Obama calls Steve Jobs' success a prime example of American wealth - Page 2

great points, obama should be praising wealth building and getting rich
i would like to be rich, making creating goods people want and MAKING JOBS
i never got a job from a poor person, this war on "rich" wealthy, etc kills jobs
i want my boss to do very very well, so i can keep my job as i show him/her my worth in my work ethic and if not i can move to another job....JOBS MAN JOBS

Government needs to get away from picking winners and losers, but it benefits far too much from feeding dependency, welfare, unemployment, disability ARE NOT CAREERS.

Hey, the wealthy in this country pay very little in taxes, this is a fact, despite your whining.

Based on our current tax structure, Oprah or SJ pays 7% more of their incomes in taxes than I do, and I can assure you I am not wealthy. Their incomes are *-much-* larger, 'obscenely larger' would be an apt description in FACT, and they have a great many more deductions such that they really shouldn't have to pay much tax at all if they have experienced any losses (like Oprah slipped and gave away 2 dozen more Cadillacs than she should have or something.)

Seriously? Seven percent more? Those poor, poor rich people. Since 35% is the top bracket, and no one pays more than that, then people who are barely making ends meet shouldn't be paying even 1/2 that much. But, the TRUTH is that someone who is making 34K is paying OVER 70% of what the ELITE PAY--so that's 25% from the struggling workers and only 35% from the richest of the rich. How in the world is this fair? On 34K you are going to be lucky to afford a house and a car.

Apple doesn't need the whole world they only needed less then 10% to be massively profitable. Most of the other companies make money on quantity because they have all undercut each other on price. Those other companies need "the world" to support them.

You just don't get it do you. Socialists never do.

such ridiculous abortion of intelligence.

You're a socialist. Get over it. We all are.

Lol, I couldn't help but quote you on this ridiculous post. A 7% increase has no bearing on the real world take away of income taxation.

Say You make 34 k and pay, say 25% of that in total income tax (thats $8,500 you have contributed to "the greater good"). Say Steve Jobs makes $100m dollars and pays 30% of that gross in taxes. That would be $30,000,000.

Steve Jobs just paid 3529x more tax then you did. He just contributed more to "society" then you could in 30 lifetimes. Will Steve Jobs see 3529x more benefit from his tax contribution then you will?

Of course, this is extremely simplified, and ignores other qualms I have with taxation, and social philosophy, etc. But sometimes people just need a little perspective.

Right - it's only the corporations like APPLE INC that are capitalist.

The financial system may be flawed but it's just as critical as innovation for the USA in a global economy.

Nice one on the 6,000!

Democrats are healthier capitalists than republicans are, actually, and last I checked, you guys got your tax cuts. The rest of the country just can't wait for all those jobs the rich will create with a tax level the same as it has been throughout this country's long tumble down...

I facepalm every time I hear a republican drone parrot the propaganda they've been fed, then turn around and act like everyone ELSE is an enemy to capitalism. Funny idiots individually, but scary and damaging when they get together.

Well considering Obama signed an executive order authorizing the targetted assasination of US citizens, hopefully Steve doesn't tick him off...

PERSPECTIVE!????

Let's go back to your little example there.

What do you think Jobs and that person making 34k a year have in common? OH RIGHT, the cost of goods. You think that person making 34k has a choice in eating food, getting to work, paying for a place to live, or perhaps to take care of kids? Food, transportation, mortgage or rent, child care, these are all things that don't have a progressive price on them, and cost the same to both them and Jobs (cost of course meaning the actual cost, and not the impact on life the cost has.)

Ok, so the taxes get taken out. Jobs is left with 70 million, and our good for nothing waste of space is left with 16k. When you add up the cost of surviving (not living) how much money is that dead beat left with? Enough to buy an iPad, Jobs hopes.

So yes, Jobs pays into it more, but he's not battling for survival like the person making 34k a year is, and trust me, that $8500 to the person making 34k is felt FAR MORE than the 30 million taken from Jobs.

Do you know why food stamps and unemployment benefit is the governments best way to stimulate the economy? Because there is a 100% chance it will be spent. It's a necessity. In fact, tax cuts to those who are struggling are FAR MORE effective than tax cuts to those who absolutely aren't struggling, because of this very reason! It gets spent! Spent on gas, groceries, energy, mortgage, what have you. These are the staples of our society that actually employ people. A bank account collecting interest does not create jobs like you think it does.

