At 10/2/08 11:49 PM, Glaiel-Gamer wrote:

At 10/2/08 10:36 PM, mexifry895 wrote: You are STILL getting higher returns on a flat tax rate at the higher levels of income.
If people wanted true, "Fairness and Equality," we would give the same rate to everyone in Income tax.

I really have no opinions on the difference between flat taxes and what it is now, but I think the main argument about flat taxes is that even though it's proportional and fair, the cost of living isn't. Someone who makes 20m/year is going to have no problems paying for taxes and food and housing and still has a ton extra, while someone who makes 60k/year after taxes might have trouble paying for all their living expenses because those don't scale with income as much as taxes do. The rich have a lot more to give and still live in luxury.

Yeah the middle man is usually the one that suffers the most. Which is why i hate any sort of 'bail out' ... much more so if its coming from our beloved GW
I'll have to cut back on caviar tuesdaysssss..... back to eating napkins.

on a different and less depressing yet more spammy note....
who's on your msn / whatever right now :)

lmao yes ive stooped this low.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE8MsjlJW zI

This ad started popping up on tv around here and it is probably the gayest no smoking ad I've ever seen.

I mean, if I was a kid watching that commercial, i'd probably rush out the door to buy a pack of cigarets just so I don't have to be like the kid in that commercial.

I don't like the concept of smoking and would never do it, but like... no smoking ads piss me off cause kids don't want to be like the image they are presenting of non smokers and smokers already know all the dangers of it. People should just decide for themselves anyway.

At 10/3/08 12:07 AM, mexifry895 wrote: It's like punishing the rich for, well, succeeding.

Except it really isn't. Someone will live the same off of 20 million/year expendable income as they would 10 million/year.

I appreciate that it requires work, but really, there's some luck involved. There's a limited amount of money in the country, so not everyone can become rich even if they want to.

At 10/3/08 12:07 AM, mexifry895 wrote: If someone wants to live off a low income job, it's generally, but not always, their choice.

whuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut?

No really, what...?

Anti Smoking Ads

Yah that one was super stupid glaiel, and most of them seem to be that way, like where the dog was smoking or something and when the girl licked all the stuff in the alley... If they just did ads where people were alienated while smoking, or showed fucked up lungs or something, that'd probably be many times more effective.

At 10/3/08 12:03 AM, Luis wrote: on a different and less depressing yet more spammy note....
who's on your msn / whatever right now :)

lmao yes ive stooped this low.

dude I think that David guy lives near me. My phone number also starts with 452.

At 10/3/08 12:19 AM, mexifry895 wrote: They still had ups and downs, but in the end, it was a lot of hard word to get that money.

So? The middle class works hard to earn their money too. When you get into upper management you can just pay people to earn money for you and sit back and relax. Their quality of life would be exactly the same even if they were taxed 70% (not that i necessarily support taxing that much, just saying), which you can't say about the middle class.

At 10/3/08 12:07 AM, mexifry895 wrote: If someone wants to live off a low income job, it's generally, but not always, their choice.

wow.... generally? i never knew people strategically make the choice to be poor. Youre kidding arent you

So... methinks that its time newgrounds started inteviewing new people. On the portal it still shows "latest interviews!" and the most recent is like...2006ish... That's a shame...

At 10/3/08 12:19 AM, mexifry895 wrote: stuff

From a purely capitalistic point of view a flat rate tax would make the most sense, because it's being equal to everyone in the percentage the government takes from their income, but in a humanitarian sense, it's pretty retarded. I suppose if you care nothing about your fellow human beings, you should hail the flat rate, but in a country where 40% of the population holds 1% of the wealth, a flat rate tax sounds more like a crime against humanity to me. Then 10% of the population holds 70% of the wealth and the top 1% of the population holds 38% of the wealth.

Not everyone is born equal, not everyone has equal chances, and I think it's only humane to distribute the wealth from the insanely rich to the unnecessarily poor. And what do you think taxing the wealthiest in the country over 50% of their income is even going to do? It might slightly dent the gap in wealth, it's not tearing down the rich and bolstering up the poor, and it's definitely not socialism.

