I know a lot of folks around here are pretty excited about the Huskies’ big win over Idaho yesterday, and plenty more are looking forward to the Seahawks’ opening game this afternoon. But for me, the big sporting event of the week was the opening of my daughter’s soccer season, where she and her teammates walloped their opponents 9-0.
Go Supremes!
Watching a bunch of little girls play soccer (well, at 12 to 13, they’re not all that little anymore) is one of the unexpected pleasures of parenthood, but it’s also one of the rarely considered amenities of city life. My daughter’s team practices twice a week at the grass field atop I-90’s approach to the Mt. Baker tunnel, and plays their home games on the neatly turfed and lighted field at Genesee. And during the course of the season they’ll play at half a dozen other fields around the city… all of them built and maintained with our tax dollars.
The anti-tax/anti-government crowd loves to complain about elected officials stealing their money, but in pushing forth their bathtub-sized government agenda, they also love to ignore the many big and little things that government does to improve our quality of life. For example, without a government willing and able to acquire and maintain the land, there would be no public play fields in Seattle, as the demands of the real estate market simply would not allow it. Sure, a handful of private schools might have amenities of their own, but these would be available only to the rare few who could afford it, rather than the thousands of children and adults who enjoy Seattle Parks and Recreation facilities everyday.
There is a reason Seattle voters approve nearly every local levy that comes our way: we want and enjoy the services and amenities these levies provide, and while we all have our quibbles, we generally believe we are getting value for our dollars compared to the alternative. There are simply some things on which we can’t rely on the free market to provide… and my daughter’s soccer game was certainly one of them.
Taxes for national defense – fine.
Taxes for parks – fine.
User fees for parks – also fine, provided it stays in the park budget.
Taxes for 911 – fine.
Special levies to fund 911, because the general fund has been plundered to support entitlements – not fine.
Taxes to support art programs that wouldn’t survive absent government funding because it’s not artistic or desirable – not fine.
Taxes to support to two full-time city positions to ensure people are recycling (aka garbage police)- so very fucked up.
If you subsidize things, you get more of them.
If you tax things, you get less of them.
The only “fair” system of taxation is a flat-rate system.
I can reduce Goldy’s post to one sentence:
If you enjoy some public things your taxes pay for, you forever lose the right to complain about your taxes going up.
PI: oh, you mean like the state B&O tax that makes it so risky to run a business that isn’t incorporated in this state? (If your business fails, the state collects its bite from your personal savings, if any.)
Goldy, you may not realize it, but Seattle has proportionately fewer and smaller parks than Portland, San Francisco, and NYC. My impression is that the city has not, in fact, spent very much on amenities.
Sounds to me like Goldy likes parks. Hmmmm, Parks good. Parks levy good. McGinn good.
Absolutely not.
Let’s say the flat rate is 15 percent.
15 percent of a million dollar income for a family of 4, the family is left with an income of 70,833 per month. With that kind of money they’ll be doing just fine, thank you very much.
15 percent of 60,000 dollar income for a family of 4 the family is left with an income of 4,250 per month.
The 15 percent monthly tax for the 60k family is $750 – that’s a couple of utility bills during the winter, that’s the difference between new shoes and hand-me downs for the younger sibling. That’s less money the family will have to save up for the kid’s college, orthodontics, vacation or what have you.
And all so it looks “fair” to right wingers on paper, and for the vain hope that the rich family will let some of their income “trickle down” to the rest of us.
That’s unfair taxation.
@5 yup! McGinn is the candidate for mayor that has been working to bring improvements to existing Seattle Parks and to build new ones!
McGinn good?
He is a tool.
http://manywordsforrain.blogsp.....rsers.html
why do i want to pay taxes so your ittle brat can play soccer?
@9;
You’re paying taxes so that thousands of little and big brats have amenities they can use. And even if you want to say you in no way at all benefit from roads, sidewalks, parks, streetlights, fire or police response (to name a few things)you do, at least in increased property value.
Isn’t the information contained in your post the sort of things that kids are told NOT to post for everyone to read on the internet? Her team name, age, and where they practice / play games? Really?
I know you’re an impulsive douchebag sometimes Goldy, but use some common sense when posting private information about your children.
Hmm, sounds like “soccer socialism” to me. Paging Glenn Beck. ;-)
@11: So does that mean when we see some creep stalking around known Seattle soccer play fields looking for a 12 year old girl named “Goldstein” who is on the “Supremes” team, we can tell the police his name is “Chris”?
Jesus Fucking Christ. Get a fucking clue; you fear mongers are what is making this country a more and more fucked place, all the bullshit about child rapists and WMDs. You people live in a fucked world, and you want all the rest of us to as well.
