Oh, For F*** Sake!

This just in off the wires....

All 47 Senate Republicans, joined by two of President Barack Obama's fellow Democrats and one independent, stopped a piece of Obama's popular $447 billion economic stimulus plan.

The $35 billion proposal would increase taxes on millionaires to create or protect 400,000 jobs for teachers, firefighters, police officers and other first responders.

So, fewer teachers, firefighters and police officers, but all of our millionaires are hiring, I guess, so it doesn't matter that 400,000 more ordinary people will be out of work.

I'm sorry but if you have 73% of the wealth you should be paying 73% of the taxes. And here I don't mean a tax of 73 percent, any more than Fox means that when they say 1% pay 50% of the the taxes. They mean of the total money collected, 50% of it comes from the people with 73 percent of the money. while those of us with 27% of the money pay the OTHER 50% of all taxes collected. No. That's not very fair. Not to mention we 99% are the ones put out of work and denied needed services like first responder services. So, let's be really fair...let's charge a percentage of the total taxes collected equal to the total percentage of the national income that you have.

Edit To Note That the only totally independent figures I could find put my 73% of the wealth with the top 10% of Americans. Still, they only pay 38 percent of the tax burden, according to a conservative think tank called The Tax Foundation. In those same Stanford figures, 40% of all Americans have only 1% of the nation's wealth. These would be the people Fox News and the Republican Candidates are talking about when they say 50% of American's pay NO taxes, but then, they don't have much of the money.

A FAIR TAX SYSTEM

Okay, here is a completely fair tax idea. The government needs a certain amount of money to operate needed services. They purpose a budget for that.*

Whatever the purposed budget is we tax to cover it allowing a little raise for inflation and deadbeats (since we would really be taxing for NEXT year to have money to cover things). And what you pay in taxes would be a percent of that budget...linked directly to the percentage of the wealth of the country that you possess. If you own 5% of the country's wealth then you pay 5% of the tax burden. That is not 5% of your income, but 5% of the full burden of taxation. Overall you would be paying a far greater percentage of the tax burden than poor people. But the easy way to lower your tax burden, would be to employ more workers, passing your money to them so it becomes THEIR problem. It would actively discourage hoarding wealth, which would allow the money in the country to circulate through a number of hands. That's what makes the economy work, btw.

Rae


*This is where we would still get some partisan bickering because various people have different views about what "needed services" are. But our elected officials need to do something. For argument's sake let's say we need defense, education, roads for commerce, social security, health care and government workers to be paid in various services to all of us...police, fireman, teachers, librarians, social service workers, people to enforce safety regulations, etc.