Comments by "Mat Broomfield" (@matbroomfield) on "Fox Hosts Shocked Their Own Polls Say "Tax the Rich"" video.

"You'll just have to pay your fair share and pay a little bit more." That's not their fair share then is it David?
5
I'm not a Republican but I am poor and I think that people are entitled to keep a decent percentage of what they earn. Fix all the problems in the system, don't simply set an arbitrary point at which you will start stealing from them.
3
@Zomgtforly There is NO DOUBT that America needs to implement minimum wage laws in line with the cost of living. The idea of bosses earning tens of thousand sof times the incomes of their workers by paying their employees below a living wage is an utter travesty.
3
@ArvidProductions No person earning enough to live comfortably should be charged a higher rate than anyone else.
1
@ArvidProductions I agree 100% that the rich should pay THEIR FAIR SHARE. If the tax rate is 25%, then they should pay 25%, no exclusions. As for Sweden, I have serious doubts that you are the nation that should be advising others on taxation. The drop out rate in university is up to 50% in some courses, yet in Sweden EVERYBODY get sthe right to get an education that should come at the employer and recipient's expense. As a tax payer in an increasingly single and childless population, why is it MY responsibility to increase your employability and/or pay for a six year vacation from reality - especiaally looking at the way the university seems to be warping young minds nowadays? And your mother's brain surgery - delighted she was able to receive that. Hope that she has made a full recovery. Health care should be a human right, but corruption in the US prevents it. BTW, I don't live in the US either.
1
Greg Moonen In what way do you think they're being stolen from? And please clarify what you mean by "actual work".
1
@ArvidProductions Everything you say sounds very nice but it's simply wrong to impose it upon people, especially if they have to pay for it. The only reason we live in societies is because it increases our convenience to do so. If you were my neighbour, I'd be pleasant; helpful even but then if you approached me and said "Excuse me, can you give me $3000 so that I can get a masters degree, potentially in some worthless subject", I'd laugh you out of the room! If you were ill, I'd share my meds. I'd even give you some money to help you recover, but even then there would be limits as there certainly would if out positions were reversed. I OWE you nothing. If I am nice it's because I want to be. Taxation is a form of theft. It's theft that we all agree to because we are forced to by law, and then we justify our decision not to simply not pay it by looking at what we get in return for the money. As long as people feel that the return is appropriate to the expenditure, AND the expenditure is largely on reasonable things, people continue to pay tax. When that ceases to be the case, they vote out the government in return for one that is more reasonable. You seem to think that society is like a party that we all opt to attend. It's not. It's something that we are born into and for better or worse, we stay within because it's virtually impossible to opt out of.
1
@johnpliskin8759 Any tax rate is arbitrary. The fact that stealing from the rich worked is no justification for it, any more than the fcat that shoplifting making you happy is justified.
1
Greg Moonen I think you have to be careful when you use emotive terms like "stealing from people", but the wealthy UNQUESTIONABLY have a legislative and administrative financial advantage over the average American worker and that needs to be taken away and the playing field levelled. I'm not impressed simply because somebody works 60 hours a week. Nor do I think that someone who works that hard automatically deserves to reap the same rewards as someone with a billion dollars. I'm not even sure that I believe that everyone should be able to afford a house. To be honest, and this is simply coming off the top of my head as we chat, I think that maybe a percentage of all land should be owned by the people, and not allowed for resale, so every citizen always has a space on which to live. The idea that the wealthy should make it literally impossible to afford the most fundamental right - to be able to afford a place to live - is repugnant. There are so many issues with the wealthy, but simply compounding a huge set of problems by stealing back does not seem like a sensible solution.
1
@HopperDragon Nonsense. The average defender of not OVERtaxing the rich know only too well that they will never be millionaires much less billionaires. I suspect that because they are conservatives, they believe in fairness rather than simply stealing from one person and giving it to another.
1
@HopperDragon What do YOU call taking what doesn't belong to you by force or stealth?
1
@TheCheese1988 Whether it is additive or explanatory, the purpose was to suggest that rich people should pay more than the percentage paid by everybody else. That's not fair then.
