Author Topic: Doug Ford Helps the Poor  (Read 3541 times)

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Offline SirJohn

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Re: Doug Ford Helps the Poor
« Reply #45 on: April 19, 2018, 03:09:50 pm »
Well I didn't write a long dissertation

No, but to be fair you also didn't actually talk about the issue under discussion at all. I tried to do that, which requires, you know, words.

It says a lot about you that you consider three paragraphs, none of which was overlong, to be 'a long dissertation'. It seems you and Trump have much in common.
"When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won't do." David Frum

Offline SirJohn

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Re: Doug Ford Helps the Poor
« Reply #46 on: April 19, 2018, 03:13:04 pm »
"Idiot" is actually a noun. I thought all non idiots knew that. Psst-the adjective you were looking for is "idiotic"

It can be used as an adjective too, you idiot (there, now it's a noun).
And if I used a short form, so bloody what?

"When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won't do." David Frum

Offline ?Impact

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Re: Doug Ford Helps the Poor
« Reply #47 on: April 19, 2018, 03:13:14 pm »
It seems you and Trump have much in common.

Nope, not going to bite.

Offline kimmy

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Re: Doug Ford Helps the Poor
« Reply #48 on: April 21, 2018, 12:54:22 pm »
So your position is 80% of the population is poor? Have I got that right? 80% of the population is too poor to pay taxes on the government services they love so much. They can, of course, afford cars, mortgages, cell phones, video games and players, big screen TVs, laptops, high speed internet,  trips down south every year and all the rest, but taxes are just too **** hard on them.

Your own claim was not that 80% of the population doesn't pay taxes.  It was that the top 20% pays 87% of taxes, in the US.

There is a world of difference between those two claims!

And when you consider the vast amounts of wealth  concentrated in the hands of the very few, it's obvious why such a small group of people pays such a vastly larger share than the rest.

To continue the breakdown you started: the bottom 80% pay just 13% of taxes.  The next 19% pay just 42% of taxes.  The other 45% is paid by just 1%.   And if you drill down even farther into that 1% you'd probably find that a similarly disproportionate share is paid by just 0.1%.

Why does such a tiny group pay such a vast share of taxes?!

Because their income dwarfs everyone else's income to such a vast degree.


Rich-guy types prefer this group-type depiction-- "our group pays this much, their group just pays that much, so obviously this is unfair to us!" -- because it obscures the incredibly vast difference in income that is the real cause of such a small group paying such a large amount of tax.

Instead of talking about "this group pays that much" and "that group pays this much" just point at the tax-bracket scale and point out the point at which you feel the marginal tax rate becomes unfair.


Your indignation at the thought anyone but 'rich' people should perhaps contribute to the state which so many of you want to step in to take care of every single problem in life is an indication of the socialist mentality you've grown up with. Hate the rich. Love the poor. Bring in more poor and love them more, and hate anyone who has more than we do. And after we make the rich pay more we'll sneer at them and call them names and hate them some more for being better off than us. Meanwhile we'll enjoy all the things the state provides that we don't pay for, and feel incredible noble about our generosity in giving money we don't own and didn't make to the poor.

I pay my taxes, and I'm hardly wealthy.  I don't object to paying taxes.  I don't object to people wondering whether we get good value for our taxes.

What I do object to is rich people complaining that poor people aren't paying enough taxes. Just having a roof over your head and food on your table is becoming an incredibly expensive proposition.   The investor class has been doing incredibly well, making sure that their companies turn in healthy profits by driving wages as low as possible and eliminating as many jobs as possible.  For these people to then complain that the people whose livelihood they've been actively working against aren't paying enough taxes is the height of absurdity.

 -k
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Offline Omni

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Re: Doug Ford Helps the Poor
« Reply #49 on: April 21, 2018, 01:12:21 pm »
People use numbers all the time to try and bolster this or that point. It's certainly not hard to see through the bias bs in sir argus' attempt.

Offline SirJohn

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Re: Doug Ford Helps the Poor
« Reply #50 on: April 21, 2018, 01:24:54 pm »
Your own claim was not that 80% of the population doesn't pay taxes.  It was that the top 20% pays 87% of taxes, in the US.

There is a world of difference between those two claims!

I don't take it as a world of difference. And I haven't denied that others pay some small measure of taxes. Wealth, btw, is not taxed. We're talking income. I also don't object to a progressive tax system. In fact, what I have been pointing out in this thread and others is not that "rich people" pay far too much but the impact this has on society with regard to voting patterns and political choices.

Quote
What I do object to is rich people complaining that poor people aren't paying enough taxes.

