I Cried Today

big_g wrote:

I seen there was a movie about David Koresh & the Branch Davidians last night… was on really late. Anybody catch it ?

By the looks of some of these replies there are several devout followers of Koresh here.

CaptainMusky wrote:

By the looks of some of these replies there are several devout followers of Koresh here.

LOL

I’ve seen a documentary on that and found it to be fascinating actually. Every time I see a guy with long ratty brown hair I think of David Koresh. Its not a good look.

Steve Hix wrote:

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>Eelpoutguy wrote:</div>
For some of us it doesn’t matter what you claim. They just take it.
They take $.49 out of every $1.00 i make.

There must be more to the story. There is no 50% tax bracaket.

Actually there is it’s called self employment tax if you are single and self employed any money over 170k is taxed at around 50%. Because when you are self employed you have to pay social and med 100%. When you work for someone they pay half of those liabilities.

Fed 37
Mn State 9.85
Mn corp 9.8

Gitchi Gummi wrote:

It’s crazy how much people gripe about the state of Minnesota on this site. No one is forcing you to live and pay taxes here. There are 8 states with no state income tax calling your name.

LOL amen.

Go back a few years, it’s the same people who told everyone to move out of the US if they didn’t like what Trump was ‘doing’. Shoe, other foot, etc.

Like Reef said, 99 times out of 100 if you’re having to pay in big time this time of year, you just need to meet with an accountant and get a better handle on what you’re putting in. And yes, sometimes that means contributing more from every paycheck, even if you are already claiming 0(that’s what my wife and I have to do every year).

As for the portion of what we are all taxed, my only complaints are that the highest tax brackets stop at like $500-$650k. I think they should keep going up the more you make and we don’t tax the extremely wealthy nearly enough.

Other than that, I agree with some here that I don’t like the way tax money is spent, but may be different in what I disagree with. We as a country spend WAY too much on the military and we don’t tax large corporations enough(not even close).

Same thing on the state side I guess, big surplus, spend on infrastructure, education, etc is fine for me. If that money is used to help people/children who need the help, then that’s a better use than a few extra hundred dollars in my pocket. We all do better when we all do better right?

The ultra rich not paying enough taxes is a fallacy. The top 1% pay over 42% of the taxes while the bottom 50% pay only 2%.

Its insane to take more tax dollars from a person who makes more money to pay for roads, etc when they contribute no more to the wear and tear of our infrastructure than someone making peanuts. Taxes should be based on what you are spending and your property value.

Actually I am in favor of a flat sales tax… on everything ! If you can afford it, pay the taxes. If you don’t want to pay taxes, don’t. No more loopholes. If you buy the $2M yacht, pay the 30% tax.. if you buy the $60,000 fish & ski, pay the 30%.. if you buy the $800 canoe, pay the 30%.

I did mine this weekend with TurboTax. Both were rejected. State was rejected because Fed was. Fed was rejected because I missed a form. TurboTax told me what form I missed. Added that info in and both were accepted.
I had my financial advisor run my numbers to estimate my tax liability this year. I adjust the withholdings in one of my pension checks accordingly. I ended up having to pay more since interest rates went up and my savings account generated 7x more interest than expected. No skin off my butt since I made more than expected.

big_g wrote:

Actually I am in favor of a flat sales tax… on everything ! If you can afford it, pay the taxes. If you don’t want to pay taxes, don’t. No more loopholes. If you buy the $2M yacht, pay the 30% tax.. if you buy the $60,000 fish & ski, pay the 30%.. if you buy the $800 canoe, pay the 30%.

This!

I’m about ready to just stop paying altogether. First step will be to stop paying during the year and letting them hold that loan interest-free. We’ve gotten closer to breaking even this year than ever before, but considering just not paying in at all until tax season. Unfortunately I don’t know anybody who does this, so It’s tough to find anybody to talk to about strategies. Everyone looks at returns as a bonus or like they just struck gold- it’s our money why lend it out to a failing government for 12 months at a time and then celebrate when they give us back what they never should have taken to begin with?

If the student loans start being “forgiven” on our dime I’m considering skipping out for a few years altogether. I already paid my taxpayer-funded loans with substantial interest which is what got for going to school during a recession. I’m not ready to pay for anybody else’s.

