The government produces many, many things that benefit our society. (Technically its the people occupying governmental slots but that's alot to type). Gov. Production: R&D (research and development)---the internet did not create itself--gov. did that. Do like your water system? Gov produced that. How about your insured bank accounts--FDIC is gov. Did you take out a subsidized loan for educational purposes? That's government. Do you have a dollar in your pocket? Did you mint that? No the gov. did. How about those property rights you have? Do you enforce them with your personal handgun? Of course not, the gov. legal system keeps what's yours yours. How about consumer protection standards? You like safe products or do you want to go back to 'buyer beware'--that's some value added service from our gov.
Ok, I didn't say that the government didn't produce anything valuable, what I said is that the government generates no wealth of it's own. The income of government depends entirely on seizing portions of income on businesses and individuals who do produce wealth.The government has no money of its own, only money generated by its subjects, money is generated by business and business is privately owned in America. Building a bridge does not generate wealth, the truck driver driving over it does, and he paid for that bridge with his own money, it's not like the bridge was a gift!
Government also gives grants for research. But just because the government helped discover the cure for cancer doesn't mean it created any wealth. After the cure is discovered a privately owned organization must hire people, build factories, develop distribution lines, spend money marketing, and then the cure for cancer generates wealth. The drug company generated the wealth, not the government, and the grant money the government provided came from the drug company to begin with in the form of the taxes it paid.
Enforcing property rights, consumer protection status, insuring banks, all this is made possible by money generated by businesses and individuals, and none of these things directly generate wealth, they merely facilitate the process. That is a very big difference.
As far as minting, printing money doesn't create wealth. If it did Zimbabwe with it's 11 thousand percent inflation rate would be the richest country on earth. Printed money only reflects the spending power of the consumer, you can't print more wealth.
Generating wealth is very specific, it is when you take money, invest and grow it. Government does not grow money, private organizations do.
With that said I ask you, yes the government does provide infrastructure, law enforcement, utilities (last time I checked people have to pay their water bills). But where did the government get that money in the first place? From the taxpayer, seized at the barrel of a gun.
When's the last time you created your own highway system? You haven't b/c the fed. gov. did it for you. We could go on and on about the GI Bill, satellite infrastructure, anti-trust laws which keep our free market humming along, the EPA, OSHA, FDA add value to our lives by making sure that crooked private businessmen have minimal standards of acceptable behavior. How about gov. sponsored medical r&d? There are so many things that our government produces they boggle the mind. And you couldn't think of one thing?
Yes, but the government cannot do any of things without taking this money from tax payers. The government uses our money to provide services for us, you act like this is done out of some kind of generosity. I'm getting a feeling that you believe government owns all of the money in the country and they just generously hand it down to us. That thinking is completely backwards, we own the money, and we hand it down to THEM whether we like it or not.
This is like when I was forced by my local government to pay for my house being connected to a sewer system (I had no choice). According to your logic, I was given a gift by the government, even though I had to pay for it myself. Do you feel like you are giving your local grocery store a gift when you purchase your food?
Everybody pays taxes, not just the 'rich.' FICA/FUTA, sales, value added, income. Did you know that state corporate taxes are deductible at the federal level? Did you know that through creative accounting and corporate welfare, your local McDonald's worker paid more in taxes than most US corporations. According to the GAO, btn 1998 and 2005, nearly 2/3 of of large US corporations paid zero corporate taxes to the US federal gov. http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/12/news/economy/corporate_taxes/
I'm assuming your referring to taxes rates here right? The idea that McDonalds worker are paying more in taxes than large corporations is ludicrous.
Yes corporations use all kind of deductions and loopholes to avoid taxation, as do individuals, but that doesn't mean that businesses don't pay any taxes. Your article here is referring to large corporations. Keep in mind 99% of private organizations in America employ less than 500 people
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/oecon/chap4.htmNow as far as your statement about everybody pays taxes, well that's true, but that's not the whole story:
Now you see here that the VAST majority of Federal tax money comes from Individual Income Taxes, Payroll Taxes, and Corporate Income Taxes, a mere 5% come from from Excise taxes and other sources. Keep in mind that the Federal Government collects over 3 trillion dollar per year.
Now sales tax doesn't factor in here because it is administered by the state. There's not much data on how much sales tax is collected unfortunately, but we can make a pretty good estimate based on the data we have.
I'll use Wikipedia data if you don't mind, I know college professors frown on it (only because it's too easy), but were not writing an essay here or anything.
Sales taxhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_StatesCalifornia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California- First you have to remove the states that don't have a sales tax and subtract their population. These are Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon for at total of 7,484,000. With about 300 million population you have about 292,516,000 people.
- Now lets look at California, according to this source California collects about 28 billion dollars worth of sales tax per year. Divide this by the population 36,553,215, and you get exactly $766 worth of sales tax per person. Now California's median income is in 11th place, so I'm comfortable using this number for the entire US population. What you get is about 224 billion dollars if every person in America is paying an average of 766 dollars per capita. Now keep in mind California has a very high sales tax rate and we are not even taking into consideration what goods are exempt from the sales tax.
- 224 billion dollars total sales tax collected is 7.5% of the total income Federal Income taxes of 3 trillion dollars. NOW you have to consider that states and counties also collect income taxes, and those income taxes are just as heavily progressive as the Federal Income Tax.
