Taxes on the top 1 percent of income earners should be increased

First, Pro has violated the rules by issuing a rebuttal and addressing my sources in his opening argument. Voters, please take this into account. Now onto my rebuttal: Many arguments against raising taxes on the wealthy arebased in a fundamental misconception about the current state of taxation. Thecurrent taxation system, although it is intended to be progressive, is actuallyregressive, because of how low capital gains and sales/excise taxes are. Where are your sources for this? You have not provided a link or the specific taxes you're referring to. The 33.6% rate that I cited from the CBO gave a figure of the total tax bill for the top 1 percent of Americans, and it factored in capital gains and such. It did the same for low-income Americans, and nevertheless the system is still highly progressive. That is, as you earn more in income, you pay a higher tax rate. Obviously I will like to see tax cuts, but the current system is very much progressive. Your eighth source shows this perfectly, actually. It pointsout that TEN of the states require those in the bottom 20% to pay 6 times morethan the wealthy. With all due respect, I think this shows you aren’t actuallypicking sources carefully/reading them through… This claim is absolutely ludicrous. This shows that you're not looking through the source correctly. I ask that you quote and cite the piece you're referring to directly. Rent-seeking is a general term for practices on the part ofthe wealthy that channel money from the poor to the rich. This siphoning occursmost often when regressive taxation runs rampant, as it does now. Where is your evidence for this second remark? Correlation does not equal causatio, but you haven't even provided that. Cite this. Otherwise, it's baseless. With such a comparativelylarge portion of money coming from the poor, this money gets reinvested intothe economy. How does it get reinvested? It is rarely redistributed back to thepoor. Far more often, massive sums of money are used to bail out wealthypeople. First of all, the rich pay a lot more in taxes than the poor. I've already pointed this out. Second, we are not discussing bailouts, so you've got off topic on this one. I don't support bailouts. During the 2008 economic downturn, predatory bankers, orgenerally those in the financial sector, were bailed out massively by thegovernment. For example, Citigroup was given 476.2 billion dollars [1]. Instark contrast, the government only spends 550-600 billion dollars a year onaverage [2], far far less than the money spent on all of the bank bailouts whenyou add them together. When so much of the government’s money comes from thepoor, since our current system is regressive, and this money gets redistributedback to the wealthy bankers, money is siphoned to the top and the market is distortedSame as above. This has absolutely nothing to do with taxation. The economy does well when people spend and reinvest in theeconomy. Absolutely, which is why even John Maynard Keynes would advocate counter-cyclical tax cuts. Raising taxes amid a recession, as even Barack Obama acknowledges, is antithetical to growth. It destroys jobs and removes incentives for investment. With the combination of the aforementioned regressive taxation and itsnot being redistributed back to the poor, the poor are unjustly dealt with andour economy suffers. Bailing out bankers to combat economic crises may benecessary, but it has to be countered by far greater taxes on the wealthy intimes of economic stability.You keep mentioning regressive taxation but you've been proven wrong. Also you keep mentioning bailouts. Please at least try to stay on topic. Sub Point 1: Inequality of income hurts spending and leadsto depressions and recessions. Conversely, periods of relative equality haveexperienced rapid growth.Correlation does not mean causation. Prove that inequality hurts spending and leads to depressions. Even Paul Krugman disiagrees with you. Economic growth is only 2.8% in the last 30 years as opposed to 3.6% growth in the preceding 30 years. This corresponds with the post-1980 skyrocketing inequality, AKA the "Great Divergence" [3].Your source for this in Wikipedia. Also, you're forgetting that in the 1950s, the US wasn't competing globally. Now it has the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Greater taxation on the super-wealthy will cutthe deficit.No evidence. In fact it would destroy jobs and increase the deficit. CEOs can earn up to 252 times what their employees do. Honestly, I don't think I need to argue this point very much, it is very clear that the amount of revenue that would be earned from higher taxation on the super-wealthy is extremely massive.No, they would put their money overseas and pay themselves in stocks because their income is more elastic, so you would actually get less revenue. If America were a land of opportunity for those in all walks of life, either poor or rich, chances of, say, winding up in the top 10 percent would be the same for a child who comes from a more poor and less educated family as one who comes from a richer and more educated family. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Economic mobility is very tied to socioeconomic background, in the U.S. moreso than any other advanced industrial country [4]. Especially since the 1980s, which again corresponds with the Reaganite lowering of taxes and skyrocketing of inequality, economic mobility has greatly decreased.This is nothing but a baseless sob story. You have not linked this argument to tax rates at all. This is directly indicative of the fact that, contrary to what we would like to believe as Americans, our system in fact is not one of equal opportunity. America should become a land of opportunity- not by reducing social welfare and progressive taxation, but by increasing these things, in order to create an even socioeconomic playing field and thus ensure as equal as possible chances for poor and for rich children. No, all you would do is destroy jobs by raising taxes.