[quote=kev374][quote=asianautica] Aren’t they supposed to get rewarded for working 2x has hard as most people?[/quote]

Amen to that! what we don’t need is socialism. America has become great because of the philosophy that the harder you work the more rewards you get to keep. Sadly these socialists are trying to take from those who work 2x as hard and give to those that put in only minimal amount of effort.

We need FAIR taxation across the board. Sure, exempt the lowest income that is needed to subsist from income taxes but AFTER that it should be flat tax. Everybody pays their share as a percentage equally.
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It is a very popular, however, almost entirely incorrect belief among conservatives that the rich work harder for what they have than the poor. This seems to be largely because conservatives like to think that our current capitalistic system is both fair and impartial, and rewards work.

In fact, purely capitalistic systems do not reward work. They reward CAPITAL. Indeed, the drive of a capitalistic system is to REDUCE the amount of costs incurred by work, to maximize the amount of reward to capital (e.g. cut expenses by doing such things as offshoring salaries to less expensive countries, to increase the “bottom line”, and thus dividends available to the stockholders, who’s only work in the company is in putting CAPITAL into it).

This, of course, leads to serious inequities, where the top 1% don’t actually need to work at all to continue to make enormous amounts of money (and many don’t – and those that do, frequently work “bankers hours”…like George W. Bush has pretty much his entire life). Some actually did work their way up to it…many others though, inherited the wealth, and have done little or no productive work at all in the economy, yet receive an enormous benefit and continuing income from simply having capital to invest, that they never worked at all for.

Over the long term, a pure capitalist system tends to concentrate the vast majority of capital into the hands of a very few (something that happened in the late 1800’s, and is currently happening again today, as we witness with every year the gap between the rich and the poor widening – CEO’s, for example, now make 300x the average wage – a tenfold increase in the disparity between the have’s and the have-not’s in less than a generation).

A progressive tax is only part of the solution needed to keep the excesses of capitalism in check, but it is certainly needed. Capitalism is NOT inherently fair, and to balance it, frequently there need to be checks on it which are equally unfair in the opposite direction.