I love it that even their website is passive. To go back to a previous page, the button says "wander back". Don't expend too much energy, its cool. Just wander. It's what we've done our entire lives, and it's definitely the way to go!

The first part of the problem is that they probably have never had a checkbook...just a little plastic card.

They're perfectly free at any time to just wander into the inner city or the suburbs and start handing out cash and checks.

I'm working to be rich. In a few years, I probably will be, for all intents and purposes. I'm not stealing anything to do it. I'm not going to feel bad about "making it".

My kids will have to meet certain conditions in order to inherit. No serious criminal record, remain debt free, hold down a steady job, etc. after that, if I were a watching ghost, I don't think I'll have anything to worry about. They'll get a leg up in life, and they'll get it because I made it possible.

If another parent would sooner not do that for their kids, that is not something I'll feel bad about either.

Those of us who think taxes should be higher don't think so just to fuck with people. The point of raising taxes would be to solve the problem of our enormous national debt. I could write a check to the Treasury for my entire net worth and that would not even make a noticeable impact on the debt.

If your answer to my suggestion that we raise taxes to lower the national debt is that we should instead cut government spending, fine, that's a valid argument. If your answer is that I should just pay off the national debt myself, well, that just makes no sense.

"The point of raising taxes would be to solve the problem of our enormous national debt."

It doesn't work that way. Surprise: American taxes are already pretty high. If you raise taxes beyond a certain point, you get *less* money.

Taxes on corporations are already past that point: corporations go through incredible - and expensive - contortions to get the money out of the USA, so that it is taxes at more reasonable rates. The "rich" do the same.

Raising taxes is not the way to go. Cut spending - really cut it, by at least half. That's the only chance left.

>"My family worked really hard to amass a fortune. I was handed the keys to the castle. Because I did NOTHING to earn this money, I would like to see it taken away from me, because we spit on the American Dream. We prefer Socialism"

No, your Parents were the American Dream, YOU are the one spitting on it...

This is the problem with handing something, anything, for free. Regardless if it's a spoiled richkid, or someone whose family has been on welfare for 3 generations. The money comes for free without work, so they don't really get the whole work culture.

Because, Amy, they don't want to just make the decisions for themselves. They want to make the decision for everyone in their tax bracket.

Perhaps there should be a voluntary higher tax bracket.

Clinky's comment is repellent.

> Those of us who think taxes should be higher
> don't think so just to fuck with people.

Yes. Yes, you do. You're intoxicated with the muscle of government... You're blind, stumbling drunk with the enchantment of controlling and managing the lives of others through the irresistible power of government authority. It's a metatastic loop of logic at this point: More money for more power for more money, cancerous growth without end. And you can't even see it; we can tell from this short comment that you're in a whirlpool.

The debt is not some incidental effect of Americans doing their best. It wasn't money well-spent. Most things purchased with that debt are things we don't want. If my teenager had maxxed out my credit card buying noxious chemicals for a meth lab, I'd of course be expected to pay it off. But I'd also want to get that dangerous shit out of the basement and make the son stop misbehaving. There won't be any progress until those things happen.

Your insistence that we (wordlessly!) regard the debt as an expression of our shared hopes for what our government should be is inexcusable manipulation... And intellectually insensate. ("Drunk".)

> I could write a check to the Treasury for my entire
> net worth and that would not even make a noticeable
> impact on the debt.

Yep, there it is. People think their individual lives have no meaning or power. Amy used to cluck (foolishly) about the churches. But in the past ten years, while we weren't looking, every pair of pants has swollen with a boner for government authority. Nobody really believes in God. But EVERYONE –left & right & rich & poor & religious & Godless– EVERYONE believes in government.

Stephen Pinker's got a new book out. He did an appearance on Colbert, which is not something I've ever made time to actually watch... The clip was pretty appalling. The fake fealty to government that's the basis for the TV show is only a two second joke, but they stretch it out with music and graphics and all the rest. Colbert's remarks are as weak as those of any workaday comedian; but during his interview, Pinker made sure to give each of them polite laughter anyway. Steven Fucking Pinker! Why?!??! Why would a Harvard professor eagerly grovel in such a setting?

