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The Welfare State Fallacy

That's a poorly titled chart. The chart clearly shows that the income distribution in the US became much higher than other countries starting in the 80s. The US went from the middle of the pack to the highest concentration of wealth at the top.
 
Increasing the taxes of the very rich is about perceptions of fairness and not about significantly improving the situation of the poor. Anybody who thinks that you can meaningfully help the poor by increasing the taxes on the rich, even by significantly increasing the taxes of the most wealthy, nay even by confiscating all of the property of the top one percent, is simply mistaken.
 
The article misses the point entirely, in my opinion.

The point is that those nations have a much stronger social safety net for the poorest to fall into. That safety net is funded by everyone, but does not necessarily mean that wealth needs to be redistributed.

Furthermore, this is income alone. The 99% in the United States pay more for their healthcare and are much deeper in debt whether it be from property mortgages or student loans. The income simply doesn't mean as much. The average "poor" person in Sweden is much better off than one in the US, while the 1% in Sweden enjoy the same (or slightly lower) percentage of earned income for the country as a whole.

And yes, they pay higher taxes. Everyone does. MUCH higher taxes.
 
Boom don't confuse him with facts like the highest personal income tax rate in Sweden is 57%. Or that their VAT is 25% (12% for food and hotels, 6% for publications). Or that all employers must help pay for every employee's healthcare (which is significantly cheaper than in the US). Or that employers are mandated to give at least five weeks of vacation to their employees.

The irony is there is no uprising of the Swedish 1% thinking they are getting screwed. They are quite happy to live their lives and pay their fair share.

Unlike America's Top 1% who lies about things like,"If you raise our taxes to 39%, we will not create jobs."

What's sick is lower income Repbulicans/Tea Partiers/conservatives being brainwashed into believing this drivel.
 
sailordeac said:
Increasing the taxes of the very rich is about perceptions of fairness and not about significantly improving the situation of the poor. Anybody who thinks that you can meaningfully help the poor by increasing the taxes on the rich, even by significantly increasing the taxes of the most wealthy, nay even by confiscating all of the property of the top one percent, is simply mistaken.
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Even granting your assumption, for argument's sake, we still need to increase taxes on the top 5%, if for no other reason than to get control of the national debt. We need to cut spending and raise taxes on those that can most afford it---those that have been benefitting disproportionately from the decade-long tax holiday our nation has been enjoying.
 
Arlington, I don't disagree with you. I agree that the tax rates on the very wealthy need to be raised, and raised in such a way that they cannot be easily avoided. I am not among the very wealthy but I think that even they would agree that their taxes need to be raised. Nevertheless, I don't think that raising these taxes will help poor people much. We need to be realistic. The poor are not poor because there are rich people.The poor need opportunities to help themselves, and that's a much more difficult problem to solve. If taking from the rich solved poverty, then the former communist countries would have no poor people at all. Instead, they have legions of them.
 
sailor that wasn't the problem with communist countries. I hosted a group from the former USSR in 1990. As one the business people who was handpicked by the Russia government told me,"It may take us 10-20 years to understand capitalism. In the old days, the government would tell a dress factory that they needed 1000 dresses by Friday. They'd send us the fabric and the hangers. Then trucks would show up.

We weren't asked how many people we used or any other costs. All we knew for seventy years was that we had to produce those dresses. Even the people who ran the plant had no idea how much each of those dresses cost or what they would be sold for. It was immaterial."

One of the reasons that there were so many poor people is that if everyone was poor (other than the elite) they wouldn't have anything to compare their problems to and create problems.

The growth of a semi-middle class of educated people and managers led to the downfall of the USSR. Each of these five leaders said the same thing.
 
RJ, your understanding of communism and the former Soviet Union leaves more than a little to be desired, and so I recommend that you concern yourself with something else, like basketball. Communism was just an example anyway, an extreme example, but just one example none the less of the fact that taxing the rich will do little to solve poverty.
 
RJKarl said:
sailor that wasn't the problem with communist countries. I hosted a group from the former USSR in 1990. As one the business people who was handpicked by the Russia government told me,"It may take us 10-20 years to understand capitalism. In the old days, the government would tell a dress factory that they needed 1000 dresses by Friday. They'd send us the fabric and the hangers. Then trucks would show up.

We weren't asked how many people we used or any other costs. All we knew for seventy years was that we had to produce those dresses. Even the people who ran the plant had no idea how much each of those dresses cost or what they would be sold for. It was immaterial."

One of the reasons that there were so many poor people is that if everyone was poor (other than the elite) they wouldn't have anything to compare their problems to and create problems.

The growth of a semi-middle class of educated people and managers led to the downfall of the USSR. Each of these five leaders said the same thing.
Click to expand...

Dear God, please make it stop.

Sent from my Nexus S using Tapatalk
 
sailordeac said:
RJ, your understanding of communism and the former Soviet Union leaves more than a little to be desired, and so I recommend that you concern yourself with something else, like basketball. Communism was just an example anyway, an extreme example, but just one example none the less of the fact that taxing the rich will do little to solve poverty.
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You're right you know more than senior people from the former USSR. I keep forgetting people who learn from books at WF know more than the people who were actually at places and doing things.

Those weren't what I said. That's I was told by leaders, but keep thinking you know more than they did at that time.
 
RJKarl said:
You're right you know more than senior people from the former USSR. I keep forgetting people who learn from books at WF know more than the people who were actually at places and doing things.

Those weren't what I said. That's I was told by leaders, but keep thinking you know more than they did at that time.
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Wrong on all counts in your assumptions about me.

Stick to basketball and, as many others have already asked you, stop being a simpleton in areas that you don't understand.
 
fuck you. I had been civil with you. There's no need to name call to me......it's you who are being a simpleton. I'll take people who ran factories in the USSR and the head of the political science department at Moscow State University over you EVERY time.
 
The tax base would be larger if there wasn't as much income disparity. The people who create the jobs and pay the wages are the ones responsible for a declining middle class.
 
I'm still waiting on the example of a country that used a welfare-esque socialism government model, and was successful. This might be thread #5.
 
The US has less "welfare" than UK, Germany, Sweden and most other industrialized nations. I guess none of them are successful in Bill's world.
 
BillBrasky said:
I'm still waiting on the example of a country that used a welfare-esque socialism government model, and was successful. This might be thread #5.
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Give a list of successful countries first. But most of the ones in Europe (including the one I'm sitting in currently) would likely apply.
 
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