$300 for every $10,000 over $250,000. That's how much extra income tax the wealthy will have to pay-

[dysfunctional press]

by rolling back the bush tax cuts.

that's all.

and that's all you'll need to know to shut the whiners up.

[LSparkle]

1. Where'd you get that stat? Hopefully others will find it ...

You're right -- that's ALL you need to shut these
selfish bastards' pieholes!

[dysfunctional press]

14. i actually saw it on abc evening network news

despite charlie gibson.

[gratuitous]

2. A whopping 3%

So, someone making a million a year would pay an additional $22,500 on that extra $750,000 in income. Let's ask the question: What can the person buy for that $22,500? How many jobs could they create for that much extra money?

Answers: Not much and zero.

How much more can the country accomplish with that extra money, pooled from all those disparate sources? Quite a lot.

[Alias Dictus Tyrant]

7. I dunno

I always dumped any extra money I had into seed-stage tech startups, which can get a lot of mileage on that money. I guarantee you that was a lot more productive and less wasteful than giving that same money to the government.

And while that is a tax increase, the immediate income tax burden on those folks is over 50% in many States, which seems excessive by any measure. Not something I have to worry about though. ;) And it is much better to tax income than capital gains anyway from an economics standpoint.

[ColbertWatcher]

9. And it's even better to tax both income AND capital gains! Welcome to DU, btw! n/t

[Alias Dictus Tyrant]

15. I think most people do not understand capital gains taxes

The US has had basic capital gains tax rates that were higher than most of Europe for a long time. Capital gains tax rates are very damaging for competitiveness, because most technology ventures and similar are traditionally funded through capital gains and can only be valued in such terms. Europeans understand this, it is a well-understood and proven principle in economics, and them having low or no capital gains taxes makes their tax structure more competitive than it otherwise might seem. The only reason this has not impacted the US economy as much as you might otherwise think is that there is a giant exemption in the tax code that lets you defer capital gains indefinitely by investing it in small-ish ventures, and a lot of people do. In places like California with a strong tech venture industry, the State tax code mirrors the Federal tax code in this regard in order to help small companies thrive.

If we both raised capital gains taxes and eliminated the reinvestment deferral -- what has been proposed -- it would be pretty damaging to our international competitiveness. More importantly, capital gains reinvestment directly funds something like 5-10 million high-paying jobs in the US, which would disappear within two years if the US capital gains structure was no longer competitive (and half of that money immediately goes back to the government anyway through income, payroll, and other taxes, so the loss is less than it seems).

[ColbertWatcher]

17. Interesting that you'd bring up Europe.

Tell me, that big collider thingie, who paid for that?

And, public transportation in Europe, who pays for that?

I say keep the giant corporations out of innovation; we need more people inventing things in their garages and public money funding them.

It's high time that mega-corporations and the filthy rich pay their fair share to enjoy the fruits of the free market in this democracy.

(But then again, I'm not a tax expert)

[Alias Dictus Tyrant]

23. Ironic

Not only did the US help fund the Large Hadron Collider, but we funded our own high-energy physics program as well. In any case, that funding is a drop in the bucket of global R&D funding (a small fraction of a percent).

See:

http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/guiintl.htm

What you will see is that not only the US a huge share of the funding pie, but that the EU is in third place behind Asia. With the exception of a couple countries like Germany, which invest similar amounts of money in R&D in relative terms, most European countries do not even come close to the percentage investment of the US.

The US private sector alone now funds about as much R&D as funding from all sources in the EU. I work in R&D myself (theoretical and applied mathematics), and most of the productive funding comes from the US private sector. To the extent that there is public sector funding for my own area of mathematics, it actually comes from the US military budget since the US DoD is the only government agency that has any interest in mathematics research. I have a lot of acquaintances from Europe who work here (San Francisco) because this is where all the good research money is. The US has adequate public sector funding, but private sector funding has grown so much that it dwarfs public sector funding these days, and is often better funding anyway (less nonsense, fewer strings). Back in the 1950s public sector funding was larger than private sector; it hasn't shrunk, the private sector grew.

