The wealthy greedy pigs who run America do blame the stone. the Wall Street fat cats who crashed our economy and caused great hurt for everyone else...got away with it scott-free...not a single one of them were jailed for their risky criminal behavior. But if I'm a junkie that holds up a 7-Eleven for $50 and a Mars Bar...you'll see me go up the river for 20 years. Welcome to America...yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!!
No, I do not feel this, just because I am forced to pay LOTS of € from my very tiny income (from which other people here could not live due to their standards and habits)
Like I said before, you can't regulate pride. You can't force someone to care about something. You can't control a person's sense of worth in the society they belong. You feel that way and that is good for you but you can't say "everyone should feel this way" and expect it to ever be used as a beacon for progress because, quite honestly, there are many people that do not and cannot feel that way. Yes, everyone should pay taxes, but there are just too many factors involved to make such blanket statements.*edit* sorry, I accidentally an entire sentence there
Sometimes it makes them feel better about themselves, sometimes it doesn't, you can't dictate how they will feel about a situation. Besides which, the chores are presumably chosen so as not to be in excess of what the handicapped child can do. That is the crux of my argument: everyone should pay taxes in accordance with what they can reasonably be expected to do. I do not believe that families making 30K per year can consistentently be able to afford to pay any taxes across the board. There are some people in some places that can definitely scrimp and save and build themselves up, but there are also places where 30K is literally not enough (and more especially towards the average of 17K) to maintain reasonable living conditions. What would you have these people do? Tax them $1 just so that they can "feel included"? It doesn't work that way.I fully agree that everyone should pay taxes relative to what they can afford. Where we disagree is that I believe there exists some plateau where what a family can afford is unfortunately $0. That plateau will never go away, you just need to get more people above it. Currently about 47% of the population is below it. Fix that.
These two sentences are necessarily at odds. You say you won't argue about how people should feel and then present an argument that people feel better about themselves when they are contributing. You need to resolve this conflict before we can have any chance of meaningful discussion: either drop the "feeling like a contributing member of society" argument entirely or present your case that the feeling is universal and would outweigh the costs.
I never disagree just to disagree. If I disagree it's because I think you're wrong, and I think you're wrong either because you are wrong or I am wrong about you being wrong. You can be wrong, I don't care, it's when I'm wrong that I can't stand, and there's a chance you're trying to say something profound here and just getting caught up in logical twists.If you genuinely believe that everyone will feel happy about being taxed and contributing to society (not "should feel", definitely will feel) then I have not misunderstood what you're saying. I'm really hoping I'm wrong and that you're trying to say something else.
How do people best "contribute toward society?", by paying taxes or by performing voluntary exchanges like providing a service in exchange for something else?
What you fail to understand is that the problem is systemic.
I thought we talked about how much tax can a 17K family spend. I was assuming that one partner earns the money. A 16K family doesn't pay taxes but for social security (health care, retirement etc). If you want to pay nothing, you have to earn less then 400€ per month (i believe it was changed to 450€ in january).
No _income_ taxes perhaps. But still 20pct VAT and 300pct Gasoline tax and automobile tax, if you have one.
No, this entire time I've been trying to counter your universal claim that "everyone needs to pay something" by admitting that I agree everyone SHOULD pay something but accepting that there exists some level below which there are families that quite literally cannot afford to pay anything. I then went on to say that I believe that level to be around 30k but that's just an impression and entirely flexible as new information comes in. This is the crux of what I've been trying to get at, you continue to insist that everyone pay something and then used an example from a country with a similar tax platform where there are people who do not pay income tax, which didn't make any sense. Three times I pointed out the flaw in your assertion and asked to make sure that that is really what you were talking about and you always came back to basically saying "yes, everyone needs to pay taxes because contributing makes you feel good".So again: do you believe, universally, that everyone should pay something regardless of their situation because it will make them "feel good" about their country or whatever, and do you have any evidence to support this claim, and suggestions on how to handle the costs of this policy?
Yesterday I "stumbled" upon something that supports your (/people you talked to) claim - theses aussies are some nasty people, but what to expect from convict descendents
