Is government supposed to take sides?

I believe that people can improve their situations in spite of government...

If that's what you believe, then you absolve the individual of any and all responsibility...

And the problem will be solved if all individuals do. That doesn't seem to be something you're too interested in seeing happen, though...

That's incorrect?

I say that people should reap the benefits of their hard work, and you say "That's incorrect"??

So, you mean you don't believe that people should reap the benefits of their hard work?

It could impact an employer's ability to give a person a well-deserved raise if it's been dictated that they have to pay others more, regardless if they're deserving of a higher wage...

Clarification? You mean, I have to do the research for you?

Very well..........

In April 1909, Senator Joseph W. Bailey, a conservative Democrat from Texas who was also opposed to income taxes, decided to further embarrass the Republicans by forcing them to openly oppose an income tax bill similar to those which had been introduced in the past. He introduced his bill expecting it to get the usual opposition. However, to his amazement, Teddy Roosevelt and a growing element of liberals in the Republican party came out in favor of the bill and it looked as though it was going to pass.

Not only was Bailey surprised, but Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, the Republican floor leader, frantically met with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and President Taft to work out a strategy to demolish the Bailey tax bill. Their own party was split too widely to permit a direct confrontation, so the strategy was to pull a political end run. They announced that they favored an income tax but only if it were an amendment to the Constitution. Within their own circle, they discussed how it might get approval of the House and the Senate, but they were quite certain that it could be defeated in the more conservative states-three-fourths of which were required in order to ratify the amendment.

Thus, the Democrats were off guard when President Taft unexpectedly sent a message to Congress on June 16th, 1909, recommending the passage of a constitutional amendment to legalize federal income tax legislation.

The strategy threw the liberals into an uproar. At the very moment when their Bailey bill was about to pass, the Republicans were coming out for an amendment to the Constitution which would probably be defeated by the states.

Reaction to the Amendment

Congressman Cordell Hull (D-Tenn., and later Secretary of State under FDR) saw exactly what was happening. He took the floor to excoriate the Republican leaders. Said he:

"No person at all familiar with the present trend of national legislation will seriously insist that these same Republican leaders are over-anxious to see the country adopt an income tax...What powerful influence, what new light and deepseated motive suddenly moves these political veterans to 'about face' and pretend to warmly embrace this doctrine which they have heretofore uniformly denounced?" {1}

He went on to expose what he considered to be a political trick. He needn't have been so concerned. The slogan of "soak the rich" automatically aroused Pavlovian salivation among politicians both in Washington and the states. The Senate approved the Sixteenth Amendment with an astonishing unanimity of 77-0! The House approved it by a vote of 318-14.

National Retail Sales Tax Alliance - History of the 16th Amendment



Please. The attitude of the day is well known. All taxes are levied for revenue, but they are also used for other reasons. Altering behavior is one. The marijuana tax act is a prime example, as are sin taxes and energy taxes. Want to stop people from wasting energy, tax the crap out of it. In the case of the income tax, the democrats wanted to make the Republicans look bad and the Republicans wanted to feint support for the income tax and allow the states to be the bad guys, since they did not believe the states would ever ratify the amendment. Both plans backfired, or did they? I suspect our Congressmen were manipulated.




For most people who were married with children, the income tax wasn't that bad back in the 50's and 60's because most married women were not yet working and the exemptions saved most families. The single person who made good income was punished though, unless of course his name was Rockefeller and all his money was in trusts and foundations.

As ALL taxes increased, the single family income was no longer able to provide a middle class living and the mother in households started entering the workplace more and more in the 70s.

In 1950, 23% of married women were in the labor force. In 1960 it moved to 31%. By 1980 54% of married women were in the work force.

Over half of all married women work in the US at any given moment, but our private and public debt continue to rise.



We now need both parents to work, yet families are going deeper into debt.(YES I know that much of this is because we are living beyond our means and because we make poor financial decisions)

Obviously taxes are not the only reason, but they are a large part of the problem.


Look, the income tax didn't cripple the economy, I was wrong. The income tax is just one of many taxes that are making it difficult for people to stay out of debt. As to real wages, why are they declining? Obviously it is complex. One of the main reasons though is all of our so-called free trade agreements, but that is another discussion altogether.

"The Constitution says what it does."

Are you kidding me? That is a flipping joke. Madison was the "father" of the constitution. No one knows it better than he does. HE SAID........

It would be absurd to say, first, that Congress may do what they please, and then that they may do this or that particular thing; after giving Congress power to raise money, and apply it to all purposes which they may pronounce necessary to the general welfare, it would be absurd, to say the least, to super add a power to raise armies, to provide fleets, &c. In fact, the meaning of the general terms in question must either be sought in the subsequent enumeration which limits and details them, or they convert the Government from one limited, as hitherto supposed, to the enumerated powers, into a Government without any limits at all."




