I do believe Shawn was referring to USA Federal Income Tax, based upon the
numbers that he was using.

Based upon some number I saw resently ( and I wish I could find them),
around 40%  pay NO Federal Income Tax and that 1% of the people payed
greater than 30% of the Federal Income Tax.
Of the 40% who paid NO federal income tax, a large percent got a Earned
Income Tax Credit. Regardless of which party is responsible for this joke, I
will never understand how a Federal Income Tax return can provide a refund
for MORE than what was collected.

I will also admit that I dont recall how corporate Federal Taxes related in
the article.

The only true way to insure that people are treated equally is to have a
flat tax on any income with no deductions. But that will never happen.





----- Original Message -----
From: "James B. Byrne" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, January 31, 2004 11:15 AM
Subject: [HP3000-L] OT: Re: Rules for being a republican


> On Fri, 30 Jan 2004 15:28:08 -0800
> Shawn Gordon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > The "wealthy" pay the lions share of taxes regardless of any cuts.
>
> This is simply not the case.  The vast majority of taxes collected by
> any state are not income taxes but direct and indirect levies on
> economic transactions and accumulated assets.  The ability to bear
> these types of taxes is inverse in proportion to income or
> accumulated wealth as there exists a minimal level of consumption
> necessary for life in a cash based economy.  There are far more
> poor than wealthy, thus in the total the less well-off pay more in
> both absolute and relative terms than the wealthy, who in any case
> pay their taxes from a surplus (by definition) rather than from a
> simple sufficiency or even insufficiency for the poorest levels.
>
> Further, deficit spending by government is itself a form of income
> transfer from the poor, who pay the taxes necessary to service the
> resulting debt from their sufficiency or insufficiency, to the wealthy,
> who lend from their surplus to the government and subsequently
> collect the rents therefrom.  When one considers that much
> government spending is paid directly into the coffers of this same
> group (the owners of defence industries, pharmaceutical
> companies, large industrial sectors, transportation concerns,
> resource extraction industries, financial markets, etc.) then the
> situation is even more starkly revealed.
>
> One of the most distressing things about political discussions is that
> complex issues are frequently asserted by partisans to have only
> one, obviously deficient, premise or viewpoint worthy of discussion.
> Governments are not mandated from heaven but are complex
> social organizations that gradually come into being to service the
> majority of the governed; who realize from bitter experience that co-
> operation provides a better payoff than competition, on average.
> However, there exists within all biological collectives a residual
> group who see exploitation of their own as being beneficial to
> themselves, and be damned to the rest. In humans we call these
> creatures psychopaths.
>
> There is an evolutionary explanation for this, any perverse survival
> strategy has worth if it is sufficiently rare. The concentration of
> power, material resources, and opportunity that government
> represents apparently proves to be an irresistible attractor for those
> whose personal survival strategy is narrow self-interest and
> exploitation.
>
> The tendency to avoid looking directly at these unpleasant
> observations and attempting to systematically deal with them
> makes up a great deal of the art and artifice that we call politics, in
> no small measure due to the actions of the psychopaths themselves
> who employ mimicry and diversion as tactical measures to further
> their own agenda.  This in not to claim that all, or even the majority,
> of those that seek public office are psychopaths, but it is delusional
> to believe that our present political systems select against such
> creatures.
>
> Real politics  is the art of identifying and collectively mitigating the
> effects of these inherent and irreducible flaws in human nature so
> that, on average, the benefits of co-operation can be realized by the
> majority; and those who would have it otherwise are prevented from
> exerting their baleful and malign effects over the rest of us.  This
> struggle is eternal while improvements are small, infrequent, and
> often transient.  Yet humans persist since the potential benefits
> from even small successes are enormous.
>
>
>
> --
>
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