Cash wrote:1900 a month for doing nothing.....you don't have a problem with that?

If you have a problem with it, then you have a problem with the whole premise of unemployment protection.

There are many people out there that don't have the family support structure to handle a layoff and still feed their kids.
It is easy to look down your nose at those in need until the shoe is on the other foot.

Perhaps you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth.. or you just don't care in how people are able to take care of themselves when there are no opportunities left to do so.

Perhaps you have had a long plight to reach the level of socio-economic stability you now enjoy.... Regardless

There are millions of people out there that will never have the opportunities you enjoyed.
Without help people will go homeless, starve, die, or even turn to crime.

It is in the best interest of society to help as many people as we can, especially in the middle of the worst recessions in any of our lifetimes.

Cash wrote:why did this country enjoy a better standard of living then any other country for years.

If you look up the tax rate for the highest earners between the WWII and the 60s. That is when America became dominant.
The rates for the highest earners back then was in the 90 percentiles....
Now the they are less than 20%.

When you have the lowest earners who actually spend the money shoulder most of the tax burden (collectively) you have what America has turned into these days.
A place where it is getting harder and harder to find a job. Corporate greed drove the outsourcing bonanza of the 90s and our manufacturing base was gutted.

Try to end the tax breaks for companies that use offshore tax havens and that outsource jobs and guess what... it will be mostly Republicans doing the blocking of the legislation.

For this country to truly become great again it must start to prioritize the lil guy once more. The well-off have been taken care of for far too long.

Panos wrote:

nyvector16 wrote:

Cash wrote:why did this country enjoy a better standard of living then any other country for years.

If you look up the tax rate for the highest earners between the WWII and the 60s. That is when America became dominant.
The rates for the highest earners back then was in the 90 percentiles....
Now the they are less than 20%.

When you have the lowest earners who actually spend the money shoulder most of the tax burden (collectively) you have what America has turned into these days.
A place where it is getting harder and harder to find a job. Corporate greed drove the outsourcing bonanza of the 90s and our manufacturing base was gutted.

Try to end the tax breaks for companies that use offshore tax havens and that outsource jobs and guess what... it will be mostly Republicans doing the blocking of the legislation.

For this country to truly become great again it must start to prioritize the lil guy once more. The well-off have been taken care of for far too long.

Dude, not sure where you get your numbers from. The lowest earners DO NOT shoulder most of the tax burden:

Below see the percentile of income earners vs. what that group contributes to the total tax paid.

Top 1%      39.38% 
Top 5%      59.67%
Top 10%     70.30%
Top 25%     85.99%
Top 50%     96.93%
Bottom 50%   3.07%

In other words, the people whose incomes are in the top 10% of incomes in the country pay 70% of all of the taxes.
The people whose incomes are in the bottom 50% of incomes in the country pay almost NONE of the total take.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/22652.html

those are kind of misleading numbers - the top 10% pay 70% of the taxes but they make more than 70% of the money. in other words, the wealthy folks don't have a higher tax burden - if they're making 70% of the wealth, they should be making up 70% of the tax base.

and you're saying the bottom 50% pay almost NONE of the total take? guess why? because they MAKE almost NONE of the total take. bottom 40% of this country makes less than 1% of the wealth. top 1% makes more than 70%.

In the United States at the end of 2001, 10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth and the top 1% owned 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation's wealth.[14]

Panos wrote:
In this country you pay tax on income, not on wealth. There is a big difference.
Income is what you make any given year. Wealth is what you have in the bank, your house, and investments, all things that you purchased with your income AFTER already having paid income tax on it.
I suppose you're advocating the govt take money out of people's savings every year on top of what they claim from your paycheck?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States

potato patato

Cash wrote:unemployment like welfare is the worst idea ever. I will sit and smoke and drink in my underpants for a few weeks, but omg this country needs to take a turn. This used to be the country of people who wanted to make something of themselves. It isn't anymore. It's the chill in my underpants and complain about how i don't have a job and smoke weed and drink country. Briggs i think you will agree with me.

Look, I would not do this for anyone, but since you seem like a rather troubled soul, let me suggest that you send me about half of your unemployment benefits. We can arrange monthly payments using PayPal. You will be relieving some of your guilt by giving me the $$, and you will have more reason to look for a job and not spend your money on the kind of substance(s) which you took before initiating this thread.

