The Case For Biden

I can't be too specific, but there is a close family member whose yearly income for 20 years fluctuated between 1 and 7 million. (He lost and acquired - this doesn't represent straight earnings.)

He would rather - and did - pay attorneys to find loopholes - created dummy corporations and listed his kids as employees - and other little tricks to zero out his taxes.

I was relatively poor and had to pay. Enormous corporations with millions and billions in profit hide taxable income using shady means.

I think it's wrong. I want it to be fair.

My understanding is that it's taxed the year it is earned.

Awesome.

That's certainly not an unusual phenomenon. I have friends in Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York state who make excellent money as tax attorneys and accountants finding and using those lovely loopholes for high income Americans.

Btw Rog - please don't feel put upon. I adore you and if you get tired of this conversation, just tell me to stick it where the sun don't shine and I shall make an effort.

In the meanwhile, thanks for discussing it. You are bringing up issues I am seeking answers to - as I should.

The fact that's it's not an unusual practice just tells me the loads of income we could get with a reasonable tax law without loopholes.

It’s hard to debate about who’s mooching off of who - even when real numbers are available that support one’s point of view, there is disagreement based on ideology about definition of terms.

For instance, some lump Medicare and Social Security in with traditional social welfare programs. I see Social Security as an earned benefit and a legitimate way for the government to serve older citizens. I define traditional welfare as financial aid or a subsidy – welfare checks and food stamps, TANF temporary aid for needy families which replaced AFDC aid to families with dependent children, rental-aid for low income families, public housing projects, and the like.

Some might have a much broader view of what a government handout to an individual is. I see corporate welfare as government subsidies given to rich big businesses that could do without the help (The 8 biggest named on cheatsheet.com are Nike, Shell, Fiat/Chrysler, Ford, GM, Intel, Alcoa and Boeing – to get to the 92 billion, you have to include subsidies to big farmers)

The Cato Institute estimated that, in 2002, $59 Billion was devoted to social welfare programs, or 3% of the federal budget. $92 billion was devoted to corporate welfare, or about 5 percent of the federal budget.

It’s clearly a complicated calculation - if you scan the internet for estimates of what is spent on social vs corporate “welfare”, the numbers are wildly different depending on who’s telling it. The conservative Heritage foundation sees it one way, TruthOut, which is a non-profit that lists as Independent but leans progressive, sees it another. Does social welfare include everything that government pays for?

The numbers can be shaped to fit your existing worldview on what’s fair and what’s not, and what’s a handout and what’s not, and what is a rightful role of government, and what’s not.

To me, this is the bottom line, when discussing who the real leeches on the government tit are:
The poor, the disenfranchised and the elderly can’t fight back so they are always first in line to get gouged when it’s time to find more money. The rich hire lobbyists and influence the rules so that they stay rich, and so that their handouts and cheats stay nebulous.

http://www.cheatsheet.com/business/high-on-the-hog-the-top-8-corporate-welfare-recipients.html/?a=viewall
http://thinkbynumbers.org/government-spending/corporate-welfare/corporate-welfare-statistics-vs-social-welfare-statistics/
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/tbb-0205-7.pdf

If I hadn't felt like answering, I wouldn't have.

Another question: wouldn't it help with government finances if I had to pay taxes on my crumby, little pension and social security benefits? Confidentially, I have my own little loophole. I remove as much as possible from my IRA account without generating a taxable income. So, shoot me.

Check with me when the situation applies to you. I can give you a few pointers.

Not bilking retirees on a fixed income is why the wealthiest Americans are expected to pony up.

I generally agree with your comments about the difficulty in making accurate comparisons and getting agreement about definitions. I note that your data was from 2002 - that's 13 years ago and I strongly suspect the welfare numbers have increased significantly since then. In any event the differences don't appear to be nearly as great as your original statement implied.

Social securiry was indeed sold as an earned benefit, but it is not. There is no real trust fund and it doesn't earn any returns with which to pay benefits. The explosion in disability pasyments over the past seven years has hastened the moment in which our obligations will far exceed the collections from taxes.

Some payments described as corporate welfare originally involved beneficial economic policies that helped both consumers and producers - programs for the stabilization of agricultuiral commodity prices for example. However, like all such government programs they are quickly corrupted by the organized political action of potential beneficiaries and end up costing far more thasn any collective nenefit delivered. That happens with welfare benefits too.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/welfare_spending

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_budget

I wish I could have one of those lightening like moments like you must have had. I love your thinking about the rich and taxes. I couldn't agree more. If Sanders could have someone on his ticket to flesh out his more dovish tendencies, I admit I could really go for him. I think he just needs to be himself and stay away from gimmicks, his message is one which would benefit everyone under the one percent and would particularly benefit minorities as well. He just needs to find a way to reach them.

The track record for socialist programs such as his, despite the nice sounding "trust us, we'll take care of you" promises of those,who seek personal political power and control over the lives of others in excchange for such promises, isn't very good worldwide.

History teaches us that human nature is far more perverse than the idelized concepts such thinkers use to rationalize their sweeping proposals. The devil, as the saying goes, is in the details.

