<p>Thank you for your eloquent and well-thought out response to everything I have said. You have truly proved that you have an uncanny ability to respond reasonably to arguments and defend your own ideas.</p>
<p>BTW, so what if they do? He was one of the few people against the Japanese internment, and fought to end racial segregation and environmental persecution - basically a modern-day liberal. And if they do have a file on us, it sure hasn’t affected my life in any way, shape or form…I don’t even understand what you were trying to say.</p>
<p>NonAntiAnarchist, thanks. I’m proud of my heritage. Also, StudyStudyStudy, I think I love you. ~ reesezpiecez103</p>
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<p>You need to drop the B.S.</p>
<p>Taken from the same link you provided in which you said your great-great grand dad “hated communists.”</p>
<p>“Although Thomas himself favored work to establish a broad Farmer-Labor Party upon the model of the Canadian Cooperative Commonwealth Federation,[13] he nonetheless remained supportive of the Militants and their vision of an “all-inclusive party,” which welcomed members of dissident communist organizations (including Lovestoneites and Trotskyists) and worked together with the Communist Party USA”</p>
<p>P.S. For those who don’t know, Communist Party USA was the most influential communist party in the country.</p>
<p>BTW, so what if they do? He was one of the few people against the Japanese internment, and fought to end racial segregation and environmental persecution - basically a modern-day liberal. And if they do have a file on us, it sure hasn’t affected my life in any way, shape or form…I don’t even understand what you were trying to say.</p>
<p>NonAntiAnarchist, thanks. I’m proud of my heritage. Also, StudyStudyStudy, I think I love you. ~ reesezpiecez103</p>
<hr>
<p>Yeah, he was fantastic. He was also AGAINST WWI and WWII (yes, he was against the war against Hitler - what a superb gent!).</p>
<p>It wasn’t till after Pearl Harbor he changed his opinion (Like most liberal/socialist - it take a bomb on their front porch to knock some sense into them).</p>
<p>Thomas was also an anti-Semite, particularly against Zoinism, which allows for Jews to pursue/have their own homeland.</p>
<p>Ok, lets assume Generation 1 is a hardworking Gung Ho man who earned his riches. Now lets assume Generation 2 is spoiled as so many of you claim that all rich kids are. Generation two would see the purchasing power of his money destroyed by the time he reaches his mid life. You mentioned that wealth is assets that just sit around, falling predation to inflation. Thus, Gen 2 of the rich person MUST put his assets to good use to maintain his social status. I’d call inflation a good incentive to work. </p>
<p>As for the real estate tax, I am sure that there are tax shelters. I am absolutely confident that stocks can be bequested tax free until capital gains are realized. Thus, selling the house and transferring the money via stocks seems to be a better option.</p>
<p>^^^^ To make that sort of argument you really need to designate an amount of wealth.</p>
<p>I mean, a person who get’s $200 million from inheritance won’t understand the concept of diminishing purchasing power as much as a person who gains $200,000 from inheritance - both which would be considered wealthy, albeit different brackets.</p>
<p>I’d love to be in either person situations, lol.</p>
<p>You clearly don’t read my posts. I give you the respect of reading yours, but that’s fine. Short version: assets ** don’t ** sit idly. They earn interest as cash, dividends as stocks, or appreciate as real estate. </p>
<p>The appreciation of this wealth almost completely offsets inflation. If there is no estate tax, heirs can live off large wealth indefinitely.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>An estate (we’re not talking about just real estate here) includes stocks. You probably mean the step-up basis for stocks. Under step-up, an heir doesn’t pay capital gains tax on the price increase in the stocks their parents held during their lifetime. In other words, they receive the stocks at fair market value and only pay capital gains on any increase in the stock price since the date they received the stock. </p>
<p>That doesn’t exclude them from estate tax when the actual stock is initially transferred to them. They still pay that. </p>
<p>So if dad bought stock for 1M and now it’s worth 50M, they won’t pay capital gains on the 49M increase (and neither did their parents since they never sold the stock and they died). But they will pay 45% tax on the 50M that is now their estate.</p>
<p>Consider an example:
Dad left 100M to kid. For simplicity, all of it is in cash. Kid is an idiot and places it in bank, earning an average of 3% over the years. Inflation happens to be 3%, too. Kid gets 3M per year in interest. </p>
<p>Assume the kid only wants to spend the interest and never deplete the principal. How long will he sustain himself without working? </p>
<p>The 100M is subject to inflation, but this is irrelevant for our purposes because the kid never touches that money. So the only question is how long will 3M/year be fiscally viable? Assume the kid used to luxurious living and requires at least $100,000 in today’s dollars to be satisfied without working. </p>
<p>Assuming 3% inflation, the kid will last:
$100,000 = 3M/(1.03^x)
x = 115 years</p>
<p>That should suffice. If not, there’s still the 100M principal in the bank after that. Oh, and did I mention that any naive investor can make more than the inflation rate using conservative bonds?</p>
