OT- Who's job is it?

Ask Hamei. He knows about some Taiwanese and Hong Kong Chinese who have learned the trick.

In the shoe biz, those guys are getting 40% or more as they travel across the Pacific.

Possibly, but then how can you reconcile that with the fact that this past year boasted (?) the second largest run of personal bankrupcies ever, in our countries history?

I may have my facts wrong, it may be the *largest* indeed.

Jim

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Personal bankruptcy has little to do with income levels. It has to do with people who can't control their credit cards and desires for immediate gratification. Lots of people think they are *entitled* to that brand new SUV regardless of their ability to pay for it.

Unfortunately, our bankruptcy system in the US has become a joke. I just had a friend of mine file for chapter 7 liquidation. The combined household income between he and his wife was just over $100,000 per yr. They live in a 2,000 sq ft house - nothing fancy. In the 3 months prior to the filing they bought a new Ford Expedition, spend over $10,000 to hot rod an older pickup truck, bought 3 new high dollar desktop computers, a handheld computer, a laptop, new TV and God only knows what else. In the state of Texas, you get to reserve your homestead, transportation and I think the first $50,000 of personal property from liquidation under chap 7. So, they essentially got all of this stuff for free after the debts were wiped out by the court. There was no effort by the judge to move the case to chapter 11 or 13 where they would have been put on a payment plan to pay the debt. With a system like this it's starting to look to me like declaring bankruptcy might be in everyone's best interest. All you need to do is set aside your personal pride and let the courts give you everything you want.

Robert

Is there a 'right' in this business Gunner? Seriously they're all politicians. I don't think kerry is any great shakes but by the time the primaries roll around here in NY that will be about the only choice.

A lot of folks I know are voting ABB.

As you say, he does tend to polarize folks.

Jim

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*Correct*. And also banking regulation. But the bottom line is it has a lot to do with folks having lost their jobs.

Jim

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How do you reconcile that with the fact that an extraordinarily disproportionate number of boxing champions, baseball players, football players, Hollywood actors, etc file for bankruptcies? Could it be that they don't know how to manage their money? Could it be that they get too far into debt because they don't consider that the gravy train has a finite end? Could be.

Same here. Too many people in the 90s borrowed too much money with the expectation that the speculative bubble would never burst. Well it did. Now they have to pay off that second Lexus, that 52 inch plasma screen TV, the $500,000 condo, etc, and they can't do it.

I volunteer at a food bank here. We have people who live in half million dollar houses, with a Mercedes in the driveway, who are coming to us for canned goods so they can feed their children. They have a negative net worth because they overextended themselves in the boom times with the expectation that there would never be a day of reckoning. Idiots!

Gary

On 21 Feb 2004 15:27:32 -0800, jim rozen brought forth from the murky depths:

Don't he, though?

P.S: I fixed whomever's subject here. You, Sue, and I will have him spreaking Engrish shortly, huh?

----------------------------------------- Jack Kevorkian for Congressional physician!

Wondrous Website Design =================================================

Were only some people handed those social benefits? Or were they available to anyone willing to take advantage of them?

I believe it is the latter. Everyone had an opportunity to take advantage of those social benefits. Some did, others didn't. So now if those who have prospered owe society for those benefits, then equally the indolent, the whiners, owe society for those benefits in equal measure.

The opportunities were there for all, so all owe the same amount for those opportunities. Whether any particular individual had the wit and the will to take advantage of them or not is a matter of personal responsibility. It isn't the responsibility of society, and it isn't the responsibility of those who did seize the opportunities offered to all by society.

Gary

Article 1 section 9(4) requires that capitation (poll tax) must be uniform for everyone. So you can't exempt those who don't vote from a poll tax.

Gary

Here's another hint, it has nothing to do with the "blog" you keep nattering on about. Boortz has a website. That's W E B S I T E, website, not blog.

Gary

Well, no, they can't. Wages paid to foreign nationals in foreign nations are outside the jurisdiction of US law and US taxing authorities. Nations still have sovereignty in this world. The US would have to invade the foreign nation to impose its tax regulations on that nation's nationals.

Also, under current law, a US national working overseas for more than

6 months out of the year is also exempt from US income taxes.

Gary

Ambition is both encouraged and enabled by our system of supports and opportunities. And there are two kinds of ambition that benefit from them more than any others: the ambition to achieve, and the ambition to acquire. Those who seek to achieve are the sparkplugs to the development of ideas and culture, and, ultimately, to growth of all kinds.

Those who seek to acquire can be very useful to the whole society as well. They have to do something with their money, and we can help them do something useful with it , because there are many ways we may realize our individual desires and ambitions, of which the acquisition of wealth and power are only two. And this government and society are the property of all of the people, not just the successfully acquisitive.

