Isn't the mooch the one who takes the most from government without paying for it?
Foreign wars and military bases overseas to protect oil profits is the biggest mooching going on.
Too big to fail banks being propped up by the government when they are crushed by their own malfeasance is the biggest mooching going on.
Except, as we are so often told by the left, banks (corporations) aren't people. Right?
Many pay no taxes and many get far more back than they pay in taxes.
Many pay no taxes and many get far more back than they pay in taxes.
Hmm, sounds an accurate description of people in the bottom 3 income quintiles.
Hmm, sounds an accurate description of people in the bottom 3 income quintiles.
Per capita who gets more? Who is the bigger moocher?
Some get millions and some get substandard health insurance and education for their children, and children who suffer from lethal force despite the lack of a lethal weapon.
Hmm, sounds an accurate description of people in the bottom 3 income quintiles.
Per capita who gets more? Who is the bigger moocher?
Some get millions and some get substandard health insurance and education for their children, and children who suffer from lethal force despite the lack of a lethal weapon.
ronburgundy said:That is fine, but irrelevant to the thread and the point of my bringing up Swiss accounts. The thread is about the validity of using the CBO numbers to infer the relative % of income paid in taxes by the rich vs. others. The fact that the rich use foreign accounts to hide many billions in income from taxation (and have done so for a century) completely undermines the validity of the CBO data by showing that the % of income paid in taxes by the rich is an extreme underestimation. Foriegn bank accounts are just one way in which the rich hide the income and wealth from taxation, which doesn't show up in any of the official numbers conservative like to throw out to support their claim of extreme progressive taxation.
Alleging some vague amount individuals about "hid(ing) many billions from taxation" is little more than your 'article of desperate faith', unconnected to any attempt to demonstrate that these unsupported speculations have a significant effect on computed rates for the higher or highest quintile.
After following your 'arguments', it seems that when you run out of supportative facts, you argue methodology. When your methodological knat swatting fails, you pound the table with speculation.
Per capita who gets more? Who is the bigger moocher?
Some get millions and some get substandard health insurance and education for their children, and children who suffer from lethal force despite the lack of a lethal weapon.
Well, the people in the bottom 3 quintiles net about $750 billion per year in cash and in kind payments. That seems like a lot.
They clearly meet your established definition of "moochers".
ronburgundy said:That is fine, but irrelevant to the thread and the point of my bringing up Swiss accounts. The thread is about the validity of using the CBO numbers to infer the relative % of income paid in taxes by the rich vs. others. The fact that the rich use foreign accounts to hide many billions in income from taxation (and have done so for a century) completely undermines the validity of the CBO data by showing that the % of income paid in taxes by the rich is an extreme underestimation. Foriegn bank accounts are just one way in which the rich hide the income and wealth from taxation, which doesn't show up in any of the official numbers conservative like to throw out to support their claim of extreme progressive taxation.
Alleging some vague amount individuals about "hid(ing) many billions from taxation" is little more than your 'article of desperate faith', unconnected to any attempt to demonstrate that these unsupported speculations have a significant effect on computed rates for the higher or highest quintile.
After following your 'arguments', it seems that when you run out of supportative facts, you argue methodology. When your methodological knat swatting fails, you pound the table with speculation.
Well, the people in the bottom 3 quintiles net about $750 billion per year in cash and in kind payments. That seems like a lot.
They clearly meet your established definition of "moochers".
To be fair though, allocating the expenses of government isn't easy and makes assumptions.
The original table already told us which income quintile pays the most and how much exactly. The arbitrary number 274% doesn't tell us anything. It might as well be 345 snorfpuggles or 71 dog skins.What is odd is why you think the metric has any meaning. The amount of money that changes hands doesn't matter: Consider a hypothetical country that uses tax revenue only for wealth transfers, in other words it collects taxes and pays exactly the same amount back to people. The total would be zero in this case, and therefore any amount - be it $1 or $1 billion - of taxes paid by the richest quintile would be an infinite percentage. Heck, you could even imagine a country that pays more than it taxes, and finances it from other revenue sources such as profits from government owned businesses. In this case the total of taxes plus transfers would be a negative amount. Calculating a percentage of something from something doesn't make sense if the values of that other something is on a scale that is not fixed to zero.
What does it mean if a richest quintile pays 274%, 100%, 0%, -100%, or 1,000,000,000% of the net tax burden? What does that tell us?If we assume 25 million households per quintile, the total net taxes paid by quintile are:
5th - receive $215 billion
4th - receive $313 billion
3rd - receive $228 billion
2nd - pay $18 billion
1st - pay $1,163 billion
Total net = pay $425 billion
The percentages are -51%, -74%, -54%, 4%, 274%.
The top 20% pay 274% of the net taxes collected.
It's just facts.
