26 Feb 2004 | Don Schenck said...

I have always maintained that society's ills all come down to morality.

26 Feb 2004 | Josh said...

I think the root of our ills is not being able to agree on what morals to follow.

Why is not paying retail wrong? I never pay retail for anything. Amazon, Half.com, newegg.com and eBay are my favorite places to shop. Even Best Buy sells CDs for less than retail. I'm intersted in the lowest price I can find. Is having H&R Block crunch numbers to max out your tax return wrong? if tax laws aren't broken, then what's the problem? Who doesn't lie? Not telling the truth has been around for a long time. If your G.F. asks you if thoses jeans make her look fat, you don't say "yes" if they do. You lie and live.

26 Feb 2004 | Paperhead said...

Aw Don, but our leaders are such good role models ;)

Considering the debacle of the intelligence reports on Iraq, I think Josh is stumbling awfully close to the title of the next James Bond outing: Lie and Let Die. James uses Q's modified PDA to run the experimental MUID (make up intelligence dossier) software.

Matthew, isn't getting the best deal that you can for yourself just corporate thinking brought down to the level of the individual. The free market has no morals, we are individuals operating within the free market, so why should we be any different. Or maybe the free market is just the reflection of what we are when you scrape away the niceties (or civilization as we naively used to call it).

Ho hum.

28 Feb 2004 | p8 said...

This 10 minute documentary Despotism & Democracy produced by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films in 1946(!) still seems suprisingly up-to-date.

It measures how a society ranks on a spectrum stretching from democracy to despotism. Explains how societies and nations can be measured by the degree that power is concentrated and respect for the individual is restricted. Where does your community, state and nation stand on these scales?

29 Feb 2004 | four legs good said...

Maybe we need to be pirates because of the the perfectly legal covert campaign to rig our tax system to benefit the super rich and cheat everybody else.

"Since 1983, American workers have been paying more into Social Security than it has paid out in benefits, about $1.8 trillion more so far. This year Americans will pay about 50 percent more in Social Security taxes than the government will pay out in benefits."

So what has happened to that $1.8 trillion?
It helped finance the income tax cuts for the ultra-rich.

"Mr. Greenspan told Congress earlier that Mr. Bush's tax cuts should be kept in place. The biggest beneficiaries would be the top 400 taxpayers, whose average income in 2000 was $174 million each. They paid 22.2 cents on the dollar in federal income taxes and, under the Bush tax cuts, would have paid about 17.5 cents.

Over all that year, Americans paid 15.3 cents on the dollar of income in income taxes, but many middle-class Americans paid a larger share of their incomes to the federal government than the top 400 when both income and Social Security taxes are counted."

Author David Cay Johnston's book

29 Feb 2004 | Carl said...

And the rich pay the vast majority of the taxes. If you are going to give someone a refund, don't you think you should refund the people who've actually paid the most? When you buy something at a store and then get in line to return it afew days later, do they give you the refund (since you bought it) or do they refund the 3rd person in the line behind you?

29 Feb 2004 | four legs good said...

Carl: "If you are going to give someone a refund, don't you think you should refund the people who've actually paid the most?"
I think everyone should at least get the same percentage returned.
Now the ultra rich get a refund while the rest has to pay extra.
That's like returning your product to the store and not getting the whole refund while a third richer person gets the rest of your refund!

Did you read the article? Or this (scroll two-thirds)?

A person earning $50,000 has been paying $2,500 each year in expectation of getting that sum returned as a retirement benefit, then a cut in benefits is essentially erasing a credit due to the earner. This would have the effect of retroactively raising taxes on earners, for the $2,500 would be converted from savings into a tax payment into the general fund.
This means that George W. Bush wants to raise your taxes.

We can have in America a system in which the middle class and the upper middle class, people making $30,000 to $500,000 a year subsidize people who make millions of dollars. If that's what you want.

02 Mar 2004 | red beard said...

Meanwhile Bush acts like the Pirate of the Caribbean:
Financial Times - Dont fall for Washingtons spin on Haiti

02 Mar 2004 | four legs good said...

Krugman gets it (of course):

Maestro of Chutzpah

You see, although the rest of the government is running huge deficits and never did run much of a surplus the Social Security system is currently taking in much more money than it spends. Thanks to those surpluses, the program is fully financed at least through 2042. The cost of securing the program's future for many decades after that would be modest a small fraction of the revenue that will be lost if the Bush tax cuts are made permanent.
And the reason Social Security is in fairly good shape is that during the 1980's the Greenspan commission persuaded Congress to increase the payroll tax, which supports the program.

The payroll tax is regressive: it falls much more heavily on middle-and lower-income families than it does on the rich. In fact, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, families near the middle of the income distribution pay almost twice as much in payroll taxes as in income taxes. Yet people were willing to accept a regressive tax increase to sustain Social Security.

Now the joke's on them. Mr. Greenspan pushed through an increase in taxes on working Americans, generating a Social Security surplus. Then he used that surplus to argue for tax cuts that deliver very little relief to most people, but are worth a lot to those making more than $300,000 a year. And now that those tax cuts have contributed to a soaring deficit, he wants to cut Social Security benefits.

The point, of course, is that if anyone had tried to sell this package honestly "Let's raise taxes and cut benefits for working families so we can give big tax cuts to the rich!" voters would have been outraged. So the class warriors of the right engaged in bait-and-switch.

Repeat after me: "Bush wants to cut your Social Security Benefits to pay for tax cuts for millionaires"