Quote from AAAintheBeltway:
Your ideas about taxes are so confused it's hard to unravel them. You continually confuse the concepts of wealth and income. One is taxed and one isn't.
People making $50k certainly pay next to nothing in income taxes, and they pay far less on a percentage basis than someone in the max marginal rate. I wouldn't call them middle class either, unless maybe they are living in a very low cost area. The rest of your comments about "wealth trickling down" and "income being redistributed to the wealthy" make even less sense than Obama's "spread the wealth" philosophy.
Rather than debate this stuff with you endless and fruitlessly, let me just put forth a couple of principles. One, I think the purpose of the tax system should be to fund the government with the least possible harm to the economy. We end up with suboptimal tax schemes when we start trying to punish one group or reward another using the tax system. If the objective is to cause the least harm to the economy, at least everyone is focused on the same goal and we can debate the methods rationally rather than get caught up in demagoguery. Of course, democrats object to this principle because for them, the purpose of the tax system is to buy votes and make class envy appeals.
Two, I agree with liberals that vast and persistent wealth disparity is a potential problem. But statistics can hide as much as they reveal. Is there mobility between income strata? That is a good thing. If we are constantly adding poor people at the bottom of the ladder through immigration, etc, then we will always have a "statistical" problem, but if they are able to rise over generations, then it is much less of a social problem. The way to address this issue is to limit immigration by poor and unskilled people and make it easier for wage earners to accumulate capital. Current policies do the opposite. We allow unchecked immigration but our tax system penalizes savers. Obama would make it worse.
Three, taxes should be spread over as wide a base as possible. Obama has famously claimed to "unite us", but his tax policies, like the rest of his policies, would do the opposite. He pits one class against another and had the audacity to criticize a working man for not "sharing the wealth." When a significant percentage of the population pays little or nothing in taxes, they have every incentive to want lavish government programs. After all, they're not paying for them. While a vast expansion of goverment and dependency on government are exactly what democrats want, it is clearly not in the interests of the country. We need only look at other countries that pursue such policies, such as in latin america, and we see social division, tax fraud on a vast scale with all the corruption it engenders and dysfunctional government. Obama seemed to be quite comfortable in the pervasive corruption of chicago machine politics, but most of us aspire to something better for our country.