Justice Antonin Scalia [merged]

[Kulindahr]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

"tax cuts for the rich (businesses that employ people when they can afford to)",

There's a growing number of billionaires and multi-millionaires who disagree with you by saying the cuts should not have been extended for them, they don't need the money, it wouldn't and won't generate jobs.

And historically, tax cuts in the range where we are, for people with annual incomes of $5 million or more, don't improve economic activity. If we were doing tax rates up above 50%, that would be different, but we aren't.

And low taxes on those who hold the top 2% of the wealth endangers liberty.

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

So typical of the "activits judges who gave us GWB in 2001.

They weren't activist. If you read the whole thing, they basically said that state law is state law and don't mess with it.

 

[palemale]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

Sigh. BearDaddy and Kuli, I'm afraid you are wrong. The Supreme Court majority in Bush v. Gore was the epitome of an activist court. You won't be able to find too many conservative legal scholars who will dispute that.

 

[Supersix]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

I DID admit that politicians from both sides try to avoid the constitution, but you guys avoided my argument entirely by clouding the issue with "well they did it tooooooo!"

 

[Supersix]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

Kuli, it's all in the definition of the word "rich". A small business can be considered rich if you define it by an annual earning of any number, and then cry about how the "rich" can afford this or that. Demands for the "rich" to pay more usually costs lower and middle classes the most, by increased costs for this or that, since businesses, by definition, pass along costs to the consumer, a fact that the left notoriously ignores. You know this is what I was talking about.

 

[Supersix]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

Nixon and G.W. Bush were hardly conservative.

 

[Supersix]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

McCarthy was many decades ago, get over it.

 

[Supersix]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

Company Y will have to increase his costs as well, unless he has a cheaper way of doing things. Or if they are granted a waiver by the Obama administration from the new healthcare reform law as a thanks for donations and support. And if rich people have less money to spend or invest, the rest of us have less, because we all work for someone richer than ourselves. Now try and tell me that you are for the forced redistribution of wealth, which would impoverish all of us.

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

Kuli, it's all in the definition of the word "rich". A small business can be considered rich if you define it by an annual earning of any number, and then cry about how the "rich" can afford this or that. Demands for the "rich" to pay more usually costs lower and middle classes the most, by increased costs for this or that, since businesses, by definition, pass along costs to the consumer, a fact that the left notoriously ignores. You know this is what I was talking about.

Don't mix companies and people.

Historically, cutting taxes for the richest people produces no jobs

We should be putting the top bracket back to Reagan's levels, and slashing taxes for businesses. Those are two entirely different things. And when people talk about tax cuts for the rich, they aren't talking about companies.

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

Company Y will have to increase his costs as well, unless he has a cheaper way of doing things. Or if they are granted a waiver by the Obama administration from the new healthcare reform law as a thanks for donations and support. And if rich people have less money to spend or invest, the rest of us have less, because we all work for someone richer than ourselves. Now try and tell me that you are for the forced redistribution of wealth, which would impoverish all of us.

I know the theory, but it doesn't happen. When rich people have more money to spend or invest, first of all they don't spend enough to even notice, and second it doesn't produce enough jobs to notice.

In fact tax rates on the wealthiest few percent can go to a third before there's any measurable effect on the economy. It's part of the whole Laffer Curve thing: the result is not ubiquitous.

But I'm not "for the forced redistribution of wealth", I'm for the assigning of heavier burdens to those who can better afford it. With wealth comes responsibility, and since our wealthy have shown little inclination to assume any, and the country is in need, there's nothing wrong with hitting them up.
I'll make one caveat: this revenue has to go to things that benefit everyone tangibly -- no nebulous bureaucratic "benefits", no generic benefit of the military, but things people everywhere use every day. That comes down to a single thing: infrastructure.

And that, as abundant statistics and studies demonstrate, will do the opposite of impoverish us all.

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

Well, yes, actually, I am for forced redistribution of wealth.

And as for your statement that it would "impoverish us all"? Tommyrot.

Mere redistribution of wealth has minimal effect on the economy. Use of that wealth to make our infrastructure superb would, because it makes everything anyone does more efficient.

There are a few areas where direct redistribution are beneficial. One is care of the mentally ill. The Republican approach is to get them all in jail, because that's what happens when you have no programs and few facilities; they end up on the street, and because they don't mesh well with society, large numbers end up behind bars -- which is why the largest facility for the mentally ill in the country is the LA county jail. On the streets, they have various costs to society; behind bars, they have a serious cost. It is more cost-effective to make sure they have basic housing and care..

A similar case can be made for the disabled. I'd detach disability from Social Security, and attach it to Medicare; let the states determine who's disabled, and just funnel the money through them -- and make sure it's enough for the disabled to at least have housing (which it currently isn't; depending on where they live, the $535/month SSI check to the disabled, if spent for rent, won't even stretch to cover groceries -- and don't talk about subsidized housing; the typical waiting list across the country is nearly two years to get into anything, which leaves people homeless and not uncommonly resorting to crime).

I'm not familiar with figures on this last one, but I suspect a similar case could be made for the elderly.

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

^My OH says his father, who would have been taxed at those "horrible rates" in the 70s, significantly reduced his tax burden by investing in real estate. He would buy a unit, rent it out at below market value, and write off the loss. The unit would appreciate, he could borrow off it (remember, in those days there was no "funny" stuff, so it was legitimate), and after it appreciated so much, sell it.

And so on. (Other people like Wayne Newton invested in American oil wells. If the well didn't produce, he got a writeoff; if it did, he increased his wealth, yada yada).

The thing was, this system (high taxes for the rich, but with write-offs for investing directly in the economy) worked very well for the three or four decades it was in existence...

Yes. And what I'd do there is jack up the top bracket another 5%, but write in major write-offs for new businesses providing jobs (only) in the US, and 100% write-offs for new companies in the energy field.

 

[MoltenRock III]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

^My OH says his father, who would have been taxed at those "horrible rates" in the 70s, significantly reduced his tax burden by investing in real estate. He would buy a unit, rent it out at below market value, and write off the loss. The unit would appreciate, he could borrow off it (remember, in those days there was no "funny" stuff, so it was legitimate), and after it appreciated so much, sell it.

What you are writing about / speaking of, is one of the main reasons why the USA had the Savings & Loan "Scandal" it did. Under the Reagan "tax simplification" bill, it changed overnight the way rental property was taxed and depreciated. This was solely a Republican nonsense move, which required bailing out all the S&L's.... go figure.

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

What you are writing about / speaking of, is one of the main reasons why the USA had the Savings & Loan "Scandal" it did. Under the Reagan "tax simplification" bill, it changed overnight the way rental property was taxed and depreciated. This was solely a Republican nonsense move, which required bailing out all the S&L's.... go figure.

That was one of the places where Reagan trusted someone, let them write a bill with no supervision, trusted what they said was in it, and probably never understood he'd been had.

I wonder who he trusted that he appointed Scalia.

 

[Kulindahr]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

MoltenRock, I'm not sure if we're talking about exactly the same thing.

I'm referring to the 70s, not the 80s. What would happen (on paper)is that these rich guys would build 70s houses, rent them out, write off the loss. If the house lost value, they were able to write that off, too. If it gained, they were made wealthier, and so on.

As a handyman, I've done a few repairs in 70s houses.

I've done repairs as well on 60s houses.

Mostly, the 60s houses were better built.

Though generally 50s houses were better than those, while 40s houses... no consistent quality.

Anyway, the point is that investment schemes like that resulted in crappier houses when they should have been better -- and gave us a "housing industry" where the goal is quantity, that had to be regulated because a general attitude of craftsmanship got replaced with a factory mentality.

Therein is an example of how the super-wealthy plunder the system: if we make money, they make more; if we lose money, they make money.

