Xanthious said:
Unfortunately for Cain I have just as much chance of writing a tax plan up on this discarded tissue in my waste bin and getting it passed as he does of passing that 9/9/9 plan. Even if he wins the White House (which is highly unlikely as Romney is pretty much all but written in on the ballots at this point) republicans and democrats both will shoot that thing down with a quickness. The conservatives will never let a new 9% federal sales tax pass on their watch while the liberals won't raise the taxes on the poor and middle class, many of whom pay no taxes at all and some even make money come tax time. Bottom line is this plan of his will be dead in the water before it's ever proposed.
The bottom 50% of the country, the poor, do pay taxes. Yes, they don't pay 'federal income' tax, but their income is taxed in payroll taxes by about 8%. Then they pay more state and local income taxes than the rich per dollar, more excise taxes than the rich per dollar, property tax (for the few that manage own anything anyways, and those that don't you can be assured will have their rent adjusted to offset the costs to their renters), higher percentage of their income in sales tax than the rich, etc.
And to say that they're not responsible for
any corporate taxes is also misleading, because if a company pays a % of it's profit in taxes, there's no way that some of that money is not coming out of the wages of employees and prices are raised on consumers to make up the difference. So the poor do effectively pay corporate taxes if they work for one, unless you think that a single CEO pays all corporate taxes out of pocket out of the goodness of his heart.
The bottom 50% is responsible only for roughly 2.5% of the nation's wealth, but it (directly) pays for about 4% of the federal budget.
It's easy to be misleading if you ignore pretty most of the data. Saying they pay no taxes is about as intellectually honest as saying that a bag of skittles only contains red pieces, if you just happen to not count any other color piece.
tehroc said:
Romney isnt going anywhere. A Mormon is unelectable. Look at how much opposition Kennedy had just for being a Catholic (which is a long established religion, not so for the upstart cult of "American Christianity" like Mormonism). I like Cain the best out of the GOP hopefuls, at least he is not a Christian Fundamentalist.
Enough with shitty GOP manufactured talking points. I pay taxes every time I get paid to both federal and medicare/ss .(Sure I get most of my FICA back, but I'm still forced to loan money to the US government [at no interest btw] annually. I get none of my medicare/ss back) I pay state taxes every time I buy something not food related. I pay who knows how many of 100s and 1000s of miscellaneous taxes.
To be fair, times have shifted a bit away from the worry that a Catholic president would be basically a puppet leader for a foreign Papal leader, just because he's Catholic. Now people just think that if somebody's a half black half white Protestant they'll be a puppet leader for a foreign Islamic state, just because his name's spooky and they can't tell the difference between Arabic and Kenyan.
Wait, did I say times have changed? Never mind. Carry on, sir.
