I have no problem with unions.

I have a serious problem with taxes.

If people want to combine to get more bargaining power, that's just fine with me. If once combined, they want to try to use that bargaining power to get bigger and bigger slices of the pie they share with their employers and their employers' customers, that's fine with me, too.

I don't think fighting over pies is a sound business model, but that's neither here nor there. What other people do with their pies is their choice to make, not mine. Union, no union, labor unrest, no labor unrest, blah blah blah. If people want to make their sandbox a war zone, fine with me. It's their sandbox.

What I object to is them fighting over a pie that neither of the sides pay for. I don't believe people are entitled to take tax dollars just because they want bigger slices of pie.

Oh, yes, since someone asked this, albeit rhetorically, I do favor tax cuts for "the rich". Their money is neither mine nor yours. We aren't entitled to it, any more than we're entitled to the money of the poor.

I'd rather be richer than I am. But just because people like Paris Hilton or Donald Trump or the last lottery winner lucked into having a crapload more wealth than me without "working" for it, doesn't mean I'm entitled to share their wealth.

If they want to spend their unearned wealth on trivial stuff, on hundred-dollar Italian underwear and silk toilet paper and solid gold doorknobs...well, that may be all sorts of disgusting to me. But its still their wealth.

And if they want to turn around and pay their employees minimum wage, well, yes, they're scumbags as well as frivolous twits.

But it is still their wealth. Not mine. Not yours.

Just because we're in the majority, and the rich scumbag frivolous twits are in the minority, doesn't make their wealth ours to take.

The problem is not that politicians cut taxes to the rich too much. The only problem is that there is not a politician alive who is willing to make big enough tax cuts.

"Wade" wrote:

You just pick and choose what to see?

"longtimefan" wrote:

The unions might want to get with the times too. As Green also points out, the poll numbers for politicians who are taking a stand against the unions are actually rising. Predictions of these politicians committing career suicide are overblown.

"Nonstopdrivel" wrote:

Sigh.

Suppose we impose a 100% tax on all income over $200,000 a year. What happens?

1. The revenues collected don't come close to covering the profligacy of our spending on ourselves through federal, state, and local government. And it won't come close...
2. EVEN IF none of those earning over $200,000/year said "fuck you!" and tool their money and their productive capacity and their human ingenuity offshore and out of our reach for next year and beyond.
3. EVEN IF none of those earning over $200,000/year said "fuck you!" and stopped doing anything productive once they made their $200,000 since they couldn't keep it anyway.
4. EVEN IF none of those earning over $200,000/year said "fuck you" and spent 20 percent of their pre $200,000 income hiring tax lawyers and trying to evade classification of their official income as greater than $200,000.
5. EVEN IF none of those earning less than $200,000 stopped taking risks and innovating since their gains from risk-taking and innovation are going to be maxed at a paltry $200,000 grand a year.

NO INCREASE IN TAXES WILL EVER -- EVER -- KEEP US FROM GETTING SCREWED. Because the bigger they get, the more taxes screw with our incentives to produce and innovate.

An economy grows as its productivity increases. Productivity grows only with innovation. And innovation -- the putting of new knowledge to work in productive ways -- only takes place if innovators are willing to put in a crapload of work and take a crapload of risk.

And when innovation works, what happens to the distribution of income. It gets more and more skewed. Successful innovators end up earning a lot more. If we want to stay living in the richest economy in the history of the world, we have to be willing to LET people accumulate and keep incomes that are farther and farther away from us.

Even if some of those rich bastards do turn into Paris Hiltons.

Because that's the ONLY way to keep us from getting screwed.

Government can't increase our productivity. It can provide us with the occasional public goods -- national parks, national defense against hordes of rampaging Canadians. But apart, perhaps, from the occasional grant of temporary monopoly power to innovators (e.g. through patents), it simply isn't set up to provide incentives for innovation.

What the government does is manage an incredibly complicated system of transfer payments. Use a hundred thousand pages a year of laws and regulations to shift pieces of whatever pie has been created outside by real people and real innovators.

This is why "political solution" is an oxymoron, and why politicians on both sides are useless. ALL they can do is fight over ways of splitting up pies between this or that constituency as they take their own cut. They don't do anything that increases the pie.

They can't. When it comes to increasing innovation and productivity, politicians are as useless as extra nipples on a man.

"Wade" wrote:

"Nonstopdrivel" wrote:

By the way, I would probably have a lot more sympathy for public employee unions if they weren't, as Alexander Green so aptly put it, "a group that traditionally tells political leaders what they 'must have,' not what they 'want.'" A little honesty would go a long way toward earning public sympathy.

"Nonstopdrivel" wrote:

"Nonstopdrivel" wrote: