Our current government (local, state and federal) is set up to increase its strangle-hold on the public as it refuses to consider limiting spending and unnecessary services. Of course, there is always someone who deems each service as necessary - but who will determine when enough is enough? If this matter is not resolved, we will indeed gravitate toward socialism, and ultimately communism. While that concept sounds outlandish, please realize that the government in this country was not set up to take from one group of society and give to another in every aspect of our lives.

Unfortunately, morally fair or not, that is exactly what is going on today.

I would implore all citizens to examine how they intend government to rule their lives. I truly believe the Founding Fathers did not intend for this level of intrusion into citizen’s lives - and therefore we should be working together to focus our government, whether local, state or federal, to work on our behalf, and not against us. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will be interested in reducing their scope of involvement in our lives as perfectly demonstrated in the past several years. While I do not have a defined solution to our problems, I do ask that we discontinue complaining about who pays more or gets more, and focus on reducing the overall burden government is placing on all or our lives. Take care & best wishes to all!

Business and business owners do not bear an unfair portion of the tax burden - they pass it onto their consumers instead.

The percentages are to be found in the MN Department of Revenue Tax Incidence Study, which shows clearly that the bottom 10% pay an effective tax rate (in state and local taxes) of around 17% of their income whereas the top 10% of earners pay around 8% of their income to state and local taxes.

I see JS denying that this is another way to relive pressure on a drastically underfunded news research effort by the Strib, but I don’t buy it at all. Just like public insight journalism at MPR, this is a cost saving measure (and a good way to get tips).

For the record, I think it is morally reprehensible that someone was permitted to take home as much money as an entire country of 7 million people, from the past post which Jeff alludes to.

I also think that John Locke, whom Jeff probably thinks would defend his overblown sense of entitlement to gross, disgusting amounts of property, would have done no such thing.

Reading the second treatsie, we find that life and liberty are rights put before property rights by Locke. Perhaps Jeff hasn’t traveled in central asia or witnessed coverage of the conditions in Afghanistan and neighboring areas, but life and liberty aren’t exactly flourishing there, and distributing the same wealth to a single investment banker as to an entire nation of 7 million, well, that is an affront to the human right to life and liberty.

Also, reading Locke, we’d discover that we only have property rights to those things which we make out of a combination of two things. 1) Our own, god-given labor, and 2) resources not created through anyone else’s labor (i.e. wild game or land).

He goes on to say that our right to the land we’d be working only goes so far as we can productively use that land. Pretty hard to productively use 3.6 Billion in a year.

Usually, people like Jeff stop reading after the section regarding individual rights in a state of nature. But in a state of society, like, for example, the United States, almost none of the resources could exist without everyone’s combined labor.

Consider the combined effort involved with the means of transportation, or the stable and widely accepted currency we have, or the markets free of foreign invasion, or the level of domestic tranquility and lack of popular uprising we have enjoyed.

People like Jeff get so mad when it is suggested that they pay taxes on the basis Adam Smith suggested - proportional to income - rather than equal dollar amount per head, as the US Constitution specifically disallows.

And then, people who never bothered to read Adam Smith or John Locke or anyone else relevant to questions of property rights and taxation get their opinions published, not only on blogs like this one, but in the letters section, in a ridiculous 6:1 ratio vs. people who support proportional taxation like proposed by Senator Dayton in his recent editorial.

It goes directly to what Ladies and Gentlement is saying. People are entitled to opinions, but they’re not entitled to mislead the public with clearly false and misleading arguments, ignoring facts, and particularly, simply because personal greed enjoys a 6:1 advantage over public sharing as a value among your publication’s readers doesn’t mean that the publication needs to try and convince that 1 reader in 7 who is a good person.

I just think that it’s wrong to have Miley Cyrus as a sex symbol when she can’t drive a car, or vote.