<p>Oh yeah, and note that this assume the kid will spend all the interest expense he can every year. So most years he won’t be spending 100k, he’ll be spending 3M the first year, 2.91M the second year, etc., (in real dollars, he obviously will have 3M in nominal dollars per year)</p>
<p>So, if the kid didn’t waste all his income every year, didn’t only earn 3% per year, and didn’t mind slowly using the principal, he could live on $100,000/yr real dollars with just 8-10 million in inheritance.</p>
<p>The media focuses on the radical faction of the tea party movement. I think it’s good that many true conservatives are voicing their unhappiness with the GOP and supporting people who stick to their beliefs. It’s not a movement but rather a demonstration of frustration and possibly a slight realignment. But you’d have to talk to Sidney Tarrow about that.</p>
<p>He was not an anti-Semite. One of his children married a Jew, and he had no problem with it; to this day I have Jewish family members from that side of the family. He wanted to open America to the Jews after WW2, and worked with the American Council for Judaism to reach a peaceful solution. </p>
<p>What he was was a pacifist. He disliked what he viewed as Jewish aggression towards Palestinians because he felt that the Palestinians had had their land taken from them, and were being unfairly discriminated against, but he was NOT an anti-Semite. He was FOR the creation of Israel, but fet that the land should be open to all, as it was holy land for members of three religions. </p>
<p>He was a conscientious objector to WW1 because he was a pacifist and did not believe in war. However, he changed his stance and ADMITTED later that he had made a mistake regarding WW2, so what’s your point? I never said that he was perfect, only that I admired the stance he took against the tinernment of the Japanese Americans.</p>
<p>I never quoted the article to make him sound like the be-all and end-all of everything, or presented him as a perfect human being. Though I agree with the majority of his social policies, I’m NOT a Socialist and I admit that his economic views were flawed. HOWEVER, my point was that you were making offensive and almost laughably false generalizations by essentially saying that liberal = Socialist = Communist, which is not true at all.</p>
<p>To be honest, some of the context in your posts makes me wonder whether you’ve ever read a political textbook, let aone graduated with a degree in the area. Justtotalk, I think you put it perfectly: it’s like talking to a moron, or a robot. I can’t win, because no matter what I do or say, he’ll just regurgitate random pieces of information and spit out random generalizations that are rooted more in the teachings of Glen Beck and Sarah Palin then in actual fact. Honestly, I’m probably going to take this opportunity to bow out of the conversation entirely, though I may still lurk occasionally because I think the economic debate that’s going on is fascinating.</p>
<p>I think most taxes are immoral. People tax the rich because people don’t feel bad for rich people. Poor people who are recipients of many welfare state policies barely pay for the services they are granted. Taxes are a way for the government to gain more power by increasing its purse. It’s a way for them to cause class conflict so people argue about whether the rich should be taxed more instead of whether the government is truly justified to tax its people. They want people to argue among class lines to cause tension so people don’t unite together to oppose taxes. All of you are getting in an argument that can not be won instead of seeing how all Americans are united and collectively opposing ALL uneccassary and excessive taxes, regardless of a persons income.</p>
<p>Less than 10% of “tea party” members actually care about things being discussed in this thread.</p>
<p>The rest are basically Obama haters who are essentially using the tea party ideals to cover up their racism.</p>
<p>That’s really the reality here. Most of the idiots you see at rallies aren’t smart enough to think this deeply about the nature of taxes etc. And most of them are likely anti-marijuana legalization despite the fact that a true libertarian (tea-party member) disagrees with all drug control.</p>
<p>You don’t believe in paying interest on the federal debt (243B)? You don’t want to fund NSF? NASA (19B)?</p>
<p>Do you not believe in an infrastructure that allows efficient transportation of goods and services throughout the value adding chain? ( Dept of Transportation (73B)?)</p>
<p>What about the ** Department of Defense (730B)**? </p>
<p>Do you not believe in a functioning legal system that protects patent and copyright law that encourages creative production and economic progress? Don’t you think that the FDA serves a fairly useful role in protecting consumers from harmful products?</p>
<p>What kind of quality of goods would you start seeing without product liabilities? Who do you think establishes minimum standards for warranties and fair advertising campaigns? Who funds the court systems that then ensure these standards are adhered to?</p>
<p>What do you recommend? Should none of these be initiatives be funded? Or are you mostly referring to the Dept. of HHS? If you are, don’t you think this is more a question of how much we should be taxing people, and where these taxes should be going (considering HHS “only” accounts for ~800B of the budget)–rather than whether we should tax in general?</p>
<p>Because that is the question typically debated. Very few people believe that taxes should be abolished because they believe that most or all of the above initiatives are so important to the economy and to US citizens in general that they’re willing to sacrifice some efficiency to guarantee its funding.</p>
<p>I don’t like extremists on either end.
