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The World Health Organization calls for decriminalization of most drugs

Deacon923 said:
Actually no. The more you make the less likely you are to pay 35%. The only people paying that are high income renters with no kids and few deductions - in other words, almost nobody.
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Yeah I wasn't thinking deductions. Really good point.
 
The people who are making that level of money usually have cap gains and dividends comprising a decent amount of their income.
 
Deacon923 said:
Actually no. The more you make the less likely you are to pay 35%. The only people paying that are high income renters with no kids and few deductions - in other words, almost nobody.
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To a good number of high earners the deductions from mortgage/kids aren't extremely significant to their effective tax rate.
 
Baconwfu said:
To a good number of high earners the deductions from mortgage/kids aren't extremely significant to their effective tax rate.
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True, but the higher you go, the more of your earnings are in the form of capital gains, deferred into tax-delayed/exempt retirement plans, reduced by pass-through business deductions, or otherwise sheltered from full taxation.

One of the wealthiest dudes I know hasn't paid tax in years due to pass-through losses on his extensive real estate holdings, which spin off gobs of cash. If he ever sells, he'd have massive recapture income, but he will hold onto it until he dies. Then all the basis gets reset for his heirs and all those years of debt- and depreciation-funded cash will never be taxed. I'm not making a moral judgment here, he's followed all the rules and taken plenty of risk to get where he is - just pointing out that the taxman's touch gets lighter and lighter the higher up you go, if your CPAs and lawyers are halfway competent.
 
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Milhouse said:
who? just curious.
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Germany is a decent example. Look up their campaign financing and campaigning laws on Wikipedia. Very interesting.

Of course, there are counter-examples too, like France and Greece and Italy, but the northern European countries seem to have it figured out.
 
in a belated attempt to get back to the original point of this thread, Cato has this take on the link between our drug war, the atrocious murder rate in Central America, and the resulting underage migrant/refugee crisis. http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/child-migrant-crisis-just-latest-disastrous-consequence-americas-drug-war

And even if you accept the morally dubious premise that we should be willing to sacrifice Latin American lives to prevent Americans from ingesting drugs, these policies aren’t working. A study last year from the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy found that “despite increasing investments in enforcement-based supply reduction efforts aimed at disrupting global drug supply, illegal drug prices have generally decreased while drug purity has generally increased since 1990.” The study concluded that “expanding efforts at controlling the global illegal drug market through law enforcement are failing.”
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Wait, I thought mandatory minimums had been overwhelming successes?!!??!
 
Deacon923 said:
Actually no. The more you make the less likely you are to pay 35%. The only people paying that are high income renters with no kids and few deductions - in other words, almost nobody.
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welcome to my world. and i live in cali so state taxes are super high too.
 
Deacon923 said:
in a belated attempt to get back to the original point of this thread, Cato has this take on the link between our drug war, the atrocious murder rate in Central America, and the resulting underage migrant/refugee crisis. http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/child-migrant-crisis-just-latest-disastrous-consequence-americas-drug-war
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I definitely feel like there are more people who use illegal drugs now- especially weed, and especially middle to upper-middle class white folks in their 30s and 40s.
 
it's always interesting to find out just how many suburban schlubs toke it up
 
Even if it's not that much, I've never seen phan complain about it.
 
i don't make over $300k. myself and my wife both have high incomes as we live in an area of high cost/high income. we don't have kids, and we don't have a mortgage. as such our effective tax rate is something like 35% (i don't know it definitively because my 2013 taxes were all wonky because of marriage, selling real estate, and moving for work). not complaining just pointing out that it sucks to be a dink with out a mortgage from a tax perspective. still feel blessed to be where we are and dont have qualms with our taxes, but i do think the current structure is silly and slanted to hurt middle class folks compared to their richer brethren.
 