Look at China. No social safety nets, so almost everyone saves every penny they have. Why? Because if they get hurt or sick, THEY ARE FUCKED. The result is people aren't buying enough domestic goods and China's economy depends heavily on the rest of the world. Remember this the next time a "conservative" talks about ending social programs that take care of Americans in need.

Don't talk to us about perspective. People like you lost that such a long time ago, it's just a word with no meaning to you now. BTW, Jobs made his money in America because the system was healthy and working right. America has a system that provides a path to wealth and if that system is sick, and dying, then that path to wealth is cut off. If you want lower taxes, we need to lower the size of the government FIRST, otherwise people like Jobs won't have customers!

Well, then you better prepare yourself...

Obama and the Democratic marauders in Washington have done more recently to harm American business and innovation in the past few years than any administration in recent memory. At least Bush was raiding the public coffers to make sweetheart deals with the military-industrial complex to ensure our country would remain at war for several more administrations, if not longer...

Obama is clever, but never quite as clever as he thinks. His credibility among his own base has eroded and his transparent attempt to woo back the political middle is as sloppy as I've ever seen. He's nearly guaranteed a one-term presidency, and to be honest, it really didn't matter who won the office this time around. A recession/depression president could only avoid blame by getting out of the way so business and the market could accelerate the process of cleaning up this economic mess we're in by bankruptcies, reorganizations and much needed firings. Instead we got the "visible hand" of government manipulating markets, printing money and bailing out every large company with a hard luck story in hand.

Like what?


Maybe "conservatives" should actually learn the meaning of the word, and stop treating the primaries like a popularity contest.

I'll be voting for Ron Paul.

I don't know what flavor Kool Aid you drink or where you get your "facts". But the latest data show that the top 1% of income earners pay over 38% of the federal taxes. The top 5% pay over 58%. The bottom 50% pay less than 3%. If you want to see all the data, here's a link from a non-partisan group http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html

The question is how much more do you want these "obscene" wealthy people to pay? It is there money after all.

How much should you pay? How much should I pay? How much should anyone pay?

The answer is ZERO, but guess what? That's not the reality we live in right now. Those people are rich because they live in a free country that allowed them to get rich. If people don't have jobs, they can't buy products, and they won't make people "rich." To ignore that is obscene, and to simply give rich people tax cuts and claim it creates jobs is IDIOTIC.

If the other side runs Palin, Obama is a shoe in.

Remember many thought the "B" actor Reagan could never be elected- anything is possible. I mean the country voted in W and then Obama- 2 of our nation's worst.

Let's be honest, someone making $34,000 who also has kids is not paying much in taxes. More than likely after returns are filed this person is getting money back and basically has a zero tax burden. We have a very large portion of our society that pays no taxes at all. The greatest amount of revenue comes from our highest earners and it isn't even close. You may be right when talking about tax as a percent of income... but let's talk about it from a bottom line perspective. Where does the government have tax revenues and where does the government have tax out flows?

One thing you are very right about is China's domestic economy. Unless China improves social services their population will continue to hoard and will not spend. However, there comes a tipping point where the economic benefit of the social programs is far outweighed by their costs and the productivity they prevent. Socially programs have their place, unfortunately they grow like weeds and sap the soil.

I guess you must work for a poor person. If the socialists in this country had their way, we would all be poor because the rich would emigrate. And if you don't think tax cuts create jobs, there's no common ground for discussion.

Cheers

They couldn't price competitively otherwise. If something is going to be done about this it will have to be on the government level, and it should be more along the lines of making sure businesses don't benefit from doing this (rather than punishing them for doing this).

Pretty complicated issue which people like to complain about without understanding it.


You're a bit of a troll, aren't you? At least judging from some other responses I've seen from you...

The anser of ZERO is insane and unrealistic. As long as we have governments those governments need to be maintained, and as long as we have countries we're going to need governments (and even if we didn't, we'd still need some form of structured leadership to handle the tasks for which people have no motivation to deal with). As for the rest, are you arguing against this whole job/products/rich thing? It is hard to even understand what you're writing about. And finally, yeah, giving tax breaks to the wealthy—especially considering the $250,000+ bracket includes many small businesses—does create jobs, and we've got plenty of information through history to prove that time and time again (it isn't that hard to understand anyway). That does not mean we should be giving tax breaks to the multi-millionaires or that they should have had Bush's tax cuts extended, but what you claim there at the end is what is IDIOTIC, and naïve to boot.