On one end we have the irresponsible folks who thought the next four years would be an Obama Disneyland–everything is free! All of the bad mortgages we took on and the mismanagement of our finances doesn’t matter! And for health care…Obama gold will pay for that too!</p>
<p>On the other hand we have the tea party folks who want to reverse the civil rights amendment and destroy the government. Taxation is stealing and we use this stolen money to fund horrible organizations like Teach for America! Also the mythical “welfare moms” and the illegal immigrants are just draining the system! Find me someone who is very anti-immigration and anti-illegal immigration and I’ll show you someone who is unsuccessful and undereducated.</p>
<p>It’s the socially conservative and the fiscally liberal that I never understand. Fiscally conservative and socially liberal policies seem, for the most part, common sense. </p>
<p>It’s just a matter of realizing that a socially liberal agenda inevitably clashes with fiscal conservatism, and that’s where the trade-offs should be made.</p>
<p>I’ve found liberals seem to think that most conservatives oppose their actual goals because social conservatives are more outspoken than fiscal ones. As a fiscal conservative, I just find many social welfare projects to be ideal but economically infeasible today.</p>
<p>Justtotalk, I think we have a lot more in common than we realize. I might not be <em>quite</em> as fiscally conservative as you are, but I certainly agree with the majority of your points (with the exception of gay marriage, but that was in another thread so I could really care less), abd want to commend you for your eloquent debating.</p>
<p>If ever there’s to be more fiscally conservative than you’d typically consider, it’s now.</p>
<p>IMO, fiscal conservatism should be a function of federal debt and the trend of deficits. The greater the debt, and the greater the upward trend of deficits, the more urgent fiscal conservatism becomes–to avoid future generation’s tax dollars going primarily towards interest instead of initiatives. </p>
<p>The treasury department now receives the third largest chunk of funding after Defense and HHS. That’s ridiculous. The interest we pay on debt could be funding ~30x the current NSF budget–that’s a lot of lost research.</p>
<p>Once the recession passes, we should be temporarily slashing social benefits to the bone, temporarily raising taxes, and maintaining rock bottom interest rates to hopefully offset the stranglehold that’ll have on the economy. </p>
<p>Anything else is simply an implicit tax on future generations to fund our own needs today; their taxes will pay off our interest.</p>
<p>Technically I am that future generation so this argument is self-serving, but I would argue the same thing if I earned a large income today.</p>
<p>Selling T-bills would oppose the whole point of fiscal conservatism; the Fed would be paying interest on these T-bills just to avoid having rampant inflation–putting us in even a worse crisis. </p>
<p>But it’s really not as terrible as it sounds, at least according the CBO and the Fed. The Fed now pays interest on these reserves, so there’s actually no incentive for banks to pump these reserves back into the market once the recession is over. </p>
<p>You’d think that this isn’t much different from paying interest on T-bills–it still forces the Fed to pay interest to avoid inflation. But according to the CBO, the riskier securities the Fed has taken on should increase revenue enough to offset the losses in interest ([Director’s</a> Blog Blog Archive The Budgetary Impact and Subsidy Costs of the Federal Reserve?s Actions During the Financial Crisis](<a href=“http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=948]Director’s”>http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=948)). So, I think we might find that these new ridiculous reserve levels can get lent out very slowly because the central bank is incentivizing banks to hold onto their reserves. </p>
<h2>To be honest, some of the context in your posts makes me wonder whether you’ve ever read a political textbook, let aone graduated with a degree in the area. Justtotalk, I think you put it perfectly: it’s like talking to a moron, or a robot. I can’t win, because no matter what I do or say, he’ll just regurgitate random pieces of information and spit out random generalizations that are rooted more in the teachings of Glen Beck and Sarah Palin then in actual fact. Honestly, I’m probably going to take this opportunity to bow out of the conversation entirely, though I may still lurk occasionally because I think the economic debate that’s going on is fascinating. ~ reesezpiecez103</h2>
<p>Well, you can think what you want - it really means nothing to me, however - even if I didn’t go to school for Poli Sci (which you can read through my posts, I’ve probably mentioned it in about 20 other threads), or go to college at all, what would it matter?</p>
<p>You sound like an elitist, do you only think people who go to college can have an opinion on the direction our country is going? Or voice their opinion?</p>
<p>Also, the main point about your Great-Great Grandfather, was that you posted the link to Wikipedia and stated that he “hated communists” blah blah blah, and you were somehow showing proof that not all socialists are communists as well, but in the very link you provided it said that he worked with communists members and other communist parties.</p>
<p>So, he may have hated them privately, but he sure wasn’t afraid to align himself with them either - so your original point was lost.</p>
<p>P.S. Talking about Beck or Palin is stupid, I could just as easily say you are brainwashed from Olberman, Maddow or Obama.</p>