I'm getting lots of heat from conservative readers who think McCain clearly won last night's debate, because he hit Obama hard on the stuff conservatives care about. The polls show that most people scored it for Obama. John Podhoretz explains what the right doesn't understand about this result. Excerpt:
The problem, in my view, is that the shorthand in which McCain spoke about these matters made them comprehensible only to those of us who are already schooled in them. In almost every case, Obama answered McCain's shorthand with longhand -- with detailed, even long-winded answers that gave the distinct impression he was more in command of the details of these charges than the man who was trying to go after him on them.We're not the audience for these debates. Undecided voters are, and undecided voters are, or so studies tell us, often astonishingly ill-informed.
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A low wage is simply a measure of the value of the worker's contribution to the business or product.
Riddle me this:
Company X sells $100 billion worth of subprime mortgages to the public. Or hyped dot.bomb stock. Company X makes over $10 billion in commissions. It has 10,000 employees who average $1 million in yearly compensation.
A year later Company X's customers have seen their purchases dwindle in value to $20 Billion. They have lost a combined $80 billion through their dealings with Company X.
Are Company X's employees really "worth" their $1 million in compensation per year?
Is it really intrinsically unjust to tax their $1 million in income at a marginal rate above 33%?
Try thinking dynamically instead of statically.
I think this is code for "They're coming to get you, Barbara."
Is it really intrinsically unjust to tax their $1 million in income at a marginal rate above 33%?
It does not appear that anyone is advocating taxing "bad people." So I guess if you want to impose high marginal rates on only bad people I could get behind that as long as I can help craft the list. Atheists should definitely be on it. We should tax those guys at a 75% marginal rate. And hippies too. Also people who want to impose high marginal tax rates should get stuck with the rates they recommend imposing. I just don't see the argument that people with high incomes are bad and should therefore be subject to punitive tax rates.
Obviously 33% is not a magical line with any particular significance. But there is a line out there to be determined based upon how much any single individual should be contributing financially to the common good (rather than how much money the grasping class wants). I don't think it's above a third. But maybe it's 25% or 20% instead. Either way, a good rule of thumb for you should be "what percentage am I currently willing to pay."
I've got a sure-fire method that anyone can use to wind up paying less in taxes:
Don't make so much money.
Rick has a penetrating analysis here. Don't let your ideologies block out your brain.
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