I hope the President's acknowledgement of Steve Jobs' effort will make him finally adopt the iPhone as a show of encouragement and support.

His official salary is $1 year. His stock options are a little more lucrative.

His unclaimed assets are trivial in matter compared to his wealth.

As for the 'throwing money at' thing, the reason why tax breaks create jobs is because they allow businesses to expand faster, maintain more staff, take on new projects, etc. Just as a consumer with $1,000 in discretionary spending is going to spend more than a consumer with $500, a business will invest and spend more if they have more money to do so (and more incentive to expand). The same rule apply to tightening things up for a business. Wealth for the rich also works similarly in many cases as they often-times start and lead business ventures (some are just disgustingly wealthy and greedy, but the matter is much bigger than them). In short, it is about creating more workers, not necessarily throwing more money at existing workers.

As mentioned before, there's definitely room to address the growing income gap in America and those super-wealthy folks certainly can handle a disproportionate burden, but tax cuts at lower tiers like $250,000 do have an impact on the economy and jobs. People just need to weigh the pros and cons and decide how to react to a given situation.

You paint a very simplistic picture. The reality is we have a tiered tax system and have had one for almost as long as this Country has been around. It worked very well for us. The rich and lower wages earners pay the same taxes for the earnings made in the lower brackets, as your earnings increases into other brackets the taxes one pays increases. The rich are benefiting more from the American economy, thereby provide more in taxes. In addition, they have more influence over the government.

Specifically, the wealthy have access to government resources the rest of us do not have. For example, did you read the list of wealthy Americans who borrowed zero percent tarp money from the government? Michael Dell and McDonald's was on the list. Can you go borrow government money for free? No. Further, the super wealthy use their wealth to undermine the strength of our country. For example, so called Free Trade Agreements. In the height of the economic boom where more people were becoming millionaires then any other time in our history, the rich lobbied to do away with import taxes so they could pocket more profit at the expense of our Country's over all well being.

Those import taxes made it so Americans workers could compete fairly with countries that essentially utilize slave labor; those taxes kept manufacturing here; and the manufacturing in turn created local funds for local governments. Because the rich were greedy, manufacturing has moved overseas, local governments are struggling, workers have lost their jobs, and the economy is in a mess. The rich keep getting richer and want to pay less taxes then they have at any other time in history. The government wants more money to operate its foreign wars, so the pressure is on the lower wage earners to make up the difference.

We had to borrow another 500 billion dollars from the Chinese to cover the riches tax break. The Chinese can afford to give us the money because the american elite has made China ultra rich by giving China all of the US manufacturing industry and the wealth that goes along with it. The low income earners will repay these loans to China. The government is already talking about decreases in Social Security and the doing away of tax write offs that largely benefit people in the lower income brackets.

Finally, the taxfoundation may not be partisan, but it was founded by people who fall in the top 1 percent wealth category. I suspect their views are slanted. The group essentially is against most taxes. Civil society relies on taxes.

Way to ignore all the things Obama does that prove he's actually a moderate conservative. Your anti-socialist rants are quite a bit like a religion to you. You WANT to believe them so you ignore facts. You might want to try some introspection...

Well the bottom line is the government is too big, and the constitution doesn't give them power to do a lot of the crap they're doing.

I think tax cuts should be the result of limiting the government, not precede it. The income tax specifically. When you hear a republican talk about limiting the government, they conveniently pick and choose where they want it limited, hardly ever mentioning military spending for instance and consistently pointing at things like food assistance!



Ah the imbecilic logic of a republican. Are you one of those "Muslims attacked us on 9/11" people as well?

Yes, I work for a rich person, but not every rich person creates jobs, just as not every Muslim is a terrorist.

As to your ill-thought straw man argument at the end - you should try a little harder. I never said tax cuts don't create jobs. I'm saying a sweeping income tax break for the rich don't create jobs as people like you claim. Tax cuts to small business does! I'm all for taking that money we're spending on tax cuts for the rich and spending it on small business, since small business creates 75% of all jobs in the US.


Thanks for that first statement. It prepared me for the idiocy that followed.