You have to remember—credit rules hadn't been loosened yet. My esteemed colleague Kulindahr will tell you how difficult credit was to get in those days; it was a long process that took literally years. Only the truly credit-worthy got credit, unlike only five or ten years later when they started sending credit cards unsolicited through the mail.

Yeah. To get an actual credit card back then, you started in high school by establishing credit with some store owner who trusted you, and where you generally bought things anyway -- you just put them on account, and paid it by the end of the month. Do that a couple of times, and with that record you try for an account at a store where they didn't know you at all. After five years of that, when I was two years out of high school, with eight such references on my sheet -- no credit agencies; they looked at your references and checked about half -- I applied for a gas card, and got it ONLY because I could show that my job at the time paid me mileage.

What happened (in actuality) is that the rich were forced to invest directly in the local economy, not in fraudulent Ponzi schemes ,(I mean) derivatives, that produce no jobs and services whatsover.

And it worked. In those high-tax 50s-70s, our nation was never richer.

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Though by the end things were fraying because of the downward trend in quality. As an example, just about every toy I got as a wee brat outlasted every toy I got in the late 70s. Most of the toys I got as a tyke still survive; I think the only ones from the late 70s which do are ones that sat on a shelf ten months out of the year because they were too valuable to risk.

@Kulindahr. I agree with almost all of your post.

EEK!

If the dirty commie and the liberanarchist agree, the Arkansas thread must be right -- the world is ending!

 

[rareboy]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

While Supersix's off-topic diversion is entertaining, it isn't germane to the thread, which is about Scalia.

And Supersix. If you believe in trickle down economics, you don't have a clue about how the economy of a healthy western nation works.

 

[Supersix]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

C'mon, we have been through this, no one works for someone poorer than himself, and people spend more when they have more to spend. I wouldn't remodel my bathroom if I couldn't afford it, would I? You guys LOVE to argue.

 

[rareboy]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

C'mon we've been through this. The vast and I mean vast majority of people work in jobs that serve the middle class and poorer folk, not remodelling 25 million dollar cottages for hedge fund executives. Even the largest percentage of construction is for corporate, institutional or middle to lower income housing...by far.

The concentration of wealth does not improve an economy. It does not improve innovation.

But if you want to live as a serf, buying hook, line and sinker into the delusion that your living is only made possible as long as someone has crumbs to feed you from their table....great.

But again, the topic is Scalia, not your failure to misapprehend the essentials of economics in the 21st century.

 

[MoltenRock III]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

MoltenRock, I'm not sure if we're talking about exactly the same thing.
....

What happened (in actuality) is that the rich were forced to invest directly in the local economy, not in fraudulent Ponzi schemes ,(I mean) derivatives, that produce no jobs and services whatsover.

And it worked. In those high-tax 50s-70s, our nation was never richer.

I'm quite aware of how the system worked, and we are talking about the same things. It was under Reagan that a plethora of tax incentives were eliminated for rental properties, while home ownership tax incentives were increased dramatically.

Google "Tax Reform Act of 1986" and "TEFRA". TEFRA was enacted in 1982 and also reduced some of the tax shelters available for rental property, but 1986 was the "big year" for change that also affected rental property. However, TEFRA was a prime example of everyday tax shelters many Americans even modestly to moderately well off were "invested" in to avoid punitive income taxes that were as high as 70%.

 

[palemale]

Re: Justice Scalia shows his true colors

To refresh my memory I checked the facts again... SCOTUS ruled 7-2 (per curiam opinion) that the FL SC went too far and exceeded their authority

The 5-4 vote was on the "remedy"

It was the remedy portion of the decision in which the 5 conservative supremes were "activist." They had no constitutional authority to declare that Bush get the electors. Article 2, Sec. 1 of the Constitution gives the state legislatures the authority to choose electors, not the SCOTUS. It was a disgraceful display of naked partisanship on the part of the 5 members that tarnished the legitimacy of the Court.