The other place on the globe that has real research funding is Asia, but I don't feel like moving to China. :)

So I think you are ignoring just how much good R&D funding comes from the US private sector, and how diverse that funding is. The problem with public funding is that it tends to ignore some areas of research and encourages a "grant mill" system that produces relatively meager results for the money spent. Yeah, the big companies do a lot of bad things, but they also spend a lot of money on productive R&D that would never get funded by the public sector for reasons having nothing to do with the value or quality of the research.

[U4ikLefty]

18. Please don't hide your profile. It makes you looks suspect when you have only 14 posts.

Thanks

[Veritas_et_Aequitas]

3. But how will they be able to afford their monocles ?

[OmahaBlueDog]

4. You libs just don't get it. They could do more for the economy putting that toward....

1. Dues at the Country Club
2. Sending money to rehabilitate Ted Haggard
3. Contributing to pay Jim Calhoun's salary
4. Paying an illegal domestic to watch their kids
5. Getting the Mercedes fixed (again)

[sandyd921]

5. It's time to roll back the Reagan tax cuts too!

Let's go back to the days when the wealthy and corporations would put the money that they now pocket (formerly income over 3,000,000 was taxed at 70%) to good use investing in enterprises which created jobs for lots of folks.

[Alias Dictus Tyrant]

11. Where do you think that money goes now?

A lot of that money is already invested in other parts of the economy.

The current tax code provides a strong incentive to invest gains in small-ish companies, allowing capital gains taxes to be deferred indefinitely as long as it is invested; most of that money ends up as payroll. And if the investment is long-term, the capital gains rate gets cut in half regardless. I consider this to be one of the better features of the current tax code, making our capital gains taxes almost as low as the Europeans in practice (some European countries don't even have capital gains taxes).

A lot of the technology ventures are funded through that way, it is one of the things that keeps Silicon Valley busy. In fact, I think we need to focus more of our economy away from very large companies, something that I think is currently being ignored at the moment.

[aquart]

13. Universal single payer health care will do that.

[Alias Dictus Tyrant]

16. No disagreement on that.

Though it might damage American medical and biotech R&D. The US is about the only country that even invests in that sector any more (the US private sector investment is well over half the global R&D alone, never mind when you add public sector investment on top of that). Much of the rest of the world gets a free-ride on medical tech paid for by our expensive healthcare system.

I would prefer not to have investment in medical technology research to disappear, but no one has explained how it will be paid for if otherwise. If the Europeans are any example to go by, global R&D in medicine would drop by an order of magnitude. I don't think we can force the Europeans to carry their weight on R&D.

[OneBlueDotBama]

19. Over half goes to R & D,,,,,,

Please, do let the people know that in the US, marketing is included in the R & D column for the pharms. It's a huge scam as far as biotech research is concerned in the US, no doubt drafted by the Heritage Inst. for the pharm lobby.

[rvablue]

6. Kick. This is a quick and clear way to frame it if someone starts whining. n/t

[liberal N proud]

8. It's one or two less nights at their 5 star hotel

BFD!

[indepat]

10. But does anyone grasp the staggering number of $10,000s those having taxable incomes

exceeding $250,000 amounts to, just how much revenue has been lost in eight years. My wife and I have paid more than $600 more in Federal income taxes each year since 1996 by reason of up to 85% of social security having been made taxable in the early 1990s. While 'pukes saw to it to have the highest marginal rate on the most affluent rolled back from Clinton highs, the MFing sons-of-bitching bastards forgot to roll back the taxes on social security so that no more than 50% of social security would be taxed as before. But who am I kidding: not rolling back the portion of social security subject to tax to 50% wasn't forgotten, it was by design! :P

[L0oniX]

12. Well ...there goes my Lexus payment.

:sarcasm:

[Skidmore]

20. Oh, the humanity. Now how about some of our Dems growing spines and getting

out and explaining this so that the people can get behind it publicly. Shame these greedy bastards into shutting up the whine.

[SammyWinstonJack]

21. Which I would glady pay, were I fortunate enough to make that kind of money.

[old mark]

22. Works out to a little over

82 cents a day per $10,000.
No wonder we are running out of millionaires - Obama the foreign devil is taxing them to death to fund his commie plans to take over the US - sorry, I just gave away the entire GOP "philosophy".


mark