Answer: absolutely nothing.
One would have thought, with transfer payments, it tells us which income quintile pays the most for government and which quintile is the mooch - which is, by the way, what the thread OP is about.
The original table already told us which income quintile pays the most and how much exactly. The arbitrary number 274% doesn't tell us anything. It might as well be 345 snorfpuggles or 71 dog skins.What is odd is why you think the metric has any meaning. The amount of money that changes hands doesn't matter: Consider a hypothetical country that uses tax revenue only for wealth transfers, in other words it collects taxes and pays exactly the same amount back to people. The total would be zero in this case, and therefore any amount - be it $1 or $1 billion - of taxes paid by the richest quintile would be an infinite percentage. Heck, you could even imagine a country that pays more than it taxes, and finances it from other revenue sources such as profits from government owned businesses. In this case the total of taxes plus transfers would be a negative amount. Calculating a percentage of something from something doesn't make sense if the values of that other something is on a scale that is not fixed to zero.
What does it mean if a richest quintile pays 274%, 100%, 0%, -100%, or 1,000,000,000% of the net tax burden? What does that tell us?If we assume 25 million households per quintile, the total net taxes paid by quintile are:
5th - receive $215 billion
4th - receive $313 billion
3rd - receive $228 billion
2nd - pay $18 billion
1st - pay $1,163 billion
Total net = pay $425 billion
The percentages are -51%, -74%, -54%, 4%, 274%.
The top 20% pay 274% of the net taxes collected.
It's just facts.
Answer: absolutely nothing.
One would have thought, with transfer payments, it tells us which income quintile pays the most for government and which quintile is the mooch - which is, by the way, what the thread OP is about.
And I ask again, what does it mean for the top quintile to pay 2.74x the total? Is it a lot? Is it a little? I gave a hypothetical example that shows that with slightly different government spending priorities it could be infinite percent, so by comparison, 274% seems like nothing at all.The original table already told us which income quintile pays the most and how much exactly. The arbitrary number 274% doesn't tell us anything. It might as well be 345 snorfpuggles or 71 dog skins.What is odd is why you think the metric has any meaning. The amount of money that changes hands doesn't matter: Consider a hypothetical country that uses tax revenue only for wealth transfers, in other words it collects taxes and pays exactly the same amount back to people. The total would be zero in this case, and therefore any amount - be it $1 or $1 billion - of taxes paid by the richest quintile would be an infinite percentage. Heck, you could even imagine a country that pays more than it taxes, and finances it from other revenue sources such as profits from government owned businesses. In this case the total of taxes plus transfers would be a negative amount. Calculating a percentage of something from something doesn't make sense if the values of that other something is on a scale that is not fixed to zero.
What does it mean if a richest quintile pays 274%, 100%, 0%, -100%, or 1,000,000,000% of the net tax burden? What does that tell us?If we assume 25 million households per quintile, the total net taxes paid by quintile are:
5th - receive $215 billion
4th - receive $313 billion
3rd - receive $228 billion
2nd - pay $18 billion
1st - pay $1,163 billion
Total net = pay $425 billion
The percentages are -51%, -74%, -54%, 4%, 274%.
The top 20% pay 274% of the net taxes collected.
It's just facts.
Answer: absolutely nothing.
One would have thought, with transfer payments, it tells us which income quintile pays the most for government and which quintile is the mooch - which is, by the way, what the thread OP is about.
It's the actual true-as-shit ratio of what the top quintile pays versus the total net amount collected. It tells us the top quintile pays 2.74x the total net amount collected.
you may not like it or wish to talk about it, but it is true nonetheless.
And I ask again, what does it mean for the top quintile to pay 2.74x the total? Is it a lot? Is it a little? I gave a hypothetical example that shows that with slightly different government spending priorities it could be infinite percent, so by comparison, 274% seems like nothing at all.The original table already told us which income quintile pays the most and how much exactly. The arbitrary number 274% doesn't tell us anything. It might as well be 345 snorfpuggles or 71 dog skins.What is odd is why you think the metric has any meaning. The amount of money that changes hands doesn't matter: Consider a hypothetical country that uses tax revenue only for wealth transfers, in other words it collects taxes and pays exactly the same amount back to people. The total would be zero in this case, and therefore any amount - be it $1 or $1 billion - of taxes paid by the richest quintile would be an infinite percentage. Heck, you could even imagine a country that pays more than it taxes, and finances it from other revenue sources such as profits from government owned businesses. In this case the total of taxes plus transfers would be a negative amount. Calculating a percentage of something from something doesn't make sense if the values of that other something is on a scale that is not fixed to zero.
