Sad state of our National Parks-II

tomman58 wrote:

JRscooby wrote:

Charlie D. wrote:


From the tax foundation: "In 2016, the top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of all individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 3 percent. The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent).Nov 13, 2018"

Well, I bet if until the year 2011, when I retired, if the top 10% of highest income paid the same percentage of their income in taxes as I did, the budgets would look much different.
It is the people that make enough to buy everything they need, and some of what they want, and do it with time left over to enjoy what the have that makes the economy grow. Take a many that has enough to buy anything he wants, and give him more. He is not going to buy more things people make, he has everything. And the only service he will add to what he already buys is he will buy a politician, and ads to convince voters they should pay more taxes, or go without the best government services, but he pays enough...

Sorry but it isn't 2011 anymore and today we are going a TRILLION more in debt annually because of the "new and improved" tax codes.

As much as we see most of the USA each year, yes each year we go at least half way and on the off years we go to LV and AZ from Michigan and then down and across to FL. Sorry but there is one heck of a lot of poverty that is evident especially in the southern states. We are saddened in Fl because we are there the longest and each month we give heavily to the food bank in our camping area. There really is no good reason for this in our country. I also hate Wallmart and others that do not pay a proper wage for a person to live on yet reap billions each year in profits. I guess that is me but from my drivers seat we have been there done that often enough to know this country needs to do better.

It is a simple fact that you cannot run up any debt unless you spend, period. The US Government spends 11 Billion dollars every single day. Jeff Bezos is the worlds richest man with a net worth estimated at $165,000,000,000. If you could turn him upside down and shake the last dime out of his pockets he could fund the government for 15 days. Then what?
Want to tax his income? Great, only problem is he doesn't have any. His wealth is Amazon stock. It doesn't pay a dividend. He would only show income if he sells some shares and if he wanted to avoid a punitive tax he could get billions in cash by borrowing at any bank and using some shares as collateral.
So the logical answer would be to tax wealth. Only problem is the wealth of billionaires is tied up in investments. They are not like Scrooge McDuck and have their wealth in cash stashed in vaults. To get the cash to pay those wealth taxes they will have to sell those investments. Problem there is the potential buyer pool is other rich people who are also looking to sell for cash, not buy. So now you either have limited the buying pool to foreign billionaires and countries like China or have the stock market crash to such a low level that the prices are so low that the non rich can buy. Problem there is any investable money the non rich have is likely in things like IRAs, 401Ks and other investments whose values have crashed because all the rich are being forced to sell. So the non rich are net losers right along with those evil rich people.
And this doesn't even account for all the people who will lose great jobs due to these evil rich being forced to cut back. Blue Origin is one example. It is a pet project of Bezos that seeks to be a private space exploration company. It employs over 2000 people, many highly skilled and highly paid. It loses vast amounts of money and is basically an expensive Bezos hobby. Force him to scramble for cash, it is likely one of the first things to be shut down, moving those 2000 plus employees from the taxpayer category to the recipient category increasing government spending and lowering actual tax revenues.
Proper and fair taxation alone will never come close to being a panacea, spending MUST also be addressed.