From: mellon@ncd.com (Ted Lemon)
Newsgroups: rec.bicycles.soc
Subject: Re: Gas subsidies and taxes (was Re: Bicyc
Date: 10 Sep 92 15:12:03 GMT

tomk@netcom.com (Thomas H. Kunich) writes:

>Is this suppose to give us the idea that we can stand yet more taxation?
>I don't notice businesses in Great Britain nor France doing so hot with
>their massive taxation.

I don't know about France, but Great Britain has a very similar problem to
the U.S. - birth control is considered to be a sin by a great majority of
the poor and working class, and defense spending is a large portion of the
GNP.   Also, I don't know if this is the case in G.B., but in the U.S., highway
transport is so heavily subsidized by tax money that cheaper forms of
transportation, both for goods and for people, are ignored in its favour.
If you want to look for drains on the economy, this is a good place to start.

>Companies are fleeing California with such alacrity that one estimate
>has us losing 100,000 jobs over the next ten years.

Good.   Maybe the people who came here for jobs rather than because it's
where they want to live will go back home.   Unfortunately, there's no
evidence that that's happening yet.

BTW, your point about the GNP falling regularly isn't true - the economy may
be going through a decline, as you say, but it's due to restructuring of the
industrial base, not due to taxation.   The government has long jumped in to
interfere with the death or restructuring of U.S. industries, and as a result,
many of these obsolete industries are now so obsolete that even governmental
support can't keep them alive.   People are suffering as a result.    This
problem can get worse, or it can get better, depending on what businesses and
gov't do to solve the problem, but they won't get substantially worse or better
because of minor changes in taxation.

>Perhaps you don't understand what's going on?   If I earn $50,000/yr
>(a good but not great wage in the SF bay area) I will be taxed
>34% from the federal government and 12% from the state government.
>(Or is that 18%?) This means that I am paying _46%_ of my income
>in income taxes alone!

We're both in roughly the same tax bracket, which is kind of shocking, because
our yearly incomes are quite different.   However, we both fit quite nicely
into the hump on the bell curve of per capita annual income, which means that
adding one percent to our tax rate makes more money for the gov't than adding
two percent to the tax rate of somebody who makes twice what we do.   Somebody
making ten times what you do still pays roughly the same percentage in taxes,
but probably on a much smaller tax basis, since they can use all sorts of
loopholes that you and I can't to reduce their apparent yearly income.

If you're upset about the percentage of the load that you're shouldering,
work to support the repeal of the Reagan/Bush tax reform which reduced income
taxes on the rich from as much as 90% of their "adjusted" annual income to as
little as 27% (yes, that's less than *you* pay), and raised taxes on the middle
class (remember how they called that increase temporary?   I do!) to support
the tax reduction for the rich.

When considering how high 90% seems, remember that adjusted income does not
include the value of investments which earn income, so we're not talking about
taking away 90% of a rich person's money every year.   Also, consider
supporting a long term capital gains tax reduction to encourage rich people
(remember, most corporate executives qualify as rich people!) to invest for
the long term instead of for the next quarter's results.   This
is one of the many tax incentives that were removed by the Reagan/Bush tax
reform legislation that put you in your current high tax bracket.

				_MelloN_
--
mellon@ncd.com						uunet!lupine!mellon
Member, League for Programming Freedom | To learn how software patents could
cost you your right to program, contact the LPF - league@prep.ai.mit.edu