As we saw with the ill-conceived Obamacare legislation that, while it was true that, as Nancy Pelosi forecast, we would have to first pass the legilation before we found out what was in it, the result was full of errors, omissions and unforseen side effects. For exapmpleAs a result of bureaucratic pressures to reduce costs, and the perverse incentives built into the programs for "qualified suppliers", hospitals and other medical practitioners are consolodating facilities, reducing their supply, just as the demand for subsidized services is expanding.

The laws of economics, supply and demand, etc, operate independently of the actions of the mindless bureaucracies that increasingly run our medical establishment. As the supply of facilities and services contracts they will be either become more expensive or rationing (and a black market) will be introduced. At that point the government bureaucracies are in charge. We can all observe what a fine job they are doing in Venezuela, where even toilet paper and food are rationed. (This in a country with the world's lergest petroleum reserves, abundant agricultural land, and extensive virgin forrests from which paper can be manufactired, and exported to the world.

The law of unintended consequences unfailingly brings such systems down. The rhetoric sounds good, but the results are awful.

True...the rhetoric does sound good, George.

But despite what you said, the results seem to be anything but awful...unless one is a conservative hoping for poor results. Then the results are poor...for conservatives who see that the plan is working...and is a decent start in a direction we Americans long ago should have taken.

Biden insiders Feel Clinton STALKING

Joe Biden isn’t running for president yet, but Hillary Clinton’s already running against him. Clinton and her aides have their line—the vice president deserves the time and space to decide, they repeat over and over and over—and so far they’ve held off the heavy artillery. Instead, they’re firing warning shots. Tightly targeted warning shots. The hints from the campaign come in heavy: Biden would be to Clinton’s right if he ran, more out of touch with the party’s progressive base. Surrogates have sounded off, questioning his chances and his political abilities, wondering if he’d be up to the job. Clinton even leapt in herself, bringing him up out of nowhere as she spoke to a woman in a diner last week in New Hampshire to knock him for how disappointing he’d been when they were working on the bankruptcy bill in the Senate. That was followed by her campaign chair John Podesta, sprinkling a little of his own shade in front of the pro-Clinton Priorities super PAC in New York—it’s already too late for Biden to mount a real challenge, and he’s not going to decide for a few more weeks on top of that.



They’ve stepped up the roll-out of their endorsements and organization. Their operation is just so massive and well put together, they want Biden and anyone considering supporting him to think, there’s just no space left for him. So sure, take your time, is the message people in and around the campaign seem to be sending—but if you end up at yes, you’re going to get hurt. Saint on the sidelines is far different from actual candidate, they want him to realize, when they and everyone else unleash on him, raking through every gaffe and every vote in 36 years in the Senate, digging through his personal life. In the campaign headquarters and in Clinton's wider orbit, they take care to say how much they like him, how much they respect him, don't want to say a bad word about him. But “Should a man like Joe Biden run?” is going to be a very different question for them than “Should a man like Joe Biden be president?”
They haven’t engaged as much as some around the campaign expected, or as much as some Biden allies (the ones who feel affection for him and feel like he’s being goaded into a run) were hoping, so that he’d be scared off.



Inside the Brooklyn headquarters, this has become a sensitive topic. “Because of the personal tragedy and because he is beloved by the president and because he is beloved by so many staffers on both sides, they are super sensitive to doing anything that even whiffs of attacking him,” said a source close to the Clinton campaign. To Biden and the people he’s talking to most about running, this is proof, they think, of just how much of a scare they’ve put into Clinton. On top of what’s public, they say they think the spate of stories a few weeks ago digging into his record on bankruptcy and the Crime Bill came, if not straight from the headquarters in Brooklyn, from people just far enough removed to give them plausible deniability. “This is not a surprise,” said one person familiar with Biden’s thinking. “I think it’s pretty clear that they’re concerned about it.”


http://www.politico.com/story/2015/09/joe-biden-hillary-clinton-2016-213911

This article makes the best case I've seen to this point that, although Uncle Joe is still publicly waffling between yes and no, it's probably more likely NO.

The article posits that there are
"4 Things That Must Happen for Joe Biden to Run for President",
then shows pretty clearly that none of those f conditions exist.

http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2015/09/_4_things_that_must_happen_for_joe_biden_to_run_for_president.html?wpisrc=topstories

I agree it is looking more like he is not going to run. I think he is getting into the spotlight to get more news for democrats?

I wonder who the administration is going to endorse if any?

So how did the trickle down and tax cuts for the rich work out for ya? (To paraphrase Sara Palin) To answer, not good at all.

Quite well thank you. That, of course, all came before the Obama presidency - since then we have seen the opposite; i.e. tax increases on income, dividends, capital gains, medicare other items. In addition business investment and job creation are down as companies hoard cash, reluctant to invest it in new job creating enterprises because of unceertainties in an increasingly intrusive regulatory regime that prevents reliable forecasting of likely outcomes, and return on investment.

That is the real reason behind the stagnation of the middle class.

In the previous decade my company grew by over 50% adding many hundreds of new jobs for young engineers, geologists and scientists, and as stocks went up their retirement funds grew apace. Now employment and growth are flat and prospects for new investment are uncrertain at best as we wait to see just what stupid action an increasingly intrusive and aggressive government will do next.