YOU COULD NOT BE MORE WRONG. PERIOD.

“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”
— James Madison, Federal No. 45, January 26, 1788

If you would like more quotes from the founding fathers on this topic, just ask.

Look, how do you judge if a law is constitutional, or not? Is it up to the Supreme Court, or the States, or lawyers, or Senators, or are IS IT UP TO YOU?

I believe each of us, has a right to decide what is constitutional, or not, since it is our duty to decide.

As Jefferson wrote........

"But the Chief Justice says, 'There must be an ultimate arbiter somewhere.' True, there must; but does that prove it is either party? The ultimate arbiter is the people of the Union, assembled by their deputies in convention, at the call of Congress or of two-thirds of the States. Let them decide to which they mean to give an authority claimed by two of their organs. And it has been the peculiar wisdom and felicity of our Constitution, to have provided this peaceable appeal, where that of other nations is at once to force." --Thomas Jefferson to William Johnson, 1823. ME 15:451

It is up to each of us to educate ourselves and to decide what is, or is not constitutional. This is how it works. This is why prohibition was repealed, as American jurors stopped convicting their brothers for something which shouldn't be a crime.

Just summarize that argument in terms of my original question.

And I believe that, too. I also believe that water is wet and the sky is blue. And I believe none of those statements have any relevance to the present discussion.

For closing the wealth gap, yes. For his own situation, no. You don't seem to understand that these are two different subjects.

The problem is that it is harder now than it used to be for any individual to do so. THAT problem will not be solved if, by some miracle, all individuals manage to in spite of it being harder now. Which, of course, won't happen.

What's incorrect, as you know perfectly well and are only pretending to be confused about, which by the way is contemptible, is "you believe otherwise."

Try again. And this time, cut the bullshit.

Employers don't pay according to their ability. They pay according to what they have to pay, either by law or by market demand, whichever is more.

You're doing the research for you, in order to make your point. Which, by the way, you didn't do with this new stuff. Clearly the Republicans, or at least some of them, were behind the income tax, which makes it difficult to claim that it was implemented to embarrass the Republicans. I'm not sure why that's an important point anyway, but I am sure you haven't made it.

Of course, but you were talking about top marginal rates, which don't apply to "most people who were married with children," or even most people who weren't. They apply only to top-bracket taxpayers. Obviously, for someone making millions a year, the income tax was higher then.

I don't see how, if taxes are lower now than they were before.

It's very much a part of this one, which is about wealth gaps generally.

Doesn't matter. That's the nature of law. It says what it says, not necessarily what its framer intended it to say. If the framer did a good job, those two will be identical. In this case, clearly if Madison wanted a restricted Congress that would not be broadly empowered, he did NOT do a good job, or else other influences overrode him.

But the Constitution itself disagrees with you, or at any rate our voice in the matter is minimal. The Supreme Court is of course the arbiter of what is or is not constitutional. That's the law. Our own ability as voters to influence the makeup of the Court is negligible. This is one of the anti-democratic elements in the Constitution. There were more of them in the original document than there are in the current one as amended, but there are still some, and the way judges are appointed is one of them.

As Jefferson pointed out in your quote, we can also play a part in amending the Constitution and overriding the Court in that way. But this doesn't change the fact that, at law, the interpretation of the Constitution as it now exists is in the hands of the Court, and not the people.

Prohibition wasn't repealed because people decided it was unconstitutional. It WASN'T unconstitutional. It was a perfectly valid (if unbelievably stupid) amendment to the Constitution, and while in force it was the law of the land. It was repealed because people didn't like the (predictable) results.

Oh, wellholy shit. It's "harder".

Work for it, or you don't deserve it.

That's a pretty fuckin' simple concept.

All these whines I see about narrowing this so-called "wealth gap" would go away if everyone buckled down, did the hard work, and narrowed it. Expecting the government to fix anything is a fool's task...

I made a statement that you, consequently, disagreed with.

Don't get all pissy with me because you now realize how silly it made you look...

My employer does...

Steve, I've had it. Deliberate deceptiveness, like gratuitous rudeness, is something that puts you on my ignore list. Adieu.

Sure it does. No matter how you set the policies, it's going to favor one side or the other. For example, we can set immigration quotas so as to have a high labor-to-jobs ratio or a low one. High immigration means low wages, low immigration means high wages. Same with unions, either the government protects the right to form one or it doesn't. The government must either side with capital's desire to have a plentiful labor pool, and keep wages low, or with labor's desire to have a tight labor market, and keep wages high. It must either side with capital's desire to bargain individually, and have more control, or with labor's desire to bargain collectively, and have more control itself. The government need not go to extremes in either direction, but it must make decisions, and so must favor somebody to some extent.

This is framing the question in a misleading way. We ARE all equal before the law; nevertheless there are some actions which capital can take and labor can't, and vice-versa. As I pointed out, any actions which capital should be prevented from taking towards labor should also be prevented in reverse. They happen to be impossible in reverse, so that no such prevention is really necessary, but the principle remains true.

Since one usually measures GDP growth in per capita terms, this should not skew the observation.

Ah, yes, an important point which in fact supports what I'm saying. Pent up demand from the war years -- what does that mean? It means, very simply, that consumers had lots of money, and had a lot of things they wanted to buy with it. Since the government's massive spending to fight the war had ended the Depression, full employment at high wages put lots of money in people's pockets. At the same time, the economy wasn't producing much in the way of consumer goods, so people had pent-up desire.

Those two factors -- desire to buy and ability to buy -- are what go into demand. Both were high at the end of the war, but one of them (desire) normalized within one year, at most, after the economy returned to producing consumer goods. Yet the economy continued humming along for decades, with only mild recessions to mark the amazing boom times. Why? Because the other factor (ability to buy) remained high.

"The effect of rising wages"? THAT was the effect of rising wages: increased consumer buying power, resulting in increased consumer demand, resulting in higher sales, resulting in higher profits, resulting in higher wages, resulting in increased consumer buying power -- and so on. It was known as the "virtuous spiral." And that is the trend that has been reversed since the Reagan Revolution.

The only way that would make any difference is if we had not also been, for all intents and purposes, the only manufacturing market in town. Anyway by the '60s it was no longer true; Europe had recovered from the war damage and was doing very well.

The fact that they would have nowhere to sell the goods they produced there. The problem with paying people next to nothing for the labor to produce goods (apart from the morality of it) is that those same people don't have the wherewithal to buy the goods they produce. So when you do that, you have to sell the products to other people who do have the money. In today's global economy, the idea is to produce goods in places like China and Indonesia, and then sell them in places like the U.S., Canada, and Europe. There would be no reason to produce those goods in China and Indonesia if they were only allowed to sell them in the same countries, because the market wouldn't exist.

"Punishment" is not just taking something from someone. It is deliberately inflicting a penalty so as to discourage a behavior. For example, we put people in prison for committing violent crimes, hoping that the threat of this punishment will reduce the incidence of such crimes. A progressive tax is not implemented with the idea that being wealthy is a crime or to discourage people from doing so, but with the idea that the government must have revenue from somebody and it is fairest to take the bulk of it from those most able to pay.

No, it doesn't. Immigration policy need not be intended to favor one or the other. One solution would be to set immigration quotas at replacement level. The government can protect the right to form unions, and the employer's right to hire whomever he wishes at whatever wage he wishes. One does not preclude the other. Regardless, government's job is not to set policy to favor anyone. If you want to argue it is, I would like to know what qualities a person must have in order to deserve government favor.
It's not misleading, it's just more blunt than you're comfortable with. You wrote, "Put the government firmly on the side of labor in the capital/labor conflict." Therefore, government should favor labor. Therefore, there must be some quality of labor which makes it worthy of such preference. "Labor" is people; "capital" is people. Therefore, there must be some quality of the people who make up "labor" which makes them more worthy of government protection than the people who make up "capital". I would like to know what that is. To argue you're protecting both of them equally, though unnecessarily in the case of "capital", is to make your point moot. If they are both being protected equally, then why should government be "firmly on the side of labor"? Government would be firmly on neither side.
It doesn't skew the observation, it mitigates your expected results. We no longer have a growing domestic population, therefore we no longer have growing domestic demand. You're expecting rising wages to be compensated for by increased production. But increased production won't happen because there won't be increased demand. There will be decreasing demand because you're cutting off the fastest growing markets on the planet.
There were no high wages during the war. There were wage caps. People didn't have lots of money because they were getting paid well; they had lots of money because they couldn't buy anything and they were saving everything. We don't have the same situation now. We have a negative savings rate and people buying everything they want as soon as they want on credit.

You're not going to get what you want. You're going to raise wages domestically, and cut off trade with low-wage countries. The same countries which have the fastest growing middle-classes on the planet. Domestically, prices will rise because we can no longer get the things we want as cheaply as we want. But we'll have higher wages, so maybe they'll offset. But we won't be able to keep up with the higher wages. The only demand for our expensive products is going to come from the domestic market - a market which is declining. No one on the planet will spend more for something produced in America except Americans - and the only reason we'll do it is because you won't let us buy from anyone else. As the domestic market continues to decline, production will decline, and unemployment will decrease. As the market declines, domestic businesses will realize they can move to some other free-trade country and open up a world of consumers; consumers eager for their products. They'll also be able to reduce their costs and reap much greater profits than in protectionist America. This will further reduce production and increase unemployment.

