How much should you give up?

iVillage Member
Registered: 10-21-2008
How much should you give up?
352
Tue, 10-21-2008 - 8:35pm

My mother wrote an angry reply to a post on this board. It was deleted, from what I read in her email. I know you will ask how I got into her email, well, I have the password in case something happens to her. I went into it tonight because I was trying to figure out why someone as lovely and kind as my mother tried to take her own life today. In her email, I found a reply to her post. In that reply, she was asked how much this person should have to give to her out of her $250,000 a year. This isn't an attack, it's an answer from someone who knows and loves my mother more than anything in the world. No doubt this will be deleted as well, but here it is until then.

First off, none of what you will be "giving up" out of your $250,000+ dollars will come to her or to anyone like her. It will be going to pay off the deficit for your children, and hopefully for mine, so that they will not get to a point where they would rather die than lose everything they own at the age of 56.

You were talking about losing 12% of $250,000. That is more than my mother made every year. She lost her job, and is about to lose her house. She never had much, but what she had she has lost over the years due to having a chronic illness. She has no retirement, and has watched her home value plummet. If she sold her house tomorrow, she would make less than $30,000 on it. We all know that's not even a year's income, and she cannot collect SS for 6 more years.

So here's my answer to you. You should be willing to give anything necessary to save people like my mother. You should do it because you have it to give. You should do it because it's the right thing to do. You shouldn't begrudge anyone your 12% who has worked so hard, and given so much of her time and energy to others free of charge when they were in need.

My mother taught us to give. Every Christmas, we had to take one gift off of our "want" list (which wasn't very long, since we were poor), and give that money to charity, or to someone with less than we had. There weren't a lot of people who had less than we had, or so I thought. I learned from my mother that I was wrong. She took me to homes where single mothers who had been abandoned by their husbands sat shivering with their children, wrapped in blankets, because they could not afford heat. We gave her a used kerosene heater and a gift certificate for $30 for kerosene. It wasn't much, but she cried when she got it.

Our next stop was to an elderly black man who was blind from cataracts, and had lost his wife just a month before Christmas. My mother brought him a homemade mincemeat pie, because he had loved his wife's so much. She apologized to him, saying she knew it wasn't as good, but it was filled with love.

We gave shoes to children who had none, clothes to women in battered women's shelters so they could go to work, gas money to people struggling just to get to work, and food to families when the food stamps didn't last out the month.

My mother gleaned fields every year after harvest and donated the food to a soup kitchen, and she also drove over 100 miles around our county giving it to the poor and the elderly. She never asked for anything in return. She has literally given the clothes off her back, well out of her closet, to someone she thought needed them more.

Now she lays in a hospital room, fighting for her life, because when it came down to it, nobody would help her. We kids did as much as we could, but it wasn't enough, because we don't have much either. Social services turned their backs on her because she didn't have a job to go back to. She lost her car, and her utilities were going to be cut off. And nobody...NOBODY cared about this woman who has done so much for others during her lifetime.

You obviously don't understand the spirit of giving. That's sad, with Christmas coming up. Too bad you didn't have a mom like mine.

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iVillage Member
Registered: 12-18-2005
Thu, 10-23-2008 - 2:48pm

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-Kristen

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iVillage Member
Registered: 12-18-2005
Thu, 10-23-2008 - 2:53pm

when you talk in that post about de-regulation...are you talking about allowing lenders to lend to people who can't afford it? that was my inturpretation, and given that interpretation, i don't think that de-regulation benefitted the top....which was what i thoguht you were getting at....


idk


anyhow....


-Kristen

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iVillage Member
Registered: 12-18-2005
Thu, 10-23-2008 - 2:56pm

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then let me ask you a question that i don't know the answer to....


so BO wants to return the taxation level to what it was with clinton....


but how do his plans for the rest of us compare to what it was like with clinton?


is he re-enforcing some policies for some, but not everyone?


-Kristen

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iVillage Member
Registered: 05-14-2008
Thu, 10-23-2008 - 3:02pm

Very likely here is where he'll get it:

Obama and the Tax Tipping Point
How long before taxpayers are pushed too far? By ADAM LERRICK

What happens when the voter in the exact middle of the earnings spectrum receives more in benefits from Washington than he pays in taxes? Economists Allan Meltzer and Scott Richard posed this question 27 years ago. We may soon enough know the answer.
Barack Obama is offering voters strong incentives to support higher taxes and bigger government. This could be the magic income-redistribution formula Democrats have long sought.

