Some thoughts on taxation and the economy:

Of course we shouldn't tax everyone so that they have the same amount after, as someone falsely suggested that I wish. That's ludicrous. You know, that's the one after ridiculous. How did you come up with that one??? As I see it, everyone, with few exceptions, is interested in bettering themselves. But in the same way that the industrial revolution freed people's time to get more creative, more innovative, because they were freed from the drudge of subsistence living, so should we consider something a bit above the poverty line as a base necessary income.

Taxing can start after that, or taxing becomes a means of maintaining poverty. Small businesses, the same. It is less of a public expense in the long run, as has been pointed out by several communities, to give indigents a minimum living situation, than to clean up after their efforts to do it on their own. Safer, too, including drug usage. Salt Lake City UT and Richmond CA are examples.

Taxing can from those points be graduated. It's been done before, "in extremis" compared to today, and people still got filthy rich. Why? Because there are in fact two economies. But that is another discussion, although it bears on this one in that being more heavily in the paper one pays enormously better than the labor one, both in income and in greatly reduced taxes.

As for graduated taxes, while there can be much boasting that "I built this all on my own", that's essentially bullshit. No one does anything alone except die. So somewhere along the line the great guru of free enterprise, Adam Smith, has to be acknowledged for his least popular and least invoked directive: There has to be a mechanism to ensure that money circulates, else it will pool at the top (yeah, that's not happening) and eventually the system will fall over for lack of support. That system would be taxes, those going back into infrastructure and public works, including the Arts, those all being the very stuff of material civilization.

There are also other ways that what we have chosen to do that would fund the government independently from taxes. We have, because of certain Western tendencies, not gone down those roads, often to our detriment. Principally this is because we are pathologically infected with a view of success that is extravagant, unbalanced, and extraordinarily expensive in terms of social and geophysical ecology. And please remember that "ecology" is no fru-fru term. It comes from the same root, "eco-" as does "economy" and both relate to keeping house.

Restricting our considerations of those to the absurdly and suicidally dangerous narrowness of supporting astonishing accumulations of money by a relatively few is both pathological suicidal in terms we most likely refuse to look at because we think of supporting all that in terms of our own personal survival. Nothing could be further from the truth. But in the same way that a successful Wall Street campaign convinced the general public that this is a Nation founded on christianist, not secular, values, we have as a public also been mislead into thinking that the kind of capitalism we practice is God's gift and it cannot be improved upon.

If you ever talk to a banker who operates at an international level, and ask the right questions, you will discover, as one I know admitted, that our current economy and financial practices are the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on humankind aside from religion. But that is another pair of discussions yet. And if you are interested in a short bit about the money pooling in one place I will PM that to you on request.

I'm sorry that this was so long. Not because you or someone had to expend attention reading it, but because it is evidence of how potently packages the lie of our economy is packed in pill Those are two different questions. What do you think?

Of course we shouldn't tax everyone so that they have the same amount after. That's ludicrous. You know, that's the one after ridiculous. How did you come up with that one??? As I see it, everyone, with few exceptions, is interested in bettering themselves. But in the same way that the industrial revolution freed people's time to get more creative, more innovative, because they were freed from the drudge of subsistence living, so should we consider something a bit above the poverty line as a base necessary income.

Taxing can start after that, or taxing becomes a means of maintaining poverty. Small businesses, the same. It is less of a public expense in the long run, as has been pointed out by several communities, to give indigents a minimum living situation, than to clean up after their efforts to do it on their own. Safer, too, including drug usage. Salt Lake City UT and Richmond CA are examples.

Taxing can from those points be graduated. It's been done before, "in extremis" compared to today, and people still got filthy rich. Why? Because there are in fact two economies. But that is another discussion, although it bears on this one in that being more heavily in the paper one pays enormously better than the labor one, both in income and in greatly reduced taxes.

As for graduated taxes, while there can be much boasting that "I built this all on my own", that's essentially bullshit. No one does anything alone except die. So somewhere along the line the great guru of free enterprise, Adam Smith, has to be acknowledged for his least popular and least invoked directive: There has to be a mechanism to ensure that money circulates, else it will pool at the top (yeah, that's not happening) and eventually the system will fall over for lack of support. That system would be taxes, those going back into infrastructure and public works, including the Arts, those all being the very stuff of material civilization.

There are also other ways that what we have chosen to do that would fund the government independently from taxes. We have, because of certain Western tendencies, not gone down those roads, often to our detriment. Principally this is because we are pathologically infected with a view of success that is extravagant, unbalanced, and extraordinarily expensive in terms of social and geophysical ecology. And please remember that "ecology" is no fru-fru term. It comes from the same root, "eco-" as does "economy" and both relate to keeping house.

Restricting our considerations of those to the absurdly and suicidally dangerous narrowness of supporting astonishing accumulations of money by a relatively few is both pathological suicidal in terms we most likely refuse to look at because we think of supporting all that in terms of our own personal survival. Nothing could be further from the truth. But in the same way that a successful Wall Street campaign convinced the general public that this is a Nation founded on christianist, not secular, values, we have as a public also been mislead into thinking that the kind of capitalism we practice is God's gift and it cannot be improved upon.

If you ever talk to a banker who operates at an international level as I have, and he is honest with you and you have asked the right questions, it will be revealed to you that our present economic system is the biggest hoax perpetrated on humankind along with religion. But those are two other discussions.

I'm sorry that this is so lengthy. Not because it may have taken some expenditure of attention on someone's part, but because the lie of the necessity of our present system has been made into such a compact and potent pill to make it easy for the public to swallow. It takes this much space to untangle it even a bit, and could take much more. It is that entrenched. And it is also likely that you are completely immunized to even thinking about it a tiny bit, that tiny bit which could lead to a new kind of freedom, one many seem not to be capable of imagining. Nor do you want to, being perfectly happy with what in the end are crumbs.