You might have been able to make a point there, albeit a weak one, but then you just had to extend the “douchbag” attack. Asshole.
STFU with your bullshit the-world-is-full-of-bad-people crap. Crawl back under your rock.
So Goldy, your point is???
Is it that we should approve ALL tax increases because you daughter is on a Soccer Team??
I have been involved personally in building soccer fields for kids.
When the government gets involved, the cost triples.
We built fields in one week…equipment & labor and materials were donated because the School District was broke.
Some UNION THUGS actually complained.
They wanted it to be built UNION.
Sorry Goldy, your daughters Soccer Team doesn’t justify major tax increases.
IDEA!
Get off your ass and help…despite what the UNION KLOWNS say. Get it done Goldy.
YLB @ 6–
Spoken like a chronically unemployed “between jobs” pig!
Oink Oink!
YLB needs the trough because he cannot provide for himself!
ylb arschloch has his hand out for anything taken from da rich. He knows he blew it in skuul and had to “settle” for what an arschloch gets when you waste your formative years being “progressive”.
15/16 – I don’t see an argument here with numbers. In my comment, one taxpayer is punished by a flat rate, the other is barely affected at all.
What’s your argument – name-calling. Typical.
Someone’s gotta pay for all the fancy weapon systems and wars that Republicans like. The middle class can’t afford them anymore – they can barely cover education, health care and social security needs with their income which by the way hasn’t budged on an inflation adjusted basis for over 30 years.
People who love taxes are some sick and twisted folks.
Re 17
Without name calling there is an answer to your mathematics. Several actually.
First, in a flat rate system like in a progressive one those people who use the most government services pay no taxes. Quick pop quiz: If a welfare mom with 3 kids by different dads collects conservatively $12,000 to $15,000 in housing subsidies, WIC, EITC and all the other incentives to laziness and poor planning and she pays $1500 in federal taxes from her Walmart job how much in taxes did she actually pay? (Hint, this is a trick question, she actually got more than she paid.)
Second, no-one is being punished, except possibly by themselves. Anyone has a right to work harder, get a better education, start a small business or buy rentals and improve their lot. The failure to do so is a personal one and as a taxpayer I fail to see why I should subsidize it with my hard earned money.
Finally, even if I accept the adulation of government espoused by the left, we all benefit equally and should pay the same way.
“Sure, a handful of private schools might have amenities of their own, but these would be available only to the rare few who could afford it, rather than the thousands of children and adults who enjoy Seattle Parks and Recreation facilities everyday.”
Well, that’s kind of the point. Over here in Bellevue (where I work), you will find some of the most radical conservative anti-tax wingnuts around. But they don’t mind paying for their own kid’s private school, or special levys or fund-raisers to supplement the budget for their own kid’s public schools.
At one high school, they were auctioning off preferred parking spots for students at a “fundraiser” auction. Parents were paying thousands of dollars so their kids could park their Lexus or BMW in reserved spaces only a few feet from the front door, but the “hoi paloi” who couldn’t come up with that much cash had to walk from the back reaches of the student parking lot to the school entrance – oh, the horror!!!!
Another news story from some time back detailed how a football coach on the eastside was having his salary supplemented by Boosters (i.e., player’s parents) by tens of thousands of dollars (I think it was over 100K, but I can’t be sure, it was too long ago). The idea was to keep him happy, reduce his need to earn money from other sources so he could concentrate on football, and prevent him from going somewhere else where the salaries were higher.
But if you ask them to raise taxes generally to support education statewide, the howl you will hear!!!! They want to selectively support only those schools and teachers which directly impact them or their students, and the SURE don’t want to spend money on inner-city Seattle kids, for whom they assume the money is “wasted”.
Same goes for individual needs. They opposed any taxes going to welfare programs which generally have an administrative framework to verify income, reduce abuse, etc. But they are willing to decide, on a one-on-one basis, using their own personal standards and prejudices, who “deserves” such aid, at which times they can occasionally be surprisingly generous.
I guess it’s no secret that they will complain that they don’t trust the government to make those decisions. But it does go deeper than that. They are perfectly willing to let a party (the Republicans) remain in power who will be extraordinarily lax in it’s financial controls and wasteful in spending money, deferring spending money on infrastructure but willing to throw huge sums of money willy-nilly to “solve” the PR problems caused by their neglect. But let the Democrats try to put into place a rational program which costs money in the short term but saves money in the long-term, and then suddenly they get all bent out of shape about Democrats spending too much of “their” money.
@ 19 said: “The failure to do so is a personal one and as a taxpayer I fail to see why I should subsidize it with my hard earned money.”
