iwishiwascool

Seriously?! You live in a nation that protects your national security, a state that provides you infrastructure to drive and post these messages, a local police force to ensure all those welfare queen's baby daddies don't steal your shit all for a measly 15%. Sound like a goddamn deal to me.

Instigator

If its an income spike adjust it with an i9. It's not like they keep it forever if you pay too much because you were too uninformed to do anything about it.

Anecdotes aside, the archetype of the welfare queen and the emotion it evokes is far disproportional to its actual existence in the wild. There are far more people, like the immigrant painting my house back home right now who makes 12/hr, works 50 hours a week and supports 2 kids and a wife. Even if he doesn't have a federal tax burden at the end of the year I guarantee the taxes he does still pay impact him far more than my much higher burden impacts me. I, for one, am not jealous of the predicament of poor people.

So the hypocricisy is great. People like you complain about the "moochers" who "don't pay taxes" which only means the don't have a federal income tax burden, most everyone in the country pays each of the other taxes, including the payroll tax, that many here are including in their total tax burden. Anyone who invokes the "barstool economics" argument and compares every tax they've ever paid to the one tax poor people don't pay, you aren't being honest with yourself or others. Which reminds me, I'm in Miami this week, I've paid about $35 in tolls and parking. I better tack that on to my effective rate :eyeroll

The difference is in the payroll tax. That tax holiday that republicans had no interest in including in the fiscal cliff deal. I'd be interested in hearing how capital gains tax increases have impacted you before our quarterly payments are even due.

I'll defer to Jordan on this since my experience is limited to my own. What I do know is that if anyone has room to complain it is small business owners /1099 income earners (like me), but I don't because I know how to deduct effing expenses.

Then you should pay someone else to do it. If you end the year paying 39%, w2 or 1099, you are doing it wrong. The marginal rate for a married couple is 450k. That means only income over 450k is taxed at that rate. This also does not factor for deductions which if you make anywhere near this, you should be smart enough to pay someone to find some tax shelters for you. Even paying, at most, 8% to the state it doesn't put your effective rate at 39% until you are well into the millions while taking zero deductions. My diagnosis: The culprit must be your property taxes, the tax must be, as a percentage of your income, too high. Tim, are you sure that you didn't just receive a bonus check at or above 8k that triggered a higher end of year projection? When I was a W2 commissioned employee a 10k commissioned week would pull x% more than usual. I often adjusted my I9 for that week alone to keep it in line with what my effective rate would be at the end of the year.

This thread is a disaster. If you are paying 39% you are doing it wrong or lying. The fact that some of you dont understand the difference between marginal and effective tax rates is the product of willful ignorance and a symptom of why you are poor.

Old Hilliard Coin and Fine Art by chance? The owners are our bestest friends and super good people. It doesn't surprise me that they made it right... If it was them.

Give David Johnson @ the Diamond Cellar a call, or PM me you number and I'll have him call you. He is the son of the owner and would love to stick it to Jared's. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/david-johnson/6/b9a/994

You are exactly right, raising taxes in a downturn is equally as dumb as cutting spending. Though the impact was limited to the highest income earners whose consumption will not be dramatically reduced (if is declines at all). We agree. The real reason we are where we are was because we engaged in two unfunded wars while maintaining the lowest tax rates in 30 years. You can blame poor people all you wan't but they are just the low hanging fruit; scapegoats that don't have the political influence to defend themselves and show that politicians doing the pointing are doing so acknowledging that it was the wars that they authorized and sold to the American people that caused this ongoing financial "crisis". That is the only class warfare that is happening. You don't enact equal amounts of cuts to meet stimulus spending because you are then contracting the economy in the exact proportion that you are expanding it. You might as well do nothing. It's not that Republicans are stupid and Democrats have all the answers, or vs. versa. They each have half of the puzzle but are too married to ideology to see the whole picture. Yes, tax cuts work to stimulate the economy. Most economic models suggest they work exactly as well as stimulus spending. The problem is that Republicans only believe in cutting spending when Democrats are in office. Dick Cheney famously said "Deficits don't matter" when he had the steering wheel. Democrats are incapable of marketing the reality that austerity is fucking stupid in an anemic economy. Classic republicans who understand that deficits indeed don't matter ONLY in recession and economic downturns are so afraid of the Tea Party voters that they pretend they hold the same strange view that national debt is some sort of moral hazard. So the solution is to cut middle class taxes and/or inject stimulus capital (that impacts the middle class) and don't fucking worry about deficits for a year. When we are seeing 4-5% growth again we can slowly make changes to military and so called entitlement spending to reign in the deficit to the appropriate trajectory.

