How much should you give up?
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| 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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Thanks for clarifying.
I have said this numerous times, but I'll say it again.
You can cut taxes by reducing the percentage rate of income that people pay in taxes, i.e. from 20% to 15%.
You can cut taxes by offering deductions for certain things, which lowers taxable income. This lowers taxes because you might get pushed down into a different tax bracket. These also ensure that you're not overpaying.
You can cut taxes by offering a credit, which reduces the actual amount of tax you have to pay. So, if you owe $5,000 in taxes and you get a $2,000 credit, you only have to pay $3,000.
The part of Sen. Obama's proposal that I take issue with is that he is adding a bunch of refundable credits. See this link http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/UploadedPDF/411750_updated_candidates_summary.pdf
And I cannot believe how selfish, heartless, and greedy some people in this country have become.
Is this truly what we have become as a society?? Ugly, Ugly. Ugly.
And some have the attitude of you
I do know this!!! and I totally get where the thoughts come from. I weep for single mothers,
<owe any income tax.>>
That's absolutely, unequivocably untrue.
No, that's not true.
There's a difference between a credit and refundable credit.
What you're describing is a credit. What I'm talking about is a refundable credit.
Also, the AMT doesn't apply to all people, only to the higher income earners. So, it wouldn't apply to Obama's refundable credit recipients in any case.
If you look at the link I provided in my post, there is a list of all the additional tax credits- beyond the Earned Income Tax Credit- that Obama wants to add to the system.
They are all refundable, of course.
And that is why people criticize his "tax cuts" as welfare. If you take a look at John McCain's tax plan (also in the link I posted before) you'll see the difference between his tax cuts and Obama's refundable credits.
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Maybe you could answer this question for me.
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