this is another line of rubbish.  What I find interesting, and as a Mormon
I run in to this all the time, is people like you getting on their soapbox
and telling me what I believe, when in point of fact, you have no clue.  I
know you are highly schooled Wirt, so I know you understand how percentages
work.  The "wealthy" pay the lions share of taxes regardless of any
cuts.  There is new data for 2001. The share of total income taxes paid by
the top 1% fell to 33.89% from 37.42% in 2000. This is mainly because their
income share (not just wages) fell from 20.81% to 17.53%. However, their
average tax rate actually rose slightly from 27.45% to 27.50%.

This proves that it was not the tax cut that caused revenues from the rich
to fall, but the recession and the stock market crash. In other words, you
live by the sword, you die by the sword. If you are going to benefit from
the rich paying more taxes, due to progressivity, on the upside, you are
going to lose more revenue from these people on the downside. This is a
good argument for reducing progressivity.

Think of it this way: less than four dollars out of every $100 paid in
income taxes in the United States is paid by someone in the bottom 50% of
wage earners. Are the top half millionaires? Noooo, more like
"thousandaires." The top 50% were those individuals or couples filing
jointly who earned $26,000 and up in 1999. (The top 1% earned
$293,000-plus.) Americans who want to are continuing to improve their lives
- and those who don't want to, aren't. Here are the wage earners in each
category and the percentages they pay:

Top 5% pay 53.25% of all income taxes (Down from 2000 figure: 56.47%). The
top 10% pay 64.89% (Down from 2000 figure: 67.33%). The top 25% pay 82.9%
(Down from 2000 figure: 84.01%). The top 50% pay 96.03% (Down from 2000
figure: 96.09%). The bottom 50%? They pay a paltry 3.97% of all income
taxes. The top 1% is paying more than ten times the federal income taxes
than the bottom 50%! And who earns what? The top 1% earns 17.53 (2000:
20.81%) of all income. The top 5% earns 31.99 (2000: 35.30%). The top 10%
earns 43.11% (2000: 46.01%); the top 25% earns 65.23% (2000: 67.15%), and
the top 50% earns 86.19% (2000: 87.01%) of all the income.

The Democrats like to tax wages, but they don't tax wealth, so you have
people like Ted Kennedy, John Kerry (the richest man in the senate), Diane
Feinstein that have tons of wealth but don't pay near the taxes that even
someone like myself will.  I can't believe that a super smart guy like you
would buy in to this "tax breaks for the rich" crap.

I chose to take on one of your points, but the rest are all equally
invalid.  Now note, that all I'm doing is refuting what you are saying, I'm
not telling you what you believe, unlike what you are doing.  You see,
liberals can't help themselves, they want to control your lives, tell you
what is right, what is wrong, spend your money for you (because they know
best) and tell you what you think.  Whoops, I just told you what you think.


At 02:50 PM 1/30/2004, [log in to unmask] wrote:
>Shawn asks:
>
> > this is the most pathetic rubbish I've seen on this list of late, and there
> >  has been a lot of it.  Do you truly know so little about [what]
> Republicans
> >  believe in?
>
>At the moment, the current Republican liturgy is:
>
>      o The smallest possible government is the best possible government
>
>      o The road to peace in Jerusalem runs (ran) through Baghdad
>
>      o War is the natural state of mankind
>
>For years now, the first objective has been best thought to be achievable
>through massive tax cuts. The Republican mantra has been for years now:
>"starve
>the beast." Unfortunately, such tax cuts for the wealthiest -- who
>coincidentally tend to be the Party's primary supporters -- run afoul of
>the necessary
>promises for increased governmental spending for critical programs for
>specific
>problems and groups, leading to the massive budget deficits that have been
>characteristic of the last several Republican administrations.
>
>The second objective has been governed principally by the hijacking of the
>party by the highly conservative religious right over the last quarter
>century.
>Throughout the 1990's, when the party was out of power, a neoconservative
>mindset was formulated around either the right-wing Christian philosophy
>that the
>Jews returning to the land of Israel -- in its entirety -- was one of the
>signals necessary for return of Jesus to this Earth, or that of the Jews
>who saw
>their mandate to once again regain control of the land that was promised to
>them by God. The Project for a New American Century, whose members are/were
>William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld, and others, was
>founded
>with this as one of its two central tenets, thus the attack on Iraq was well
>formulated as soon as the current administration took power in 2001. The
>other
>proposition was that the United States, as the sole remaining superpower,
>must
>return to a stance of strength, eschew diplomacy and project its might into
>every corner of the world.
>
>The third objective, which is more of philosophy, is one of the two basic
>ideas promulgated by Victor David Hanson (Denys' favorite commentator), a
>second-tier intellect who teaches at one of California's premiere
>universities, Cal
>State Fresno. Dick Cheney has been one of Hanson's most ardent admirers and
>often quotes from Hanson regarding the idea that war is the natural state of
>mankind.
>
>These ideas have evolved to be so completely antithetical to ideals of John
>C. Fremont and Abraham Lincoln, the founders of the modern Republican
>Party and
>who argued for the "better angels of our nature," that I'm sure that neither
>would now avow any allegiance to any part of the current party.
>
>Wirt Atmar


Regards,

Shawn Gordon
President
theKompany.com
www.thekompany.com
949-713-3276

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