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To the people here who live under socialism...; and think it is good or great....
Topic Started: Oct 27 2008, 11:57 PM (1,467 Views)
Dandandat
Member Avatar
Time to put something here
STC
Oct 28 2008, 06:00 PM
^^^

I'm sure there are a lot of differences, but as the healthcare expenditure is a major one, it would nonetheless be interesting to factor this in.


Yea, but then, you get into the "Who's health care is better" argument that gets no where fast. Quality of a service rendered is an important part of judging its cost.

You know what another major expenditure is? a military. And last I checked the US had quite a large one making it easier for our friends to have a smaller one.
Edited by Dandandat, Oct 28 2008, 06:08 PM.
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Dandandat
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Time to put something here
Minuet
Oct 28 2008, 06:01 PM
Dante - I think we should leave municiple services out of this as they are not funded by federal income tax. That includes leaving out the cost of schooling as this is usually funded locally in the US.

I think it is pretty simple to make a comparison if we add the private cost to Americans of services funded federally by other countries and add it to the total tax cost just to see who is really paying more.
The municipal service was just a fun anecdote to present my point, STC took it for what it was why couldn't you?

The point was there are a lot of differences you would have to take into account if you would like to get something even close to being a proper tax cost analysis.
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Minuet
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Fleet Admiral Assistant wRench, Chief Supper Officer
There is no way to get into the "better" argument because frankly it is inconsistent throughout the US. Some have great healthcare, others none.

The best comparison is to factor in the cost and see if the benefit to more people is coming at a greater cost or a lesser cost.

But to just say you pay lower taxes and not factor in the private cost of what others pay through taxes paints a false picture.
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Minuet
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Fleet Admiral Assistant wRench, Chief Supper Officer
Dandandat
Oct 28 2008, 06:07 PM
Minuet
Oct 28 2008, 06:01 PM
Dante - I think we should leave municiple services out of this as they are not funded by federal income tax. That includes leaving out the cost of schooling as this is usually funded locally in the US.

I think it is pretty simple to make a comparison if we add the private cost to Americans of services funded federally by other countries and add it to the total tax cost just to see who is really paying more.
The municipal service was just a fun anecdote to present my point, STC took it for what it was why couldn't you?

The point was there are a lot of differences you would have to take into account if you would like to get something even close to being a proper tax cost analysis.
Why so hostile? I basically said the exact same thing as STC. I don't know why you would take his comment as "fun". His comment was serious but not rude. Just like mine.
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Dandandat
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Time to put something here
Minuet
Oct 28 2008, 06:09 PM
There is no way to get into the "better" argument because frankly it is inconsistent throughout the US. Some have great healthcare, others none.

Correct; which is why I said it is exceedingly difficult to make a proper tax cost anymses

Quote:
 
The best comparison is to factor in the cost and see if the benefit to more people is coming at a greater cost or a lesser cost.


In correct; you are then judging the US on an ideal your country holds that we do not. That is why the "which healthcare is better" argument never goes anywhere.

Doing as you suggest does not properly account for quality in the eyes of the US. Their for it would not be correct to use that quality number in the analyses of US tax cost.


Quote:
 
But to just say you pay lower taxes and not factor in the private cost of what others pay through taxes paints a false picture.


Oh I agree, I just don't agree with your overly simplistic way to make a proper cost analyses. There are just to many factors you are ignoring. Some even equally as large as health care - as I said military being one of them.
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ds9074
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Admiral
Admiralbill_gomec
Oct 28 2008, 05:20 PM
ds9074
Oct 28 2008, 01:32 PM
Dwayne
Oct 28 2008, 07:48 AM
ds9074
Oct 28 2008, 07:41 AM
Dwayne
Oct 28 2008, 07:21 AM
Unfornutately, one persistent misstatement all of you seem to be making in describing your medical system is this...

