<p>The Iraq War (which ended in 2003) did NOT kill half a million children - not even close. The destruction of wastewater treatment plants, coupled with sanctions against repairing them and against the shipment of simple antibiotics against dysentery by Bill Clinton/Madeleine Albright caused around half a million deaths of children under age 5 (and likely about a half a million more on top of that), according to UNICEF. Confronted with the numbers, in 1996, Madeleine Albright said, “we think it is worth it.” Genocide complaints were filed by several European nations, caused the resignation of Dennis Halliday in the U.N. food program, and precipitated the formation of Oil for Food.</p>
<p>Virtually every family in Iraq has the memory of a dead child left over from the Clinton days. If the vast majority of Iraqis approve of killing Americans, one doesn’t have to look far for an explanation.</p>
<p>“My personal view is, regarding foreign policy, I am more likely to trust those who lie than those who are easily taken in by same. (I just wish the first were better at it.)”</p>
<p>And won’t those who lie - regarding foreign policy - also be the ones lying regarding everything else? Let’s just open the floodgates for an increase in political corruption (not to mention, rich getting richer, poor getting poorer…). I know, I know time to take off those rose-colored glasses, and stop being such an idealist (despite the fact that the very foundation of our country was based on IDEALS). The end should justify the means, better to imprison 1 innocent man than to let 10 guilty ones go free…exactly what is it we are trying to preserve again??? Right, stay the course - by all means!</p>
<p>Actually, Mini, I hadn’t seen your question until 20 minutes ago. My answer? I think with Dems in power we have a better chance of slowing and possibly reversing the increasing concentration of wealth and income in the very top sectors of society. I think voting for anyone else is a vote to increase that concentration. I also think the Dems are a little better on the environment. Not pefect, but better than the alternative.</p>
<p>And what do you expect the Dems to do about “reversing the increasing concentration of wealth and income?” Increase taxes on the “rich?” Their definition of rich is any one tax return that shows adjusted gross income of $100K. That’s pretty sick when you think about it. That isn’t a lot of $, especially when you consider the following with that income:</p>
<p>That’s only $50K for the husband and $50K for the wife if they file a joint return;
You pay over $7,000 in Social Security & Medicare on that amount if you both get W-2s
Your employer has to match that
You’ll pay another $11,000 or so in federal income tax (and that’s conversative!)</p>
<p>So right off the bat, the fed governement gets $25,000 off that husband/wife joint return</p>
<p>And that doesn’t count all of the other federal taxes you pay every day and don’t realize</p>
<p>That’s enough tax for me, thanks . . . especially when I see what all of those in DC do with the $. </p>
<p>And did you know this? According to IRS data:</p>
<p>The top 50% of wage earners in this country pay 96.54% of all income taxes
AND
The top 1% pay more Than a third: 34.27% </p>
<p>(Sorry, I’m a CPA - couldn’t resist sharing some inside info!)</p>
<p>How exactly will the dems change a major economic force that is impacting most modern economies? Stop trade with China, India, and others and endanger the relatively civil relations we now have with them and slow the growth of incomes in those countries? More wealth transfer? Cap CEO earnings (peanuts in the overall picture).</p>
<p>The top tenth of 1 percent had more income in 2003 than the poorest third of taxpayers, a group with 330 times the number of people, analysis of the data showed. This is a sharp change from 1979, the earliest year in the I.R.S. report, when the total income of the poorest third of Americans exceeded that garnered by the top tenth of 1 percent by 2.5 to 1.</p>
<p>The I.R.S. data tend to understate incomes for those at the very top because of different rules for reporting wages and capital gains, meaning the actual disparity was larger than the official data show.</p>
<p>Bush’s tax cuts have worked out brilliantly for the wealthy top 2-5%. They get 70% of the benefits while the bottom 80 percent get 6.5% of the benefits. Ditto with accelerating the 2004 tax cuts: 64.4 percent to the top 5% of taxpayers; 7.7% to the bottom 80%. Fully one-third of President Bush’s tax cuts in the last three years have gone to people with the top 1% of income who have earned an average of $1.2 million annually.</p>
<p>Doing away with these idiotic tax cuts is step one.</p>
<p>I’m taking the tax return data straight off my husband’s and my joint tax return. I merely substituted $100K for our joint income. It’s astonishing and disheartening how much in tax we really pay, and even more so when I see what the fools in DC do with it, don’t you agree? I don’t think they need any more of my money.</p>