NY Times says it's time to Legalize It - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/27/opinion/sunday/high-time-marijuana-legalization.html

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
It took 13 years for the United States to come to its senses and end Prohibition, 13 years in which people kept drinking, otherwise law-abiding citizens became criminals and crime syndicates arose and flourished. It has been more than 40 years since Congress passed the current ban on marijuana, inflicting great harm on society just to prohibit a substance far less dangerous than alcohol.
The federal government should repeal the ban on marijuana.
We reached that conclusion after a great deal of discussion among the members of The Times’s Editorial Board, inspired by a rapidly growing movement among the states to reform marijuana laws.
There are no perfect answers to people’s legitimate concerns about marijuana use. But neither are there such answers about tobacco or alcohol, and we believe that on every level — health effects, the impact on society and law-and-order issues — the balance falls squarely on the side of national legalization. That will put decisions on whether to allow recreational or medicinal production and use where it belongs — at the state level.
We considered whether it would be best for Washington to hold back while the states continued experimenting with legalizing medicinal uses of marijuana, reducing penalties, or even simply legalizing all use. Nearly three-quarters of the states have done one of these.
But that would leave their citizens vulnerable to the whims of whoever happens to be in the White House and chooses to enforce or not enforce the federal law.
The social costs of the marijuana laws are vast. There were 658,000 arrests for marijuana possession in 2012, according to F.B.I. figures, compared with 256,000 for cocaine, heroin and their derivatives. Even worse, the result is racist, falling disproportionately on young black men, ruining their lives and creating new generations of career criminals.
There is honest debate among scientists about the health effects of marijuana, but we believe that the evidence is overwhelming that addiction and dependence are relatively minor problems, especially compared with alcohol and tobacco. Moderate use of marijuana does not appear to pose a risk for otherwise healthy adults. Claims that marijuana is a gateway to more dangerous drugs are as fanciful as the “Reefer Madness” images of murder, rape and suicide.
There are legitimate concerns about marijuana on the development of adolescent brains. For that reason, we advocate the prohibition of sales to people under 21.
Creating systems for regulating manufacture, sale and marketing will be complex. But those problems are solvable, and would have long been dealt with had we as a nation not clung to the decision to make marijuana production and use a federal crime.
In coming days, we will publish articles by members of the Editorial Board and supplementary material that will examine these questions. We invite readers to offer their ideas, and we will report back on their responses, pro and con.
We recognize that this Congress is as unlikely to take action on marijuana as it has been on other big issues. But it is long past time to repeal this version of Prohibition.
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I'm really looking forward to this entire series.
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
And small business owners.
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If a business really is "small", there's no way the owner will approach 35% effective tax.

For larger privately owned businesses, I would say that greatly depends on the business. It also depends on how you do the math. A small business owner might possibly have an effective rate that high showing on the tax return as a percentage of AGI, but at the same time be driving a company car, living in a company-owned apartment, travelling on deductible "company business" vacations, and filling their bathrooms and kitchens with inventory that mysteriously disappeared from their retail store and got deducted. Certainly not all of that is true for every (or even most) closely-held businesses, but it's extremely disingenuous to just say that "small business owners", as a class, are paying high effective tax rates.

I suspect ChrisL68 would have some interesting insights here.
 
Deacon923 said:
If a business really is "small", there's no way the owner will approach 35% effective tax.

For larger privately owned businesses, I would say that greatly depends on the business. It also depends on how you do the math. A small business owner might possibly have an effective rate that high showing on the tax return as a percentage of AGI, but at the same time be driving a company car, living in a company-owned apartment, travelling on deductible "company business" vacations, and filling their bathrooms and kitchens with inventory that mysteriously disappeared from their retail store and got deducted. Certainly not all of that is true for every (or even most) closely-held businesses, but it's extremely disingenuous to just say that "small business owners", as a class, are paying high effective tax rates.

I suspect ChrisL68 would have some interesting insights here.
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i mean, i assume you mean tax solely on business income but you can definitely exceed 35% as a business owner, especially if you're not a shady tax cheat
 
ImTheCaptain said:
i mean, i assume you mean tax solely on business income but you can definitely exceed 35% as a business owner, especially if you're not a shady tax cheat
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I didn't say it was impossible. I just take issue with the statement that small business owners, as a class, are paying over 35% effective rates. It's simply not true. Some may, but I would wager that the great majority are not. I mean, something like 80% of small businesses clear less than $50K/year.
 
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