"I can get the medical treatment I need totally free of charge"

"Hospital is free"

It is never free, you're just paying for it on the front end, through your tax system.
This is incorrect as for me personally it is totally free. However the point is it is free of charge not free of cost. That means that the cost to an individual is not related to how much they need to use the system or the costs to the system but only to their tax bill.
So, are you saying you produce no income at all? Are you incapable of producing income?

If you are incapable of producing an income, then would it surprise you to know that 100% of your medical needs would be covered in the United States?
I do produce an income but in the UK everyone has something called the personal allowance which means the first £6035 you earn is free from income tax. That means I dont pay that much tax and when you take into account the tax credits I get it means I do indeed pay no tax whatsoever.

8247
 
Basically, I want to know this:

If your gross income is $100,000 a year, how much could you expect to pay in taxes in a year, total.

In the UK, based on current exchange rates, you would pay $25,333 in Income Tax and $6348 in National Insurance. So of $100,000 earned you would keep $68,319, with total deductions of $31,618.

I would be interested to know what the deductions would be like under the US system.
In the United States you would pay $19,472 in tax, leaving you with $80,528.

http://www.irs.gov/individuals/page/0,,id=14806,00.html
Does that also include Social Security payments or is it just Income Tax?

National Insurance is semi-equivilant to social security in that it is a payroll deduction that provides qualifying years towards the State Pension and certain other state benefits.

If you do exclude National Insurance and just compare the Income Tax your talking around $5,500 extra in tax on a $100,000 income under the UK system over the US.

Then look at the average wage in the United States of around $40,000 a year and run the same comparison. The way I calculate it both systems would tax around $6000 in Income Tax.

Finally look at someone working full time at the UK minimum wage which would give a before tax income equivilant to around $18,000. They would pay around $2000 under the US system and around $1600 in the UK.
Edited by ds9074, Oct 28 2008, 07:18 PM.
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somerled
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Admiral MacDonald RN
whitestar
Oct 28 2008, 12:17 PM
8247
Oct 28 2008, 11:08 AM
So, you pay a flat tax rate of 2%? What is your sales tax, estate tax, etc?

Basically, I want to know this:

If your gross income is $100,000 a year, how much could you expect to pay in taxes in a year, total.
very few items attract a sales tax since a 11% GST was introduced in the late ninties.

Estate tax? well, if you mean annuall land rates, they are are a local government tax to pay for services such as garbage collection to road maintenance, etc etc and it's a matter of land value that sets the rate owed, on average in the cities you would expect to pay from one thousand upto many thousands of dollars per year
Income tax on $100,000.... 33%, including 2% levy, thats before tax deductions, the better your accountant the less tax you pay
:doh: it's a 10 % GST here Whitestar ....
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somerled
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Admiral MacDonald RN
Dandandat
Oct 28 2008, 12:44 PM
whitestar
Oct 28 2008, 12:17 PM
8247
Oct 28 2008, 11:08 AM
So, you pay a flat tax rate of 2%? What is your sales tax, estate tax, etc?

Basically, I want to know this:

If your gross income is $100,000 a year, how much could you expect to pay in taxes in a year, total.
very few items attract a sales tax since a 11% GST was introduced in the late ninties.

Estate tax? well, if you mean annuall land rates, they are are a local government tax to pay for services such as garbage collection to road maintenance, etc etc and it's a matter of land value that sets the rate owed, on average in the cities you would expect to pay from one thousand upto many thousands of dollars per year
Income tax on $100,000.... 33%, including 2% levy, thats before tax deductions, the better your accountant the less tax you pay
Whitestar, the Estate tax Frimp is referring to I believe is the tax you pay on inheritance when a family member dies and pass their assets off to you.
There is no such tax here in Australia.

But there used to , up to the late 70s I think .
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somerled
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Admiral MacDonald RN
Minuet
Oct 28 2008, 01:53 PM
whitestar
Oct 28 2008, 12:45 PM
Dwayne
Oct 28 2008, 12:38 PM
^^^ Yes, what is the point?
Ok, I had built a certain respect for you Dwayne, all gone now.
Join the club ;)
Been in that club for a long time.
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Sgt. Jaggs
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How about a Voyager Movie
Wow having read over this post I think this is an outstanding discussion.

