That’s...bad?

“And as a policy matter, encouraging work, ingenuity, etc. makes everyone’s life better.”

I work as a lawyer and get paid well. I’m all for my taxes going up slightly if it means a better society. I’ll be OK. If you’re rich, you’ll be OK if you pay slightly more money.

What the fuck is “work hard?”

Here come the mansplainers to mansplain mansplaining to us.

In Kansas every year for the last 5 or so, the state has been fighting in court their school funding formula. They are continually violating a state mandate requiring adequate funding of schools and the courts keep rejecting their plans. There are several districts in affluent areas of Kansas where they are hitting…

Every job that I’ve gotten where there is a pay increase resulted in me doing less actual work than the last. I never worked as hard in my life as I did when I was making $6/hr.

THIS^. The thing that no conservative tax crusader will ever tell you is that probably 90% of the tax code only applies to people in about the top 2%. Period. We’re talking about the vast majority of the tax code exists purely for a few thousand corporations and people.

The argument about the complexity of the tax…

The bracket simplification argument really burns me. We could go to 10,000 brackets and the computer I’m typing this on could probably compute every US taxpayer’s income tax in about 4 days, maybe 4 hours.

But NOOOO: “Reduce the number of brackets, THAT’S what makes the tax code so complex!” Lying liars with pants on…

Exactly. Everyone is so concerned about “I’ll save $474 in taxes. Woohoo - new TV!” or “Bill Gates will be paying only $7.8 million in taxes - Boo!” that they are ignoring what those taxes pay for. Tax cuts are only feasible if spending cuts go right along with it. We are TRILLIONS in debt as a nation..and no one…

Can’t star this enough. Where are those deficit hawks?!? Didn’t we have a budget surplus before the Bush tax cuts? Aren’t these tax cuts going to increase our deficit by over a TRILLION dollars?

There’s additional craziness with things like trying to subsidize health flexible spending accounts through the tax code. Trying to calculate how much to contribute for your family is nuts — calculate wrong and you either end up missing out on tax benefits or else going crazy at the end of the eligibility period…

Correct re: brackets. You can have two brackets or 200 brackets. Doesn’t matter since it’s just a matter of looking up your income and finding it on the chart. So it takes six seconds longer to find your bracket among the 199 others. It makes no difference in “simplifying” the tax code. Wanna simplify? Every dollar…

It`s not just the Neocon establishment that wants a dumbed down worker class.

Don’t forget the followup to the tax cuts - oh wow, now the deficit has exploded, we have no choice now but to cut health care, unemployment benefits, or anything else that benefits mainstream America.

Progressive taxation. I mean real progressive taxation - like there should be a 90% bracket over say $5 million a year.

Literally everybody likes having more money in their pocket. Telling people you are going to lower their taxes will ALWAYS be a winner, no matter how fucking stupid it is. I actually think it’s the most important of the three legs of modern conservative philosophic stool (the other 2 being racism and evangelicism.)

If you want to make America Great Again, then you’ll have to jack up the top marginal and corporate tax rates in order to spur innovation:

Also acceptable: stepping and fetching.

Honest question here. Is this the definition of “shucking and jiving”?