22 comments

• Comment Link Sunday, 05 May 2013 11:33 posted by VanishingMediator

  The money that wealthy people make is for altering the economic landscape with novel ideas about how things can work. This is what is rare and therefore what people are most rewarded for. This talk about workers not sharing in the profits is nonsense. They didn't do the planning or execution of novel ideas. They just did the execution of specific tasks that were laid out for them, and which anyone could do. Capitalism is set up to most reward skills which are the most rare to the benefit of all. Any conversation about redistribution of wealth is Communism and entertaining these notions means dooming your society to failure.
  
  If you want equality, teach people how to think and do things that the most capable people do.

• Comment Link Saturday, 13 April 2013 11:20 posted by Starr

  Apparently this is what the esteemed Willis was takiln' 'bout.

• Comment Link Tuesday, 02 April 2013 15:35 posted by David E

  The rich cannot survive without the poor...
  
  It is the poor that turns the wheels of labor...
  
  It is the poor that buys the goods from stores...
  
  It is the poor that pays the bulk of taxes...
  
  The rich do not understand that without taxes that funds the infrastructure of the country, it will be harder for the poor to do their services to the rich, and hand over the money they earn to the rich to pay for food and merchandise...

• Comment Link Tuesday, 26 March 2013 10:32 posted by Tony Calandro

  I'm always struck when people talk about how hard wealthy Americans work to earn what they have earned. I don't disagree with this by the way. I think lots of people in this country have fought hard and done good work to get where they are. What I disagree with is the idea that most people in poverty don't work hard as well.
  
  The problem isn't that they are rewarded too much. The problem is that people at the bottom have no leverage to seek reward. It's a zero sum game, and most of the people that made fortunes in this country did it with a great deal of help from people that didn't share in the profits.
  
  Very few people in this country can expect to achieve what is labeled "success" without hard work, but we need to stop pretending that being born in a good family doesn't provide the reasonable expectation that you will be rewarded for that work.
  
  Let's assume two brothers. They work equally hard. They are equally talented. If they embarked on the same financial journey, but circumstances happened to make one of them blindingly wealthy while making the other homeless. What can we reasonably assume they would credit for their fate?
  
  I imagine the successful brother would say, "Hard work." The homeless brother might say, "bad luck."
  
  Who is wrong?

• Comment Link Saturday, 16 March 2013 19:26 posted by Benjamin Wey

  "You cannot love jobs but hate job creators." Well said! This is the most cherished foundation of the American capitalism. Flat tax is the right solution and is the fairest process. The rich can buy tax-free municipal bonds and tax-free treasury securities. That's how the rich can legally lower their tax rates. There is nothing wrong with that.

• Comment Link Monday, 04 March 2013 16:03 posted by Pat Gumby

  Tax should just be a flat rate for rich and for poor.

• Comment Link Monday, 04 March 2013 14:19 posted by john stark

  Broadening the base is as clear as mud. One side using the term to mean removing loopholes, the other side using the term to include a higher percentage of the taxes paid by middle income earners. Typical lack of clarity leading us to a floating definition of terms which then leads to inaction when the time for the calrification of terms comes and agreement can't be reached because terms were not clarified at the begining of the debate. Games lawyers play churning the waters, givng a good show, with no intention of resolving the issues.

• Comment Link Sunday, 17 February 2013 21:11 posted by Sagun

  I'm not sure how a tax cut is going to have any immediate effects, unless you are proposing some sort of immediate rebate solution. In that case, we know that those types of programs are usually used a short-term economic prop that only keeps the drop from happening so early.3% seems like a massive amount of money to inject back into the system. With the Federal Reserve and the Treasury printing and pumping over a trillion dollars back into the economy, we should already expect an inflationary wave to hit us in the next couple of years. At this point, it seems like the markets are correcting themselves and we really just need to cradle the egg as it's falling instead of trying to stop it altogether.You should also remember that the congress, senate, and all other budget-makers are not the finest group of financiers. There is very little proof that we could see a federal smart spending program that does not get tied down with bureaucracy and waste.

• Comment Link Monday, 07 January 2013 01:26 posted by Gwen Gage

  The "brilliant" guy sealed his own fate with the example of Warren Buffet, making it clear that the richest people will always be able to find a way to colossally minimize their taxes. I paid 10% on adjusted taxable income of $15,000 while Mitt Romney, a 2 percenter, paid less than 4% more!!

• Comment Link Saturday, 05 January 2013 14:47 posted by Mike Horn

  I was impressed with the talent on the panel. I believe that the Laffer curve exists but I don't think that even Arthur Laffer knows where we are on the curve. I suspect the parameters may "float" with inflation.
  
  We might have been near the optimum operating area of the curve during the Eisenhower Administration or the Clinton Administration or both.
  
  Nobody talks about the wage-price spiral anymore.
  
  Economists often say a one percent inflation rate is good. They haven't convinced me that any inflation is good. I do understand the relationship between inflation and balance-of-trade with other countries.
  
  Since the Korean Conflict such things as housing, automobiles, motor fuel, college education, and health care have shown average annual inflation rates around 5.6 percent. During the same time incomes of the wealthy have risen at 6.0 percent or more, wages of most everyone else have risen at about 4.0 percent, and prices farmers get for their crops have risen at only 2.8 percent. All rates are annual averages.
  
  I see executive compensation in the U.S. as an expression of pathological eliteism and I see many of the wealthy to be as clueless as Marie Antionette or Czar Nicholas II. The French and Russians haven't really fully recovered from the excesses of their respective revolutions.
  
  We cannot have the general population lose faith in the rule of law or something like the "Occupy Wall Street" movement snowball into something far worse. If that happened one of the milder outcomes would be Grover Norquist, the Koch brothers, Wayne LaPierre, and possibly some UAW leaders being led to the guillotine.
  
  It might be necessary to "tax the snot out of the rich" to restore public faith in the rule of law.
  
  I see a high volume of firearms sales as a symptom that the public are losing faith in the rule of law.