To sell books, we suppose. It's a popular program. And there are SEVERAL daily TV shows that pretend to treat government with mockery; but the very existence of these shows aggrandizes government. When I was a kid, it would have been unthinkable to have even ONE show like that, a typically tepid daily effort, about government.

But it's the new God; government is what we all agree about, right, Clinky? And you think we should ALL have to pay for it. So you don't really give a fuck about the debt in any moral sense; you don't think of that expenditure as having brought anything good to your life. No, you just want the machine to keep growing. It's terribly important, but not a personal obligation.

For a fascination of religious centrality, your disinterest in answering the debt on a personal level is telling. Amy's right. If you truly, truly thought this was important, you'd be paying every cent into government that you could, and you'd only spend time with others who did the same. (In real churches, the better ones, poor people ARE expected to make generous offerings, as are those with doubts about God's love.) This is fundamental, and grotesque, hypocrisy.

You're not that kind and generous, and you know it. You are trying too hard, and FAR too late, to pretend that we agree about the virtue of all this spending; and until everyone says so out loud, you don't wanna pony up. You're not for real.

The problem here is the ridiculous infantilism of the protestors. They want socialism because they want the government to parent them. As identified above, it's all very passive.

Corporations are evil because they're an extension of active individualism. Evil corporations actively pool their money with the goal of making more money. This, of course, is contrary to the enforced passivity---learned helplessness---of socialism.

Clinky, have you ever heard the saying, "Throwing good money after bad"?

The debt problem exists because of uncontrolled spending. If you give more money to the institution that fucked up in the first place, why should we think it won't fuck up again and spend the increase?

Further, revenue actually starts to DECREASE as taxes increase. Its not an immediate impact, in the short term you do see a tax revenue increase, but in the long term taxes decrease and continue to decrease.

Its like having a large number of cows, if you slaughter some of your breeding stock, you'll have a short term increase in the amount of available meat, if you do it to often you start running short of milk AND meat.

Taxes come out of the wealth producing private sector. You can skim some of it to run the public sector, but the more you take the less the private sector can use to expand itself. Explain how you would keep high taxes from doing that?

Who gives a shit about what a bunch of trust funded kids think about tax policy? They are among the last people who should be consulted on practical matters. If I didn't know better I'd have assumed that this was a parody intended to embarrass the Occupy movement. I'd give more credence to a 10 year old with a paper route.

Did you know that the US has the second highest corporate tax rate among OECD countries and one of the most regressive systems of personal taxation? People who think that the US is a low tax country don't know what the F they're talking about.

Why would I want a government that thinks it's OK to give guns to Mexican drug cartels and is no longer content hassling citizens in airports to have more money?

Sorry progressive not regressive.

Joke

That's not a joke; that's a horror show.

Ok to paraphrase these kids.
I didn't earn it, my parents did. I feel guilty, so tax my parents more. I'm still sitting on a nice tax exempt trust fund.

A simpler solution would be the parents kicking them out penniless.Then donating their

Your Freudian slip of regressive and progressive is illustrative. No one is allowed to actually progress---out of the tax system. As one make "progress," rising up the income laddder, one is taxed more heavily. One's burden progresses to nothing as one "regresses" into poverty.

We are never done paying. It is never enough.

Tyler, take another look... Is it at least possible the the intention is satiric?

"The problem here is the ridiculous infantilism of the protestors. They want socialism because they want the government to parent them. As identified above, it's all very passive."

Specifically, they want their student loan debts forgiven. As in the case of the '60s protests, most of the rest is window dressing. In the '60s, what they wanted was the end of the draft, so that they wouldn't have to go do icky military stuff and get their hair cut and all. When the draft was suspended in 1971, the student protests literally ended overnight. They got what they wanted; they didn't really give a fuck about social justice or any of that other stuff.

