Gene Wolfe's Politics

brunians at brunians.org · 31 Mar 2009, 10:23 · from 2009-March.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: brunians at brunians.org (brunians at brunians.org)
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:23:17 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: (urth) Gene Wolfe's Politics
In-Reply-To: <49D1D3C2.3050201 at io.com>
References: <958496.76164.qm at web180202.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
	<1523.72.171.0.142.1238077325.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<BLU120-W165E063BB36FDA170696F786910 at phx.gbl>
	<2509.67.142.130.16.1238095509.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<1f7617370903261242r3fbdec07scd2f4b38ee8b5a29 at mail.gmail.com>
	<6055.72.171.0.139.1238099237.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<1f7617370903261332k2dbe29fah1dbfa89734131259 at mail.gmail.com>
	<7C5DB9EE-9F01-432E-8E6F-5C3F135CCE06 at comcast.net>
	<14480.67.142.130.20.1238204745.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<49D1D3C2.3050201 at io.com>
Message-ID: <4790.67.142.130.49.1238494997.squirrel at brunians.org>

> brunians at brunians.org wrote:
>> This is why 'raising taxes on the rich' doesn't work, for those of you
>> who have been paying attention.

>>>> I'm talking about the gummint going bankrupt, silly boy.

>>> Gummints don't go bankrupt, having produced nothing in the first
>>> place.  They may print money, which will devalue all the goods and
>>> services of the society and bring about its ruination, of course.
>>> They have that power, but they don't have the power to create money
>>> in the original sense of the word, as a store of value.  You may or
>>> may not be aware that businesses don't pay taxes either, individuals
>>> do.  Businesses pass them along to their customers to pay.

> Who do estate taxes get passed on to?

As far as I know, estates are only left by natural persons, that is, they
are not paid by businesses.

Estate taxes are basically a means of limiting social mobility: the idea
is to prevent middle-class families from becoming upper-class. The way a
middle-class family becomes upper-class, of course, is by increasing
wealth from generation to generation. This can be useful in limiting the
influence of undesireable ethnic groups with a demonstrated ability of
making money.





.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net