- Again lets consider California's tax system, my source says it collects 40 billion dollars in income taxes. Keep in mind that California taxes are very steep, so this estimate will probably be high. But anyway, same formula as the sales tax: SIT / population = $1094 per capita, times the US population = $328 billion. This is one tenth of the Federal Income taxes, and there is no reason to believe that State Income taxes aren't collected by similar margins as Federal Income Taxes.
- So that means that FIT ($3,000 billion) + SIT ($328 billion) + ST ($224 billion) = 3.552 trillion dollars. So total state sales tax account for about 6.3% of the total of those three figures. Not exactly a big percentage is it? Keep in mind that I proved pretty convincingly that there is no way in hell the bottom 50% of earners are paying the majority of the sales tax.
1.3 million companies with at least $250 million in assets or at least $50 million in sales paid NO TAXES at all.
Sure they did, dividends tax (double taxation if you ask me), property taxes, sales taxes, capital gains taxes, payroll taxes (you know that your employer pays half of your payroll tax right?). Of course big businesses do avoid paying taxes, but they wouldn't really bother if America's corporate tax rate wasn't so astronomically high and complicated. The very article you posted suggesting lowering the Corporate tax rate in order to increase revenues, I agree with them.
Also keep in mind that these corporations create tax paying jobs, ok ACME doesn't pay any corporate taxes, but it employs 100,000 people who pay income taxes. Really corporations are taxed on multiple levels, first they have to pay an income tax on their earnings, then they have to pay a dividend tax when they pay dividends to their stock holders, then they pay their employees, who in turn have to pay some of THAT money that was taxed before, as personal income taxes. It's like an assembly line of taxation! I'm personally for the FairTax, which is a national retail sales tax that replaces all other forms of taxation. Check it out, it's interesting!
http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServerI guess that's how a 15-39% tax rate does not reflect reality.
Sure it does, IRS numbers only reflect the number of people that filed taxes, the income they declared, and the amount of taxes they paid. You can see what percent of the burden each tax bracket shares and the top 50% pay 97% of all Federal Income Taxes. The bottom 50% pay 3%. According to IRS.gov numbers the top 1% earned 21.2% of the total amount of funds earned in 2005, yet they paid 39% of the burden. The bottom 50% earned 12.8% yet only had 3% of the Federal Tax burden which is by FAR the largest source of government funds in this country. How can you conclude that the poor have this huge burden? The numbers don't add up at all.
The Luke mentioned the undeclared income in this country, which is true it exists, but most of it is owned by wealthy people (who already foot the bill). He wanted to make the point that because homeless people and illegal aliens aren't counted that the IRS numbers aren't significant. Newsflash! Homeless people don't have money because they don't work, that's why their homeless, and illegal immigrants are made up mainly of low skilled laborers, they don't exactly have a lot of purchasing power. 10 million Mexicans working on the fields making 5 bucks an hour isn't statistically significant at all.
Income tax--yes, all taxes--absolutely not.
I think I have proven my point sufficiently
I see you reference the old myth that our poor are well-fed fat people living it up on the dole. In fact, according to you, they are not just fat but living like kings as well. No hyperbole there.
See my numbers in previous posts, American poor people live like kings compared to the average person in most of the world. This is not a myth, there is a ton of data backing this up.
Millions and millions of american children and elderly are hungry. That's a fact. http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/?q=node/view/104
Ah the hungry nonsense, this is the most asinine movement I've ever seen. I'm an EXSS student, we are required to go into the health problems America faces quite extensively, the #1 problem we encounter here in America is obesity. The idea that hunger is a problem in the United States is delusional, people are either too fat or hungry, not both.
Now I agree that the poor have a malnourishment problem, but that is because of the poor choices they make. Calorie intake is NOT an issue for poor people in America at all, this hunger thing just drives me crazy, I remember hearing the criteria for "hunger" it was something ridiculous like: "missing one meal a week or month". Under that criteria, I suffer from "hunger", even though I'm 225 lbs and anywhere from 15-20% bodyfat and I take in anywhere from 3500 to 4500 calories per day. The criteria used for those worthless phrases such as "food insecure" are so vague and stupid. I'm sorry I'm very passionate about this, America has an obesity epidemic and some morons are claiming that Americans have a "hunger problem", stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life.
Here's just a few articles dealing with this issue:
86 Per Cent Of American Adults May Be Obese By 2030: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/116358.php Obesity Highest In Children From Lower Income Areas: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/121473.phpHow can you say that they are living like kings?
They have way too much food, they get free health care, and they get free money in the form of tax credits (even though they didn't pay any taxes). All this and they don't have to do shit or pay hardly any taxes at all. They have it MADE.
Big business is already fleeing this country to avoid paying its fair share of taxes--It uses American infrastructure but does not want to pay for it.
To me that's betraying america for selfish reasons.
American businesses pay a huge portion tax bill directly and generate the jobs that provide the income for the rest of it, they use infrastructure that they pay for already, plus they employ millions of people who in turn pay taxes. If businesses in this country didn't pay their "fair share" (who determines what a fair share is anyway?), then the Imperial Federal Government wouldn't be able to do a damn thing.
No, the American government is betraying its people by driving American businesses away and discouraging foreign businesses from investing here, with their stupid tax policies and wasteful spending. Businesses are not the enemy, government is. The sooner people realize this the better off we will be.