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richardhutnik on 29 August 2011
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Kasz216 said:
richardhutnik said:
mrstickball said:
Mr Khan said:
mrstickball said:


Your numbers are off significantly. According to the Tax Foundation's research into 140 million tax returns, the tax rate among the super-rich top-1% was about 100% greater than those making $40,000/yr.

And according to your logic, the fact is that the people making $40,000/yr and spending everything they have on living expenses aren't going to grow the economy. They will pay into goods and services, but cannot invest in new opportunities. Therefore, it is the right thing to ensure that those that have more money aren't robbed of their monies so that they can invest into businesses and ventures that can create jobs - rather than be taxed. As much as you'd love to argue that a yacht creates few jobs, I shudder to think how many jobs are created by the government's taxation of the same amount of income. In most cases, the only jobs created from that have a horrible rate of return.

At the end of the day, there simply has to be a tradeoff of prosperity for services the free market otherwise wouldn't provide. It's not about taxing people to make jobs for stimulus purposes, it's about taxing people to support the people who need it

The only debate, obviously, is how to do this while minimizing the damage such taxation does.

The question is, 'what other services the free market wouldn't provide'. There is a great divergence in belief on what the free market wouldn't or couldn't provide. The vast majority of services could be provided for by the private sector at a fraction of the cost. To minimize the damage taxation does, one simply needs to reduce who gets taxed, and ensure that those that must be taxed, are taxed. A great example of this is the 'roaring 20's'. Did you know that only 2% of Americans - the top 2% paid any income taxes at all, while we retired 25% of the national debt?

My argument is that what the government does today - which requires about 35% of all GDP in the US - is far greater than what the government must actually provide. If it provided for what was absolutely needed, then we'd ensure that capital was readily available for more important, useful projects.

produce a monopoly on roads, for example, privatizing roads wouldn't be in the best interest of a community. 


Actually, you'd privatise roads simply by extending property rights.

1) You are responsible for the road infront of you.  Just how in most cities and states you are responsible for your sidewalk.  It's actually been done in small cases and tends to work out very well.  Reason being that homeowners can't afford to let roads fall apart like cities can. 

Rather then wait for giant pot holes because of the way budgeting works... they fix the problems when they are small cracks and tiny holes at a fraction of the cost and time as it takes at most a day to fix things.

Generally they tend to form road orginizations of a whole block or so to take of things so that it's cheaper for all... however the orginizations, unlike the government, stay small enough so that they're actually efficent about it.

I'm not sure if it'd be any cheaper then if government actually handled roads in a smart way... but governments do.  They're either too big or just don't care since it's not their money.

I had thought what you said regarding roads might be an interesting approach.  However, there are several problems with what you said, as far as I can see it:

* In the case of the sidewalk, is there any case where a person is said to own it, eventhough the town makes it their responsibility?  It they owned the sidewalk, they could do whatever they liked with it, including removing it.  If that wasn't the case, then the sidewalk wouldn't be privatized.

* The value of a road depends on the whole of the road.  Like, if you were to take the sidewalk as an example, say someone they decided they didn't want a road in front of their house.  If they owned the road in front of their house, they could decide to tear it down if they like.  As a part of a network, this would be useless.

* When ownership of roads is discussed, it is usually that one company ends up owning the entire road network in a given area, and then charging tolls for usage.  There is a practical issue here, that if you were to make the roads completely private, you could end up with possibly too many roads in a given area.  Not saying that there are some cases where that couldn't be done, just that in key areas, where geographical layout causes natural monoplies in roads being done.

I say this also saying that the American economy was impacted by the building of the national highway system.  What seemed like a great idea when America was the world's leading oil producer put it on a path where it become over dependent upon petroleum products to empower mobility.  Doing this also likely played a role in individuals pouring out of cities, and totally devestating the tax base of major cities also.