Stephen King: Tax the FUCK out of me!

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

OK so another rich person has broken ranks and is spitting in the symbolic eye of the GOP, who holds people like him up on a pedestal. 

Only he goes further and shreds Good Old Gov. Christy aka Santa Claus and his "shut up and write a check" dismissal of The Buffet Plan.

And this ain't no fiction, but it is a horror story.

From Comrade King:

Cut a check and shut up, they said.

If you want to pay more, pay more, they said.

Tired of hearing about it, they said.

Tough shit for you guys, because I’m not tired of talking about it. I’ve known rich people, and why not, since I’m one of them? The majority would rather douse their dicks with lighter fluid, strike a match, and dance around singing “Disco Inferno” than pay one more cent in taxes to Uncle Sugar.


Lighter Fluid (Made in China)

The read is entertaining and reinforces some common sense realities (unless you are an apologist for the GOP, where you can take a cue from Christy, and dismiss those not in lock-step with your view).

So, does his position on the fantasy that is 'jobs creation' change anyone's mind? Still want to argue 'trickle down'? I say it, again, like so many other posts this week have shown, we need to either tax the fuck out of the rich, again, or take a big chunk of a billionaire's estate in tax, and put if back into the coffers from whence it beget. So the infrastructure can be maintained for the next generation of billionaires to EARN wealth as opposed to INHERITED wealth.

I'll settle for either.

Comments

[fornikate.livejournal.com]

my king

[luzribeiro.livejournal.com]

Stephen King is a commie zombie? Oh, the horrors!

[sealwhiskers.livejournal.com]

Well, like King, I've met some of the truly wealthy..and the thought of anything trickling down from them (even numerous jobs) is humorous, to say the least.
Their whole existence is devoted to figuring out how to *not trickle* so to speak. The only people getting real money from them are lawyers who figure that shit out for them.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Depends :)

trickle down, indeed

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

what amazes me are the people who defend the rich's 'right' to be taxed at historically low levels have probably never met one, mush less know them on a social level.

Conservatives desperately want to be seen as peers to the wealthy because they dream of being wealthy themselves ("If it wasn't for the goddamn LIBERALS!..."). Unless they hit a lottery, what they have now is all they will ever have.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

So, they don't buy anything? Interesting.

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

19 and 99. And i say Thankee-sai.

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

King Code?

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

More seriously: King sums up something that's really been bothering me. Yes, the wealthy do give a lot ot charity, but he points out why that's potentially a fallacious argument: they give to pet causes, and often those causes don't actually accomplish the business of running a nation. And again, there will be accusations of class-envy or wanting to punish success or whatever, but I love what King said: "Nobody wants [Mitt to apologize for being wealthy]. What some of us want—those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money—is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged."

Good point about "Let them eat cake" and "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" at the end. Sums up the establishment response to Occupy perfectly: Antoinette's "They should just get jobs!" and Scrooge's "They're all rapists smelly hippies who belong in jail!" And way to stick it to Christie. What a blowhard. Finally someone took that idiotic "Why don't you just write a CHECK then" meme and put it in its place.

[fornikate.livejournal.com]

no you see they did it all by themselves! on an island!

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged."

I acknowledge this. The problem is we disagree on who/what is doing the clogging.

[harry-beast.livejournal.com]

they give to pet causes, and often those causes don't actually accomplish the business of running a nation
The same could be said of government, except they do it with taxpayers' money.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Oh Christy, he has such a punchable face, anyone else notice that?

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Jimmy Kimmel at the White House Correspondents' dinner last Saturday:

“You know, they say that inside every American governor there’s a president struggling to get out. In Chris Christie’s case, it’s the only one where you can still hear him screaming. Governor Christie, I think you might be misunderstanding New Jersey’s slogan—it’s not ‘The Olive Garden State’.”

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Watch out! He carries himself like a made guy. You might wind up with some broken bones for such remarks.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Punching his face would send ripples throughout the time-space continuum. A buttefly would die somewhere.

[caerfrli.livejournal.com]

I used to be rich (not Romney or even King rich but top 5% rich) before the crash and I urged higher taxes all the time. Telling people to voluntarily pay more is just being fatuous.