At 10/3/08 12:36 AM, mexifry895 wrote: I was being facetious, but what i was talking about was, if you try to live off 10$/hr for 25 years, you obviously could apply for a better job somewhere else.
If you really work your ass off, you can live a decently comfortable life.
There are many opportunities to take hold of.

its not always that simple. and it really rubs me the wrong way because i grew up a poor fuck and nobody gave the memo to my mother that all she had to do was apply for ceo and stop housekeeping. Meh its just really annoying.

This reminds me of some quote from Barbara Bush that always stuck with me:

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle) - this is working very well for them." -Former First Lady Barbara Bush, on the hurricane evacuees at the Astrodome

At 10/3/08 12:36 AM, mexifry895 wrote: They worked their ass off to get to the level of income that they were at. Honestly, they earned their share of money. It's not the the government's job to say, "Well you could live just as comfortably with this amount of money."

Ya it is the government's job to do that. It's not socialism because it's not 100% taxes, and there's still a divide between rich and poor. And not all rich people worked hard. How many people do you think inherited their wealth, got lucky on an investment, or just paid other people to do the work for them?

Is it the government's money, or YOUR money?

Mine mine mine mine mine no taxes no taxes i want my money wahhhh. Without taxes, you have no services. No public education, no roads, no firefighters, no police officers, less scientific research, etc.

You could take that arguement even further and the government could say, "We feel that you have enough money at 60k/yr, you can still live off 30k/yr. It's giving the government too much power.

I hate to break it to you, but ya they technically could. They don't because nobody would get reelected if they did, and there's a huge difference in quality of life between 30k and 60k, whereas there isn't so much between 10m and 20m

At 10/3/08 12:39 AM, mexifry895 wrote:

At 10/3/08 12:31 AM, Duchednier wrote: So... methinks that its time newgrounds started inteviewing new people. On the portal it still shows "latest interviews!" and the most recent is like...2006ish... That's a shame...

I agree, that is pretty pathetic.
Who does those interviews anyways?

anyone who wants to. If you interview someone and send it to tom, he'll put it up

At 10/3/08 12:43 AM, Luis wrote: nobody gave the memo to my mother that all she had to do was apply for ceo and stop housekeeping.

No but all she had to do was apply for business school, get accepted, pay for tuition, spend years learning, then build her way to the top of a company by being better at management then the thousands of other businesspeople out there.

Of course, it's hard to pay for school when you're born into a poor family to begin with.

At 10/3/08 01:05 AM, mexifry895 wrote:

At 10/3/08 12:43 AM, Luis wrote:
its not always that simple. and it really rubs me the wrong way because i grew up a poor fuck and nobody gave the memo to my mother that all she had to do was apply for ceo and stop housekeeping. Meh its just really annoying.

I can understand your angst, because I was bankrupt for the first 10 years of my life till business picked up.
I never said it was easy for people o get rich. IT takes them a lot of fucking work also.
Not everyone can become a CEO, but you can always find something that makes your situation better, unless you live through a time with inflation and unemployment was through the roof and there WASN'T jobs.

At 10/3/08 12:42 AM, Coaly wrote: Not everyone is born equal, not everyone has equal chances, and I think it's only humane to distribute the wealth from the insanely rich to the unnecessarily poor. And what do you think taxing the wealthiest in the country over 50% of their income is even going to do? It might slightly dent the gap in wealth, it's not tearing down the rich and bolstering up the poor, and it's definitely not socialism.

Humane? I understand that people not always have equal chances, but you can always, like I said, even slightly better your situation by gonig the extra mile, even when it means working your ass off.
It's not like my parrents work 80+ hour weeks for nothing.

And what do you think taxing the wealthiest in the country over 50% of their income is even going to do? It might slightly dent the gap in wealth, it's not tearing down the rich and bolstering up the poor, and it's definitely not socialism.

How is that not socialist? 50%+? That is quite a lot of money to be taken away. That is quite definitely tearing down the rich, and bringing up the poor.

