Both good points but how far are you going to take it?

If it costs $5 million to take a loss on your newly built house, sell or rent out your office building in a down market, move your company and those employees willing to relocate and uproot your family from their home and friends to move to another state in order to save $5K per year out of a $1.5 million salary then those are *awful* expensive principles, particularly since you'd have no gaurantees that the state you moved to wouldn't do the same thing to you next year.

Someone making that kind of money could conceivably afford to take that kind of loss and if it pissed them off sufficiently then perhaps they would do it but it would seem to me a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face although it most certainly is someone's right to do such a thing.

[edit] What it really does discourage are companies that were thinking of moving *into* the state. That's where the big difference will be. In the case of Michigan it probably doesn't matter since people have been leaving the state in huge numbers ever since the 70's (I left shortly after the riots in 1968 having grown up in Detroit), but I would think that would be California's primary concern. [/edit]

I guess the bottom line is do you feel that a graduated tax is intrisically unfair? Certainly we have had a graduated federal tax for a long time with historical marginal tax rates as high as 70%. For 2009 the highest marginal rate is 35% but then there's also the issue of AMT which has affected me for the last few years and hopefully will continue to affect me.

I say hopefully because if I'm affected by AMT then that means I will have been able to maintain what I consider to be a relatively high salary which I consider to be a good thing. That's not to say that I would complain if AMT were eliminated but I'm not overly complaining about it to begin with. After all if I pay more taxes it only means that I made more money.

Same with state tax. I see no intrinsic evilness in a graduated state tax. I know most here disagree with that premise and so I won't argue the point. You are all welcome to your opinion but you must realize that you're not in the majority.

They enjoy life because they have the legal right to do harm to other people without their consent?

 

No. Although there are those that could argue a similarity here as well.

It's because smokers are an easy minority to dislike and therefore are the constant target of tax increases. Similarly the rich are an easy minority to dislike and therefore are the constant target of tax increases.

They are also an easy minority to not be a minority (they can just stop smoking) and an excellent minority to tax (because they are not doing anything useful and if we tax it and they stop, we are not losing anything).

 

Yes, but the rich are a useful minority. If they decided not to be rich, we'd all be poorer because the wealth they created and own would simply not exist and they wouldn't share it with anybody either.

Smokers: produce smoke, pay some taxes

Rich boys: produce a lot of wealth, pay a lot of taxes

The rich boys pay more taxes than smokers and even if neither group did, there would be no advantage for society to convince rich people to be poor instead.

(Contrary to popular myth rich people are not rich because other people are poor and, conversly, smokers do not stink because other people smell nice. Making rich people poor would not increase anybody else's wealth and making smokers quit does not make other people smell worse or more unhealthy.)

 

I have yet to see a law that actually allows a rich person to harm me as severely as a typical smoker thinks he is entitled to.

 

All of this is mere subterfuge to the real underlying question. Which is:

Also there's no need to answer because I already know your opinion just as you already know my opinion.

I have no real interest in being dragged down a superfluous discussion defending smokers’ rights or the lack thereof.

Ah yes. It always gets down to voodoo, trickle down economics. That was disproved by the *first* Bush depression of 1990-91 and reinforced by Bush 2 in 2001 and the Bush 3 depression that we're still currently in.

Plus who in the world ever "decided not to be rich"? Very few willingly make this choice, the last person I recall trying was Ricky Williams but he is a definite nut case and it didn't work out all that well for him. The NFL sued him for his signing bonus and "forced" him screaming and kicking back into the realm of the wealthy. Like I said, a nut case, but still a great running back.

I am all for smokers' rights, as long as they have the same rights as non-smokers.

 

You are making this much too complicated.

If I build a chair, I will be richer than before (because now I have a chair). Somebody else, although they also have the wood, will not have a chair, because they didn't make one.

If we as a society decided that we should all be equally rich, neither of us would have a chair (unless you force me to make two chairs). Nobody would benefit from that (and the second option is a form of slavery).

 

It's usually decided for people.

 

If you hold Bush responsible for this recession shouldn't you, by by use of time, hold Clinton responsible for 2001? Your partisan knickers are showing.

You don't understand how this works.

The recession that followed Clinton's eight years in office and coincided with Bush's first year in office was Bush's responsibility.

And the recession that followed Bush's eight years in office and coincides with Obama's first year in office was Bush's responsibility.

 

I think it would be great to see a graph that uses some form of means to track whether we are in a recession (unemployment?) and shows those numbers in relation to who is President and who makes the congress majority.

 

No, *you* don't understand how it works.

A recession/depression is the responsibility of whoever was president at the *inception* of said recession/depression.

From the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession article the 4 most recent US recessions are the following.

July 1981-November 1982: Reagan

July 1990-March 1991: GHW Bush

March 2001-November 2001: GW Bush

December 2007-current: GW Bush

Say what you will about my definition but at least it *is* consistent. Also of note is that a Bush presidency has consistently averaged one recession and one war per term of office. Remember that before trotting out Jeb come 2012 and 2016. Oh I forgot, conservatives *like* wars and recessions. In that case nevermind.

That's funny; the only reason this country was powerful was because of the rich people who paid the majority of taxes. Yet the concept of how they became rich is all "voodoo" stuff. It's typical for some to, as oppose to taking those who can not succeed and make them better people, take those who have succeeded and bring them down. I don't understand why education is so important in this country when all we seem to need is a few rich people to (as Leauki put it) make more than 1 chair for everyone else.

So if the subprime thing had happened just two months later, it would have been Obama's fault?

 

It is also useless.

 

So you don't think it was coincidence that Al-Qaeda chose 2001 as the date for their big attack? It had something to do with Bush?

 

The official start of the recession was December 2007 so it would have needed to be 13 *months* later to have been Obama's fault. Also note that the previous recession was fully 14 months into Bush's first term. In both cases the recession was over a year into Bush's presidency.

Simplistic but not useless. Without it this thread would be both useless *and* boring, consigned to the dust pile with only a handful of "me too" replies agreeing with each other.

Without some level of disagreement there's really nothing to talk about. But then to have reasonably interesting conversation requires both *give* and take. Occasionaly you do have to acknowledge that someone other than yourself has a point. You don't need to go overboard with it but you do need to throw folks a frickin bone once in a great while or they'll get sick of the abuse and wander off to more interesting locales.