also the name of a famous boat and therefore it is intentionally misleading to people who can not tell the difference between a document and a boat!!!!

4) There are no photographs or videos of the founding fathers signing the US Constitution! Sure there are a few drawings, but everyone knows that drawings are the work of Satan...

Based on the above facts, I am not confident that the US Constitution is real... or even that it exists!


Why are people so clueless? :2 cents:

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

Shit that caught me off guard, coffee everywhere. Another keyboard ruined thanks to you. :1orglaugh

Another feeble attempt to piss upwards, eh troll?:1orglaugh

Based on exit polls, silly kid?
I could explain the sociology and inaccuracy of exit poll questions of "who did you vote for?" and "how much do you make?" but it would be wasted effort on someone of your low mental level

the actual vote for Obama was higher than the exit poll numbers... :2 cents: