[progunr]

No. I'd expect you to help your neighbor, if possible, not steal from them.

Like Obama's huge tax increases, that will surely help those that didn't do a single thing to earn the money, that will be taken away from someone who did, and given to them.

So by your premise, Obama is stealing too?

[BABRAM]

Like Obama's huge tax increases, that will surely help those that didn't do a single thing to earn the money, that will be taken away from someone who did, and given to them.

So by your premise, Obama is stealing too?

Well that's you. More people laid off the better.. huh? I'd rather keep policemen, fire fighters, teachers, and nurses employed because they earn their keep, feed their families, and it's a benefit to the community. Maybe we can even get some people back to work that's already laid off. Imagine that. But you can't have that. Nope. Because "Obama," according to you, and a few others, would be stealing.

[inthebox]

No. I'd expect you to help your neighbor, if possible, not steal from them. You're mentality is backwards on the issue. BTW I included a list of others that could help and are making large profits, other than oil companies. I wish I could afford to pay federal taxes fives times over, that would mean I making a huge profit.

But how did profit, no matter what percent or size, become such an evil in the eyes of Obama and a percentage of the population?

Is not profit a driving force that motivates producers to bring needed goods and services to the market?


If there is no profit motive, who is going to produce?
The government? What did the communist governments export here? That is right, the YUGO.




Who is going to work for free?

Who is going to suffer from the lack of goods and services that leads to shortages and higher prices?

That's right, you and me!

Oh, and another thing, don't you think that these evil oil companies, if taxed enough, will just leave the US and take their jobs and tax revenue, and go foreign?

[BABRAM]

"Evil in Obama's eyes?" Having policemen, fire fighters, teachers, and nurses employed, is evil? Really??

[Galveston1]

They are already accounted for already under Obama's tax plan by income bracket.[/QUOTE]
I do believe that the first man to propose a heavy, graduated income tax for the USA was Karl Marx.
Stamp out organized crime. Abolish the IRS!

[BABRAM]

I do believe that the first man to propose a heavy, graduated income tax for the USA was Karl Marx.

Stamp out organized crime. Abolish the IRS!

Ideally if we could turn back time, I'd keep it limited to a consumption tax and a luxury tax system of sorts. Personally I think inheritance taxes are a crime. I would much rather be taxed on what I spend not what I earn. But unfortunately American history took many twists and now we find ourselves compensating other directions often to make up for shortcomings. Yes. Although I don't think it is practical currently, I do agree with reforming the IRS until we can eventually abolish it.


Concerning Karl Marx, if you're really bored and have the time, read this:

Capitalism

"A term denoting a distinct form of social organization, based on generalized commodity production, in which there is private ownership and/or control of the means of production. The word 'capitalism' is a relative latecomer in social science, with the OED citing its first use in 1854 ('capitalist' in 1792). Originally popularized by Marxist writers (Marx preferred to speak of the capitalist mode of production or bourgeois society), it is a term which has increasingly gained credence across the political spectrum, although this has inevitably produced inconsistency in its employment. At least three present-day usages are discernible.

Karl Marx sought the essence of capitalism neither in rational calculation nor in production for markets with the desire for gain (a system termed by Marx, 'simple commodity production'). For Marx capitalism is a historically specific mode of production, in which capital (in its many forms) is the principal means of production. A mode of production is not defined by technology but refers to the way in which the conditions of production are owned and controlled and to the social relations between individuals which result from their connection with the process of production. Each mode of production is distinguished by how the dominant class, controlling the conditions of production, ensures the extraction of the surplus from the dominated class. As Marx clarifies in a famous passage, the really distinctive feature of each society is not how the bulk of labour is done, but how the extraction of the surplus from the immediate producer is secured: 'It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers … in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short the specific form of state in each case' (Capital, vol. iii, ch. 47). Capitalism is thus perceived as a transient form of class society in which the production of capital predominates, and dominates all other forms of production (generalized commodity production). Capital is not a thing, not simply money or machinery, but money or machinery inserted within a specific set of social relations whose aim is the expansion of value (the accumulation of capital). Capitalism is therefore built on a social relation of struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class. Its historical prerequisite was the concentration of ownership in the hands of the ruling class and the consequential and 'bloody' emergence of a propertyless class for whom the sale of labour-power is their only source of livelihood. The distinction between the sale of labour and the sale of labour-power (the capacity to labour) is crucial, Marx argues, for understanding how all profit derives from the unpaid and therefore exploited labour of the worker. Capitalism therefore combines formal and legal equality in exchange with subordination and exploitation in production. The existence of trade, rational calculation, production for the market, the use of money, and the presence of financiers is not enough to constitute a capitalist society. For Marx, capitalism is based on a specific form of private property which enables capital to yoke labour to create surplus value in production. Like Weber, Marx portrayed capitalist society as the most developed historical organization of production. Unlike Weber, Marx envisaged that class struggle would intensify and produce an ever-expanding union of workers who, as a self-conscious, independent movement of the majority, would rise up and abolish capitalism.

All periodizations of capitalism are problematical. Whilst Marx claims that in Western Europe bourgeois society began to evolve in the sixteenth century and was making giant strides towards maturity in the eighteenth century, Karl Polanyi concludes that capitalism did not emerge until the Poor Law Reform Act of 1834. Capital existed in many forms—commercial capital and money-dealing capital—long before industrialization. For this reason the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is often referred to as the merchant capital phase of capitalism. Industrial capitalism, which Marx dates from the last third of the eighteenth century, finally establishes the domination of the capitalist mode of production.


For most analysts, mid- to late-nineteenth-century Britain is seen as the apotheosis of the laissez-faire phase of capitalism. This phase took off in Britain in the 1840s with the Repeal of the Corn Laws, and the Navigation Acts, and the passing of the Banking Act. In line with the teachings of classical political economy (Adam Smith and David Ricardo), the state adopted a liberal form which encouraged competition and fostered the development of a 'self-regulating' market society. Liberal and conservative thinkers have been keen to identify this particular phase of capitalism with the essence of capitalism itself. This has encouraged some theorists to dispense with the term completely when describing societies in the post-1945 period. Hence during the post-war long boom (1950-70), an explosion of terms—industrial society; post-industrial society; welfare statism; post-capitalist society—threatened to displace the centrality of the concept of capitalism. The waves of economic and political crises experienced since this period, however, led many commentators to reinstate the term, particularly under the influence of the new right (Hayek and Friedman). In contrast to liberals, writers in the Marxist tradition understand twentieth-century developments in terms of the movement from the laissez-faire phase of capitalism to the monopoly stage of capitalism. On the basis of Lenin's famous pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, the monopoly stage is said to exist when: the export of capital alongside the export of commodities becomes of prime importance; banking and industrial capital merge to form finance capital; production and distribution are centralized in huge trusts and cartels; international monopoly combines of capitalists divide up the world into spheres of interest; and national states seek to defend capitalist interests thus perpetuating the likelihood of war (see also imperialism).

Since the extension of the franchise in nineteenth-century Britain there has been a hotly contested debate on the relationship between democracy and capitalism. The experience of the twentieth century, however, shows that there are a variety of political forms—liberal democratic, social democratic, fascist, statist, republican, monarchical—which can accompany capitalist economies. This constitutes the basis for the study of the state in capitalism.

Although the world market has always formed the backdrop to the development of capitalism, a number of recent changes, associated with both the 'globalization of capital', and the demise of the Soviet Union, have strengthened the claim that capitalism should now be viewed as a world system. (See also Anglo-Saxon Capitalism, Rhenish Capitalism.)"