James Shiffer

thank you for sharing that you are selfish. Now all that read this know that, but the point of your arguement is more like POOR ME.. WHAAAA WHAAAA

I make a lot of money, and shouldn’t have to help with anything, whaaaaa

I pay 12% of my income in for taxes whaaaaa

Even though a person that is less off may pay 31% of their income in various taxes… whaaaa whaaaa whaaa

My 70,000 (12% is more money than their 11,000 31%) so it’s not fair it’s not fair…

whaaaa

Well, guess what… if people with money were a bit more shall we say less likely to try and bend over the poor people to take more of what they have… the poor people probably wouldn’t complain because they can’t afford the private education, or to send their children to college… so being nice to them just a little probably wouldn’t do much more than help keep the peace, and the silence, but when you have companies that are legally allowed to discriminate against others then there are problems. When you’ve got companies that say they can’t afford to pay more for healthcare, but they donate 2.5 million dollars in campaign funds to the people that keep the health insurance industry in constant dysfunction then my friend you can take your pacifier and put it in the other hole, and bounce the hell out of Dodge because I don’t really want to hear rich people complaining.

When companies start taking care of their employees, then maybe we won’t have as much public out cry?

I blogged about it on myspace and received about 700 reads of it, and as it stands it can be found in the top 10 still for the Celebrity aspect of myspace blogging if you are familiar with their catagories.

But the other night I was working on a new poem, and I saw a survey asking a question that really bothered me. It was 1 am.

ARE YOU HOTTER THAN MILEY CYRUS?

Isn’t this in a way forcing the sexuality of a 15-16 year old girl as a sex symbol?

I’m normally a pretty liberal guy on a lot of things, but as a father I don’t know of anyone that would let their children be up at 1am in the morning, and two beyond the seemingly blatant pandering of Miley Cyrus to a mostly male population at that point in time online…

When something like that appears during the day, and a teenager sees that it can only make them feel bad about themselves… give them goals that are not physically obtainable for most people.

This kind of thing really bothers me, and in a way I see the people of myspace, and the creator of that survey profiting off the sexual exploitation of a teenage girl.

Is there anything that can be done? I don’t know. Myspace rarely responds personally to cries of foul on their page, and I am afraid to click the survey because of the potential of a virus, or tracking software being downloaded onto my computer.

Myspace has been a great avenue for my writing, and the dialog for the most part on this topic, and my writing has been VERY WELL RECEIVED, but it’s surveys like that which help make myspace look like a pedophile playground of which I have never seen any examples of in my 2.5 years on the site, but it’s reputation is already horrible. This just seems to be poor management.

Personally I just want something written into the morality codes of conduct that corporate people make. I know that if the JR. VP of such and such company is busted with a prostitute, or a DWI as a representetive they can be fired for making the image of the company take a hit. I want a morality code put in that these people are resposible not to exploit the sexuality of teenagers.

Am I in the right? Am I in the right place?

Have I just sold my liberal self, and become a fascist book burning conservative that hates free speech?

I don’t think so, but if it protects my children, and my children’s friends from harm. OK, but I would still rather die and go to hell than ever vote for a republican after Pawlenty, Coleman, and Bush have trashed our country and our state so badly in their tenures.

- first, identify a fictitious whipping boy (business owner, the rich, investors, etc.);
- then, focus on the real dollars paid by these lamentable groups under present tax policy;
- finally, whine about unfair (or biased) coverage focusing on the percentage tax burdens of those falling within the “middle” and “low” tax families.

Often this formula is used to create the impression of a reasoned argument, but practically it’s a “red herring” used as a non-sequitor to confuse the conversation, as is the case here with Jeff’s post. For instance: at what point do taxes weigh in on examining the moral and ethical behavior of community actors (commercial, governmental, individual)? But for the mind of the conservative talk point cheerleader, there’s no logical connection between the two in the present instance.

Why is the Star Tribune now asking us to do their work for them? This seems like another way for the Strib to save money by not having to do any actual reporting.

What a joke.

Instead of investing all your effort in telling others how much money CEOs make (as if it were a crime in this country), why not focus a little attention on the HUGE chunk of income taxes that these people pay? Go ahead…state the percentages. And then why don’t you state the percentage of taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of income-earners.

Go ahead and blow your whistle about that….

Instead of slamming business people, America should be thanking them for carrying an unfair tax burden as well as employing millions and millions of American citizens.

Jeff