dagblog - Comments for "Has the Democratic Party Gotten Too Rich for Its Own Good?"

This is a great cite, ocean

artappraiser — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 23:35:15 +0000

In reply to I can agree that it's likely

This is a great cite, ocean-kat. Taking it outside the same old same old blame the GOP box, if only we were like Sweden, yadda yadda. Given that the idea is to solve problems, not just take on new and different ones copied from elsewhere...

I can agree that it's likely

ocean-kat — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 22:00:08 +0000

In reply to There just is not that much

I can agree that it's likely that the "socialists" eyes are bigger than their stomachs. That being said there needs to be radical change in the way taxes are collected. Not just on the federal level but also by states and most countries around the world. There also needs to be substantial reworking of the ways we regulate LLC's. By coincidence I just read another short article about the amounts and ways the ultra rich use to hide the income.

While about 3 percent of personal taxes are evaded in Scandinavia overall, households with more than $40 million in net wealth — or the top 0.01 percent of the wealth distribution — evade about 30 percent of their personal tax burden, they found.

While this study focuses on Norway, Sweden, and Denmark the conclusions are likely similar in other developed countries.

Comes to mind that V.A.T. is

artappraiser — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 21:47:45 +0000

In reply to Edsall's bottom-line theme

Comes to mind that V.A.T. is the way many countries fund a lot of social programs, not income tax. Progressive in taxing consumption of goods and services. I'm not very savvy in economics, but it I have seen it argued that it depresses growth and/or trade. If people have high income but they save or invest it rather than spend it, their wealth is not so heavily taxed. We are currently an economy focused on consumption. My understanding is that V.A.T. is not beloved by small businesses, the bureaucracy level is along the lines of handling health insurance as a small employer here. What would it do to the craftspeople trying to create a business on like, Etsy.com?

Also comes to mind that states like FL with no income tax are popular with some for that reason. Sales tax by the state is 6%. There must be whopping property taxes for the schools...

Edit to add: if a party would want to go whole hog heavy taxation of profits, it might as well be anti-immigrant as well, because you'd bascially lose most of the legal immigrant vote by doing that.

There just is not that much

artappraiser — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 20:47:13 +0000

In reply to Edsall's bottom-line theme

There just is not that much money out there as in socialist dreams in EARNED INCOME, the type that the government taxes in INCOME taxes. People should at least have learned this from reading up on Trump deals: the billionaires and mega millionaires you read about, many do not have earned income. The CEO's that get high salaries are very few. The mega wealthy have corporations, they have capital, they have assets. They may not even have much money at all, but stock in a corporation they founded, stock which goes up and down in value.

I am not a economic numbers person, but I suspect that to truly get the wealthier to pay for socialist dreams, there would have to be a very radical change in the way federal taxes work. A change so radical that it would upset the whole economy into uncharted and unknown places.

Without that change, with just tinkering, you will just have the wealthy's accountants moving the "money" from the taxed type of income or asset or profit to somewhere else.

Edsall's bottom-line theme

HSG — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 20:15:00 +0000

In reply to A taste:

Edsall's bottom-line thesis that Bernie's tax plan would gore many Democratic voters is questionable. First, the Tax Policy Center's analysis may significantly overstate the cost of Medicare-for-all and thus either the size of the tax hike necessary to fund it or, to the extent it is not paid for out of tax revenues, the resulting increase in the budget deficit. Second, middle-income taxpayers may see a tax increase but they will also see significant benefits from Medicare-for-all and are quite likely to see benefits from tuition-free higher education and many of Bernie's other proposals. Only those who are well-ensconced in the the top quintile would likely see tax increases that would outweigh the significant cost savings that most Americans would enjoy.

A taste:

artappraiser — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 19:55:22 +0000

In reply to Has the Democratic Party Gotten Too Rich for Its Own Good?

A taste:

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that under the Sanders plan, a married couple filing jointly with an income below $10,650 would continue to pay no income tax; everyone else would pay higher taxes. Those in the second quintile would pay an additional $1,625 and those in the middle quintile would see their income tax liability increase by $4,692. Those in the top quintile would pay $42,719 more.

Higher up the ladder, the tax increase would grow to $130,275 for those in the top 5 percent, to $525,365 for those in the top one percent and to $3.1 million for the top 0.1 percent.

When the additional revenues from the Sanders tax hike are subtracted from the additional spending his proposals would demand, the net result is an $18.1 trillion increase in the national debt over 10 years, according to the center.

In rhetoric reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Sanders declared:

We must send a message to the billionaire class: “you can’t have it all.” You can’t get huge tax breaks while children in this country go hungry.

But Sanders spoke to the Democratic Party of 2016, not the Democratic Party of the Great Depression [....]

In the 2016 election, the economic elite was essentially half Democratic, according to exit polls: Those in the top 10 percent of the income distribution voted 47 percent for Clinton and 46 percent for Trump. Half the voters Sanders would hit hardest are members of the party from which he sought the nomination.

The problem for the Democratic Party is that “them” has become “us.”

In the past, Democrats could support progressive, redistributive policies knowing that the costs would fall largely on Republicans. That is no longer the case [....]