Obama bad for Broadway?? — Page 3

The democrats have been playing class warfare for quite sometime. Is it fair that almost 1/2 the people pay no taxes & yet many get a rebate?

Taxes take money out of your pocket plain & simple.The more taxes are raised the more Broadway will be hurt. If something has to go in a budget, Broadway goes over food & rent.

To Theater, if you say anything bad about any DEM but especially Obama you commit heresy & will be boiled in oil. Watch the crap that will now be thrown at me. A pity is that it is wasted as I will not come back to this thread to see the BS
Knock yourself out guys.

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OMIGOD! Mr Roxy is John McCain?

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almost 1/2 the people pay no taxes

That's not even remotely close to being true. The number of taxable units that do not pay income taxes is closer to a third, and many of those still pay payroll taxes.

Is that what's considered "throwing crap"? Pointing out an utter falsehood?

LOLARE!

Updated On: 11/5/08 at 04:56 PM

Well, he is certainly bad for Wall Street and in turn the economy

The whole point of taxes is redistribution of wealth, or at least it's inherent in the concept. Even if everyone payed an equal percentage of their income, different people benefit to different degrees from government-run and government-subsidized services.

And different states benefit differently. Look at the huge amount of money that Alaska gets, for example, in comparison with how much it gives.

In general, historically, states like New York have fared badly in terms of how much they get back for how much they give. That's one of the ironic things about how people in some smaller and less-affluent states hate people in New York, Massachusetts, and some other more affluent states. We're actually supporting them. Do those states want to change that? I'd guess not.

One important point about corporate taxes: One misleading statement that McCain made but that wasn't much questioned was when he said (twice in the debates) that America has the second highest corporate tax rate among the major industrial countries. (And yet, he screamed, Obama wants to raise it!)

What he left out is that because of loopholes, America collects the second LOWEST amount of corporate tax as a percentage of GDP. (Actually, in the debates, Obama should have responded by pointing this out.) And McCain wanted to cut corporate taxes more.

A lot (though not all) of the people who scream about taxes were the people who supported the war. I believe this was the first time in American history that we've cut taxes while we were at war. And McCain wanted to keep us at war, but cut them more. You know, it just don't work. And the experience of the last eight years should have proved it. Insanity is when you keep doing the same thing but expecting different results. So I think the idea that the answer was to cut taxes for everyone even more was insane. (And, of course, Obama's tax plan cut taxes for people who make less than $125K more than McCain's did. But at least overall he was moving toward more tax revenues.)

These charts may be of some interest:

http://www.ntu.org/main/page.php?PageID=19

http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2007/11/03/nytimes-historical-tax-rates-by-income-group/

Pat, I'd love to send you a PM about why a flat tax isn't really a fair tax, but you don't accept PMs!

But here it is in a nutshell. Progressive taxes, as opposed to a flat tax, are more designed to tax discretionary income rather than pure income.

Say one person makes $20,000 a year and another makes $100,000. The first person defines their needs -- food, shelter, etc. -- as costing $18,000 a year, leaving $2,000 in discretionary income.

The second person lives a more extravagant life and defines their needs as $50,000 a year, leaving $50,000 in discretionary income.

Therefore, if you impose a 10 percent flat tax, the first person is paying 100 percent of discretionary income in taxes, while the second person is paying only 20 percent. Also keep in mind that both people already are paying sales taxes on goods regularly and the first person already is paying a much larger percentage of income toward that than the second.