Is It Really Belt Tightening

[PanzerJaeger]

Except that isn't the context in which you put it in. You said it partly comes down to ideology. That you could say that poor don't pay into any social programs. When you link that to an ideology, it gives the impression that you making an overarching ideological assumption and are applying it. Yeah, you can back track and say "well of course I was talking specifically about federal government." but it is easy to talk about what you meant when it wasn't specific in the first place. I don't know any ideology (and lets be honest, it's the conservative ideology that looks down on poor like that), that says that the poor are freeriders who don't pay anything for federal government programs. Oddly specific for a broad ideology.

But whatever, this isn't what the topic is about at all. If you want to make vague statements and then claim afterward that it all applied to the main topic of the thread, go ahead.

Here is the whole statement:

There is a lot of ideology in this. One could also point out that the poor, who use by far the most public services, pay absolutely nothing for them. Should 'we' be paying them for the privilege through direct subsidies in the tax system? Would it really be a smart precedent to set to give the poor not a few thousand but tens of thousands of dollars simply for existing? I suspect we have differing views on that subject, as I don't even agree with the current subsidies.

You'll note that not only was the quote I was responding to about the subsidies in the Bush tax cuts, but last three sentences in my reply refer directly to the subsidies in the Bush tax cuts, which had been the subject of the discussion between Ice and myself. So if you had any doubt about the first two sentences, the last three - being in the same paragraph - should have cleared up your confusion.

Just face it, you either skimmed my post or just read Jbarto's and incorrectly believed I had been caught in an 'ah ha!' moment and decided to pile on. I really don't mind. I have enough real 'ah ha!' moments that you would be forgiven for believing you'd caught me in another.

Again, you are trying to back track and say that your sentence was about something specific when you know by now that I had interpreted it as a broad generalization. So this whole attempt at making me lose "face" by portraying me as "off topic" fails miserably. Also, your b makes no sense. Only 3 states have no sales tax at all. Alaska, Delaware and Montana, hardly where most of the poor are. Vast majority of poor still pay some amount of sales tax, thus they pay into state services, thus your b is invalid.

I'm not attempting to make you lose face. It was simply a misunderstanding.
My 'b)' statement:

You are aware that state sales taxes ... b) vary by state, correct?

I'm not sure how the statement could be valid/invalid.

State sales tax does in fact vary and I was simply asking if you know that. You keep repeating the 9.25% number as if it is the number instead of a number, but instead of assuming () that is what you meant, I asked.

Also, iirc, Oregon and New Hampshire have no sales tax.

Exactly. And of course anyone who has taken basic econ courses know that the standard of living for someone living on $50,000 is much more impacted by having to contribute 30% of the taxes than it is for someone living on $1.5 million who has to contribute 27% of the total taxes.

I think you're logic is a bit off as far, far more people contribute to that 30% pool than to the 27% one.

For example, if you have 500 people who earn $10 a year who have to pay 30% of a $1000 tax burden and 5 people who make $100 who have to pay 27%, members of the 500 pay .60 cents each and the 5 people have to pay $54 each.

Math is not at all a personal strength, so that little equation could be the 'ah ha!' moment you've been looking for.

The idea that the system is "fair" when all parties are paying the same dollar amount is flawed. The value of the dollar is not standard for all "players"(the taxpayers) in the system.

Let's say there are two people. One has $5, one has $500 dollars. The amount needed to be payed for the "bill" is $4. It is not fair for each to have to pay $2 into the system because while the rich man has 99.6% of his money left the poor man has 60% of his money left. It doesn't matter if there was 1 rich man and 100 poor people. If they split it evenly the poor (relative to the rich person) is going to take a bigger hit if they all have to pay the same dollar amount towards the bill as the 1 rich person.

This apples to the graph you posted. The middle class should be paying 3% more of the bill than the rich, the rich should be paying 10% more than all the middle class because the burden that the rich will take from paying a lot more will be equal to the burden of the middle class, because even though the middle class pays less they make substantially less money to begin with.

I haven't taken the position that the rich should pay less taxes, only that the Bush tax cuts were not exclusively for the rich and were, in fact, favorable to the poor.

The relative of burden was largely in the rich's favor. As Ice said, the tax cuts ended up cutting hundreds of thousand for the rich, a couple thousand for the poor and middle class. Taxes on capital gains went down a lot for all incomes levels, but the vast majority of capital gains to be taxed on are held by the rich, so that by itself gave the rich much, much more money than the poor or middle class could ever hope to receive.

Obviously those who pay more taxes are more sensitive to changes in the tax code either way. Strike's initial post seemed to imply that the GOP was proposing hurting the poor in favor of helping the rich. My whole involvement in this thread has been to argue that 'leaving the Bush tax cuts', as he put it, in fact helps the poor. And if we are going to use the marginal value of a dollar argument that the progressive tax system is based on, removing the Bush tax cuts will hurt the poor far more than the rich.