CaptainMusky wrote:

The ultra rich not paying enough taxes is a fallacy. The top 1% pay over 42% of the taxes while the bottom 50% pay only 2%.

It’s not a fallacy. The fallacy is only considering federal income tax as part of this stat, and neglecting to consider the piece of the ‘new wealth’ pie that the top 1% eat each year. State, payroll, local, and sales taxes are usually regressive, meaning the tax burden goes DOWN the more money you make. This stat above only talks about the federal income tax burden, which is purposefully misleading.

The bottom 50% only holds 2% of the wealth in this country…There isn’t much, if any, juice left in that lemon. Most are living in debt, with $0 or negative net worth, what more are you looking to extract out of those people/families?

Meanwhile, an extra few percentage points taken from the ultra wealthy will have 0 impact on their lives. Absolutely none. You are causing zero interruptions to their quality of life, while potentially helping hundreds of millions.

I know you all are temporarily embarrassed billionaires here, but when will people wake up and realize the ultra wealthy are NOT your friends, and they are NOT you. You’ll never be one of them, why are you trying to protect their money instead of your own, or your family’s, or your friends, or your community’s? It’s almost like cable news programs and the media are owned and operated by extremely wealthy individuals that control the narrative and convince a large part of the country’s population of the plight of the billionaire race….

A mere 30 years ago, the top 10% of Americans held ~30% share of the country’s wealth. They now hold over 70%. If you think that’s a good thing for this country….

Stop giving more tax breaks to the ultra wealthy and corporations, all it’s doing is consolidating more and more wealth and influence in a small group of individuals. It’s called an o-l-i-g-a-r-c-h-y. The consolidation of wealth and as a result, influence and power, is THE number one problem in the US today.

It’s happening at an alarming rate, the ultra wealthy are gaining WAY more than their own share of new wealth every year, so they should be taxed heavily on it. The richest 1% get almost 2/3 of all the new wealth generated every year. . So they are gaining 66% of the total new wealth generated, but only accounting for 42% of the total tax burden. Still sound like they are paying more than they should?

Don’t believe me? Here’s a quote from Warren Buffet himself, a bit old, but when you consider state, federal, payroll, and local taxes(again, regressive taxes), it’s not uncommon for billionaires to have a smaller tax burden(%) than the average American.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744,” Buffet wrote in The Times. “That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

But please, keep spouting off more garbage and misleading conservative talking points, most of which were paid for, and written by, billionaires or their lackeys.

CaptainMusky wrote:

Its insane to take more tax dollars from a person who makes more money to pay for roads, etc when they contribute no more to the wear and tear of our infrastructure than someone making peanuts. Taxes should be based on what you are spending and your property value.

I don’t know, if I owned Amazon, I feel like the 110,000 delivery vans and the 40,000 semi trucks, all the planes, and all the resources they utilize seems like they probably have a bit more wear and tear on the roads and infrastructure than my 2005 Audi a4.

Tough call though, I’m sure it’s pretty close. Some quick napkin math shows they probably are rolling out about 4 trillion pounds of vehicles every single day, while I’m rolling out about 4,000 pounds. So they are like, only literally a million times more weight on the roads than me.

I guess you’re right, it’s basically a wash!

LOL, seriously man, great point though.

Very, very well said Justin Donson. A great examples of this would be the fact we had a previous president who paid no taxes while at the same time was wheeling and dealing more tax cuts for the ultra rich.

Justin Donson wrote:

Meanwhile, an extra few percentage points taken from the ultra wealthy will have 0 impact on their lives. Absolutely none. You are causing zero interruptions to their quality of life, while potentially helping hundreds of millions.

Agreed Comrade Donson! In fact I think we should just confiscate the wealth of all the billionaires. My only question is how we will run the country after that money runs out in a year? (end sarcasm)

If gov’t was even remotely fiscally responsible we would have a lot more agreement on this (and many) issues. Instead we have $7 million dollar rest stops, $500+ million stolen from feeding children, a still TBD Billions spent on SW Light rail and trillions continually and routinely unaccounted for from the CIA. We have a spending problem first and foremost.

BigWerm wrote:

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>Justin Donson wrote:</div>
Meanwhile, an extra few percentage points taken from the ultra wealthy will have 0 impact on their lives. Absolutely none. You are causing zero interruptions to their quality of life, while potentially helping hundreds of millions.

