So throwing money into a pile and setting it afire is bad. Good to know.

This is what you said

Are you really all that surprised that people misinterpreted your position?

"System of taxation" would imply the entire.. well... system. Not just the taking part.

So your "point" was that libertarians and liberals are going to disagree strongly on what the normal deadweight loss of taxes are.? Deep stuff.

Steeeeeeeeeeeeeelllllllhoooooooooooouuuu.....

Dammit, wrong again.

Quit italicizing system and start italicizing taxation.

Wee this is fun

Taxes aren't collected for no reason whatsoever only to get divvied up on a whim.

I don't pay corporate tax because I'm not a corporation. I don't own a home or any land so my property tax is also quite low.

That's not a fair summary of what I was saying at all. It's interesting how many posters are piling on here without adding anything substantive about taxation at all.

I guess 2 out of 3 ain't bad. Do you really not see the difference in tax cuts and spending?

Sorry, it pretty much was what you claimed was the point of your statement. It is of course true (in the sense that liberals and liberarians will disagree on this), it is just obvious. (And maybe people wouldn't "pile on" if your posts made more sense?)

Given both are used to stimulate the economy in this case, no.

Also there is a big difference between 30 billion and 650 billion. 30 billion to stimulate the economy is bad expenditure, but 650 billion to stimulate the economy is awesome.

Edit to add that unemployment is just a repayment of tax paid in the past and the tax cut is a none payment of tax expected in the future - so they are largely just different sides of the same coin.

Let me spell this out for you, because you seem to be missing a lot of nuance in your rush to characterize my position uncharitably. Everyone knows that libertarian and liberal posters disagree about the impact of taxation. There's 100 posts in this very thread to demonstrate that. My original post suggested a reason for why that might be, namely that people overreact to what they perceive as anti-tax arguments, and end up moving their own positions too far in the other direction. I don't know if that is interesting enough to get your seal of approval, but it's certainly different from what you represented my position to be.

This thread is over 200 replies, the last thread I created barely got 100.

This is unfair BS.

Not everyone was lucky enough to be born with the ability to create interesting forum topics or evil enough to monopolize all the good topics for themselves.

As such I propose we implement a 200 reply max to all threads. When that limit is reached people should be forced to respond to other less fortunate threads instead.

This would achieve a much more fair and equitable forum.

That is exactly how I interpreted your post with the addition of the same but opposite bias in libertarians. Libertarians will be too quick to assume and go too far in the direction of "taxes are always going to be wasteful". I thought it was obvious and didn't take the time to type it out.

I think people have the biggest problem is that money is only a recent creation of the last couple 1000 years. Before that everything was gift exchange. What money did is allow specialization of labor, with the main value funding armies to control the world virtually ending hunter-gatherers.

Bill Gates, bought MS-DOS. His mother was on a board of directors of some large company giving Gates plenty of resources to develop it, and clients to use it. Bill Gates, did not change the world, it is the workers at MS and the people that buy MS-DOS. When Gates left, they developed Windows 7 the best thing windows has done so far without Gates. Gates is a owner. The government tomorrow could say it is going to use linux and an open word document and the money going to MS, would go to new varieties of Linux and all hardware would be built for linux. Windows would crumble fast.

To the op is correct, however the money collect by raise the top tax brackets should not go to the poor. It should go to make fair market jobs for the public. Fair market meaning, finding the lowest salary to do the given job. As for land tax, Henry George made a big blunder. You can listen to his audiobook, it is awesome. The homeless and everyone should be given free land lease, without permits, or taxes to build their home. Those that pick the best spots should pay more and checks written to everyone. Even if you ease free land only to homeless it will help everyone keeping rents and land values down.

Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Soros, have good heads on their shoulders and support progressive taxes.

Here is one of these from a dealer at San Manuel casino.

"What Obama does not understand, if you don't have money you can't give money away. You need rich people to give money away. San Manuel gave 2 fire trucks to the city of Highland. By raising taxes, you are preventing SM from giving fire trucks to fire stations."

These people can't be reasoned with. Most of these right wingers types are permanently stuck in first level thinking.

can someone please translate

np

Why do people who support progressive taxes never offer to pay more taxes? Instead they want to spend OPM. I'm sure the US Treasury will take a 30b check.

Because one person paying more tax than the next person in the same circumstances is not a progressive tax system?

Does that count as a strawman? Its pretty dumb in any case.

Yes, I agree its ******ed to build your riches via prudent tax avoidance, eschew paying taxes, donate your money to charity (ergo belief that this is a better use for your funds than taxes) then suggest that other people should be paying more taxes while ignoring the opportunity to pay more taxes yourself.

Pretty ****ing dumb.

If everyone could legally copy and sell his software, there would likely be much more secure protections in place to prevent that. And even if someone did get a copy, companies would still need software updates, which would likely require a legitimate copy.

You assuming that windows would look exactly the same in an environment much different.

FMP!

I was just a few posts early.

Agree with your last sentence here, but everything else is speculative nonsense. You're assuming that the business would have adjusted perfectly entirely because that is what would have benefited them.

Of course it's speculative seeing as that is exactly what we're doing. But I fail to see how it's more speculative nonsense than saying it would be impossible for Microsoft to sell an OS and make large amounts of money without the government enforcing copyright protections. And I'm not saying that they would adjust perfectly, just that they would still make large amounts of money and likely put a larger emphasis on ensuring licensing.

the funny thing is that without IP law, bill gates wealth would probably be more evenly distributed and we wouldn't have to worry about progressive taxation as much. the state has erected artificial barriers to entry that make the market less "free" and cause the wealth to pool among a few companies. but yeah, that IP law sure is great! lets give bill gates a means to accumulate lots of wealth, then complain about it, then take it from him.

honestly it sounds like a pretty genius plan on someone's part. help someone become richer than most everyone else combined then tax the **** out of them to increase your overall revenue.

The OS would cost $25 more because it included unbreakable copy protection, possibly using a hardware dongle that couldn't be counterfeited. The same for the more expensive business softwares like Office. This is an easy problem to solve. IP protection provided by the government is just transferring some of the responsibility for controlling the problem, from the market to the government. In many cases that may be the most efficient solution, but certainly not the only solution. In the absense of government IP protection, the market for MS products would have performed equally as well as it has, using other solutions.