With all due respect, I hope that you can re-read this sentence and understand that the assumptions you make are rather broad.
Through my financial counseling at the church, I’ve seen all sorts of people (even some very conservative Republicans) who have educated themselves, worked hard all their lives, tried to save and invest reasonably, but found themselves in deep trouble regardless through no real fault of their own. They hate taking aid, because they have believed all their life that only the poor, shiftless, lazy, etc. do so. But when it comes down to their children being uninsured, many have to sign up for welfare because that’s the only way to ensure that their children can receive medical coverage as their unemployment benefits and COBRA eligibility lapse.
You prefer to assume that these are exceptions to the rule. I’ve found that there is no “rule”, people in financial trouble come from a broad variety of circumstances.
Sure, not everyone is blameless, by a long shot. But it works both ways. A lot of people also get benefits they didn’t earn (family inheritances, social contacts & jobs through family position, family loans to start buisinesses, etc.). It’s interesting that many of this later instance are some of the ones most insistent on not giving any aid to those who haven’t enjoyed those advantages.
19 – I was comparing and contrasting two tax paying families. One has to sacrifice quite a bit in contrast to the other under a flat tax regime.
It’s interesting that the welfare recipient you illustrate has seemingly taken full advantage of those “incentives to laziness and poor planning” yet she also has a job. I don’t see the point of your pop quiz. I hope her Walmart job is part time, she’s short-changing her kids otherwise.
No one is punished? I left out that in comparison to today’s system, the wealthier family gets a substantial tax cut under a flat tax regime while the less well off family gets an increase. That too is unfair to the point of being ridiculous.
Right wingers “adulate” government all the time – when the incarceration rates go up and Republican war drum beating leads up to a deployment of troops and arms in a foreign land. Funny that a Democratic deployment of troops in say Haiti or something more dangerous like Bosnia gets at best derision from the right even though it results in a handful of casualties.
We all benefit equally? Any tax payer who is healthy, safe and able to provide for their family’s essential needs, health care and education should have little complaint about their government. However that’s far from the case for far too many citizens of our country and any decent citizen should want that to change. It hasn’t been achieved in all the years of center-right government since Nixon. Some progress was made under Clinton and a pronounced backslide occurred under Bush.
As long as the right wing desires ever increasing defense budgets and frivolous wars of choice and our citizens suffer due to right wing “governance” – if you could call it that – then I’m sorry there will long be a need for progressive taxation to clean up the mess.
Someone has to pay for the clean up – it can’t be the middle class – we’re tapped out. The only place to go is to those who benefited the most from the religion of ever increasing defense budgets, lower taxes and ever more scant regulation.
YLB and The Raven,
You’re both confusing “fair” with “favorable.” A flat rate of 15% for everybody is incredibly “fair,” but not necessarily “favorable” to anyone. Taxes shouldn’t be set to be favorable to any group.
I want us to go to a flat rate national income tax and eventually move to a national sales tax. I want to put H&R Block out of business, and I want to see the accounting profession and legal profession get out of the tax preparation and tax manipulation business. I want a drastically simplified tax code, without those ridiculous loopholes and arcane rules and regulations. I want to take all that brain power devoted to filling-out government forms to be put to better use. I want a tax system that any tenth-grader can understand and compute personal income taxes correctly. I’ve had enough of this complexity for the sake of special interest and socialism.
Re 21:
You’re correct about some percentage of the poor. Misfortune isn’t always the fault of the unfortunate. Failing to plan for misfortune is. To steal from a person the basic reght to walk through their own problems is truly immoral. All of my best lessons have been from stupid choices and the price I paid for them.
Re 22:
YLB, you sound a reasonable person with whose basic worldview I disagree. Doesn’t make yours completely wrong, or mine completely right. In fact somewhere between my admittedly right of center view and your left of center view is where most Americans probably want to live.
But I disagree with your interpretation of American history. In your view the wealthy owe society something for their diligence and intelligence. I can’t agree with that. I accept the political view of the commons. We all share protection from crime, fires, general threats the the country etcetera. We all benefit from a good public education for children, whether we personally have them or not. All people benefit equally with equal opportunity, not equal results, which no system of government could grant and leave the people free.
I get that you hate the military and the need to spend public money on it. I share the dislike of the wanton wastefulness of the defense system. But how long do you think our way of life would endure with $7 a gallon gasoline? I don’t like it any more than you do. But I do understand the need to protect our economy, on occasion through military actions. It is distasteful, but that’s just life.
Apart from your dislike of our defense department, what makes one person more liable for the commons than another? If I accept your system of fairness, I wrench the term out of all sense. Fairness means that all pay equally for equal benefit.