At 10/3/08 12:46 AM, Glaiel-Gamer wrote:

Just because it isn't 100% doesn't mean it isn't a form of socialism. Since when is it the governments job to tell you how comfortable you should live? The people who inherit stuff, didn't their ancestors work hard for their money? I'm pretty sure mot of them did.

They aren't telling people how comfortable they should live. My point is that there's NO DIFFERENCE between being taxed 30% and being taxed 60% if you make over 10m/year, because you are still filthy rich either way you look at it. More money earned = more expendable income even if the taxes gradually increase as you get richer. That isn't socialism, that is simply getting money for services without having to put more of a burden on the middle class. We're not giving money to the middle class mind you, we're putting it into services that benefit EVERYONE.

And get lucky on an investment? That's the nature of business.
It isn't always luck. People know what hey are investing in before they get into it usually.

right but that's not necessarily hard work, it's intuition, and luck. There's a difference. A smart person will know how to earn a lot of money without working too much, but it usually requires them to have a substantial sum of money in the first place (inheritance usually) or being in the right place at the right time.

Amount of work is NOT proportional to how much money someone makes. Some of the hardest workers make minimum wage, and most of the rich people don't work too much anymore. They just reap the benefits of being rich.

I hate politics in the forum. I vote we talk about CS4 some more.

Anyway, what is everyone's favourite font? This is a topic I can agree with.

At 10/3/08 01:08 AM, mexifry895 wrote: People who think that all the rich are lazy bastards, I challenge you to try to run a business for 10 years, working 80+ hours a week for 7 days a week, about 365 days a year.

Ok, give me $100m and a company and I'll see what I can do.

At 10/3/08 01:12 AM, mexifry895 wrote: Coaly, Galiel-Gamer, and Luis present...

Liberals against Mexifrey895 crew!

Lol

meh its better to just admit you dont understand the point of view of different income brackets and stfu as opposed to trying to make it seem like everyone can just have an epiphany and live some american dream. I'm happy that your parents did things by the book and can now reap the rewards. Thats great, it really is and its always motivating to know that for some people the system does work and works well.
All I'm saying is that the luxury of going that route isnt as readily available to everyone.. my parents raised us with what they had and doing shit that id get embarassed about (looking back on it, i can see what a dickbag son i was for being that way) ... im sure if they could have found the money and time and resources to drop the kids off with nana while they built their business they would have. Oh wait i forgot we were fresh off the boat. Anyway I dress cause its not pity that im after, I think that at some point life stops being about you. My mom was willing to do what she had to do to scrape by and hope their KIDS would pan out and be the worthwhile investment for the mini hell they went through.

Anyway my point is that its smug when people say oh well the opportunity is there. Everyone has different hands they are dealt.. some people are dealt bad hands and they make due with it.. that never meant they were comfortable with the bad hand or embrace it. Thats just what rich people like to think. That we EMBRACE this shit when i can definately say that nobody in their right mind embraces being poor.

Kay goodnight. I love you <3
x0x0x0x0x

At 10/3/08 01:12 AM, mexifry895 wrote: Coaly, Galiel-Gamer, and Luis present...

Liberals against Mexifrey895 crew!

Lol

You're not conservative, you're just plain silly. Seriously did you hear me? 1% of the population controls 38% of the wealth, do you understand how screwed up that is? 40% controls 1% of the wealth. Seriously if you believe that anything other than a flat tax is socialist you're just nuts. I mean really at this point of the discussion where you can't admit that people can't make themselves rich and that people do not, and I really mean do not deserve the money that they make, the millions they make, then I don't believe I can convince you.

You think the distribution of wealth in this country is normal, that 1% of the population should control 38% of the wealth, and that 40% of the population should have to, have to live off 1% of the wealth.

And you think that people always have chances to better their situation and don't deserve more than their situation allows.

It's really just sad reasoning.

At 10/3/08 01:30 AM, Luis wrote: Anyway my point is that its smug when people say oh well the opportunity is there. Everyone has different hands they are dealt.. some people are dealt bad hands and they make due with it.. that never meant they were comfortable with the bad hand or embrace it. Thats just what rich people like to think. That we EMBRACE this shit when i can definately say that nobody in their right mind embraces being poor.