What I think you non Americans miss is the perspective that some Americans have and why socialism is a bad word even in a marginalized degree for them.

It means a compromise of principles, a degradation of achievement Liberty and the "American Dream".
Democrats, Liberals and Leftists are labels that can be parsed but, for my point here, generally are one mindset. What I have found is that Leftists want everything both ways. They say they want "fairness or justice" quite often.

However I don't see how it is fair to unilaterally take more and more of their money and give it to the masses. How is that Fair?
Here is why.
Maybe in England you all do not see this but its like this in the United States:
There are SLACKERS here. LAZY people.
I see it in Austin all the time. On a street corner theres a white guy with a sign that says "please give, anything helps." He is not crippled or otherwise incapable of effort. On that same corner a Mexican Illegall walks and blows leaves with his earmuffs.
You people out there may not have seen this in your life experience but I have.
I know dudes who purposely quit jobs because they are Lazy. They float around 3 to 6 months between jobs and live off of somebody else.
Handouts reward that behavior.
Why should people who grind with hard work have their income seized and given to slackers?
Now for the less extreme of the cases I say sure give a hand up. Opportunities are one thing, WICK for low income families who get foodstamps VERY TEMPORARILY for free cheese and cereal for their kids. Great.

The constant errosion of achievement's fruits and hard work is what makes conservative Americans angry. Most of them give more to their churches and charity than the rest of the population does too.

Be carefull that you understand another persons perspective before you try to resolve it. Hell with more Ileegals in the country, if we can just get Lindsy Grahmnesty and some other McCain Rhinos on board we can make a whole new class of poor uneducated Americans able to vote while paying no taxes.

I wonder what they will vote for.
Edited by Intrepid2002, Oct 28 2008, 09:54 PM.
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Franko
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Shower Moderator


It's not socialism that's the problem. It's Statism.


Everytime a government borrows money, you have inflation, which is really just a hidden tax on everyone once again. And when you're country runs up a deficit of unbelievable proportion, well........we know where that leads.

I don't trust liberals or conservatives when it comes to statism. One's as bad as the other. If you're not sticking to the Liberterian ideal, then you're just a closet statist, wanting tons of social programs, or engaging in huge loans for corporations; a mighty military budget that is likely way over what is necessary, a space program, grants here, grants there, and both Democrat and Republican parties indulge in any range of rationalizations that are in fact statist.

Let's be honest. LIberals and conservatives these days are both statists, just with different agendas.

That's how I see it. And each blame the other when these "statist" policies start to cause problems and backfire.

Countries that are broke and carrying massive debt can't engage in tax cuts, can't engage in wars, can't engage in lofty programs, education, development, infrastructure repair. No, all they can do is keep borrowing, and figuring out how to reduce the hungary maws of the bureaucracies that each year want more and more money.

Both Obama and McCain are statists, in fact, McCain couldn't hand over a proposed 700 billion dollars to the banking and investment sector fast enough, without even questioning the integrity of that specific "sum", (he's no economist like Al Gore is no scientist) but merely calculating his own political gain in the matter.

And now even the financial gurus like Greenspan are shrugging and admitting that they may have "made mistakes" about their economic theories. Hey Greenspannie, babe....it's quite simple. A government just can't keep borrowing imaginary money.

It devalues everything, especially our standard of living. Just do the math.








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Dandandat
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Time to put something here
somerled
Oct 28 2008, 09:30 PM
Dandandat
Oct 28 2008, 12:44 PM
whitestar
Oct 28 2008, 12:17 PM
8247
Oct 28 2008, 11:08 AM
So, you pay a flat tax rate of 2%? What is your sales tax, estate tax, etc?