No my point is that there’s simply no other place to go to pay off the credit card. The middle class hasn’t seen an inflation adjusted increase to their income in over 30 years. Someone has to pay for the mistakes of right wing governance in this country and it shouldn’t be the middle class. Democrats will not stay in office by punishing the middle class and Republicans will try everything in their power to do just that.
False. I think people like me should look at the military as kind of a middle class entitlement. Many families in this country carry on a tradition of military service and I think that shouldn’t be interfered with. From time to time this country needs people like that. All I ask to start is that the Department of Defense should be able to pass a GAO audit. According to former comptroller Walker, it is the only government agency that CANNOT do that. Let’s start here with ACCOUNTABILITY. It was a miracle that the DOD just recently cancelled the unneeded f22.
In another thread people supposedly were shocked that I support the current policy in Afghanistan. I think it would be a disaster if that country were allowed to be ruled by likes of a Taliban again – a human rights disaster, and a national security threat not only to the U.S. but any modern democracy.
We spend a lot of money on government and at the same time people like yourself appear to support ever higher and higher Pentagon budgets with barely a thought to accountability. You also seemed to have little trouble with buying a frivolous, unneeded invasion and occupation on the national credit card. As long as people like you support policies such as these while there’s a legitimate need for our citizens to expect help in education and health care (both whose costs have skyrocketed) while struggling with wages that really haven’t budged for over thirty years then I’m sorry there’s a strong case to be made for progressive taxation.
On the domestic front we’ve wasted billions on drug prohibition. This policy employs plenty of police, DEA, prosecutors, fills prisons to the bursting point and even supports something of a prison-industrial complex – another policy disaster that took off starting in the age of Nixon that has been an utter failure and in my opinion we have to start to unwind from. That too will cost money before we can save money and appropriate it to more productive uses.
If everyone’s income was more or less the same while the cost of government was nary a concern, I’d be all for a flat tax but it’s definitely not. The CEO’s and other executives of the largest American corporations make obscene amounts of money, the rich have grown enormously richer over the last 30 or more years and the rest of us in my view suffer for it.
The Fair Tax – http://www.fairtax.org
A flat tax for all but the poor. The poor get a “pre-bate” every year:
Frankly YLB the only thing we disagree on is the source of revenue.
I made unsupported assumptions about where you stand on DOD issues, for which I apologize. You make a good point about middle class involvement in the military. If it were politic, legal or possible I’d say every 18 year old high school grad should spend 2 years in the military or some form of non military service to his or her country prior to college, and be paid a stipend to do it. Freedom and citizenship are too valuable to take for granted.
Accountability? Absolutely. It’s taxpayer money. As you say the DOD should be able to pass a GAO audit. And the DOD and every other department should have standards by which the spending is measured to the effect. What we get for that taxpayer dollar should not be an unanswered question.
I don’t support unlimited military budget. I simply think that there are valid economic or geo political reasons for military action that aren’t as cut and dried as, say, stopping someone like Hitler.
As for the ‘war on drugs’ you’re absolutely right. Consensual crime shouldn’t be criminal. It’s a waste of money, time and resources to pursue and prosecute victimless crimes, and should be unconstitutional.
It’s just the source of revenue, like I said. I simply can’t get my sense of fairness around the disparity of contribution from wealthy and poorer citizens to a common good.
Lost and PI, I think both of you miss the primary argument in favor of a progressive tax, likely because there’s one government service that a lot of people take for granted: the definition and preservation of property rights. Without government, there is no such thing as “wealth” and no “income” that would be subject to any tax whatsoever.
Regarding that fundamental function of government, the wealthy benefit proportionally more from it than do the poor, and, as such, should pay taxes in proportion to the extent of that benefit.
While that argument augurs in favor of a progressive tax, that still leaves quite open the question of exactly how progressive taxes ought to be. There are a number of pragmatic arguments for a variety of positions across the spectrum, all of which are complex enough that doing them justice in a comment thread is rather difficult.
The primary point, however, is that the liberal argument in favor of progressive taxation isn’t as simplistic as most conservatives make it out to be. Indeed, I’ve yet to meet a conservative who has been willing to address that argument head-on.
Re 28:
You raise an interesting point. Our liberties, financial and personal, are protected by government. To that extent without a system of law protecting property there would be no secure property.
From that a rational argument could be advanced that the wealthy benefit more and should pay more than the middle class.
Looking at the poor though a different story emerges. They benefit financially from government directly. Very often the total value taken from government in services or direct payment is much greater than the total taxes paid. No decent person could argue that we should therefore tax these people at a greater rate than the middle class. No rational economist would favor such a system.