What does it mean if a richest quintile pays 274%, 100%, 0%, -100%, or 1,000,000,000% of the net tax burden? What does that tell us?If we assume 25 million households per quintile, the total net taxes paid by quintile are:
5th - receive $215 billion
4th - receive $313 billion
3rd - receive $228 billion
2nd - pay $18 billion
1st - pay $1,163 billion
Total net = pay $425 billion
The percentages are -51%, -74%, -54%, 4%, 274%.
The top 20% pay 274% of the net taxes collected.
It's just facts.
Answer: absolutely nothing.
One would have thought, with transfer payments, it tells us which income quintile pays the most for government and which quintile is the mooch - which is, by the way, what the thread OP is about.
It's the actual true-as-shit ratio of what the top quintile pays versus the total net amount collected. It tells us the top quintile pays 2.74x the total net amount collected.
you may not like it or wish to talk about it, but it is true nonetheless.
You migth as well say, that the top quintile pays 0.013% of the US national debt. That's also "true as shit", but does that ratio have any meaning?
In context of comprison to other countries, yes, it does indicate that US taxation is more progressive than in some other countries. But you have a point that you need to also consider the net tax rate after transfers. If you look at the OECD data for how much taxes and tranfers impact the gini index, countries that have flat tax like Estonia still manage to level the playing field more than some countries with progressive taxation like Australia. The tax rate progressivity alone doesn't reveal the whole picture.The comment was in response to a chart that showed the top 10% pay 45% of all taxes. Do you find that to be a meaningful number?
We have an income tax, not a wealth tax. Wealth taxes are a very bad thing.
What we have now is a bad thing, an oligarchy.
More and more of the people in the top 0.1% are there through inheritance, not any effort of their own.
More and more of our lives are dictated by these freeloaders.
The problem is that FATCA is a very heavy-handed way of dealing with it that is having repercussions for US expats. They didn't pay any attention to the laws of the other nations--some of which have laws specifically prohibiting the disclosures required under FATCA. The banks are responding by booting customers with US passports.
Whether FATCA is a wise solution to the problem is separate from the fact the its existence shows there is a serious problem of Americans hiding wealth from taxation in foreign accounts. The support for such a law that pisses off our allies is based in the fact that it is known wealthy Americans are avoiding billions in taxes via such accounts.
Again, whether you think the US should use FATCA to try and prevent Americans from illegally hiding billions in income in foreign accounts, is a separate issue. The fact remains that the Swiss bank secrecy policy exists because it makes them billions, and it only does this because of market demand, which means wealthy foreigners wanting to secretly hide their money from their own governments. The existence of Swiss secrecy laws are themselves evidence that the wealthy are hiding billions from taxation in those accounts.
That is fine, but irrelevant to the thread and the point of my bringing up Swiss accounts. The thread is about the validity of using the CBO numbers to infer the relative % of income paid in taxes by the rich vs. others. The fact that the rich use foreign accounts to hide many billions in income from taxation (and have done so for a century) completely undermines the validity of the CBO data by showing that the % of income paid in taxes by the rich is an extreme underestimation. Foriegn bank accounts are just one way in which the rich hide the income and wealth from taxation, which doesn't show up in any of the official numbers conservative like to throw out to support their claim of extreme progressive taxation.
Except, as we are so often told by the left, banks (corporations) aren't people. Right?
Nice dodge.
If we begin to talk about moochers the biggest moochers are the large corporations.
Many pay no taxes and many get far more back than they pay in taxes.
How much would it cost the oil corporations to pay for their own protection and deal with uncoerced governments?
What we have now is a bad thing, an oligarchy.
More and more of the people in the top 0.1% are there through inheritance, not any effort of their own.
More and more of our lives are dictated by these freeloaders.
Check out the Forbes list. Most are either self-made or the immediate family of the self-made.
And that doesn't change the destructive nature of wealth taxes. Wealth taxes are about eating the rich, not about revenue. When you finish eating the rich the society dies.
Nice dodge.
If we begin to talk about moochers the biggest moochers are the large corporations.
Many pay no taxes and many get far more back than they pay in taxes.
How much would it cost the oil corporations to pay for their own protection and deal with uncoerced governments?
I don't see the coerced governments you're referring to. Where we have intervened has been in cases of the criminal seizure of US-owned assets.
Why don't you pay for your own protection? No cops will respond to your address for any reason.
In context of comprison to other countries, yes, it does indicate that US taxation is more progressive than in some other countries. But you have a point that you need to also consider the net tax rate after transfers. If you look at the OECD data for how much taxes and tranfers impact the gini index, countries that have flat tax like Estonia still manage to level the playing field more than some countries with progressive taxation like Australia. The tax rate progressivity alone doesn't reveal the whole picture.The comment was in response to a chart that showed the top 10% pay 45% of all taxes. Do you find that to be a meaningful number?
It's just that your attempt at quantifying it was nonsensical.
