This is a fantastic thread. I was a business major in university and now work at a Public Accounting Firm and after auditing many payroll registers you can see the discrepency between the inflation in earnings each year between upper management and staff. As long as we live in a capitalist society, this is unlikely to change. Seeing as capitalism is the most efficient system that we currently have, this is unlikely to change any time soon. If it didn't change much after 2008, what would lead to change now.

You should have said Communism instead of Socialism. They're not the same thing. Communism is an economic system, socialism an ideology.

There are a lot more poor than rich, yes.

But the richest ones are not behind. Remember you owe them money :)

You can tax for every dollar over a certain amount. So if you're being taxed 20% for less than 100k and then you earn 110k, only the 10k is taxed at the higher rate.

Social programs and socialism isn't the same thing ...

Socialism involves the public ownership of the means of production, while a social program can be implemented in a society where individuals and private organizations own the means of production. Excessive social programs lead to socialism because eventually the government's expenditures are far greater than the government's ability to raise revenue through taxes and the only way to increase revenue is by converting private corporations into crown corporations. Over time, through incompetence and corruption, the government destroys the efficiency of the industry they have taken over (and they have increased their expenditure further) so they must take over more industries; and even then they are typically forced to print money, leading to hyper inflation and the collapse of the country.

There are social democratic countries that have been successful for long periods of time, but all socialist states fail very rapidly.

Yeah Im sorry but I cant disagree any more.

Socialism = anything government run that is public. Schools, hospitals, roads, buildings, etc

I find the private sector to be beyond the government's level of corruption. Its the corporate sector that infiltrated government and dictates policies that make their big-wig execs big dollars and keeping their pennies safe from taxation.

Very rarey do private companies get amalgamated into crown corporations. Its the exact opposite. Gov'ts want to cut spending so they simply drop their assets, and privatize their crown corp.

Happy is correct. Social democracies (what the western world uses almost exclusively) are far different than Socialism, which is far closer to Communism than Capitalism.

Oh I din't know that.... well, I haven't been taxed yet, so maybe I shouldn't imput until I get 1st hand with this issue... :/

Well, to me obviously the super low earners shouldn't pay much at all...so I'm going to say 50-55% of all taxes (this does not infer a 50-55% tax on their income).

According to this article:

http://www.cleveland.com/pdgraphics/index.ssf/2010/10/wealthiest_americans_by_bulk_o.html

The top 5% paid just over 60% in 2007.  So perhaps the distribution could be changed slightly as this may be just a tad too high (based on them earning 33% of income that is).  Irregardless, taxes across the board should not be as high as they are as there is billions of dollars being wasted on worthless programs.

That's why they do it the way they do it with tax brackets.  With their system, you pay a certain % up to a certain dollar amount.  Then, on the next so many dollars you earn, you pay another %.  And if they were going to do a flat dollar per dollar tax rate, I'd rather just have a sales tax...that way those who like to spend can pay more taxes than those of us who save up our money.