The welfare and progressive tax systems are less preferable than...

----------------------------------------------- "I. E. The English have always claimed the English country side is pretty so there's no reason to suppose that policy X has made the countryside ugly" Actually, one could contend that policy X has made it less pretty than it otherwise would have been. -------------------------------------------- ">>Give me a solid example. . http://money.cnn.com...... 28 million dollars to help run a company into the ground. " Mulally was the new CEO, not the old one who lead the company into a $12.7 billion deficit. Of the person who did create such the mess: "Executive Chairman Bill Ford Jr. , who had held the CEO post until Mulally was hired, had agreed in May 2005 not to receive any pay, bonus or stock grants until the company's core automotive operations returned to profitability. " . http://money.cnn.com... Sorry. Bad example. I'll let you pick another. --------------------------------- "You could tax it at 90% and it wouldn't harm any company's ability to attract such 'talent' because *ALL* companies would be subjected to the same taxation. " Society is not entitled to the worth of his labor just because it is above a certain amount. ---------------------------------------- ">>"I made the innovative claim as an argument that innovation is a way to make labor more productive (thus being one of the ways to increase the value of one's labor). " It doesn't change the fact that the most innovative people are still pretty much blue-collar workers. " Find a source for that claim. Thomas Edison, who holds the record for the most patents held, was very wealthy, and worked as a telegrapher before he was an inventor. This was intellectual work, not hard labor. . http://www.nps.gov..., scientists are not "blue-collar". -------------------------- "If all the wealthy people died all of a sudden, the economy would end up better off because of the sudden influx of capital. " Actually, if all the doctors, lawyers, scientists, and entrepreneurs died, we'd be in quite a situation. ---------------------------- My opponent makes a series of attacks on "the rich". Whatever their relevance, the "data" that he refers to is on my side: "The rising number of countries that have introduced a flat tax -- notably in Eastern Europe -- have generally seen their tax revenues rise, not fall as flat-tax opponents had predicted. " . http://online.wsj.com... "The divide between rich and poor is widening in Germany" . http://www.spiegel.de... "The German tax system has undergone a comprehensive reform in the year 2001 and later in 2008. This reform is intended, in principle, to ease the actual rate of tax for both individuals and companies. Taxation of an individual's income is progressive. In other words, the higher the income, the higher the rate of tax payable. In 2008 the Germany tax rates for an individual are 15% - 45%. " . http://www.worldwide-tax.com... I await this "data" that my opponent talks so much about. ------------------- "This speaks volumes about the efficacy of the progressive tax. We can tax people with the smallest impact on productivity if we tax the super-rich. Taxes on the middle-class and poor on the otherhand do directly impact how much they can buy and how much they produce. " Actually, the same truth lies with the middle-class (as under the negative tax, the "poor" receive similar protection). A slightly higher (or perhaps similar) tax would result in no less production from this "middle-class". The "rich" are less likely to work more should they lose millions but should someone in the middle class lose a few thousand, they would simply work a few more hours, ultimately contributing more to society. And again, I insist that plenty of individuals classified as "rich" by my opponent are actually doctors, lawyers, scientists, and entrepreneurs. I also remind the audience that having a flat tax ultimately helps the middle class as the business owners have more money with which to attract employees and expand business. With more demand for labor, benefits and wages increase. ------------------------------- "To make a flat tax take in as much taxes the current progressive tax model would require a massive tax hike on the middle-class, to counterbalance the massive tax cut you'd be giving to the richest of the rich. " Actually, the percentages would be adjusted down, not up. "President Kennedy proposed across-the-board tax rate reductions that reduced the top tax rate from more than 90 percent down to 70 percent. What happened? Tax revenues climbed from $94 billion in 1961 to $153 billion in 1968, an increase of 62 percent (33 percent after adjusting for inflation). " . http://www.heritage.org... ----------------------------------- "you'd be giving them TO the employer. " Actually, people accept jobs on terms of wage made before taxation. After a tax cut, the employer does not lower wages. ------------------------------------- "They are worth every penny? They aren't. " They're actually worth more than every penny. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been employed. Basic wage economics applies to everyone that is employed. --------------------------------------- "Where the best indication of where you will end up in life is where you started it. The wealthy are the wealthy because they are the wealthy, that's all, not super-talented or super-smart. In general, they just got lucky enough to be born rich. Your tortured logic is wrong. " Being wealthy in a tax system is not how much one has, but how much one makes. Therefore, one is not wealth in the tax code because one is born wealthy, but because one makes a wage. So, the basic laws of economics apply. Your misguided assumptions are wrong. --------------------------- "We are talking about people who don't 'labor' " Their labor is intellectual rather than physical. ---------------------------- " I'd be happy to convert to a log scale. " This is certainly preferable to a bracket system, but a flat tax leads to general prosperity.