On Sep 6, 2009, at 8:11 PM, John Williams wrote:
On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 5:58 PM, Rceeberger<[email protected]>
wrote:
On 9/6/2009 7:47:52 PM, John Williams ([email protected])
wrote:
On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 5:44 PM, Rceeberger<[email protected]>
wrote:
We do not tax everyone in the world, so they do not need to be
considered as part of this discussion.
"We" do not tax everyone in the US, so are you proposing not to
provide health care to the about 50% of the US population that (net)
does not pay taxes?
Name them.
You mean name the bottom 50% of all taxpayers? I don't have enough
space to do that in this email, but check the tables here, for
example:
http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html
In 2007, there was $1.115 trillion collected in federal income taxes.
The top 50% of taxpayers paid $1.083 trillion, or 97.1% of taxes
collected. The IRS tables I found don't break it down for the bottom
50%, but obviously there is a percentile under 50, probably above 40,
where there are no federal income taxes paid.
Of course there are other taxes. But there is certainly another
percentile where net aid exceeds the other taxes paid. And there are
millions of Americans below that percentile.
Yes, federal income tax is, theoretically at least, a progressive-rate
tax. I think everyone here knows that.
There's a good reason for that. People working at or near minimum
wage (which is below the poverty level, by most definitions, even with
recent adjustments) are so close to the wire financially that they're
spending most if not all of their money on daily necessities like food
and housing. People working well above that income level spend a much
smaller proportion of their income on daily survival needs and, while
a larger percentage of tax rate is something of a strain, it's a
considerably smaller strain than it would be on the people at or below
the poverty level who currently don't pay taxes.
Above the rapidly vanishing middle class. the theoretically higher-
rate brackets can afford to hire tax attorneys and accountants whose
specialty is finding ways to avoid tax liability, legally in most
cases, so the actual revenue collected falls off fairly rapidly above
that level. Then there are the literally thousands of custom tax-code
exceptions so tightly written that they apply only to specific
individual corporations or even individuals.
So the lower income classes would almost certainly starve if taxed
enough to gather any appreciable revenue, and the highest income
classes mostly avoid tax liability by financial shell games of various
sorts. Since the top 10% or so control such a disproportionate share
of the country's overall privately held wealth that paying for a trip
to the hospital out of pocket is a barely noticeable drop in the
bucket, I assume you're really talking about the poorest half of the
population.
I have a hard time accepting that health care is a market resource
that only the people who can afford to buy it are entitled to. There
are some resources that fit that model, and there are some that
don't. I prefer to believe that health care is a resource we all have
an obligation to invest in. We can argue about details of
implementation until the argument has devolved into questions of how
many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but we keep coming back to
that fundamental point of basic philosophy.
_______________________________________________
http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
