I not saying that at all, what I'm saying is if people want to be concern about things, pick things that are true and not follow the herd.
Clearly, I don't pay nearly enough attention to entertainers as I should then, because I don't see them leading the charge at all.
It doesn't matter to me what or how people make their money, what matters to me is when a person like buffet says we need to pay more taxes but fails to actually come up with an idea on how we are supposed to get out of the mess we are in.
If I'm not mistaken, Buffet didn't say we need to pay more taxes, he said the super-rich do, more specifically the elite of the Forbes 400, the billionaires. And he didn't say it in the context of getting us out of the mess we are in, he said in the context of whether or not to repeal the estate tax.
The cliche is the left wants to take from people who earn, I don't see it happening. I don't see the massive tax increases, I don't see the additional fees and so on.
My issue was with your statement that you have "yet seen any redistribution of wealth happening in this country and I don't expect to see it," yet a graduated tax that goes to help fund entitlements is precisely a redistribution of wealth.
We once lived under tax laws that had 90% top tier tax rates and obsurd taxes like movie ticket tax. We don't have that now and if we thought about it, we haven't had a VAT tax imposed nor do we have any real increases on taxes other than vice taxes.
Well, we also once lived under no tiers of income tax at all.
In 1934 excise taxes (vice taxes, like cigarettes, alcohol, fuel and others) accounted for almost half of all federal revenue, and personal income taxes were about one-fourth, with payroll taxes (the non-income tax part, what today would be mainly Social Security) barely registered on the scale. Social Security began collecting taxes in 1937 and grew to one-fourth of revenue in three years.
By 1940, income taxes and excise taxes each accounted for about one-third of tax revenue. The individual income tax’s share of revenue more than tripled during World War II, of course, and the corporate income tax’s share doubled. In 1945 the two combined to bring in three-fourths of all federal revenue, while excise taxes had fallen to 14 percent of revenue, and payroll taxes were half that.
The share of revenue from individual income taxes has changed little since then, fluctuating between 40 percent and 50 percent. Today, or at least in 2008, personal income tax was 49.1% of the federal revenue.
So where is it?[/QUOTE]Payroll taxes, like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, mostly. There has been an increase in excise taxes, but it's still mostly payroll taxes, while the income tax remains at the same 40 percent and 50 percent. So now, instead of
income and
excise taxes making up between two-thirds and three-fourths of the revenue, it's
income and
payroll taxes making up more than eighty percent of the revenue.
Income Tax - 49.1%
Payroll Tax - 32.0%
Corporate Income Taxes - 11.6%
Excise Tax - 3.8%
Estate and Gift Taxes - 1.2%
Customs Duties - 1.2%
Miscellaneous Receipts - 0.8%
People are buying fewer of the items subject to excise taxes, and the government is making that up with increases in payroll taxes. Figure into all that the rate of inflation compared to the rate of wage increases, and that 80% looks to leave even less money in the pockets of citizens at the end of the year, especially when you consider record numbers of people on public assistance combined with large unemployment which reduces the federal revenue, and they gotta make it up somehow. Of course, reducing spending would be the easy way, but they ain't gonna go there, not in any meaningful way.
