Your tax dollars at work by dreamtrove

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Your tax dollars at work

POSTED BY: DREAMTROVE
UPDATED: Sunday, January 23, 2011 19:00
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Sunday, January 23, 2011 6:35 PM

I was just reading a out iRobots great new projects for this new american century.

Remember that cute little robot that cleans your living room? Well, now it's being replaced with a new model that kills all humans. Yep. Johnny five is actually not so cute, as it turns out, and terminator is on it's way.

So, how did this happen? Well, like all evil, incrementally. The military spied the company some time ago, and hire them to clean their floors, and then make some exclusively non-combat robots, and then search and rescue robots, etc.

Meanwhile, being clever as they are, they contracted with a different company to design an AI automated point and kill system, and simply mounted one on the other, and Presto-chango, you have the killing robot.

So, folks at robot are semi-down with this, because, like any frog on slow boil, they accept incrementalism and still claim that it is primarily for rescue missions. We know what happens if company heads or workers realize where this is headed and decide to oppose the plan. Like roomba, they get replaced with their deadlier counterparts.

So, how did we get here?

Economics.

If you have a govt. That has limitless money, they can pay more. They can in fact, manipulate the economy, depress the private sector and limit middle class buying power and put companies under stress and then show up as economic saviors with this new contract. (oh, and they're real good salesmen too, I saw an interview with a couple execs from iRobots after the first contract, and they were like "our robots will be saving lives." I could tell they were not convinced themselves, which is why they were telling me: to convince themselves.

So, how much money does the govt, have and where did it get it, and how can the households of America compete, and how can we reach an economic parity where all working groups that contribute the same amount to society have the same power in our economy (I'd consider this a fair goal for a free market. While I don't believe in forcing anything, because that empower enforcers, I think that any reasonable system would be designed with this or something like it as a goal.)

First, obviously taxes. Since we all pay 90% of our income in taxes...

Yeah, I know, stopped you with that one. Most of you. A few of y'all is clever and got there before me. I'm not real clever, but I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff, and you can figure stuff out if you keep trying at it.

Works like this.

A corporations makes something. (I've worked this one through dozens of times, so let's take a new example, food this time.) so, let's say chocolate bars. They don't start out as chocolate bars do they?

Nah, it's milk, which is domestic, and cocoa and sugar which are made overseas in slave plantations, (but for the sake of our system, consider what if they were paid workers, and were here, because that's how the system generally is supposed to work, and it ain't no benefit to anyone if the lower taxes are because of slavery.)

So, the milk is made on a farm. The farmer either pays for feed, or he has land, let's assume the latter, because I'm assuming were in Pennsylvania and it's a Hershey bar, assuming they're still made here. The cows graze on land, a lot of it, which is taxed, and they produce milk, which the farmer sells, to pay his bills, and his taxes. So, the milk is taxed twice, and done properly, so are all the other ingredients of the candy bar.

So, then we go to the factor, which is a building, so it's taxed, and it has employees, each of them pays tax, lots and lots of it, because they're Americans, and there's nothing the govt. Hates more than hiring Americans, that's why the economic system punishes this more than anything. To hire an american you need disability, unemployment, health, injury and pension insurances, which are technically really taxes, because really the banks are the govt. And they own the insurance industry, which they undoubtedly created, but I didn't include these in my taxation even though this money will then in turn be loaned to the govt for war.

So, Additionally, for each of these workers, the company has to pay FICA. But then, so do the workers right? Yes, but the employer is paying that salary, which they have to make higher, so they can pay the FICA, and pay the taxes of the employees, including their federal, state and local taxes, including their property tax, so, yeah. And as we all know, at least Americans here are familiar with it, the company never really pays the workers this money, they send it directly to the govt. Through that famous unconstitutional "withholding."

So for each worker, FICA was paid, TWICE. And then fed taxes and state taxes, and then lots of insurance programs. Those insurance programs, even if we don't count them as taxes which they are, are done by companies which have lots of employees, paying tax, and which make huge profits, on which they pay tax.

