@ largham: Who gives a shit? I'd like to see how you complain if unemployment went over 15 or God forbid 20% because all the major corporations and wealthy in america left and took there money elsewhere. Where you ask? may I direct you to wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Income_Taxes_By_Country.svg
plenty of countries with lower corporate tax rates and even lower personal income tax rates for people to hang on to their money, and this was 2005, corporate taxes in america have gone up significantly since then.
@ thucidides: "lol. they have like A LOT of money. that, let's be honest, they don't need."
Guess what, most people don't just sit on a billion dollars and say look what I have, they back someone starting a business, who then hires fifty people, turns a profit, pays those employees wages, raises, and bonuses, and more than 50 people reap the benefits from the first person's billion dollars. Sure the super rich guy now has 1.5 billion, but his friend who started the business went from middle class to millionaire, and the 50 employees went from unemployed to employed. In your alternative, the super rich guy had to pay most of his billion to the government, who then handed 10% if it directly to other countries to pay interest on our debt, squandered a bunch of it on pork projects that benefit a few, and gave the rest to the poor who remain unemployed. Now the billionaire decides he has no reason to try to make money so he sits on his remaining cash and either does nothing, or moves to another country and starts a buisness there. Next time taxes are due, either the billionaire is gone, or made no income (cause he can afford to do so) and the revenue is gone from his billion dollars profit the previous year, but guess what, the programs the goverment started to hand the money to the poor still require money, which now the governement doesn't have because they taxed the rich out of the country or into a holding pattern waiting until it worth trying to make a profit again. So now the governement has to either print money and devalue the dollar, or they have to borrow more money from other countries.
Meanwhile the unemployed are still unemployed and need that government check they've come to depend on. The governement also tends to raise taxes on the middle class, who can't afford to stop working just because taxes went up like the super rich can, so they start to struggle more and more to make ends meet and some of them fall out of middle class into the ranks of the poor. Overtaxing the super wealthy results in the lowest of standards for everyone.
Equality of opportunity leads to economic growth and the richest per capita "poor" in the world, while equality of wealth leads to truly poor who are starving and dying and unmotivated individuals and substandard living.
And I'll second the fact that the fed is the worst way to distrubute money. A local charity I volunteer at gets 200k in federal grant money. The government organization that hands out that grant has a multi-billion dollar budget. The local charity applies 100% of private donations to its work making up 80% of it's operating expenses. At this charity, the majority of the people we help are the people that the welfare, unemployment, social security, medicare, and VA offices turn away.
I've also been overseas a few times, and it's obvious where the US Govt aid ends up and where the private NGO money ends up. The local governments overseas are sitting on the US Govt aid money and using it for themselves, while private NGO's have come up with tactics to bypass the local governments and get aid to the people in those countries that are suffering. In the particular case I saw, US govt aid was being used to improve an existing airport (used by the rich no less) while the NGO money was helping to dig wells, build schools, and teach sustainable farming skills.
@ Jack Klein, I'll say again. I don't believe the poor are the problem. I believe that the government's irresponsible fiscal policies in approaching helping the poor are the problem. In fact, I believe they exacerbate the problem and enable people to remain in the ranks of the poor. (Here the real problem is human nature as enabled by the government). Let me point out that correlation does not imply causation. Tax rates of 90% at the same time as 5% economic growth do not imply that the growth was due to the tax rates. There's a time delay in economics. Goverment policies can have immediate effects, but often the full impacts are a decade off or more. Government policies in the 20's led to the depression of the 30's. What proof do you have that Regan's fiscal policies of the 80's aren't what helped us sail through the 90's? Then clinton and w bush's policies (and let's be honest, there wasn't much difference between the two) led to the pickle we're in now.
The prosperity of the 40's to the 70's I chalk up the fact that the rest of the world was rebuilding from WWII and most of the rest of the world owed us money, while our country was largely unscathed. That sealed our ascendancy to the status of super power. If you want to know the true effect of corporate tax rates, study what particular corporations do when the tax rates change. When did american companies start shipping jobs overseas? Guess what, when the corporate tax rates went up to 40%.
Oh and Putin33, ask almost any doctor whether they'd rather work with private insurance or medicare and the overwhelming result is that they hate working with medicare. Why? Because it is a poorly run, inefficient, unrealistic, slow moving, bureauracracy. They often get paid less on a medicare service than it costs to do the service. I don't deny that some charities are corrupt, but you imply that every private charity is corrupt, sorry, that's a fallacy of proof by single example. Also ask that doctor if you can pay cash, and a many will cut 30% off the cost of service for you for private insurance. Ask if you can pay cash instead of filing through medicare and they'll cut 50% off your bill, just happy to break even rather than lose money. I don't deny we have problems in health care, but government operation is not the answer there either.
A Couple New Games
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