Right and that's not to say that people can't make themselves rich if they don't want to. I'm not saying that mexifry's parents didn't work hard to get to where they are, that's fine and dandy, but it takes a lot more than hard work and smarts to get rich in the first place. Why do you think that so many rich people in this country got rich from inheritance? It's tough to jump social brackets. It takes more than skill, there's a good deal of luck and being in the right place at the right time.

And it's completely selfish to think that just cause you earned the money fair and square that you shouldn't use the money to make the world a better place. Of course, if you left that up to the people to decide, nobody would donate money, because most rich people are also greedy (most). That's where taxing comes into play. You can't trust people to make the world a better place with their money. Honestly, how many of you would willingly pay for schools to be built and roads to be fixed if you had the choice? Nobody wants to give money to the government, but the fact of the matter is you need to in order for society to function correctly.

Although I disagree it's never someones choice to live off a low income wage (duh), I do hate it when people have that sort of life when there is opportunity for them to advance themselves (if they're unhappy of course, if they can live comfortably, I'm sure they don't mind). That is why I hate homeless people - is it that hard to visit a homeless shelter/hostel, seek government help, etc? Fuck no! They're just lazy bums.

My favourite font is probably Arial.. or Trebuchet MS. I find it funny that I can recognise pretty much any general font ("OMG WHO THE HELL CHOOSES JOKER FOR A POSTER?" - general example, Joker is of course very recognisable).. funny/nerdy.. =[

My MSN right now has 24 people on.. well, I have SmarterChild added which I guess doesn't count. I can't fit them all in a screenshot (or my entire monitor) so I'll just type their names. Cos I'm lame.

-SmarterChild
-Nick (vengeance)
-Mikey (my gay meximerican amigo)
-Tito (my straight american amigo)
-Alex (someone from NG?)
-andrew (someone from NG?)
-ryan (irl)
-espen (NG)
-Evan (NG, definitely. Lol)
-Josh (NG - "Jebus")
-karena (a GM in a mmorpg I play about 1 hour a week. lulz)
-Krzysztof ("Chris", lives a few rooms away from me in my uni halls)
-Liam? (NG?)
-Some emo guy (NG?)
-Louissi (NG)
-Luis (my NG meximerican amigo?)
-Mikey (some tard chav)
-"sfox8" (NG?)
-SKinZ (NG?)
-Taylor (NG?)
-Glaiel
-Xion
-authorblue

Gosh IDK most of them but who cares.

Appear offline btw.

I'm still banned for disliking WoW =[

At 10/3/08 01:55 AM, liamAPL wrote: My MSN right now has 24 people on.. well, I have SmarterChild added which I guess doesn't count. I can't fit them all in a screenshot (or my entire monitor) so I'll just type their names. Cos I'm lame.

MSN's annoying cause people keep changing their names to weird unicode characters and I can never tell who anyone is anymore

At 10/3/08 01:55 AM, liamAPL wrote: That is why I hate homeless people - is it that hard to visit a homeless shelter/hostel, seek government help, etc? Fuck no! They're just lazy bums.

Or mentally ill?

Mexifry got me all fired up and then left, just like the ladies :[

At 10/3/08 02:08 AM, Coaly wrote: Or mentally ill?

The only homeless begger I ever felt truly sorry for was this guy in montreal who looked like he hadn't eaten in a week, was shaking, talked about how he was studying to become a doctor, and obviously had some kind of mental issue just through the way he talked.

You kinda had to see him to understand, but he wasn't the normal boozed up bum you see lying on the side of the street.

I still didn't give him change though. You never know who really needs it, who would use it to help themselves, and who is just a scammer looking for some easy money.

At 10/3/08 02:08 AM, Coaly wrote: Or mentally ill?

A mentally ill person shouldn't be on the streets, then it is the fault of their friends/family for not supporting them (helping them to live, basically) and also of the system >.>

hi guys. anyone wanna join our bed.

me, glaiel, mexifry, and coaly.