Sometimes fairness isn’t the only measure. Sometimes the question of how tax revenue is increased or decreased via the tax code is a valid question too. On this head you can find respectable competent economists with theories favoring everthing from a 90% tax on the wealthy to a flat tax and numbers to prove their system best. How do you decide which theories are valid and which are ideologically or fancifully driven?
Lost @ 29
Not necessarily. First, let me point out that you’re now moving from the realm of whether or not the ought to be a progressive tax and into the realm of just how progressive the tax ought to be.
Second, I think you overstate the actual direct benefits available to the poor. I did a quick web search, and fund this site (which sites specific sources). I’m sure you can find something more recent if you look. Welfare is not the budget-breaker that a lot of people think it is.
Lastly, as I think we’ve both pointed out, the variety of arguments for various levels of progressiveness is wide; the arguments numerous. Rather than attempt to argue them all, allow me to point out a few facts that might be worth consideration.
1) It’s important to understand the difference between cyclical government deficits and chronic government deficits. A “cyclical” deficit, by definition, is one that increases during recessions and decreases (preferably becomes a surplus) during economic booms. Chronic deficits are problematic for a variety of reasons.
2) Benefits for the poor, particularly unemployment benefits, engender cyclical as opposed to chronic deficits.
3) There are a lot of ways to structure and scale benefits so to provide incentives for people to get off welfare. And, in most cases, the incentives don’t have to be great. The notion of lazy welfare queens is one of those stereotypes that has little basis in reality. The vast majority of people really do want to work.
That’s just a partial list. I could cite quite a bit more.
That’s easy: falsification. You do empirical studies that either validate or falsify the theories. In particular, when it comes to the economic effects of income inequalities, Jamie Galbraith has done quite a significant amount of research at the University of Texas’ Inequality Project.
We need more of that kind of work, not less, and people of all ideological persuasions should support it.
Which brings me to my question for you: how do you decide that you aren’t filtering data through your own ideological lens? Is your ideology falsifiable in any way form or shape? If so, what would it take for you to decide that some of the assumptions you hold dear aren’t really true?
I’m not an economist and appreciate the links you provide.
I have a difficult time seeing how pensions for needy veterans, subsidized school lunches or medicaid are middle class, but know little enough about them that I’ll leave that alone.
I know at least one person though who lives in subsidized housing with an SSI and AFDC income, food stamps and a few other programs. She makes less than 20,000 a year, so also likely gets a direct cash check for EITC, paying no federal income tax. Of course she pays state sales tax, whatever that might amount to. Guessing high, based on her income, I’d have a difficult time believing that this exceeds $1000. Her rent subsidy based on her neigborhood must come to at least $4000. I have no idea what EITC, AFDC or SSI pay her, or what the medical care she receives costs, but the minimum must be $12,000. The net benefit she recieves from her citizenship must be in the $14,000 or greater range. I’ll freely state that the woman I mention is mentally retarded and would be unable to live in a purely capitalist society. Nor would her infant son or her other 3 children. She isn’t a horrible woman with loose morals, or an evil parasite on the body politic. She simply doesn’t know better, and couldn’t in the genetic craps shot she inherited.
Whether the net affect of people similarly unfortunate as her is dwarfed by other federal programs seems confirmed by your cite, but the direct benefits do exist. I completely agree that most people feel better as productive citizens, and that welfare reform that attempts to get them there humanely is a noble goal.
The deficit effect of these social programs, unemployment and the like is very likely cyclical, as you state. As the economy improves and the tax receipts rise some of this will be paid off. But the history of paying off debt is pretty dubious if you look at our national debt these past 40 years. It seems the best we can do is service an ever increasing debt load. As I said, I’m no economist but this seems a perilous course to pursue.
In answer to your final 2 points I agree wholeheartedly that research into how we best use the tax system to fund our government at least cost to the citizens is needed. Debates about what ‘funding the government’ means will always exist, but the value of an efficient and fair system of taxation is inarguable by either side of the ideological divide.
What it would take to change my stance on a firmly held belief is a 3 part argument. The change would have to be logical, it would have to be factually supported and it would have to be moral. Logic, facts or deeply held beliefs on their own are too subject to error. All 3 together at least minimize the chance of error.
Finally, I decide quite openly that I filter all data through a more or less ideological lens. So do you. So does everyone. Hopefully I do so knowing about this bias. Hopefully I analyze my conclusions accordingly. But not always, unfortunately. What’s that Bertrand Russel said? “To know that you know what you know, and that you don’t know what you don’t know is true knowledge.”