Anyway, we have our chocolate bar. And any company that wants to make more than one chocolate bar has to make a profit, so they can have more money with which to make more chocolate bars, and employ more workers. And, this profit is taxed. Again.

But the chocolate bars are all in Hershey, PA. That's not a lot of use to anyone, because the kids of Hershey are probably already getting fat, and they can't eat that much chocolate or someone will turn them into a giant blueberry. So, chocolate bars have to go somewhere. Fortunately, there's trucking companies.

Now truckers pay taxes. They drive vehicles that pay taxes, which consumes fuel, which is very heavily taxed. In order to be the kind of trucker that could handle Hershey, you gotta be a growing business, and you gotta make a lot of profit to do that... On which you are taxed. So off the heavily taxed chocolate bar is going.

Eventually, it arrives at a store, a building, which is taxed. Where workers, who are taxed, can put it on the shelf, and other workers who are taxed can sell it for their company to make a profit which is taxed, and for the final insult, when they sell it to a customer, who is spending their untaxed remaining portion of their heavily taxed income, yes,you got it, it is taxed.

You can figure out the number of times that each thing got taxed and how much, but it becomes mind boggling the further you go with it. It's obvious that each worker is paid twice as much as he takes home, but if everything that worker did, including necessary things for his or her job, like driving to work, or living near work with some expensive mortgage, their expensive degree etc. Were not so heavily taxed, might it not be a great deal less?

Nonetheless, even the visible taxes add up to around 90%.

Much of it can be laid bare at the Indian reservation. You can see how much cheaper the cigarettes are, maybe 1/2 as much, and you realize, oh, that's the tax on cigarettes, but then you look at the difference between those brands and the Indian native brands, and they're 1/2 as much again or less. But stop and think a moment and you realize that the Indian price for their own cigarettes, which is $2 a pack (no, I don't smoke, neither do I gamble, but I notice this stuff) is *just* enough lower to make people switch. They probably thought it through and realized that they wouldn't get appreciably more customers at $1 a pack, but if they thought they could've, they would've.

So, Uncle Sam has four trillion or so to throw around. (remember, much of the budget is no longer officially in the budget) each year. In spending money. African Americans, collectively, have 20 billion dollars, in total savings. I just read that on some website, I think it was a govt. Website, anyway, it was full of stats on the population. Goes a long way to showing why there aren't so many black owned businesses out there. So, Bill Gates has more money than black America, but he's still a paubler compared with ol Sam.

Fact is, when you look into it enough, you begin to realize how much worse it is than we think:

The banks are deliberately hiding money so as to not devalue the dollar because they own so much of it. I read somewhere else probably some conspiracy site, or some tween's blog ;) but I did my own figuring and I figure this is about right, that if the banks were to actually disclose their holdings and unleash those into the economy, it would reduce the value of the dollar to about a penny.

Since the banks can buy out any industry in american that is so called publically held, then it's not really a free system is it, they can just steer any industry they want to towards death and destruction.

So, here's the question if you made it through this laborious post:

How do you design an economic system where the individual determines what gets made, so we can have more vacuum cleaners and fewer deathbots?

ETA: re: Fremism, where you vote where your dollars go, because it wouldn't work. I like the idea, but it's got two problems, 1) govt. Will always find ways to spend money where it wants, ie, on war, (97 cents of every FICA dollar ever paid, and that stuff was earmarked for welfare I thought) and 2) Rap has a point: the wealthiest 2% or so pay most of the taxes, and add corporations, and that's almost all of it, so how much power would the average american really have in such a system? But mainly, I'm going to assume that once uncle Sam has it, it's going to bombs, and there's not a damn thing anyone will ever be able to do about that. So, we gotta redirect the economy before it gets into their hands.

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Sunday, January 23, 2011 7:00 PM

CANTTAKESKY

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
How do you design an economic system where the individual determines what gets made, so we can have more vacuum cleaners and fewer deathbots?

Tax 1% of businesses making more than $100,000 profit. No tax for anyone else.

Next question?

;)

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Everything I say is just my opinion, not fact.

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