"Because I did NOTHING to earn this money, I would like to see it taken away from me, because we spit on the American Dream. We prefer Socialism"

They can say stuff like that, safe in the knowledge that income tax increases would not actually touch them. After all, they have no income -- they're living off of someone else's money. If they really believe in what they say, they should support the reinstatement of the entertainment tax, since that's what they spend most of their money on. But propose that and watch the whining!

That site is nothing but a whole bunch of (mostly white) liberal guilt.

Most of them don't even seem to grasp what "the 1%" really is. I've got news for them.. just because your parents were able to pay for your school and you're not out on the street, that does NOT make you a "1%'er" anyway.

The amount of naïveté and such makes me simultaneously want to laugh/weep for our future.

If it really is all about student loans, then I have both more and less sympathy for their cause. Less, because they're protesting the wrong people, and more, because the student loan system is predatory.

Student loans are guaranteed by the federal government and, since 2005, cannot be discharged. I'm no lawyer, but it seems like the government is inviting students to become its permanently indentured servatns.

Why all the protest about predatory lending in check-cashing stores and sub-prime mortgages, and yet nothing about the government creating life-long servitude?

I noted many asiatics type of governance either expect people to die of frugality or inappropriate excessiveness or expect us to be slaves to their big corporations, just to have a miserable standard of existence.
A governemtnt that try to create a life-long servitude is just scary for anyone that already have suffered enough in any inappropriate or unhappy bondage of any kind.

Where's Clinky? I want to slap him or her around some more.

> Perhaps there should be a voluntary higher
> tax bracket.

Yeah.

I wanna stress this point some more: The problem isn't just that government has spent too much. The problem is that it's used that debt to buy things we don't want government to have, even if they're free.

Remember that when people say that tax increases don't affect the poor: It's not true. The assets are a troubling as the debt.

Why don't these people start companies? Or foundations? Or hire lots of household help? I don't think giving more to the Feds to squander is the answer to the economy. But, starting a comapny is work.

For Tyler

"Perhaps there should be a voluntary higher tax bracket."

Massachusetts has that. Almost no one signs up for it. In the latest data I could find, which was for 2005 and 2006, about 0.03% checked the box for the higher voluntary rate -- and it appears that a significant number of those were people who made less than $20,000 and so didn't owe any tax. And remember, Massachusetts is one of the most leftist states in the U.S.

How about this proposal? Anyone who has money they feel the did "nothing" to earn can give it to the federal government. How hard is that? If the clown in the picture wants to give more of his money to the government, no one is stopping him. The sign says tax me more. Why do we have to tax you more? Can't you just give it away? All the idiots on that website could give their money to various charities and do huge amounts of good; they don't even have to give it to the government. As a matter of fact, they could probably accomplish more good. Private charities tend to be much more efficient that he government.

They have to have some other, darker motive for doing this. Either that or they are just dumb as a bag of rocks.

Clinky said: "I could write a check to the Treasury for my entire net worth and that would not even make a noticeable impact on the debt."

To which Crid answered: "Yep, there it is. People think their individual lives have no meaning or power."

Thank you! Okay, so *your* entire net worth might not make a noticeable impact on the debt. But if you did it, and that inspired one or two of your friends to throw down, that might inspire one or two of *their* friends. And so on and so forth. Eventually, all those little checks would amount to a significant amount. So your "no noticeable impact" doesn't make a dent this year. Maybe not for the next ten years. But somewhere down the road, you might have a granddaughter who strikes it big on American Idol and says that she'll take her profits and write a check to the government "because that's what my grandparents did".

Your actions matter. Maybe not immediately. Maybe not obviously. But what you decide to do matters.

IN addition, the idea that rich people pay a lower percentage of taxes than the middle class or poor is a lie:

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/100xx/doc10068/effective_tax_rates_2006.pdf

The poor pay the least.

-Julie

> what you decide to do matters.

Yes. Always. What you say matters, too... And not just for the gesture of spitting into the wind.

If we all agreed this debt were righteous, wouldn't this be over by now?