[aresprophet]

Originally Posted by Daldolma [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Serious question: at what point does it stop being the responsibility of the wealthy to provide for the less wealthy? What's the cut-off? What entitlements are "rights" and what are indulgences? Food, I think we all agree, should be provided by the government. Education, too. Shelter. Maybe even non-emergency health care.

That's exactly the kind of serious question that we haven't been asking for the last two decades. Instead the national dialogue has revolved around how we can sustain our current society while asking less and less of everyone (but particularly of the well-off).

Is a 40% top tax bracket enough? 50%? 70%? Hell 90% worked just fine post-WWII, would that be appropriate now?

OWS is making people think about this kind of thing, and that's good because we've been pretending we can get along just fine while ignoring the realities of what it takes to support our society.

But when do you say -- "OK, we're providing enough for the baseline citizen. Let's stop raising taxes on the rich"? Do citizens have a right to comfort? I'd argue that they don't. You have a right to survival and equality of opportunity -- not to comfort. In fact, you *should* be uncomfortable if you're unemployed. You should be uncomfortable until you're employed.

"Uncomfortable" and "destitute" are vastly different things, but only a few thousand dollars a year apart for most people. Hell I'm gainfully employed and I'm still "uncomfortable", if you define comfort as having more than a few dollars a week in disposable income.

Making poor people suffer turns more poor people into criminals; placating them costs a relative pittance compared to the Big Five of the federal budget (which are, in no particular order, Keeping Old People Alive, Keeping Poor People Alive, Killing Brown People, Keeping Old People Alive (redux), and Keeping Other Governments From Repossessing Half Our Country).

I'm not a big proponent of raising taxes on the rich. I'm not theoretically opposed to it, but in practice, the US government hasn't earned my faith. The government is inherently inefficient, and American welfare programs are largely unsuccessful. The money raised by taxes is more likely to be spent on administrative bullshit or defense than on lower classes.

None of this is true. Not a sentence of it. The money spent on defense and welfare is largely a fixed amount (at the federal level anyway), federal government programs often outperform the private sector in terms of administrative overhead, and the "efficiency" of government is a non-issue when you consider that it is meant to fill roles that the private sector will not, cannot, and should not. It's not there to make money, it's there to perform certain essential functions regardless of efficiency.

Your distrust in government is not necessarily misplaced, but it is for the wrong reasons. Politicians who ignore their central duties in favor of their election campaigns, who argue in bad faith, who block good legislation to score points, and who are more beholden to lobbyists and donors than the electorate are the problem. It is no coincidence that the OWS protests are about precisely this, and share your concerns about government's ability to perform. They're just doing it for the right reasons.

It is also no coincidence that the political party who has been most defined by the above flaws over the last 15 years or so is the one that is preying on your fears about government to win your vote.

I prefer less ambiguous measures. A significant raise in the minimum wage, for instance, is long overdue. It is impossible to live comfortably on current minimum wage.

I thought "comfort" wasn't something we were supposed to guarantee? I'd rather live on welfare than slave for 40 hours a week on minimum wage, but that's not the reason we have high unemployment.

Reforming the tax code to eliminate loopholes is necessary. The wealthier you are, the easier it is for you to get out of paying taxes. That's backward. Taxes should be simple and unavoidable.

The capital gains tax is the most egregious example in world history of taxes being reshaped to greatly favor those who have over those who have not. "Loppholes" by and large are the byproduct of the kind of initiative you claim to support, and any attempt to eliminate them is generally an attempt to impose a heavily regressive tax that fucks over anyone who isn't super-wealthy (see national sales tax, flat tax, Fair Tax, see any GOP tax proposals since Reagen was inaugurated)

Greatly increase regulations on financial institutions. And fixes are necessary for the health care and education systems in America, but I won't pretend to have the answers to those questions. Raising taxes is not even close to a solution to those problems.

Yes, actually, it is. Because you can't throw hundreds of billions of dollars (in the case of health care trillions of dollars) at problems without those dollars coming from somewhere.