[curseangel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my belief is pretty much that the rich should be taxed probably more than twice what they are now, and if they want to whine about how ~unfair it is, they can go elsewhere (because, much like people who threaten to move if an election doesn't go their way, they most likely won't ever do it). Trickle-down economic theory has been more or less proven to be entirely false, and frankly, if you want to bleat about how much you love America and how much of a ~patriot~ you are, you can damn well pay your share to the society that has benefited you to the point of your having more money than 95+% of your peers.

Then again, I believe in the social obligation of the rich to give back to the society that enabled them to become rich. Most rich folks (excluding Mr. King, nicely enough) and conservatives don't seem to agree with that, strangely. They'll go on and on about patriotism, but apparently loving America doesn't mean loving it enough to give anything back to it.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

The problem isn't so much that I think the rich need to be taxes more as some sort of punishment but that the rich need to be taxes more because they can best afford it. I'm not sure where people get the idea that the rich need so much freaking money. Its at ludicrous levels of greed currently. When we have large quantities of poverty in the same country, it's fairly horrific and morbid.

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

You know I really don't know why I even bother anymore, It's not like any of you even hear what I'm saying, but since I'm bored, have a few minutes on my hands and a glutton for punishment once more into the breech.

Stephen King shows quite clearly that he hasn't got the slightest fucking clue what he is talking about.


First off the idea that we do not tax the rich "enough" is patently laughable. When all taxes at all levels of government are taken into consideration America has the most progressive tax system in the industrialized world. Sure tac "rates" are historically low, but thinking that tax rates drive what you pay in taxes is tantamount to thinking a car is fast because of it's shape while ignoring little things like it's weight, engine, transmission, suspension, etc.

Second even if the rich were paying low taxes lets see a proposal to raise them. More specifically how are you going to force the people who have the assets to essentially live income free to pay more than they want to in taxes with a system which pretty much only taxes income? "The Rich, including Mr King ALWAYS pay what they want to in taxes because regardless of how the tax system is structured they have the wealth to shift around money and even relocate should it come down to it to pay the rates they are willing to pay. So really, "Tax the Rich" it makes for a wonderful campaign slogan but the practical application of it is problematic at best.

Third, even assuming you could devise a system that really would extract significantly greater tax revenues from the rich the idea that this will somehow solve any bugetary problems the country faces is pure ignorance of demographics and how much income "The Rich" actually earn.In a fantasy dreamland scenario where everything went right and there were no negative consequences at all from the tax hikes you might be able to get another $200 Billion a year in revenues from taxing the rich, $70 - $80 billion a year is a far more realistic number, that is not even enough to make a dent in the Bush deficits and it's just a rounding error for Obama so it won't do a damn thing to help maintain "infrastructure".

This entire "The Rich aren't paying their fair share" meme is little more than the Democratic equivalent to Republicans bitching about government funding for the NEA or Public Radio, a nice talking point to pander to the base but utterly meaningless in terms of real economic policy.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

Stephen King shows quite clearly that he hasn't got the slightest fucking clue what he is talking about.

But he's rich. HE MUST BE SMART.

I disagree with your assessment of the affect. Returning to pre-bush-tax cut rates keeps SSI solvent, for example. That's serious business.

No one suggests it be the ONLY thing. But it would be good if it were first. And, frankly, people who move their money outside the country to try to save money on taxes should be punished. Society has a cost. We should be proud to pay it.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Back when the US had a rational tax policy, the greatest fear was that there would be too much money in the federal treasury. How quickly things changed after flat-earthers took control.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

[muscadinegirl.livejournal.com]

Just heard this afternoon on NPR that the majority of jobs created this month, which were much fewer than expected, were created by small businesses.

Big business just seems to take and take and demand more. My personal cynical view is that they're not going to create jobs in this country until they're allowed to chain our children to the floor to make them work.

[geezer-also.livejournal.com]

Your two sentences have actually nothing to do with each other.Given the state of the economy a big business can be in much worse shape than a small business. As a small business owner a small temporary up tick can generate enough business for me to hire someone...generally someone I have laid off. Small business hires, as a rule (again there are qualifiers depending on the type of business) in my experience tend to be more temporary.