1
@burke615 "The moral argument is that the very wealthy have benefitted the most from society" That's not a moral argument. That's an argument from entitlement. The very wealthy have (theoretically) worked the hardest, taken the biggest risks, played the system most effectively, and deserve the greatest rewards. As for the "utility" of money, that's simply a poor person looking a wealthy person's money and saying "you won't get as much use out of it as I will so I deserve to steal it from you." In what other circumstance would that be acceptable? If you have a large house and no family do I get to come take 90% of your rooms because I have 10 kids?
1
@alveolate Actually, I have no problem with those on a low wage paying litte or no tax until their income reaches a reasonable threshhold. But then after that a flat rate for everybody - no decuctions, no offshore registration, no depreciation of assets, no sly accounting. If you earn a dollar you pay 20 cents.
1
@TheCheese1988 It amazes me how an intelligent person as you clearly are, justifies theft and a sense of entitlement to other people's money. Let's unpack this. At its most basic level, taxation is designed to provide support for the infrastructure that enables society to function: roads, army, police, government, safety regulation, etc. It was NEVER intended as a form of wealth redistribution nor SHOULD it be. By what right does a poor person who has made bad life choices have any expectation to share in the income of those who earn more? Nobody CHOOSES to be born into the society that they live in. I believe it was Rousseau who coined the term "the social contract" the tacit agreement of the population to be governed by laws that they did not explicitly choose. The only way that ANYONE would voluntarily agree to that is if those laws are perceived to be both fair and necessary. On a fundamental level, providing social infrastructure is both fair AND necessary. Ignoring idiot libertarians who think that they can somehow pay only for what they use (somehow forgetting about foreign adversaries, immigration control, law and order, health and safety and a million other things that they cannot possibly pay for on a "by the use" basis. Don't get me wrong, I think that healthcare IS a human right, and affordable tertiary education benefits society, but it is not the DUTY of the wealthy to benefit society. YOu say that "a person profiting from a country and its citizens gives a share of their wealth back" and by "a share", you actually mean a GREATER share as a percentage, but this is where you are thinking like an uber-lib. Society has no RIGHT to their money. Except for those who make their wealth from investing, the wealthy have already more than given back to society in terms of jobs, and services required to support their businesses. Take Amazon - your example. They employ 566,000 people worldwide. That's over half a million people who would possibly not even HAVE jobs were it not for Amazon. Again we can definitely talk about minimum wage but that's a different conversation. Then talk about all the other industries that benefit - the fuel industry that puts gasoline in all those worker's cars, the taxation levied upon the gas to deliver all those goods, the delivery drivers (not employed by Amazon), the packaging manufacturers, plus the manufacturers of all the things they sell. The ripples of income generation for society and the goverment is massive. So when you talk about the benefis Basos takes from society, he pays every step of the way for that benefit, and society would be far worse off without Basos than the other way around. Now you have proposed that people who, through their own labour or that of family members before them, earn much more than the average, should simply have more of that income stolen from them. Why? Did they use more of society's resources to accumulate it? You say that being taxed on their earnings is "ergo fair". They ARE taxed on their earnings. If they earn 20 million and you earn 200k, if you are both taxed at a flat 20% THAT is fair. You are absolutely spot on in assessing that the wealthy are able to use their wealth to exploit a plethora of tax avoidance schemes and I would argue that THIS is what needs addressing. In a sense, simply increasing the tax rate for ALL high earners is the same as a regressive tax for the poor in that it penalises ALL wealthy for the crimes of just a percentage of them. Take Jeff Basos or Elon Musk - a bigger pair of scumbags you could not hope to meet. Perhaps they pay their staff minimum wage and hide their money offshore. Then take Bernie Sanders. I assume that he is straight down the line with his taxes. Why should he pay a higher tax bracket because scum like Musk avoid their share? The solution is not simply to raise taxation on ALL higher earners (I realise Sanders would never be in the same tax bracket as Basos). The solution is to ensure that the wealthy are not able to exploit loopholes that their wealth enabled them to have implemented in the first place. And the solution is to take money out of politics.
1