Probably should have started this in the off-topic forum, by the way. Unless you are equating your situation with a waived NBA player still being payed under a guaranteed contract, I can't see how this constitutes a thread that belongs in a BB related forum.

Good luck, bro- hoping to hear from you soon.

Cash wrote:

BRIGGS wrote:

Cash wrote:I can sit in my underpants and drink and smoke and serve no useful social purpose and get paid 1900 a month do to so. And i can do it for at least a year?

If that is what you accept as a successful life.

Honestly, no.

Was the visual in your underpants necessary? Or was that just a ploy to get that jared-jefferies-girl excited?
Take the 1900 and buy some shorts.

F--k, don't cry, I just finished off 13 months of Obama's funny money, at 2300 a month.

It's not successful, but it's better than working the squeegee and dumpster diving.

About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That's according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization

The result is a tax system that exempts almost half the country from paying for programs that benefit everyone, including national defense, public safety, infrastructure and education. It is a system in which the top 10 percent of earners — households making an average of $366,400 in 2006 — paid about 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.

The bottom 40 percent, on average, make a profit from the federal income tax, meaning they get more money in tax credits than they would otherwise owe in taxes. For those people, the government sends them a payment.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100407/ap_on_bi_ge/us_no_taxes

BigSm00th wrote:WASHINGTON – Tax Day is a dreaded deadline for millions, but for nearly half of U.S. households it's simply somebody else's problem.

About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That's according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization

The result is a tax system that exempts almost half the country from paying for programs that benefit everyone, including national defense, public safety, infrastructure and education. It is a system in which the top 10 percent of earners — households making an average of $366,400 in 2006 — paid about 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.

The bottom 40 percent, on average, make a profit from the federal income tax, meaning they get more money in tax credits than they would otherwise owe in taxes. For those people, the government sends them a payment.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100407/ap_on_bi_ge/us_no_taxes

Only concentration of resources can produce any results and grow the wealth of the society.
Only wealth can produce more wealth.
I was leaving 33 years in Soviet Union where wealth was divided accross all society and this destroyed one of the reaches countries in the world to nothing.
Communism and socialism are dead end ideas which bring nothing but regress and destruction.

Taxes are not just income tax. It includes sales taxes at the local and state levels.
The "consumption tax" affects everyone making any kind of purchase outside of food & Rent.

Also, it was late at night when I wrote it and I what I was trying to drive home was the difference in tax burden an individual making 100K paying 40k in taxes compared to an individual making 100 Million paying less than 20 million in taxes. There is something inherently wrong with a system that lays such a heavy burden on the lower income worker compared to the millionaire or Billionaire that gets to keep a much larger share of his income.

When America prospered after WWII.. these were the tax rates for the top bracket:
1944-1945 - 94%
1946-1947 - 86.45%
1948-1949 - 82.13%
1950 - 84.36%
1951 - 91%
1952-1953 - 92%
1954-1963 - 91%
1964 - 77%
1965-1967 - 70%
1968 - 75.25%
1969 - 77%
1970 - 71.75%

Now.. they are 35% and closer to 16% after all the deductions and loopholes available to them.

Cash wanted to know why this country is inherently different now than what it was years ago when we were truly the land of opportunity.

It is no surprise that things got worse off here after Bush's tax cuts that primarily benefited the top 2% in this country.

But Cash wants to feel guilty for claiming his measly 1900 a month of unemployment and then share that guilt with the rest of us.

Panos wrote:

nyvector16 wrote:I was trying to drive home was the difference in tax burden an individual making 100K paying 40k in taxes compared to an individual making 100 Million paying less than 20 million in taxes.

I'm showing you factual numbers with links to back them up, and you're making up pure fiction.
No one earning $100M is paying less than $20M in taxes. That's pure fiction.

This country is build and mantained by middlle class working people who currently earned from 40 to 250K incomes.
Rich are the source of weath required to move this country forward.
The goal of the society is to have more middle class and more rich and if this is the case we are progressing.
If weath is dissapering then we are in trouble. And pure will be in trouble first.
Rich will switch from Ferrary to BMW and pure with have nothing to eat.