The fact that someone is rich does not mean he took anything from you, no matter how poor you are. Statements like "If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets" are not only stupid but also dangerous.
Generally, the US tax code is designed in such a way that capital begets capital. Put differently, if you make money passively from the money you already have, you pay a lower tax rate then if you haul brick on your back, or teach children.
Is this taking? No, not directly, but indirectly, sure.
EDIT: Seriously folks, taxes pay for civilization. If you don't like it, don't work (so you don't have to pay) or leave. Roads, schools, fire, police, infrastructure aren't built with unicorn dust.
What group is the State taking "more than it should" from?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States...
Then you're agreeing with the commenter that you initially responded to!
> I would argue that the state is taking, not the rich
The poor, arguably (e.g. through regressive taxes).
>If you buy your first stock, you are using money that was already taxed at the ordinary income tax rate.
Which is why we only tax the amount gained. I don't see why it should matter if the gain is an investment or working.
And a lot of my salary is a return on an investment that I made into my own education and training.
IMO, captial gains should be adjusted for inflation* and then taxed like any other income.
*you really do a have to adjust for inflation. Right now inflated gains (which aren't real) are taxed as if they are.
So stop bringing up the strawman of "rich people are evil" when the article wasn't even trying to making that point. Can we have a discussion about income inequality without that bogus line of thinking?
On the other hand this is the first I witness someone to cry strawman to pull a strawman, how creative!
If you want to take issues with someone specific views, then do so, but don't make a generalization like you did on a viewpoint that wasn't really even stated by the original post.
And posting some out of context quotes give me very little go on, the discussions you can have about this should involve a little more nuance than random text bites from user comments that come from people from all sorts of backgrounds and political leanings.
My general point, which seems to have been completely ignored in favor of attacking my use of the word 'strawman', is that discussing income inequality doesn't have to devolve into an us vs them argument, that it has a lot more to do with what sort of society we wish to foster and build. But you seem content in holding on to the former view.
If my income remained the same, and suddenly all of my neighbors doubled their incomes, I would indeed be economically worse off. Everything would start costing more: Housing, groceries, health care, education--anything priced by a market, because "what the market will bear" has increased.
While they're not technically "taking anything from you", when someone else gets richer, you indeed get poorer.
For example, if your neighbors are richer because they've been developing food infrastructure, it's quite possible that your grocery bill has actually gone down, because food is more accessible and cheaper thanks to their efforts.
If we're just talking about one neighborhood, this is unlikely. But if we're talking about an entire economy, the poor people are quite likely to benefit as long as the wealth has come from developing the economy.
Rich people living in US got rich because of the healthy middle class who can afford to buy stuff (or get a loan to). They get rich because of the thousand of workers in their offices and factories.
So this is the way wealth is distributed in US. While the inequality is growing in all OCDE countries (and possibly all countries in the world), in US it's much higher than other countries.
Of course it does. That's the definition of private property - if they claim to own it then you can't freely use it anymore. The creation of private property involves taking land that nobody owned and anybody could use, and using force to prevent anybody except the owner using it.
What we are seeing nowadays is stagnant income for the middle class and skyrocketing wealth (and power) for the fortunate 0.1%
They always rely on people all around them who engage with them, the people who came before them that built up the pool they're swimming in, the people all around them who maintain the pool today...
That doesn't diminish any individual's own effort; but to ignore the world around any successful person, when talking about their success, is a little nonsensical.
Our economic and political system (mixed market capitalism) may not be natural phenomenon (what is?) but majority of voters prefer it to other systems.
The whole point of the article is that if "the majority of voters" were informed, they'd vote differently.