Tax the Super Rich now or face a revolution

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It's one of those republican myths like the numerous ones Reagan started like people buying liquor with the change received from food stamps.

Actually the rules are quite clear: If you don't wanna rot in jail or get the death penality, don't commit crimes. Also their crimes usually demonstrate planning and measures taken to avoid being caught so they know exactly what they're doing. The criminal mindset revolves around pathological selfishness. White collar crooks and blue collar crooks actually have the same mentality, it's just a matter of style.

I'm sorry to say I have met at least one family on welfare that was like this. They did nothing, lived in a s**thole, their son slept on a couch his whole life (no room of his own), and they were content in addition to being very, very racist and anglophobic

You'd be surprised at how ignorant poor people can be of the law and of a lot of other things that we just take for granted as understood.

Then there are others who view crime as the only way to make more than $14k/yr and live a better life for themselves.

A criminal lifestyle is a choice. They usually displayed pathological selfishness as kids and never outgrew it. They reject education by choice and get themselves into that predicament. Don't buy into their BS excuses when their actions and decision making process says otherwise.

so the enviroment they live in have nothing to do with how they turn out??

also, virtually everyone breaks one law or another through the course of a day, doesnt mean they are bad people.
some of the things people get labeled "criminal" for are way better than the suffering human greed has shown through the market.
not saying companies in themselves are bad, just humans, some of this behavior also only manifests as a group, like companies, sects, religion and government.
if you look at the financial equality of a country it does correlate pretty well with crime rates, health and happiness.

i am not saying people should be completely equal, people still have to be payed for the worth of the work.
but when you see a CEO who rakes in enough to feed a small african country from the interest, then something is horribly wrong.

And as I've already stated, they already have the most important job in the world; being mothers. And if a mother has no other income other than welfare, so be it - her job is raising her children.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

this has been happening in NZ: well-off people have been using loopholes in the housing economy to shilft money around and avoid taxes. The right wing government took steps to make it harder, but at the same time gave them generous tax cuts and refused to tax housing. Which we need - money is shifting into housing and cycling around, instead of being used to create exports to bring in new money and increase the money staying in the country. Much of the money in the housing market ends up in real-estate pockets, feeding the rich or going overseas. And it keeps pressure in the housing bubble, which needs to be popped like the pimple it is.

Crime is a tax that goes to feed criminals and private insurance companies rather than the criminals in the state.

I was talking about career criminals. And yes gangsters are still a minority within impoverished neighbourhoods. They are pathologically selfish in every aspect of their lives not just in crimes. Tell me, if survival was the only reason they are committing crimes, why is it that the vast majority of em waste their money on cars, jewelery, clothes, and other things they don't need? Because they are egomaniacs and it is just a way of expressing their social status.

There is something called a "culture of poverty" which is basically a cultural set of values the poor hold which is adaptive to their immediate environment but maladaptive to getting out of that environment. The culture of poverty doesn't encourage self-restraint, emotional control, deferred gratification, foresight, etc. There is a lot of overlap between the criminal mentality and the culture of poverty (cuz criminals also lack these traits and have pathological selfishness thrown in the mix), so this means a criminal who grows up in an impoverished neighbourhood is likely to be a drug dealer while a criminal who grows up in a middle class environment is likely to be a embezzler.

http://members.cox.net/samenow/concept.html

These articles are a good read from a criminologist. I've grown up in impoverished neighbourhood so it's really obvious to me, but this basically backs up what I've seen and analyzed. Plus I have to bring more to the table than just anecdotes.

What I think is horribly wrong is the high minimum wages and progressive taxing that hurts small businesses more so than big businesses.

@number5: Then you must've grown up well off cuz it's not rare at all. I've seen enough families bumming off welfare.

true there are career criminals, but you will also find a lot of people simply caught in between.

as for high minimum wages hurting small buisnesses, true to some extent, but even in denmark we still have a lot of small shops, especially for services, we have an insane minimum wage compared to the us.
the lowest tax i have ever paid is some 32 percent, highest 62, still i feel i have gotten an insane amount of help considering what i have paid, just the fact that the educational divide in denmark cant have much to do with lack of funds, as its "free", however the home the students grow up in does of course still influence the child, but they can still get a medical education and even get all their expenses paid if they cant themselves.

as for taxing large companies i couldnt agree more, there are some very specific tax breaks(individually negotiated) for the largest companies, lego, vestas, maersk and the like, all of which are probably necessary for them to stay, but very unfortunate for our nice little socialist haven

**edit** the minimum wages are individually negotiated, but the lowest at the moment is around 20-24 USD(except if you are under 18 then its a third)

So you would rather have some people work for a wage that is simply not enough to even survive on? You also would rather get rid of progressive taxation so that the poor and middle class are taxed to death and prevented from the chance to ever advance themselves? You must be incredibly ignorant to think making things more difficult for people will make them more motivated. I have a hard time understanding such a mean punitive attitude from a pot-smoking hippie like yourself.

I'm a right wing pot smoking hippie? Hahaha I've never heard that one before. How is it even fitting to call me a hippie? And fyi THC becomes a metabolite that is stored into your fat cells after the high is over, so saying it has an affect on my cognitive ability is like saying a battery can power an electronic device after it dies.

And since did I say flat taxes supposed to be high for everyone? What if I'm in favour of 15% of income taxation which is half as high as you'd get taxed in Canada making $50,000-60,000? And when did I say I was against minimum wage altogether? High minimum wages not only hurt businesses, but weeds out less skilled and experienced workers which creates a higher entry point. Also it leads to less jobs available within a business. So that's a triple whammy. Yeah so much for high minimum wages helping the poor and owners of small businesses

well thats kinda the point, in denmark we have a much higher level of social services to help the poor, we have free education and so forth.
all of this is made possible through the use of negotiated minimum wages and a high taxation.
as stated before it in itself isnt bad, only the people behind it can be.

it has given us a nation that ranks among the countries with the lowest financial inequality and the highest happiness in the world,
yet you will still find plenty of big and small companies and plenty of rich people and even the credit crunch didnt hit us as hard as many of our neighbors.
you can argue all you want but it does work here

lately our education however has been lacking behind, mostly because of government subsidies to private boarding schools.
basically we would benefit from better efficiancy in many sectors, but to do that we would need a major shift in perception.

as for the us i really dont have a clue as most political debates i view from the us have been filtered in some way, usually through several news sources.
so we get the washed out version and im a bit lazy in regards to finding news about the in depth debates from over seas.

**edit**as for the insults, please there is no reason to resort to anything like that, AOS is simply stating his opinion, just like everyone else.

I can acknowledge that, but there isn't any money to do anything about that right now. Additionally, if there was any money it would have to go to the deficit because if we default, there won't even be funding for the services the poor get now and they will end up picking through landfills like they do in India (socialism sure worked out there, didn't it?) and the Philippines.

Government is the problem not the solution.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNsdwTbvV90[/youtube]

Sad when Charlie Sheen is more fiscally responsible than Congress.

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/03/30/a ... n-in-cuts/