Let's forget about the term 'rich people' for now. The top 20% are not 'rich'. In order to get into the top 20% you needed an income of about $80,000 a year (in the US study). That's NOT rich people. The top 10% have incomes of at least $113k. That's not rich, either. In Canada, the top 20% make about $70k plus. Which puts most teachers, cops, firefighters, municipal bus drivers, nurses and tons of other public servants in that zone, along with doctors, software engineers, architects, etc. To say 'these are the rich people so they should pay for everything' is naïve.

Mind you, the liberals at all levels have done their best to equate 'the rich' with limosine types puffing away at big cigars in their 90th floor corner offices. But THAT class has hardly been touched at all by increased taxes. Most of those in the 20% group pay far higher rates of taxes than the likes of Warren Buffet or Bill Gates. Buffet basically said his tax rate was half what his secretary pays. And it's the same in Canada. The tax changes the liberals bring in against 'the rich' have little impact on the 0.01% that everyone seems to feel isn't paying what it should be.

But again, the focus of my posts has been on the likely political results of such an unbalanced tax system. If you pay little or nothing in taxes, then taxes simply are not of interest to you in terms of a politician who talks about increasing or decreasing them. Hey, no skin off your nose. THAT was what I basically said. It wasn't an attack on 'poor people' but a realistic assesment of the motivation for supporting parties like the Liberals and NDP who offer ever more government services (along with ever higher taxes) because they know taxes are very little issue to at least half the population, and reasonable for most of the next twenty or thirty percent.

Realistically, if you pay no or virtually no income taxes, why would you want to vote for a conservative party which is likely to cut back government services in any way? That would be against your own interests. You'd instead vote for the party that offered more stuff. It's free, after all.

And yes, there's a degree of unfairness and injustice in people who pay nothing or almost nothing voting for parties that will tax OTHER people more to pay for stuff they want.


« Last Edit: April 21, 2018, 01:42:26 pm by SirJohn »
"When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won't do." David Frum

Offline kimmy

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Re: Doug Ford Helps the Poor
« Reply #51 on: April 21, 2018, 01:50:44 pm »
I don't take it as a world of difference. And I haven't denied that others pay some small measure of taxes. Wealth, btw, is not taxed. We're talking income. I also don't object to a progressive tax system. In fact, what I have been pointing out in this thread and others is not that "rich people" pay far too much but the impact this has on society with regard to voting patterns and political choices.

Let's forget about the term 'rich people' for now. The top 20% are not 'rich'. In order to get into the top 20% you needed an income of about $80,000 a year (in the US study). That's NOT rich people. The top 10% have incomes of at least $113k. That's not rich, either. In Canada, the top 20% make about $70k plus. Which puts most teachers, cops, firefighters, municipal bus drivers, nurses and tons of other public servants in that zone, along with doctors, software engineers, architects, etc. To say 'these are the rich people so they should pay for everything' is naïve.

And I repeat that creating groups and saying "this group pays that much and that group pays this much" is dumb. I again invite you to point out the place where you feel the marginal tax rate shifts from fair to not-fair.

Mind you, the liberals at all levels have done their best to equate 'the rich' with limosine types puffing away at big cigars in their 90th floor corner offices. But THAT class has hardly been touched at all by increased taxes. Most of those in the 20% group pay far higher rates of taxes than the likes of Warren Buffet or Bill Gates. Buffet basically said his tax rate was half what his secretary pays. And it's the same in Canada. The tax changes the liberals bring in against 'the rich' have little impact on the 0.01% that everyone seems to feel isn't paying what it should be.

Well sure.  I've complained many times about the wide variety of tax dodges available to the extremely wealthy.

I read an interesting idea-- from Conrad Black, of all people.  He suggested taxing wealth, rather than income, in one of his rambling opinion columns.

In theory that would eliminate the case of the ultra-rich guy who can pull out his accounting ledgers and prove that he didn't make a penny this year... or actually lost money.

Of course it would instead create an equally challenging problem, in that the wealthy people would become very adept at proving they're actually not wealthy.


"There is no $12 million mansion. Show me on this ledger where you see a $12 million mansion."

"We are literally STANDING IN IT!"

"Show me on the ledger where it exists!"

But again, the focus of my posts has been on the likely political results of such an unbalanced tax system. If you pay little or nothing in taxes, then taxes simply are not of interest to you in terms of a politician who talks about increasing or decreasing them. Hey, no skin off your nose. THAT was what I basically said. It wasn't an attack on 'poor people' but a realistic assesment of the motivation for supporting parties like the Liberals and NDP who offer ever more government services (along with ever higher taxes) because they know taxes are very little issue to at least half the population, and reasonable for most of the next twenty or thirty percent.

Realistically, if you pay no or virtually no income taxes, why would you want to vote for a conservative party which is likely to cut back government services in any way?

If I was paying virtually no income taxes, I would be voting for the party that I thought was most likely to help me obtain an income so that I would be paying income taxes. 