<p>So let’s hear it now: where are the Democrats united in getting rid of the Bush tax cuts? Which Dems are running on this as a major part of their platform? (And if they are, why do you trust them?)</p>
<p>“How exactly will the dems change a major economic force that is impacting most modern economies?”</p>
<p>As the authors of neo-liberalism, why would they want to do that?</p>
<p>And the tax cuts have actually increased Treasury revenues and decreased the projected federal deficit.</p>
<p>With long-term capital gains rates generally maxxed out at 15% and qualified dividend rates maxed at 15%, more people have felt it safe to invest $ & sell tangible and intangible assets, which have poured a great deal of tax $ into Washington.</p>
<p>It’s the height of arrogance for DC to think they have the right to spend any more of my money better than I can.</p>
<p>“The top 50% of wage earners in this country pay 96.54% of all income taxes
AND
The top 1% pay more Than a third: 34.27%”</p>
<p>Which certainly says something about how big the disparity is between the have’s and the have not’s. And of course the bottom 50% earn less than $50,000/yr and of these over 12% have incomes below poverty level, while the top 5% of wage earners earn more than $150,000 and their combined is roughly 1/3 of the total income for the country.</p>
<p>Around here a reasonable person could conclude that repealing the tax cuts is the centerpiece of the Democrats’ platform. The Republican National Committee is running attack ads in every contested Congressional race trumpeting that the Democratic candidate opposes making the tax cuts permanent which means that families with children will pay more!, married couples will pay more!, even seniors will pay more! And “some” families will have to pay a . . . [gulp] DEATH TAX when one of them dies. Very strident and shrill. "Liberal Lois has a dirty little secret! It’s her plan for the biggest tax increase in history! . . . " They’ve sure convinced ME to trust the Dems on this.</p>
<p>By the way, I agree with you that Clinton handled the Iraq sanctions badly, too, although I have a lot of doubt about the 500,000 kids number. I think the sanctions were handled a lot LESS badly over a 5-year period than the war.</p>
<p>Brandon’s Mom - you’ve created a straw man, and attacked it, and successfully removed attention from the actual point: since 1980 wealth and income have become increasingly concentrated at the top - the wealthier the segment of socienty, the greater the increase in wealth, since 1980. For many decades prior to that time, the “rising tide lifted all boats.” The rich were rich, the poor were poor, the middle class was middle class - but all segments of society shared in the increase in net per capita wealth over time, and maintained a roughly stable balance of wealth. That stopped around 1980. The fates of the different economic segments of society separated. The poor stopped sharing in the increased wealth of the nation - at all. The middle class got a small uptick, but pay for it many times over through icreased “fees” and withdrawal of services that were previously free or low cost - like state college tuition. Only the wealthy have actually benefitted from the nation’s economic progress since 1980. You can look it up. The easiest way used to be to link to it from rushlimbaugh.com, but that link is now dead. (You have repeated his headlines - I went to the source data) Go to <a href=“http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04in05tr.xls[/url]”>http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04in05tr.xls</a> to see the IRS figures from 1986 through 2004. The increase in (inflation adjusted) income for the top 1% and top 5% of income earners can be seen by comparing cell C52 to C70, and D52 to D70. The lack of any increase in the income at the 50th percentile can be seen by comparing G52 to G70. That’s essentially zero tide lifting at the 50th percentile in 18 years. The net result is that the share of income received by the top 1% has gone from 11.3% in 1986 to 19% in 2004. The top 1% has an average income of about $1M per year. We’re not talking about dual wage earner families, are we?</p>
<p>This has been made possible by lots of different means. Cutting taxes for the wealthy is only one; the numerous changes in laws since 1980 which favor the more economically powerful are beyond the scope of this forum. And it’s all been greased by a slick and skillful PR/propaganda campaign - much of which you have dutifully repeated.</p>
<p>I don’t dutifully repeat ANYTHING, Kluge. I have an MBA, am a CPA, and a partner in an accounting firm, and consequently can think for myself, thank you. </p>
