>>>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tax_cuts
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>Except that those were due to retire (cease to exist) after 2010. Which did happen for those earning over $400K/$450K. Obama locked in the evil Republican tax cuts for everybody else. He also set higher contributions to Medicare for those earning over $400/$450K.
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>Seems to me that those earning over $400/$450K currently pay more than they did before the Bush tax cuts. Am I wrong?
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>>>It's competely just that those rotten aides who took care of my late wife, lovingly, who had to go to another job into order to earn enough money to pay their rent, should pay more for a gallon of gas because the state wouldn't raise taxes on the wealthy, as they should have, to maintain the roads that allow the Walmart and Johnson and Johnson heirs to collect billions as goods are moved from slave wages countries over US roads funded my aides to their minimum wage outlets.
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>Just? Maybe it would be just to calculate the amount boomers underpaid towards roads as well as everything else, and send them a bill. Meanwhile I suggest you look at average sizes of cars in Europe vs US. In Europe, people affected by the taxes drive smaller cars that use less fuel. When I see popularity of SUVs and trucks start to diminish in the US, I'll know that tax is hurting.
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>And yes, Walmart and J&J heirs should pay those fuel surcharges too. Of course. And trucks should pay higher road taxes than Smart cars. I thought they did.
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>Sheesh, I'm as critical of the 1% as anybody. But you have to come up with solutions that don't self-defeat- like higher road taxes for Walmart trucks that get passed onto customers. They're going to protect their margins, so you need to come up with something else.
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>>>Every time some one like you rants about deficits caused by the poor schlubs on Medicare, you condone the low rates on people who make billions.
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>Nice try. First, justify "lower rates on those who make billions." Are you comparing to rates paid in other countries, or pre-Bush, or ??? If pre-Bush, then you ought to look at your own rates through a period when fair contributions towards Medicare and Social Security, competently underwritten, would have yielded gigantic pots of wealth that would leave the US sitting pretty. Instead boomers resented paying their own fair share, preferring to accumulate private assets. And now they want to tax somebody else to keep it going long enough to guarantee their own benefits while protecting their own hoards.
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It's really a lot easier than that, John.
I start with the notion that the rich have excess wealth and the rest of us don't.
Forget all the mechanical stuff.
If the shared resources of the country - e.g roads, airports, railroads are in need of billions of dollars of upgrades and the government doesn't have the money it makes perfect economic, social, and ethical sense to me to take the money to fix them from the people who don't need it to live on.
Call it whatever you want, but one way or the other, they should be made to pay for them.
Taking even one dollar from someone making minimum wage to prevent that, in my view is unethical and unwise.
Yes, I know that history has gone in the opposite directions.
Kings taxed Lords who taxed serfs in order to fund their castles and wars.
But those kings and lords eventually lost their lands, their heads or both.