No, I wouldn't be voting to cut back government services.  Cutting back government services isn't an end in itself.  If I'm a poor-person and trying to scrape by, on some combination of government services and part time income or whatever, show me how cutting back government services helps me get a full time job. Otherwise you're just making it that much harder for me to make ends meet.  If course I wouldn't vote for that.  "Ok, you might lose your home and have to live on a friend's couch... but well-to-do baby-boomers would be paying less taxes!" isn't a compelling argument to bring to voters.


If poor-people being able to vote is such a bad thing for rich-guys, why are rich-guys doing so well?


 -k
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Offline SirJohn

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Re: Doug Ford Helps the Poor
« Reply #52 on: April 21, 2018, 02:06:42 pm »
If I was paying virtually no income taxes, I would be voting for the party that I thought was most likely to help me obtain an income so that I would be paying income taxes. 

No, I wouldn't be voting to cut back government services.  Cutting back government services isn't an end in itself.  If I'm a poor-person and trying to scrape by, on some combination of government services and part time income or whatever, show me how cutting back government services helps me get a full time job.

The problem is that not a lot of 'poor people' have a really good grasp of macroeconomics. The government spending money on this thing and that thing and those things and subsidizing this and everything else... that doesn't really help you get a good job. Well, not unless the government hires you as a public servant anyway.

The only proven method for uplifting the wealth of a population is improving the economy, and higher taxes are a drag on an economy. Lots of government regulations are also a drag on an economy (and no, I'm not someone who thinks all regulations are wrong. Some are vital). If masses of red tape mean it takes a business years before it can build a pipeline or develop a mine or build a housing project or an office tower or a factory, with high taxes slapped on top of that, then that slows down an economy and results in fewer jobs, not more, and less opportunity, not more. Everyone here is a free trader now that Donald Trump is against it, but how many have a clue just how much free trade between provinces is hampered by masses of internal tariffs and trade barriers? Getting rid of those would result in a huge economic boost. We have a MILLION very highly paid public sector workers in Ontario. How much do you think that costs the economy?

But it's a lot easier to buy votes when you just say you're going to give people money and free daycare and free tuition and free medication and free this and free that. It's obvious. It's clear. It's in-your-face. It makes good sound bites. And if you pay little or no taxes you're going "Yeah!"

I've been saying for ten years that the way to help poorer people is not to give them money but to give them education and job/skills training. We do a shitty job of that compared to what others, like the Germans, do.
"When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won't do." David Frum

Offline Omni

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Re: Doug Ford Helps the Poor
« Reply #53 on: April 21, 2018, 02:17:18 pm »
]

Sounds like you're suggesting the gov't use your precious tax dollars to provide job skills...heaven forbid. Oh yeah, they already do that it's called the Youth Employment Program and invests about $330 million annually.

Offline SirJohn

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Re: Doug Ford Helps the Poor
« Reply #54 on: April 21, 2018, 03:43:59 pm »
Sounds like you're suggesting the gov't use your precious tax dollars to provide job skills...heaven forbid. Oh yeah, they already do that it's called the Youth Employment Program and invests about $330 million annually.

Oh yeah, they don't. The 'youth employment program' has some decent aspects to it, but no, that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about taking people of whatever age who either apply frequently for pogey or who apply for welfare, running them through a skills/education assessment program, and then teaching them whatever they can learn that will turn them into productive people who can support themselves.
"When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won't do." David Frum
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Offline Michael Hardner

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Re: Doug Ford Helps the Poor
« Reply #55 on: September 04, 2018, 11:21:39 am »
https://twitter.com/TorontoStar/status/1036918061134213120?s=19

The Star cites service industry employment rate increase...

Offline Queefer Sutherland

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Re: Doug Ford Helps the Poor
« Reply #56 on: September 04, 2018, 10:24:44 pm »
https://twitter.com/TorontoStar/status/1036918061134213120?s=19

The Star cites service industry employment rate increase...

Wow Doug Ford is doing a great job so far!  jokes, jokes.
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Offline Michael Hardner

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Re: Doug Ford Helps the Poor
« Reply #57 on: September 05, 2018, 05:30:21 am »
YES!  Keeping the higher minimum wage was a great idea!

Offline Queefer Sutherland

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Re: Doug Ford Helps the Poor
« Reply #58 on: September 05, 2018, 05:30:29 pm »
The old rule...once you give people money/benefits it's really, really hard to take them back without pissing people off lol.
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Offline Michael Hardner

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Re: Doug Ford Helps the Poor
« Reply #59 on: September 05, 2018, 07:16:37 pm »
The old rule...once you give people money/benefits it's really, really hard to take them back without pissing people off lol.

You mean like Rent Control, Pensions, middle class income, ...