The Democratic Presidential Nomination 2020

[nfotiu]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

Again, I don't want to be mistaken as saying a wealth tax would work once implemented. I'm saying it's one example of a thing Biden could add to his platform to appease the mobs of idiots who are now saying they won't vote at all because there's no functional difference for them between Trump and an establishment Democrat.

I guess if there are enough people like Ark who rather puzzlingly think it's anathema to suggest such a thing, it might be a bad example, but you get what I'm saying. Make it seem a bit more like Bernie's platform has made its way into your own a bit, without doing anything actually revolutionary. Or maybe there's no point in even attempting to placate those people.

Health care that includes a public option and some kind of min wage proposal that makes sense and accounts for geographic economic differences would be the olive branches I'd like to see. Things that actually may help the people.

[nfotiu]

Originally Posted by New Era

Please review the presidency of Eisenhower for the perfect example. The country flourished and had its greatest period of expansion when taxation on the rich was at its highest.

The US has never had a wealth tax. We are talking specifically about the logistics of taxing wealth, not taxing the wealthy.

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by Ark2

Yep, that's a deal breaker for me, same with an estate tax. Even though I will never be wealthy enough for a tax like this to target me, it just strikes me as legalized theft and immoral.

Naww, what it does is recoups a great deal of money from an individual who made great deals of wealth on the backs of the many. The recapture of these funds then goes to provide the social programs those many rely upon because the uber-rich, the only ones impacted by this tax, refuse to share the wealth with those who made them rich in the first place. The estate tax is a great thing, because you can't take it with you and we really need fewer rich brats who never worked a day in their lives living off of mommy and daddy's money. America was at its greatest when the middle class was strong and the rich were paying for the infrastructure they mostly used.

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by nfotiu

The US has never had a wealth tax. We are talking specifically about the logistics of taxing wealth, not taxing the wealthy.

The tax structure under Eisenhower was essentially a wealth tax. The rich paid up to 90% tax and did not have loop holes to protect investment returns and shelters. You can try and argue semantics but the tax code back then was setup to tax the wealth of people who had the money so those who did not had support to have a chance in the system.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

Klobuchar has some rust belt appeal I guess, as well as being a pretty good "suburban mom appeal" candidate, if you just want to focus on winning through PA, MI, WI and OH. I just think Biden is already appealing to those states, while Abrams gives you more oomph in the south - it's a better balance. I'm sure the Biden campaign will have some electoral math as to which strategy is the best, I'm pretty agnostic about it.

I was thinking more along the lines of the qualifications for serving as Veep, rather than the election calculus.

Assuming a Biden presidency and a Republican Senate, it would be handy to have the senator responsible for passing more legislation than any other serving in Biden's administration.

[zamler]

Originally Posted by troutman

Reasons that are escaping you? My impression of Tulsi is that she has more in common with Republicans, and she has strange Russian connections that she has not addressed?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/u...i-gabbard.html

lol oh those Russians, did they turn off your power yet?

[Ark2]

Originally Posted by New Era

Please review the presidency of Eisenhower for the perfect example. The country flourished and had its greatest period of expansion when taxation on the rich was at its highest.

I have addressed this already in this thread, but the top 1% were not paying much more during Eisenhower's administration than they are now:

Originally Posted by Ark2

Despite the what the top marginal tax rates were in the past, top income earners weren't paying much more back then than they are now.

https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-on-t...950s-not-high/

Second, to attribute America flourishing during the 1950's to a high tax rate (that no one even actually paid) is ridiculous. WWII decimated most of the world, while the US escaped relatively unscathed. That had an enormous impact on America's rise as an economic superpower and had nothing to do with taxes. Were you to implement those tax rates and actually enforce them today, it would amount to economic chaos.

[afc wimbledon]

Originally Posted by zamler

lol oh those Russians, did they turn off your power yet?

no but they are turning of my democracy

[nfotiu]

Originally Posted by New Era

The tax structure under Eisenhower was essentially a wealth tax. The rich paid up to 90% tax and did not have loop holes to protect investment returns and shelters. You can try and argue semantics but the tax code back then was setup to tax the wealth of people who had the money so those who did not had support to have a chance in the system.

A high marginal income tax (and there were loopholes and deductions that meant almost no one got there) is not essentially a wealth tax.

