http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_1...ch-hurts-poor/

This is a good article regarding the tax cut plan of Mitt Romney. The wealthier you are, the more it helps you, if you aren't wealthy, it hurts you.

The man is trying to convert the country into a 1% economy and a plutocracy style government.

I plan on voting against him because I don't consider myself wealthy by any measure of the word and therefore his tax cut plan would hurt me, and benefit people who have gotten plenty of aid from the last administration in the first place.

What, exactly, do we have right now?

We are definitely moving towards a plutocracy. It is more plutocratic than it was in past years. A vote for Republican congressmen and Romney is a vote for a full blown plutocracy similar to banana Republic Central American countries.

A vote for the Democrats would be trying to reverse the country from a plutocracy back into the Democracy we had from centuries past.

No you already planned on voting against him and just wrote this paragraph and this whole thread to advance another Obama talking point. The errors in the article will be pointed out later but you hope that the casual reader will just remember the Obama talking point you pushed here instead of digging for the truth.

It's so sad that so many well meaning Americans are in this box and actually believe this utter nonsense. A vote for Romney is awful, you're right. A vote for a Democrat is also awful. One being bad doesn't assume the other is good. If you really want to discuss this in detail, I'd be happy to sometime, but just try and be more critical of things and don't think the obvious answers are always the right ones.

Income inequality is a huge problem in the US but it is the policies of big government (my opinion obv) that have caused it, and the solution won't be bigger government unless the goal in solving income inequality is just to make the average person worse off Soviet style. It is the 'easy' answer to say 'hey, we have a lot of income inequality, let's raise taxes on the rich to 99% and the bottom 75% to 0 until it is equal'. The reality is that demolishes individual freedom and makes the nation poorer for everyone.

But serious offer, PM me if you want to talk off of 2+2 sometime about this kind of stuff. I have a ton of sympathy for people like OP because that thinking isn't that far in my own rear view mirror and I believe he is sincere.

No it really is true. They ran the numbers on his tax plan, the ones who benefit the most are the wealthy. He also plans on getting rid of a lot of deductions that middle and lower class families use to lower their tax bills.

I mean I forget the structure of the tax code but say its 15% 20% 25% 30% and 35% tax brackets. He plans a 20% across the board tax cut for each bracket. So 15% would now be paying 12%, 20% would be paying 16% etc. but 35% would now be paying 28%, a 7% drop in their tax rate. In that case, the wealthiest tax bracket benefits the most.

You can not have a flat tax in a society with unequal distributions of wealth, it doesn't work, its regressive. Basically he is going to be making Middle and Lower classes pay a higher tax bill so the wealthy can pay a lower tax bill, and I suspect he will also run the hell out of the debt in the process of him enacting his plan.

The whole Republican platform when it comes to taxes is basically this, the wealthy pay too much, and the poor pay too little. That also includes the middle class since they tend to not have any comparable financial holdings to the truly wealthy in this country.

Why dont we go back to a PRe-Reagan tax structure? The WWII debt continually paid itself down with that tax structure in place, and we had a tax rate of around 94%-70% for the wealthiest Americans? The lowest the debt ever got was the day Carter left office.

Nobody paid 70% taxes. There were all kinds of deductions that existed then that no longer existed.

Income inequality does not get solved with higher taxes.

America is in danger of moving into a full blown plutocracy from its long history as a democracy if the top tax rate is slashed to a level that higher than it ever was for only a mere majority of the country's history.

Its really funny that Romney was praising the Tax Policy Center last November, but now they are a partisan unreliable group and besides something something growth and low regulation and Laffer curve.

Its not a "talking point" to cite a study by an independent unpartisan group and then talk about its results. The idea that you consider Romney's tax plan being a give away to the rich being controversial or not obvious is hilarious given this was obvious from day one, its just now that there is finally an independent study confirming it.

If you have a cite for this, I would love to see it. I've been looking, but can't find anything for the effective tax rate paid going back farther than 1979.

To be fair, the study conclusion is really "Based on what we know of the Romney tax plan, and the fact that he claims it will be revenue neutral, we can't figure out any way that this won't put more tax burden on lower/middle class and less tax burden on the rich. If Romney would actually tell us the full plan, then we could probably do a better analysis. For now though, we have to assume Romney hates poor people."

I'm pretty sure the Romney team doesn't have any fiscal tricks that TPC doesn't know about to make his plan less bad.

I just wonder if its any coincidence that a very wealthy man who is running for President, has a tax plan, that only seems to benefit other very wealthy men. Seems to me he planned this out, I would run for President because if I get elected, me and my friends will all be even wealthier by the time I get out of office.

If you talk to Republicans they are under this notion that people are wealthy because they are superior human beings, similar to how the Aryan race was in Germany. They vote Republican even if they aren't wealthy because they figure they obviously don't deserve it, and liberals, poor people, gays, women etc. are inferior human beings. They must vote in Republicans to deny the inferior human beings from ever getting a leg up in society.

Im willing to argue with them though that there are particularly evil and bad wealthy people in this country. I study disasters, not for a living but as a hobby. The Union Carbide CEO in 1984 killed as many people as Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist organization did on 9/11. He has never been brought to Justice. Since he was a CEO of a major US company, it is safe to assume he was also very wealthy.

If you ever research the Bhopal India gas leak you will find not just one safety mechanism that wasn't working that night, but more than half a dozen. The safety procedures in place for the plant were non-existant and there seemed to be a culture of trying to make the deadly pesticide plant as unsafe as possible for the disaster that occured. Point is, just because you are wealthy, does not make you superior to the rest of us people, contrary to popular belief.

How does income inequality not get solved (effected) through the tax code?

I would think you could solve or ease income inequality through the tax code. For example you could pass a surtax on millionaires that goes to infrastructure building, and it makes $8 billion in new revenue. Not counting overhead costs, you can then use the money from the wealthy to create 200,000 jobs improving roads and bridges. Not only would it create only domestic jobs that would hire a lot of unemployed Americans, but everyone else would get much better roads and bridges to drive on.

When Obama said "You didn't build that" it was a grammatical error. What he meant to say was you didn't build "those" as in the roads and bridges that allow businesses to thrive, since they use them free of charge to transfer their goods and services to and from the business. Henry Ford's car company would be pretty useless if there were no roads for the cars to drive on.