<p>Brandon’s mom, it’s not my goal to insult you - but it is my goal to shock you into actually looking at your assumptions. When you wrote:
were you unaware that on the front page of Rush Limbaugh’s website he says:
Which is my way of asking you to consider how much of what you “think for yourself” is actually stuff that’s been repeated to you so often you don’t even question its truth or significance. (By the way - both your figures are obsolete. Those were 2003 numbers; 2004 is out now. The distance between top and bottom has increased again.)</p>
<p>You can ignore my comments. But I will ask you to use your training and expertise to take some time with the IRS data and ask yourself what it says for the direction our country has been heading since 1986, and if you’re comfortable to see that trend continue throughout your chidren’s lives.</p>
<p>But much more importanly, I see real live Americans every day with tax issues, and I KNOW these people pay way too much in taxes. A good number of my clients are hard-working small business owners who have invested their own money, borrowed, and took a risk to make their businesses successful. </p>
<p>And as a reward for their success, they get to pay an increasingly higher percentage of their hard-earned $ to Washington. </p>
<p>I could give you example upon example of real-life tax horror stories. But it sounds like I’d be wasting my time. </p>
<p>Frankly, YOU sound like you’re towing the left-wing line . . . raising taxes on the “wealthy.” Why don’t YOU think for yourself?</p>
<p>So, Kluge, which are the Democrats actively pursuing a confiscatory policy? I’d like to vote for them, but I can’t find 'em anywhere! Do they exist? Is it part of a Democratic platform that I don’t know about? Which Democrats are campaigning on a public promise to roll back the Bush tax cuts, and more?</p>
<p>And if they exist, do you trust them?</p>
<p>“By the way, I agree with you that Clinton handled the Iraq sanctions badly, too, although I have a lot of doubt about the 500,000 kids number. I think the sanctions were handled a lot LESS badly over a 5-year period than the war.”</p>
<p>Low-end estimate is 400,000+, but that’s just for those under age 5. The Europeans thought it was genocide, and called him on it. (It would be the equivalent of killing every fourth child under age 5 in the U.S.) The War, by comparison, hardly killed anyone. (Now the occupation…that’s another story.) And at least the War was aimed at killing Saddam Hussein, not killing children.</p>
<p>“They’ve sure convinced ME to trust the Dems on this.”</p>
<p>So you not only trust Republicans more than Dems, you trust their TV ADS more than Dems. That says an awful lot, doesn’t it?</p>
<p>Mini, I don’t “trust” anyone, but I do expect people to behave in a somewhat consistent fashion. The Republicans have pushed hard for the single most regressive and irresponsible change in tax policy in recent years - the abolition of the estate tax, so as to allow massive sums of untaxed capital gains be handed to heirs tax free (God forbid Paris Hilton should work from need, rather than for the sheer joy of artistic expression ) Would having a Dem Congress reverse the past 25 years of economic stratification? Probably not. But I think it might slow it down. Like I said: Not perfect. Just better than the alternative.</p>
<p>The problem is that you don’t seem to have a point other than “Taxes: bad” Given your job, it’s understandable that you’d have that point of view. It’s just that, with a nation running up a huge debt for our kids to pay off, you haven’t exactly explained how you plan to make things better without restoring the tax structure to level, let alone reverse the regressive nature so that the wealthy pay a slightly higher percentage of their income instead of lower.</p>
<p>Well, when you come up with a candidate or a party you can trust, and reasons for trusting them, I’ll be all ears. It’s not like (as I noted), Dems don’t have a track record. As the lead party of neoliberalism (Clinton basically invented it in its U.S. incarnation), they are the party MOST responsible for the increasing spread of incomes, as middle class-wage jobs are eliminated, manufacturing jobs get sent abroad (where there is much MORE pollution as a result, rather than less, giving the lie to the idea of the Dems as the party of the environment), and immigrants pushed off farms in central America flee to the U.S. looking for work. It’s the party of intellectual dishonesty (when not totally clueless), and this dishonesty has real-world consequences.</p>
<p>If this is your idea of “not perfect”, I don’t want any part of it, and can easily see why voters would prefer the Party of Abramoff and Family Values.</p>
) Would having a Dem Congress reverse the past 25 years of economic stratification? Probably not. But I think it might slow it down. Like I said: Not perfect. Just better than the alternative.</p>