Taxing income is common and legal in the US and most other countries. Taxing wealth has never been tried and has a lot of logistical issues and may not be legal without a constitutional amendment.

[rubecube]

Originally Posted by Ark2

I have addressed this already in this thread, but the top 1% were not paying much more during Eisenhower's administration than they are now:

Second, to attribute America flourishing during the 1950's to a high tax rate (that no one even actually paid) is ridiculous. WWII decimated most of the world, while the US escaped relatively unscathed. That had an enormous impact on America's rise as an economic superpower and had nothing to do with taxes. Were you to implement those tax rates and actually enforce them today, it would amount to economic chaos.

This is some top notch bootlicking.

[Itse]

Originally Posted by CorsiHockeyLeague

Bernie's failure to do as well this time as in 2016 is due to a few factors:

1. In 2016, Hillary was always the presumptive nominee. Sanders was an insurgent, and really the only alternative. People like an underdog, and people really hate a coronation. In this case, Biden was leading in the polls for a while, then it looked like Warren was going to be the front runner, then Pete looked like he had a shot (although was never a favourite), then Sanders won the first few states and looked like a front runner... By the time Biden really took the lead, the whole thing was basically over. Very different race.

2. No one liked Hillary anyway, because of long-standing Republican smearing of her public persona. They'd been beating up on her for two decades, but especially since '08, because she was also the presumptive nominee way back then. Biden just doesn't have that. Listening to Joe Biden talk does not necessarily make anyone's heart beat faster like listening to Obama did, but no one seems to really hate him (besides a few Bernie people who wouldn't hold any such views if he weren't in this race and about to beat their guy). People hated Hillary. Hillary got more negative press during the Obama administration than Biden, even as the VP.

3. People like Bernie, but the people who support Bernie - the grassroots who have to convince their friends to vote Bernie - an unfortunately large proportion of them are insufferable, presumptuous, strident morons. They're exactly the sorts of people who you'd expect to see this morning saying they aren't going to vote for Biden in the general but will complain for the next four years about Trump. When someone like that tries to secure your vote, you might nod along to avoid an argument but you're not particularly likely to be convinced. Now, last time around, there were plenty of Hillary supporters who could be similarly caricatured, lobbing around accusations of sexism if you won't vote for Hillary, demanding people fall in line, trying to put their finger on the scales, and so forth. Can you even name a Biden surrogate? What does a Biden supporter even look like? They're probably not wearing a T-shirt announcing their affiliation. This is sort of a corollary of the first one - Biden's inoffensive, so are his supporters.

4. Biden spoke directly to working class people, and didn't make any effort to appeal to woke intersectionalists and the NYT editorial board, which were Hillary's core constituency in 2016. As Warren's campaign demonstrated pretty clearly, that's a losing strategy even in a Democratic primary. Bernie didn't go all out the way Warren did, but he did adopt those politics as his strategy to try to win over a chunk of Biden's African American support, and predictably, it yielded no obvious results.

The weird thing here is that normally when you win a primary you have to make a hard pivot to the center for the general. Biden's already in the middle. He might actually have to take a bit of a left turn on a few issues - throw a few bones to the progressive wing - just to try to get them on board. Say, include the wealth tax, some student loan forgiveness and a minimum wage hike, and then give Sanders and Warren credit for bringing you around on those issues to a compromise, to try to give their supporters more than a begrudging endorsement as incentive to support him. Might be worth a shot?

I would name two factors myself.

1) Most people want a safe candidate to beat Trump. No matter how much I like Sanders, he's not a safe candidate.

2) In 2016 Sanders was kind of a lone leftist voice in the country (leftist as in leaning towards socialism, not as in liberal). That had shock value and special appeal. Between then and now his ideas have moved much closer to the mainstream, and thus he himself has become less interesting as a candidate.

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by Ark2

I have addressed this already in this thread, but the top 1% were not paying much more during Eisenhower's administration than they are now:

Except the information in that link is not accurate. They make a premise of what the top 1% would be making based on current standards instead of what the actual top 1% was in the 50s. The better way to approach this is to use the standard marginal rates and then look at the top one for each era, which the top 1% would be paying.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/stat...come-tax-rates



And yes, they have shifted dramatically.

https://bradfordtaxinstitute.com/Fre...Tax-Rates.aspx

Second, to attribute America flourishing during the 1950's to a high tax rate (that no one even actually paid) is ridiculous. WWII decimated most of the world, while the US escaped relatively unscathed. That had an enormous impact on America's rise as an economic superpower and had nothing to do with taxes. Were you to implement those tax rates and actually enforce them today, it would amount to economic chaos.

