From: dos@major.panix.com (Dave O'Shea)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
Subject: Re: These statistics don't lie. (unless u p
Date: Fri, 06 Nov 92 20:31:58 EST
Organization: ACME products - artillery division

jfr@RedBrick.COM () writes:

>   This is just a complete unadulterated misreading of the facts (as most
>   Reaganites seem to be willing to do continually).  Reagan lowered the
>   RATES for SOME people (mostly the highest income people), eliminated
>   the steps of the graduated tax (which lowered rates for people in the
>   higher ends of the older brackets but left them roughly the same for
>   the people in the lower ends of the brackets), and then proceeded to
>   emasculate the deduction structure for people who needed it most.  

Wow. Can you say "run-on sentence?"

Actually, you're wrong on a few points. The Reagan tax reform package
lowered rates across the board, and introduced indexing, so that
inflation would not push someone into a higher tax bracket. Democrats in
congress didn't like that one bit, but they had little choice.

The package also completely eliminated income taxes for people with
small incomes. Reducing the number of graduations in the income tax made
filing much simpler (for a couple of years, anyway), and created yet
another across-the board reduction. Not just the people at the top,
bottom, or middle - everyone got a break.

You may argue that repealing confiscatory tax rates like 50+% may be a
large break for the rich, but when the feds, staties, and locals extort
60 cents of every dollar you earn, what's the point in keeping them?
Better to throw the money into unneeded legal services, offshore trusts,
or anything that might be able to turn a profit later on. Ask any
investment advisor.

>   The end results is that the DOLLAR reductions (which are what is
>   really important here, not the RATE reductions) resulted in most
>   middle income people paying higher taxes, most lower income people
>   paying slightly lower taxes (but only by a few hundred bucks or so
>   in most cases) and upper income people saving millions and even
>   billions in some cases because the upper tax rate dropped from 
>   48% to 28%.

Simply put, when you add a 48% marginal rate to a state tax of 9%, a
city tax of 3%, mediscare's 1.5%, you're talking about taking home less
than 40 cents on the dollar. At that point, you simply don't accept
income, you find some way to convert it into some other non-taxable
benefit; even if you only realize 50% of the value, you come out ahead.

>   From 1980 to 1982, with almost no income increase, my
>   taxes went up almost 20%.

Unless there's something you're leaving out here, I simply don't see how
this is possible.

>   Added to that the deduction elimination
>   (interest deductions were phased out, deductions for sales tax
>   and gas taxes were dropped, higher limits were placed on the
>   minimum level that medical deductions could be used, etc) and 
>   most middle incomers got raped.

Funny, the democrats who pushed to do all of this called it "closing
insidious tax loopholes"

>   Hey, don't worry, Bill Clinton's gonna put things right.  Trust
>   me, he will.  And the Reaganites will pay through the nose, I
>   hope.  They deserve it.

Actually, I think Bill Clinton may be the best thing to happen to some
industries. When he drives up the payroll overhead, many marginal,
lower-paid employees will be dumped in the streets, and their jobs will
be outsourced to more efficient, flexible providers. At $9 an hour, we
can afford to keep a dozen messengers to run packages from one building
to another. Force an additional $3/hr in mandated benefits on us, we
regretfully terminate 30% of our mailroom staff. Pitney Bowes has a good
consulting arm that will help us fill the gap with automation.

We have a construction budget that's a certain amount each year. If
labor is cheap enough, we can hire more contractors to do more work on
our buildings. Raise the cost of doing business with them, and we cut
back on the amount of work done. Ask any union tradesman what a 26-week
ticket is, and you'll understand the problem of pricing yourself out of
the market.


--
Don't blame me, I voted Libertarian.

Xref: sparky alt.fan.rush-limbaugh:7874 alt.politics.clinton:15715 alt.politics.bush:13098