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:	post by arktouros at 2011-08-05 11:30:19

Boozegood said	[orig][quote]
The top percentage of earners already pay nearly 100% percent of the taxes. Why do you want people that already pay bazillions of dollars in taxes too have to pay more?

I'll take a quick shot here. I'm not going to go and grab some numbers right now, but the first sentence isn't correct. Everything from tax cuts, to laundering, foreign investment, tax loopholes and credits, etc--people make careers out of helping corporations and wealthy people avoid paying taxes. Not to say they all do that and not to paint "the rich" as public enemy; "even the world's most privileged suffer from a cultural and class myopia that limits perspective and distorts self-understanding." So, there's this belief among the venerated American orthodoxy that taxing the rich kills jobs. In the science of economics, that's sort of an elementary school cop-out.

The healthiest economies have strong and mobile middle classes, a small, distributed upper class, and a small and upwardly-mobile lower class. To sustain a strong economy, laborers of middle and lower classes are educated, healthy, long-living, and have small families. Some would say that as owners of production, the rich have a "duty" to society to ensure that infrastructure stays intact. By using publicly-funded infrastructure (not only roads and water, but public education) to expand their wealth and service their own goals, I personally agree that they owe a debt to that public infrastructure.

Now from the perspective of a CEO, a corporation is a virus that is only interested in expanding wealth. Which is fine, and there is nothing wrong in staying afloat in a market economy to do that, but when unregulated, it begins to become exploitative, dominant, and above law. It is in their short-term interest to cut every corner possible. But lets say they stay at a low tax-rate for 30 years, and the lower classes have been picking up the tax bill. Soon when they want to recruit new workers, or use bridges to ship their goods, they'll find out that the labor pool is dumb as fuck and dies at 40, and the bridge falls out from underneath them. Which is sort of what is happening now.

tl;dr - Second lesson of history: wealth inequality creates unrest.

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