Impeding changes to our Health Care system

[SamIam]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

As long as nearly half the population has no responsibility to pay for the majority of programs in this country that are taken directly from Federal Income Tax we will have a class of voters known as zero liability voters. If you are not paying into the system and all you do is take from the system and rely on others to foot your bill, whatever your excuse, you have no dog in the hunt and no hesitation to continue to vote for others to pay your way as well as to place a greater burden on those who already pay the majority of all Federal Income Tax in order to further support those who pay little to nothing. So yea, Zero Liability Voters are real. It is easy for those who pay little to nothing to state that the rest who pay the majority are doing nothing but "whining" but it makes the facts no less real. As I stated numerous times everybody pays something, but not all pay an equal share of Federal Income Tax, and that is where the majority of the funds come from. Everyone who pays into Social Security only has an interest in what happens to Social Security. To say that, "everyone who pays into "social security" has an interest in what government programs we are ALL going to have to pay for now or next year.", is a completely disingenuous statement. That is one program and it should only be paying into that program, even though politicians have raped it blind.

The ranks of those whose federal income tax burden nets out to zero -- or less -- have grown in recent years for two reasons.

The first is the times we currently live in

The downturn in the economy has hurt household incomes which means that fewer taxes are being collected now than there were a few years back before the financial institutions decided to rip off the American public for an obscene amount of ill gotten gains. Congress furthered reduced tax bills by stimulus legislation which offered Americans temporary tax breaks to lessen the economic pain.

The second reason is that the tax code is filled with hundreds of tax breaks to encourage economic activities the government favors. For example, the law offers credits to supplement the wages of low-income workers, help families pay for college and encourage them to buy homes and have children.

Temporary tax policies, such as the Bush-era tax cuts and the tax breaks passed under President Obama, have also increased the ranks of the non-payers.

But lower income Americans are not alone in receiving tax breaks. Statistics from the IRS show that the tax bite on the very highest income taxpayers has fallen as their incomes have risen. For example, in 2007, the top 400 individual tax returns had an average adjusted gross income of $345 million, up from $47 million in 1992. But their average tax rate was just 17%, down from 26% in 1992. So, by your reasoning this group should now have 9% less say on government spending than they did in 1992.

In 1980 the average tax rate for the upper 50% in income was 17.29%. In 2000 it was 16.43% or a drop of .89% over 20 years - while the percentage reduction for the top 1% in income went from 34.1% to 27.45% over the same time period - a drop of 4.65% which is about 5 times more than the entire upper 50%.

Going by your reasoning, the wealthiest 1% should be able to vote on only one in 5 government spending bills, since they have irresponsibly refused to pay their fair share of taxes.

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

So you think that because you paid some small portion of your lifetime income you have a say in how all Federal Income Tax is taken from a minority of the population and redistributed to the rest of the population? Seriously?

Who? Me? First of all, you have no idea what percentage of my lifetime income I have paid into Federal Income Taxes. And more importantly, if you will recall the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, every US citizen has the EQUAL RIGHT to vote in Federal and State elections and petition the government for the redress of wrongs.

What you are suggesting is nothing less than the creation of a plutocracy where the wealthy will have even more control over the governance of the rest of us than they already do. So, you think that just because you are a fat cat that you get to disenfranchise me and millions of other Americans who happen to fall into the lower 47% of the national income bracket? Seriously?