You've just equated wealth with virtue. What a good boy you are! The top

0.1% of income "earners" (what an abuse of the word!) will give you a gold star now.

I'm sure they're glad they have you on their side, Gary. They sure as hell are paying for your support, and they ought to get something back for that investment.

Personally, I'm glad there are people with that much acquisitiveness in their blood. It helps keep the society perking along. Taxing them has never seemed to stop them from acquiring more wealth, so a solidly progressive tax system works out for everyone, right?

To get serious about it, the thing that disturbs me about your point is that you appear to be ignoring the fact that wealth equals power, and that we learned a painful lesson about the results of unfettered accumulation of great wealth and power just a century ago. Acquisitiveness tends to feed upon itself, to justify itself, and, given the opportunity, to empower itself. When the Robber Barons ran roughshod over the democratic control of our government -- of our entire lives -- the people who lived through it had to fight fiercely to re-establish democracy and to unseat the aristocracy of wealth.

The mechanisms for control of wealth and power that we have today are a legacy of that experience. The thrust of policy has been to allow unlimited accumulation of wealth while attempting to curb the frequency with which the wealthy acquire overweaning power. It's always been a very clumsy and uncertain business, arguably fair or not, and, in recent years, it's fallen apart. The relative wealth -- and concommitent power -- of the top 1% of income "earners" (the word sticks in my throat when we apply it to people making, say, $10 million/year) is now double what it was less than three decades ago.

So the power-politics side of the issue is more important in a democracy than wealth itself. We learned a lesson about it the hard way and now it seems we're ignoring the lesson. This is where the traditional desires and attitudes of the wealthy have become joined at the hip with the new phenomenon of middle-class, and even underclass, "liberarianism." Your silly ideology is playing right into the hands of aristocratic wealth.

You may not have noticed this, but the tax program for tax year 2005 will result in a person who's making $1 million/year paying a LOWER percentage of income in taxes than a married wage-earner who makes $60,000. Long-term capital gains will be capped at 15%.

If it isn't overturned with the next swing of the political pendulum (and I believe it will be), the aristocracy of wealth will have won a major battle. They have a whole new army of foot soldiers behind them: the New Right and the libertarians, who appear to be willing to philosophize away some hard-won lessons about how money and power can subvert a democratic government.

Ed Huntress

Yeah, that's fair. I first read Boortz's whacky bullshit on a blog, but then I saw that he has a website. And an entertaining outhouse of ideas it is, too.

Ed Huntress

Duck, dodge, bob, weave. You're good at that, Ed. Now answer the question. Were those social benefits available to anyone? Or were they specially crafted only for those who have large net incomes?

Gary

What a stupid question, Gary. You tax people on the basis of what they DO, not what they MIGHT HAVE DONE.

Where the hell did you get the idea that people should be taxed on the basis of the opportunities they might have taken to make the maximum amount of money? Should you pay the same amount of tax, say, $100,000/yr., as someone who decided to be a risk arbitrageur and who makes $500,000/yr., just because you were so dumb that you didn't go for the higher-paying line of work?

Should be all be financial wheeler-dealers, then, because to be anything else is just plain stupid?

Ed Huntress

Sure if you own a car, you can drive across the bridge. But if you own a business with a fleet of trucks, you can also drive all of them across the bridge.

To put it another way, if mr. Carnegie or mr Ford is having trouble with the strikers, who shows up to whip 'em into shape? The national guard troops, that's who.

If some guy is having trouble with folks driving onto his lawn, he can't get the local constabulary to do anything about it.

I would have to vote yes, 'crafted for those with large net incomes.' This makes sense, because they're doing the crafting.

Jim

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The costs of providing those social benefits are the same whether a person does anything with them or not. You want to tax people on the basis of their success, ie penalize success, rather than to tax people based on what the opportunities afforded them cost to provide.

I'd at least expect to pay in the same proportion. Society incurred the same per capita costs to provide social benefits to me as they did for the arbitrageur. Why should he be penalized for grasping the brass ring?

Well, we each have to choose what we think is best. For me that's buying up farmland and mineral rights as a long term strategy. For someone else it may be the short term trading of paper.

Gary

And in both cases the bridge is paid for by fuel taxes, regardless of the relative incomes of the people driving across it. The fleet owner pays more, because his fleet uses more fuel, but that's fair because he's making more use of the bridge. If the fuel tax disappeared in the switch to a flat sales tax, the fleet owner would still be paying more, because he's buying more fuel. Again perfectly fair and reasonable.

Hmmm, I thought the National Guard was called in to quell the fighting between the strikers and the company Pinkerton men.

Well, if he got out there with a tommygun and started shooting at the folks driving on his lawn, I'll bet SWAT would show up.

Gary

Then again maybe not. You might notice that nobody drives up on my lawn, does the photo of ms. Mulligan have anything to do with that? Who knows. :^)

Jim

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