Basically, I want to know this:

If your gross income is $100,000 a year, how much could you expect to pay in taxes in a year, total.
very few items attract a sales tax since a 11% GST was introduced in the late ninties.

Estate tax? well, if you mean annuall land rates, they are are a local government tax to pay for services such as garbage collection to road maintenance, etc etc and it's a matter of land value that sets the rate owed, on average in the cities you would expect to pay from one thousand upto many thousands of dollars per year
Income tax on $100,000.... 33%, including 2% levy, thats before tax deductions, the better your accountant the less tax you pay
Whitestar, the Estate tax Frimp is referring to I believe is the tax you pay on inheritance when a family member dies and pass their assets off to you.
There is no such tax here in Australia.

But there used to , up to the late 70s I think .
You do, I believe, pay Capital Gains on inherited assets, my grandmother and he siblings where required to pay cap gains when their mother passed away.
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somerled
Member Avatar
Admiral MacDonald RN
Sgt. Jaggs
Oct 28 2008, 09:47 PM
Wow having read over this post I think this is an outstanding discussion.

What I think you non Americans miss is the perspective that some Americans have and why socialism is a bad word even in a marginalized degree for them.

It means a compromise of principles, a degradation of achievement Liberty and the "American Dream".
Democrats, Liberals and Leftists are labels that can be parsed but, for my point here, generally are one mindset. What I have found is that Leftists want everything both ways. They say they want "fairness or justice" quite often.

However I don't see how it is fair to unilaterally take more and more of their money and give it to the masses. How is that Fair?
Here is why.
Maybe in England you all do not see this but its like this in the United States:
There are SLACKERS here. LAZY people.
I see it in Austin all the time. On a street corner theres a white guy with a sign that says "please give, anything helps." He is not crippled or otherwise incapable of effort. On that same corner a Mexican Illegall walks and blows leaves with his earmuffs.
You people out there may not have seen this in your life experience but I have.
I know dudes who purposely quit jobs because they are Lazy. They float around 3 to 6 months between jobs and live off of somebody else.
Handouts reward that behavior.
Why should people who grind with hard work have their income seized and given to slackers?
Now for the less extreme of the cases I say sure give a hand up. Opportunities are one thing, WICK for low income families who get foodstamps VERY TEMPORARILY for free cheese and cereal for their kids. Great.

The constant errosion of achievement's fruits and hard work is what makes conservative Americans angry. Most of them give more to their churches and charity than the rest of the population does too.

Be carefull that you understand another persons perspective before you try to resolve it. Hell with more Ileegals in the country, if we can just get Lindsy Grahmnesty and some other McCain Rhinos on board we can make a whole new class of poor uneducated Americans able to vote while paying no taxes.

I wonder what they will vote for.
There blows the tired old and worn out "DOLE BLUDGER" argument yet again. :ZZZZZ:

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somerled
Member Avatar
Admiral MacDonald RN
Dandandat
Oct 28 2008, 09:54 PM
somerled
Oct 28 2008, 09:30 PM
Dandandat
Oct 28 2008, 12:44 PM
whitestar
Oct 28 2008, 12:17 PM
8247
Oct 28 2008, 11:08 AM
So, you pay a flat tax rate of 2%? What is your sales tax, estate tax, etc?

Basically, I want to know this:

If your gross income is $100,000 a year, how much could you expect to pay in taxes in a year, total.
very few items attract a sales tax since a 11% GST was introduced in the late ninties.

Estate tax? well, if you mean annuall land rates, they are are a local government tax to pay for services such as garbage collection to road maintenance, etc etc and it's a matter of land value that sets the rate owed, on average in the cities you would expect to pay from one thousand upto many thousands of dollars per year
Income tax on $100,000.... 33%, including 2% levy, thats before tax deductions, the better your accountant the less tax you pay
Whitestar, the Estate tax Frimp is referring to I believe is the tax you pay on inheritance when a family member dies and pass their assets off to you.
There is no such tax here in Australia.