At 10/3/08 02:40 AM, Luis wrote: hi guys. anyone wanna join our bed.

me, glaiel, mexifry, and coaly.

Looks very cuddly. Can I be in your bed, your bed, your bed, your bed.. your beeeeddddd.

What the fuck? k i'll go in your bed if i dont have to pay rent :)

My favourite font is Calibri :3

At 10/3/08 01:32 AM, Coaly wrote: You're not conservative, you're just plain silly. Seriously did you hear me? 1% of the population controls 38% of the wealth, do you understand how screwed up that is? 40% controls 1% of the wealth.

That is pretty ridiculous seeing as these people with $xxx million dollars just have a large percentage just sitting there or are using it to make yet more money, which will essentially have no use to them as they already have all the money they could ever possibly need. $1million is nothing to them. Yet to a lot of people 1/1000th of that is potentially life changing and can make a real difference.

And you think that people always have chances to better their situation and don't deserve more than their situation allows.

Yeah, thats totally crap mexifry. Not everyone has the potential to improve their situation. How about someone who has had a poor childhood, badly educated, no qualifications? They're going to only be able to get a low paid job. How can they better their situation? They don't have the money to pay for classes and get educated; as their job only just gives them enough to get by.

And your statements about "they earned it, its their money", again i don't agree with. What about sports stars? They earn millions and millions of £ for simply providing mild entertainment when there are people who keep the world spinning earning fuck all.

At 10/3/08 01:55 AM, liamAPL wrote: That is why I hate homeless people - is it that hard to visit a homeless shelter/hostel, seek government help, etc? Fuck no! They're just lazy bums.

Agreed. But worst people in the world are the lazy assholes who just leak off benefits because they can't be bothered to get a job and see it as their right to claim benefits.

At 10/3/08 02:40 AM, Luis wrote: hi guys. anyone wanna join our bed.

me, glaiel, mexifry, and coaly.

Me plz.

At 10/3/08 01:55 AM, liamAPL wrote: Although I disagree it's never someones choice to live off a low income wage (duh),

Wait, so you're not Liaaaam? damn, i thought you were his alt lol

Luis
I don't feel like joining in but I wouldn't mind watching, from under the bed.

I haven't been around in a bit and as soon as I come back there's a bed invite? Count me in if you don't mind a guy with a bet of extra hair on the legs :P

As for the debate about politics, rich poor and all that, Here's my bit to add. I grew up dirt poor, still am for the most part. My mom was living alone, raising 2 kids, collecting welfare and just barely getting by. We eventually worked are way up to what I would call middle class, but in honesty it's lower middle class, if that in comparison to most around us. There was nothing she could have done while we were young, and I suspect the only reason she got ahead of where she started was the fact that we grew up, could watch ourselves and eventually move out, allowing her to get a job again. She dropped out of high school, never went to college, and couldn't have at a later point even if she wanted.

For me, I've got a fresh start, graduated high school, and have a job getting $8.25 an hour, and flash games give me some extra cash here and there. I've gone to my community college a bit because it's rather cheap, around $2500 for 4 classes and books per semester. I want to go to the university here in VT, but I can't afford it at the moment. Student loans? ya if I want to be paying money back forever and stressing myself. Bottom line is that as many have said, you aren't born with equal rights, and once your below, it's hard to get out, once your rich, if your play it smart it's not very hard to stay rich. Some rich people can live off of interest alone if they have the right life style, while some poor people can lose all there money to a simple bad economy, increase in gas prices, something small that means nothing to a rich person can destroy the financial standing of someone who's poor.

I can't say I have a solution for all of this, but I just felt the need to point out that yes everyone has opportunities, but taking them isn't as easy as it may seem in someones eyes who has always had money and never suffered the issues that being born poor can bring. I myself, I'll be saving money, going to the community college more, saving money from flash games to go to UVM and eventually get a decent job, but that timeline is stretched longer then I want all because of being born poor, parents can't offer me a dime for college if they wanted to, which they do.