Agreed Comrade Donson! In fact I think we should just confiscate the wealth of all the billionaires. My only question is how we will run the country after that money runs out in a year? (end sarcasm)

If gov’t was even remotely fiscally responsible we would have a lot more agreement on this (and many) issues. Instead we have $7 million dollar rest stops, $500+ million stolen from feeding children, a still TBD Billions spent on SW Light rail and trillions continually and routinely unaccounted for from the CIA. We have a spending problem first and foremost.

LOL, you’re joking, but there’s like no good that comes from that much wealth consolidation. The world would altogether be a much better place if no one was allowed to accumulate that much money…but as usual you take it to the ultimate extreme and act like I’m saying they should be 100% liquidated. There’s a lot of room for Jeff Bezos between $0 net worth and however many Billions in net worth he has right now. And some of those billions could literally ensure that children aren’t going hungry and have access to education, cities have clean water supplies to drink from, veterans are covered and cared for upon return from active duty, etc. etc. Instead they ensure that Jeffie B. gets another $100 million dollar yacht, or more importantly, more or less unlimited influence on congressmen and senators.

I won’t disagree that spending isn’t a problem either, it’s very rare that one action would solve everything. It’s very possible *gasp*, that we could have a tax problem AND a spending problem.

Speaking of spending, can we start with how much we spend on the military? Is there anything more ridiculous?

It’s kind of funny that you are using MN state spending as the example though, given the massive surplus we have right now. But hey, I’ll reiterate. It’s realistic we could have a spending AND a taxing problem simultaneously. But having a spending problem does not mean that we can’t have other problems or that the other problems don’t exist.

The old schtick of the government trying to make you happy by raising someone else’s taxes. That’s the whole “the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes in a nutshell. That’s page one of the playbook. The definition of rich is a moving target and includes more people all the time.

Timmy is not sitting on a $18B surplus because he held a bake sale.

icex wrote:

The old schtick of the government trying to make you happy by raising someone else’s taxes. That’s the whole “the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes in a nutshell. That’s page one of the playbook. The definition of rich is a moving target and includes more people all the time.

Timmy is not sitting on a $18B surplus because he held a bake sale.

I’ve struggled to try and sift through the lies (from both parties) and have failed to keep up. Are some sort of returns to the tax payers completely dead in the water for that ~$18 billion?

Justin Donson wrote:

Agreed Comrade Donson! In fact I think we should just confiscate the wealth of all the billionaires. My only question is how we will run the country after that money runs out in a year? (end sarcasm)

If gov’t was even remotely fiscally responsible we would have a lot more agreement on this (and many) issues. Instead we have $7 million dollar rest stops, $500+ million stolen from feeding children, a still TBD Billions spent on SW Light rail and trillions continually and routinely unaccounted for from the CIA. We have a spending problem first and foremost.

LOL, you’re joking, but there’s like no good that comes from that much wealth consolidation. The world would altogether be a much better place if no one was allowed to accumulate that much money…but as usual you take it to the ultimate extreme and act like I’m saying they should be 100% liquidated. There’s a lot of room for Jeff Bezos between $0 net worth and however many Billions in net worth he has right now. And some of those billions could literally ensure that children aren’t going hungry and have access to education, cities have clean water supplies to drink from, veterans are covered and cared for upon return from active duty, etc. etc. Instead they ensure that Jeffie B. gets another $100 million dollar yacht, or more importantly, more or less unlimited influence on congressmen and senators.

I won’t disagree that spending isn’t a problem either, it’s very rare that one action would solve everything. It’s very possible *gasp*, that we could have a tax problem AND a spending problem.

Speaking of spending, can we start with how much we spend on the military? Is there anything more ridiculous?

It’s kind of funny that you are using MN state spending as the example though, given the massive surplus we have right now. But hey, I’ll reiterate. It’s realistic we could have a spending AND a taxing problem simultaneously. But having a spending problem does not mean that we can’t have other problems or that the other problems don’t exist.

I’m not implying you think all billionaires wealth should be confiscated. I’m saying EVEN if we went to that extreme, it would fund our federal government for less than a year. What then?