The fact it would impact such a small group, I doubt it equates to economic chaos. That's a great talking point, but so was the concept of trickle down economics, and that proved to be total bull#### as well.

[Strange Brew]

Personally I can't believe anyone would believe a 94% marginal tax rate is fair no matter how much someone makes.

[OMG!WTF!]

Except the information in that link is not accurate. They make a premise of what the top 1% would be making based on current standards instead of what the actual top 1% was in the 50s. The better way to approach this is to use the standard marginal rates and then look at the top one for each era, which the top 1% would be paying.

I don't think that it is inaccurate. I've read several times that the average tax rate among the wealthiest earners in the 1950's was about 42%. The 91% rate was only on income over 200k further bringing down the average rate.

[burn_this_city]

Originally Posted by Strange Brew

Personally I can't believe anyone would believe a 94% marginal tax rate is fair no matter how much someone makes.

After the war they had to pay down the massive debt somehow.

[nfotiu]

Originally Posted by New Era

Except the information in that link is not accurate. They make a premise of what the top 1% would be making based on current standards instead of what the actual top 1% was in the 50s. The better way to approach this is to use the standard marginal rates and then look at the top one for each era, which the top 1% would be paying.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/stat...come-tax-rates



And yes, they have shifted dramatically.

https://bradfordtaxinstitute.com/Fre...Tax-Rates.aspx





The fact it would impact such a small group, I doubt it equates to economic chaos. That's a great talking point, but so was the concept of trickle down economics, and that proved to be total bull#### as well.

Why do you think the top 1% pays the top marginal tax rate. That does not appear to be the case at all in the 50s.

https://checkyourfact.com/2019/01/09...enhower-1950s/

In 1958, only around 10,000 out of 45.6 million tax filers had incomes that put them in the 81 percent bracket or higher, according to The Wall Street Journal. That amounts to about 0.02 percent of filers subject to the 81 percent rate, let alone the 91 percent rate.

The top 1 percent of income earners paid an average effective income tax rate of 16.9 percent in the 1950s, according to data compiled by the Tax Foundation from a 2017 paper by economics professors. That figure includes all federal, state and local income taxes.

I do agree that there is room to increase the taxes in the higher brackets and figure out how to tax all income high earners make. But to say that the top 1% was pay a 91% income tax at any time in US history is wrong.

[Oil Stain]

Originally Posted by Strange Brew

Personally I can't believe anyone would believe a 94% marginal tax rate is fair no matter how much someone makes.

Do you think its fair that people should be worth $70 billion dollars?

I think it's pretty hard to say that anyone worked so hard that they deserve that much wealth.

When people do the math that if you worked for $2000 per hour since the birth of Jesus until now, and you are still coming out behind the richest people in America there is something wrong with that picture as well.

[Canadianman]

Originally Posted by Strange Brew

Personally I can't believe anyone would believe a 94% marginal tax rate is fair no matter how much someone makes.

Personally I can't believe anyone would believe that someone should be worth billions of dollars while his employees subsist on food stamps, but this is what we are at.

[MelBridgeman]

i can't believe people still fall for internet memes

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by nfotiu

Why do you think the top 1% pays the top marginal tax rate. That does not appear to be the case at all in the 50s.

That's the rate they started at, not paid. Just like the top 1% today start at 37% but usually pay less than 15% after deductions. It's a game, but the deck was stacked more in the favor of the average Joe back in the 50s. Today, the top 1% rarely pays their fair share, and corporations rarely pay any tax at all.

I do agree that there is room to increase the taxes in the higher brackets and figure out how to tax all income high earners make. But to say that the top 1% was pay a 91% income tax at any time in US history is wrong.

Sure, just like saying that the top 1% pay 37% right now. Back in the 50s the top 1% paid a lot closer to 91% than the top 1% today pay 37%. The systems have always been screwed up that way because of the imbalance in reductions that rich people get to abuse and poor people have no access to.