Except that he never said that. . http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/democracy-will-cease-to-exist-quotation More later, I have to wash the sand off

Ok, my wife wasn't ready to go yet. Money is incredibly cheap right now. Let's say you own a business, growth is stagnating, and you're capital infrastructure (copiers, computers, service trucks, whatver) is falling apart. You have two options, immediately start slashing expenses knowing that each percentage you cut will cut your revenue accordingly. Or you can take advantage of near zero interest rates, swipe that credit card, and make capital investments that will increase your revenue long term. The US is in a similar place. The nasty truth is that government spending is a function of GDP each and every dollar cut will be reflected as a contraction. So we can cut spending when demand to hold our debt is high (so high that rates of return are LESS than rate of inflation) and send ripples of contraction throughout the economy reducing growth even more. OR, we could do another round of stimulus (in useful sectors infrastructure, education and technology) increase the debt a bit more for a long term increase in tax revenues. Once the slack is taken up and the jobless rate decreases we will see inflation (finally) and it will be time to increase rates.

Likewise. I didn't realize it would be 70' here today. I'm going to the beach.

I barely remember writing that. I had a few after an 80 hour work week and apparently used my leisure time to debate economics. It does but it's fairly irrelevant in our context. When I said surplus of liquidity, I didn't mean the economic term "surplus liquidity" referring to central bank holdings. I meant excess liquidity in the market; that inflation is caused by too many dollars chasing too few goods or investments - a lack of slack in the market. It is usually characterized by very low unemployment and irrationally low interest rates (at first). Obviously, we aren't there. In fact, the reason for QE 1, 2 and 3 is to battle deflation; the enemy of western civilized banks. Deflation results in less tax revenue, that wouldn't be great right now. This article highlights many of the reasons behind it, though I don't agree with his conclusion: http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/09/19/demographics-to-blame-for-inescapable-deflation/ I subscribe to a mix of MMT and Krugman economics, heavier on the latter than the former. That makes me fairly liberal in my worldview but it's better than subscribing to the Austrian principles that are getting annihilated in the European experiment.

Hi Jordan, didn't we meet once or more through CDSM? You are a finance major, a financial adviser and I'm sure Edward Jones taught you a lot; I respect you plenty enough that you don't need to be a Huckleberry or Wyatt Earp. I asked those "David Blaine" questions not to redirect the conversation but to establish a platform; a foundation for reasonable discourse. After all, a debate must be built on fact and reason. If an opponent doesn't know that the Fox news narrative that we are "Beholden to China" and they own a majority of debt is a gross misrepresentation of reality, then we aren't building argument on a bedrock of truth; right? Just so you and I are clear too, when you say that "we steal (from funded programs)", what are you specifically referring to? I'll address your notion that surplus liquidity relies on Fed holdings after your retort.

Answer the questions and we'll have a conversation where I make statements.

It doesn't pass the sniff test because people conflate macroeconomics with their own microeconomics ideals, along with the moral burdens of debt that go along with it. Debt is a function of economic solvency, a reaction to a stimulus. It should not be the catalyst to an equal and opposite reaction. You are right that reasonable measures must be taken at some time. The time is absolutely not in a deflationary period with anemic growth. When people say "we are going to end up like Europe", they are absolutely right. If, and only if, we enact the irresponsible austerity measures that they were beholden to as a result of a common currency. That article is so wrong in so many ways that it is better for you just to forget it than for me to refute it. That dude has less than an elementary understanding of fiduciary policy. Thus the op/ed

Damn it. I guess I'll just go back to working.

Ill get there in a few posts... But before I do, when you say "Printing money", does this mean that you are worried about a surplus of liquidity; that current policy is causing inflation? When you say "we", who do you mean. Who do you think has the "money we don't have"? You willful ignorance and lack of intellectual curiosity is going to make this fun for me.

"The House passed the Budget Control Act on August 1, 2011 by a vote of 269–161. 174 Republicans and 95 Democrats voted for it." The republicans that voted against it felt it did not go far enough. Republicans are the ones that want to enact austerity during a downturn. Genius.

We sure do disagree a lot for two dudes who have the EXACT same resume, appearance and all.

I like how glib you are, as if this argument isn't had in every constitutional law class ever.

Both of those precedents are used by both sides to claim victory. Both establish grounds for limitation to the types of arms one can hold. The fact that the most literal passage in the constitution leads to SCOTUS decisions which both sides cite as enamoring their position is proof enough that the constitution is a living document. If you really believe that the framers did not intentionally create malleable you have plenty of good company from strict constructionists. You and Scalia can brunch sometime and discuss textualism and exactly how dead the Constitution is. The rest of us will continue on in our Judicial pragmatism understanding that words like "liberty" and "equal protection" were employed exactly because they could evolve with societal changes.