This is not the situation we faced in the 50s and 60s.
We weren't the only manufacturing market in town. We had the whole world to sell to. You want to cut off the only growing markets and expect demand to increase. It's simply not going to happen.
But they are selling them in China and Indonesia and India. All of which have fast growing middle-classes - despite your assertion that they have no money to buy what we produce. These are the biggest markets today and you want to cut us out of them.

Moreover, as I pointed out above, why would Canada and Europe buy our relatively expensive products when they can produce them much cheaper, or buy them from countries which don't care about your morality?
The definition needs no such distinction. Regardless, the effect is the same: behavior (earning money) is discouraged, as decades of tax history demonstrate.

How harshly should we punish achievement? How much should we take from those who earn more than others? How much should we allow those who produce to keep what they produce? However you want to make it more palatable to yourself.

TSGracchus,

You are obviously an intelligent person, but it is frustrating debating you on topics you have not researched.

You also seem to have a slight comprehension problem.

According to research Cleon Skousen.......

In April 1909, Senator Joseph W. Bailey, a conservative Democrat from Texas who was also opposed to income taxes, decided to further embarrass the Republicans by forcing them to openly oppose an income tax bill similar to those which had been introduced in the past. He introduced his bill expecting it to get the usual opposition. However, to his amazement, Teddy Roosevelt and a growing element of liberals in the Republican party came out in favor of the bill and it looked as though it was going to pass.

Now, if you have ANY information that refutes this, then please share it with me.

As to the top income tax rates, I used those as a reference, since posting all rates for all years would have been a little ridiculous.

Just because income taxes might be lower, doesn't mean they aren't a problem, especially since, as you pointed out, real wages have been falling for some time now.

As to the rest of your points, they are kind of a lot to go into for this thread.

I have done quite a lot of reading on Judicial review, have you?

Do you know where the Supreme Court got their power to decide all things constitutional?

What if the FEGOV came out tomorrow and said they can seize any private property they consider needed for national defense, without compensation and the Supreme Court upheld that law? Would you say that this new law is constitutional?

WHy do you think a trial by jury was so important to the founding fathers?

I have done quite a bit of reading on Jury Nullification as well, have you?

Very few people in D.C. truly understand the constitution and the limits that were placed on the FEDGOV by that document. One of the few people who do understand it, is Ron Paul.

Do you agree, or disagree with the following statement...........

"If we stuck to the Constitution as written, we would have: no federal meddling in our schools; no Federal Reserve; no U.S. membership in the UN; no gun control; and no foreign aid. We would have no welfare for big corporations, or the "poor"; no American troops in 100 foreign countries; no NAFTA, GATT, or "fast-track"; no arrogant federal judges usurping states rights; no attacks on private property; no income tax. We could get rid of most of the cabinet departments, most of the agencies, and most of the budget. The government would be small, frugal, and limited."--RON PAUL

Could YOU now just state your overall argument in terms of the original question?

Who are you talking too?

If you are talking to me, then I am against redistribution of wealth, unless the wealth was accumulated through fraud, or criminal behavior.

"To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association--'the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.'" --Thomas Jefferson: Note in Destutt de Tracy's "Political Economy," 1816. ME 14:466

The father of the constitution, James Madison......
1791

"I can find no warrant for such an appropriation [drought relief] in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit.... The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.... Though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people. "

"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but
an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions." - James Madison, 1792

While I agree that something should be done decrease the division among social classes, what needs to be done is to undue all the damage caused by laws and regulation in the US.

The scam we call free trade is helping to destroy the middle class, as have many other government policies.

If you want to help people and if you are an American, the first step is to vote both ruling parties out of office.

Oh, golly... Not that...



People put others on "Ignore" only when they're afraid to debate using logic and reason...

I have found following this thread interesting. This statement is a curious one. I think it shows a basic misunderstanding of human nature. There are basically two different kinds of people in the world -- I call them masters and slaves. There are others who call them wolves and sheep. There never will be a time in human history were each and every person does what you seem to want them to do. In actuality, most people are lazy and unproductive. I see no indication that this will change.

The question is: to what use can these people be brought. Currently a major percentage of our support is nothing but support. We don't ask anything of them because that brings images of a dictatorship to mind. What we should do is make sure that those who live on support provide some form of useful input?

Sutanek

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