And regardless of how much we take, it will not solve child hunger or any of those issues, as we saw with Feeding our Future it will be pilfered to the politically connected. The same week Elon Musk bought twitter for $44B and the socialists said “Why don’t you cure world hunger? It will only take $40B”, the govt sent another $50B to Ukraine for the proxy war. And as I said the CIA has lost count of trillions, more than once. And the state surplus was almost entirely and directly from the money printer giving endless funds to big Corporations and the wealthy, at the expense of unprecedented inflation taxing everyone, including impacting the poorest amongst us the most. And you want to give them more? What modern problems have govt solved? I can present an endless supply of problems free markets have, and an endless amount of “well intentioned” government programs that had the worst of consequences.

Justin Donson wrote:

I don’t know, if I owned Amazon, I feel like the 110,000 delivery vans and the 40,000 semi trucks, all the planes, and all the resources they utilize seems like they probably have a bit more wear and tear on the roads and infrastructure than my 2005 Audi a4.

What a pathetic attempt at an argument. So you are trying to say that Amazon pays the same amount of taxes as you do? GTFOH. What my initial argument was if person A makes 250,000 a year and person B makes 40,000 per year they have equal stake in road maintenance. The more you drive on said roads the more gas you use hence taxed more. Now electric vehicles pose a particular challenge since they are not paying tax on fuel so how are these vehicles contributing to road maintenance? That is a huge loophole that needs to be closed.

I have never heard a “rich person” say, we need to tax the middle class more… For those who think you should be limited in how much wealth you can accumulate, just stop. Just… stop.

big_g wrote:

I have never heard a “rich person” say, we need to tax the middle class more… For those who think you should be limited in how much wealth you can accumulate, just stop. Just… stop.

X2!

The left wants “you will have nothing and be thankful for it”. So much for the land of opportunity.

Justin Donson wrote:

Speaking of spending, can we start with how much we spend on the military? Is there anything more ridiculous?

You’re joking right? If anything we should be spending more on our military. I don’t want to derail this topic but you obviously haven’t served or have a family member in the military.

KP wrote:

You’re joking right? If anything we should be spending more on our military. I don’t want to derail this topic but you obviously haven’t served or have a family member in the military.

Quite sure there are a lot of things he hasnt experienced by the looks of his posts. Thinking we should cut spending on military with the way things are going in Ukraine, North Korea, China and Iran with their nuclear program is insane.

KP wrote:

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>Justin Donson wrote:</div>
Speaking of spending, can we start with how much we spend on the military? Is there anything more ridiculous?

You’re joking right? If anything we should be spending more on our military. I don’t want to derail this topic but you obviously haven’t served or have a family member in the military.

Well, We have quite a bit of snow around here with more coming.
If we get attacked with can just pummel the enemy with snowballs.
Right?

KP wrote:

You’re joking right? If anything we should be spending more on our military. I don’t want to derail this topic but you obviously haven’t served or have a family member in the military.

“The United States spends more on national defense than China, India, Russia, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Japan, and South Korea — combined. ”

https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison

How much more should we spend?

Not sure on an exact $ amount but considering we are sending all our stockpiles of ammo etc to Ukraine we better increase it. It takes years to build the supplies we have and what we have supplied and our production capacity it will take years to get it back to where we were.

CaptainMusky wrote:

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>big_g wrote:</div>
Actually I am in favor of a flat sales tax… on everything ! If you can afford it, pay the taxes. If you don’t want to pay taxes, don’t. No more loopholes. If you buy the $2M yacht, pay the 30% tax.. if you buy the $60,000 fish & ski, pay the 30%.. if you buy the $800 canoe, pay the 30%.

This!

Again, this!^^ Look up Dan Pilla. He is a tax policy expert that has been lobbying for this for a while. His explanation of what this could look like is a real eye opener. No more IRS (think of those cost savings), no more tax returns, no more tax breaks for the rich (if you’re one of those that think the rich aren’t paying their fair share), massive savings for individuals and businesses by doing away with payroll tax processing and returns.

Joe Jarl wrote:

Again, this!^^ Look up Dan Pilla. He is a tax policy expert that has been lobbying for this for a while. His explanation of what this could look like is a real eye opener. No more IRS (think of those cost savings), no more tax returns, no more tax breaks for the rich (if you’re one of those that think the rich aren’t paying their fair share), massive savings for individuals and businesses by doing away with payroll tax processing and returns.

I mean it makes too dang much sense to do this which is precisely why it will never happen.