But there used to , up to the late 70s I think .
You do, I believe, pay Capital Gains on inherited assets, my grandmother and he siblings where required to pay cap gains when their mother passed away.
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/money/story/0,26844,23804825-5015825,00.html
Quote:
 
Death duty has a place in a changing tax environment,
Ross Guest | June 04, 2008 12:00am

THE public auction on taxation reform has begun. The first item on the block is the taxation on petrol. The Federal Opposition made the first bid with a promise to wipe 5¢ a litre off the excise tax on petrol, which led to the Government's counter proposal to consider exempting petrol from the GST – a measure that would effectively wipe 4¢ a litre off the petrol price.
The Bligh Government has even weighed in with a proposal to guarantee Queensland motorists receive the full 8.35¢ a litre fuel subsidy.

We can expect a lot more of these bids and counter-bids in the long run-up to the Rudd Government's Henry review of the tax system, to be completed by late 2010.

This could be very dangerous – some seriously bad tax proposals could finish up on the table and some that should be on the table could be ruled out as a result of pressure from interest groups.

Two examples of the latter have already occurred: changes to both the GST rate and the tax exemption on superannuation income for over 60-year-olds have been ruled out.

If we are going to have root and branch reform of the system, as promised, then all proposals should be on the table, no matter how controversial. That includes an inheritance tax, in return of course for lower taxes on income or goods and services (even, perhaps, petrol).

Queensland, under the Bjelke-Petersen government, led the way in abolishing inheritance taxes (commonly known as estate tax or death duty) in the late 1970s. Thirty-odd years on, however, there are reasons to reconsider inheritance taxes, albeit in a modified form.

Inheritance taxes could help boost the labour force participation of older workers (over-60s), something we now recognise we must do. Research shows this is the most effective way of offsetting the costs of population ageing in terms of future living standards.

Calculations show if we gradually increased labour force participation rates of 60 to 70-year-olds, so they were equal to that of 55-year-olds today, we could reduce the cost of population ageing by more than 50 per cent.

Many baby boomers, aged between 48 and 63, are now receiving large inheritances from their deceased parents whose houses have appreciated considerably in real terms over the past two decades.

At the same time, these baby boomers have often enjoyed rising real prices of their own assets. Such windfall increases in wealth tend to discourage labour force participation – exactly the opposite of what we need. A modest tax on inheritance would reduce the size of a windfall gain, encouraging people to remain in the workforce.

Inheritance taxes score well on the two most important criteria for a "good" tax: fairness and incentives. The tax is fair on the ability to pay principle – windfall gains in wealth give people a greater ability to pay tax.

By taxing the inheritance in the hands of the beneficiary, the tax rate can be adjusted to take into account other income. Those with higher amounts of other income pay a higher rate of tax.

And inheritance taxes interfere with incentives to work and save much less than do most other taxes. Why? Well, we don't know exactly when we are going to die or what our medical expenses will be in our twilight years. This uncertainty encourages many people to "over-save" to compensate. They die with surplus wealth.

Inheritance tax can have good incentive effects in the sense that it discourages wealth inequality arising from windfalls. For example, if the tax rate is higher for bigger bequests, there is an incentive to spread an estate among many beneficiaries in order to reduce the tax rate payable by each beneficiary.

All of this would seem to fit well with the ethos of a Labor government.

But if a 5¢ a litre tax cut on petrol can take centre stage in the national arena for the best part of three weeks, one can only imagine the furore over a proposal for an inheritance tax.

Ross Guest is a professor of economics at the Griffith Business School.


It has been mentioned in public debate , and also in state and federal parliment (I regularly listen to the debates).

No Dan you are misinformed or mistaken - no Inheritance Tax here in Australia , not been since the 1970s .
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whitestar
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Captain
somerled
Oct 28 2008, 09:23 PM
:doh: it's a 10 % GST here Whitestar ....
I knew that... I was just testing you to see how alert you are while shopping for pearls in Broomtown.
I thought I was wrong once but I was mistaken
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