Sen. Obama is promising $500 and $1,000 gift-wrapped packets of money in the form of refundable tax credits. These will shift the tax demographics to the tipping point where half of all voters will receive a cash windfall from Washington and an overwhelming majority will gain from tax hikes and more government spending.
In 2006, the latest year for which we have Census data, 220 million Americans were eligible to vote and 89 million -- 40% -- paid no income taxes. According to the Tax Policy Center (a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute), this will jump to 49% when Mr. Obama's cash credits remove 18 million more voters from the tax rolls. What's more, there are an additional 24 million taxpayers (11% of the electorate) who will pay a minimal amount of income taxes -- less than 5% of their income and less than $1,000 annually.

In all, three out of every five voters will pay little or nothing in income taxes under Mr. Obama's plans and gain when taxes rise on the 40% that already pays 95% of income tax revenues.

The plunder that the Democrats plan to extract from the "very rich" -- the 5% that earn more than $250,000 and who already pay 60% of the federal income tax bill -- will never stretch to cover the expansive programs Mr. Obama promises.
What next? A core group of Obama enthusiasts -- those educated professionals who applaud the "fairness" of their candidate's tax plans -- will soon see their $100,000-$150,000 incomes targeted. As entitlements expand and a self-interested majority votes, the higher tax brackets will kick in at lower levels down the ladder, all the way to households with a $75,000 income.
Calculating how far society's top earners can be pushed before they stop (or cut back on) producing is difficult. But the incentives are easy to see. Voters who benefit from government programs will push for higher tax rates on higher earners -- at least until those who power the economy and create jobs and wealth stop working, stop investing, or move out of the country.

Other nations have tried the ideology of fairness in the place of incentives and found that reward without work is a recipe for decline. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher took on the unions and slashed taxes to restore growth and jobs in Great Britain. In Germany a few years ago, Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder defied his party's dogma and loosened labor's grip on the economy to end stagnation. And more recently in France, Nicolas Sarkozy was swept to power on a platform of restoring flexibility to the economy.

The sequence is always the same. High-tax, big-spending policies force the economy to lose momentum. Then growth in government spending outstrips revenues. Fiscal and trade deficits soar. Public debt, excessive taxation and unemployment follow. The central bank tries to solve the problem by printing money. International competitiveness is lost and the currency depreciates. The system stagnates. And then a frightened electorate returns conservatives to power.

The economic tides will not stand still while Washington experiments with European-type social democracy, even though the dollar's role as the global reserve currency will buy some time. Our trademark competitive advantage will be lost, and once lost, it will be hard to regain. There are too many emerging economies focused on prosperity and not redistribution for the U.S. to easily recapture its role of global economic leader.
Tomorrow's children may come to question why their parents sold their birthright for a mess of "fairness" -- whatever that will signify when jobs are scarce and American opportunity is no longer the envy of the world.

Mr. Lerrick is a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-14-2008
Thu, 10-23-2008 - 3:11pm
So therefore you think it's an unrealistic expectation that one might consider waiting to have children until after they've completed their education? How do you justify making those who make that choice pay for those who decide to go the "children first" route? Actions have consequences--why do so many people seem not to think things through?
iVillage Member
Registered: 09-08-2006
Thu, 10-23-2008 - 3:12pm


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iVillage Member
Registered: 05-14-2008
Thu, 10-23-2008 - 3:22pm

>> Not to be overly picky, but you went to college, right? So how is it out of reach? Between financial aid, loans, community college, etc. anyone who wants to go to college in this country can do it. It's just a matter of prioritizing.<<

Not to mention the idea of actually working your way through college. What a concept! I know that's what I did as a younger person. And those older than I who went the family route first or decided on career changes later in life took classes at night or around their work schedules.

When I hear that youngsters today have somehow been mislead down the entitlement road into believing it make sense to go tens of thousands of dollars in debt so they don't have to work their way through college...well it kills me. Seriously, why should any other taxpayer have to bail them out or subsidize anything for them and their wants?

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-08-2006
Thu, 10-23-2008 - 3:25pm

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I am talking about The Glass-Steagall Act (passed in 1933, mandated the separation of commercial and investment banking in order to protect depositors from the hazards of risky investment and speculation) being repealed and the repercussions to this repeal.

 

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-08-2006
Thu, 10-23-2008 - 3:28pm

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so BO wants to return the taxation level to what it was with clinton....


but how do his plans for the rest of us compare to what it was like with clinton?


is he re-enforcing some policies for some, but not everyone?>>


 

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-31-2008
Thu, 10-23-2008 - 3:35pm


I'm not understanding your outrage. Don't people already receive EIC that bring their income tax liability to zero? I guess Obama's plan may add more to this category, do you have any projections on this number? How many actual tax payers will receive relief?


And, BTW - Don't we want these working families receiving EIC to actually work for their benefits? Are they scamming the system, or are they just abjectly poor?

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