[quote=gandalf]That’s a good post, eaves. I don’t know if I was responding to you, more generally to the clueless right-wing rhetoric that gets thrown around here at times, wealth redistribution for example.

Be sure to add to the tatoo: “Decreasing taxes without lowering spending increases the deficit.” Taxes are historically low on wealthy individuals and corporate ‘persons’, exacerbated by a cottage industry of tax avoidance.

In general, country clubs and corporations are chock full of shirkers and freeloaders and they need to pay their fucking way like the rest of us.[/quote]

Again.. Until our government has a more accurate definition of “wealthy”, I’ll pass. and align my vote to minimize an effective government to do any real change….
Because the tax on the “rich” is always “tax the upper middle class and make them poorer so that the true insanely rich don’t get touched….The only difference between the rhetoric from the two party is one takes money away from the lower part of the middle class, while the other takes away from the upper part of the middle class. Both parties leave the true rich alone and can’t take it from the poor since, well they are poor. That $200/250k household line defining “rich” is one example of this joke. Just like the attempt to repeal prop 13 (while grandfathering in folks over 60). Let’s just get real. This country will never heavily tax the true wealthy…

And those “tools” aren’t going away…Because those corporations that provide the tools are heavily entrenched in our government. Do some due diligence on variable annuities for example…Why do you think an insurance product has such favorable estate tax treatments? And run the numbers to figure out who truely can/should be using these tools.