So the presence of a government automatically means the citizens must be taxed. Well that's a very tyrannical way of thinking, isn't it? I mean, in 1817 they ran the government with tariffs on imported goods, and the income tax didn't come about until the civil war in 1863 and was merely a result OF the cost of war...

You say you've got information throughout history that shows tax cuts to the rich creates jobs, but this can easily be disputed. We had many jobs at a time when the rich were paying an exorbitant amount of taxes on their income.

I know it's hard for you to see what I'm arguing for, but that's because I'm a libertarian. You must be too accustomed to the left / right nonsense.

After reading some of the latest comments it's time for me to move on. When people claim Obama is anti-socialism and is actually a moderate conservative, I know I'm in LaLa land. There's just no way to discuss reality with people who want the rich to pay more taxes and the poor to receive more entitlements.

As the warden in Cool Hand Luke so aptly said, "What we've got here is failure to communicate."

Maybe you should also remember that Alaska is one of the biggest recipients of that horrible but oh so tasty DC pork. So there.

Well I can name a non-democracy with a very succesful private sector – China. Capitalism can survive and thrive under a totalitarian regime. That's when the system is called a plutocracy.

BTW, to many Republicans or at least their supporters, the Nordic countries (and all the rest of Europe, for that matter) are prime examples of that dreaded soshulism. Funny how they are constantly put in the Top 5 of those Best-Country-To-Live-In lists. Way ahead of the U. S. of A. at that.

Oh, and the rich people of those countries didn't move away because of high taxation rates like some bright bulb here claimed would happen if taxes were hiked on them in America. Gee. Reality sure seems to have a liberal bias. I also wonder, how didn't they all drag their rich a$$e$ to the Caymans or some other rich people haven when the eeeeeeeevil gubmint was taxing them much, much harder back in the 50', 60's and 70's.

Note the absence of a questionmark. It indicates a rhetorical question.

I'll give you a 10% higher tax bracket on people earning more than $1,000,000 per year if you give me tight border security and effective quick deportations of illegal aliens.

so you like a society where there are some mega rich people, and the rest are just there waiting for them to "trickle down" some leftovers?

You should move on, because you don't have a clue what you're talking about. This is what happens when you take conservative propaganda as truth.

It's scary that you vote.

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Edited by MacRulez - 5/4/12 at 1:07pm

Maybe the unions forgot that they have priced American labor out of the market. The unions might not be too happy about the way they have destroyed U.S. competitiveness in manufacturing.

Oh, and by the way, China has labor unions too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-Chi...f_Trade_Unions

Yeah except they have unions for reasons unions are actually needed for. Breaks, safety at work, that sort of thing. Here, it's starting to become unclear what the unions do, if anything, other than damage.

It is not realistic to suggest that American workers should lower their working conditions to those of 3rd world countries.


There's a mistake there: China has a labor union, which has a monopoly. From the same article:

Also:

Ergo: the ACFTU is just another arm of the totalitarian Communist Party of China, and thus cannot be compared to free and independent Western labor unions.

what do you mean by "unless"?
Have you not been following the news?
The US is over 14 trillion in debt, the Federal Reserve private bankers own the country.
With interest and lending rates, it is 100% impossible to ever repay this debt. Taxes will be paid to these private bankers forever.

Millions and millions of people are on the street and unemployed.
My god man - it's not 'unless' - the US is in the middle of a complete meltdown. Marshal law is only 6 - 10 months away. The empire has completely collapsed - the mainstream media just hasn't decided how to inform people yet... While they squeeze every last penny out of America and move their money off shore. (didn't you read about that little detail in the TARP package? The fed can never be audited and it can move money offshore with no oversite.) seriously, read it. It's what Ron Paul is fighting.

The question isn't if Apple will bring jobs back to America- but when Apple moves it's headquarters out of the US.

Oh my Oh my. I'll take "conservative propaganda" over the communist propaganda you wholeheartedly support. How about you move to North Korea, where they will embrace your leftist, and warped ideals.

I chuckle at each and every misguided soul who believes that an awful "income gap" exists in the US. Try going to some countries where you'll find a mansion with a Rolls Royce in the driveway 20 feet away from a shack.

Again, perspective

The obvious mutually beneficial connection between the Democratic party and the American labor unions is, of course, a fact. But is either one controlled by the other to great lengths? As such, American labor unions are just another advocacy group in a sea of many, and not all that powerful, unlike their European counterparts (and their political arms, the social democratic parties in many European countries).