My old debate partner, Richard "I'm no wife swapper" Bennett is back in the comments section again:
I see why you're so aggressive now - you hope you can prevent people from seeing through your lack of understanding by lashing out so violently. The table you linked yourself says that California's top bracket is 9.3%. You couldn't even type that in accurately. You also lie about he sales tax, higher in California than in Washington, and in your analysis of property tax you ignore the higher median house prices in California and what that has to do with the size of the tax bill.Initially, I thought you were a demagogue, but looking at the desperate arguments you raise about things like cigarette taxes, while dodging the car tax, it's apparent that you're simply ignorant.
But don't be sad because I made you look so bad in the course of this lesson - I've mopped the floor with better men than you'll ever be, so you're in good company.
Happy Emergence.
Posted by Richard Bennett at October 20, 2003 07:14 PM
Happy Emergence, indeed? And you've been a real feinting flower throughout this and other debates? Aggressive? Thou dost protest too much. Actually, Richard, I'm just taking the tone you've established in every exchange between you and I or that you've had with others that has come to my attention. You are consistently abusive and insulting, totally unable to take the kind of factual arguments you think you dish out. If you were the tough guy you talk like, you'd be able to take what you serve, but what you are is an inveterate exaggerator of fact, at the least.Here, again, you try to dodge the reality that every fact I cited was backed up by government or corporate sites that can be checked. I don't make up things to fit my argument like you do, and I don't need to be polite to someone who established the tenor of our exchange when you called me a wife-swapping liberal. Now, if you'd ever met or talked to me prior to that statement, I'd have given you the benefit of the doubt, however that was the first thing you wrote in retaliation to a response to one of your innumerable attacks on Joi Ito. You never dealt with the substance of a difference of opinion in that exchange, nor have you here. Damn, though, you are an accomplished name-caller.You're still the one who has been wrong on every "fact" you bandied about in this tax discussion. I've pointed to state documents -- if you are too thick to understand the finer points of taxation, such as the cumulative marginal sales tax in two different states, it's not my fault. Calling me stupid only points out where the real blame lies: you don't ask a clarifying question or answer any of the questions I put to you in asking you to prove your point, instead you defame other people's intelligence.
I'll be glad to mop the floor intellectually with you whenever you choose, just as I've done with abusive far-right Y2K zombies who deployed the same kind of "rhetoric" to discredit well-reasoned arguments that their advocacy of a doomsday scenario was completely off base. I always found your lot are really quite docile in person, usually full of the sound of their own voice and scared of every other voice, so scared you try to drown it out. Since you live in Camas, why don't you drop by one of these days and we'll see how your name-calling works in person? I live in Lakewood. I'll buy you a beer and we'll see if you can be polite for more than two minutes.
Yes, Richard, I have baited you. I don't like your style, but I am playing according to it, since you've inverted the Golden Rule so perfectly that I rather enjoy mocking you with some of the shit-talking you do. I don't like your politics, but I'll accept your beliefs if you take even one step to support them with actual facts instead of accusations of lying absent any proof I am wrong. So far, you haven't made a single statement supported by fact -- you've got plenty of opinions, but they are unsupportable in the real world.
Your argument about Californians not being overtaxed is so broad that it betrays complete ignorance or intolerance of the fact that different states use widely divergent tax strategies that distribute the burden of taxation quite differently. If anything, Washington and California are on the same track, moving the burden onto the backs of the middle class and poor to create some voodoo economic stimulus.
Yet, as you would know if you read the papers in Washington state, the only thing that these moves have got taxpayers is Boeing and other companies taking jobs out of the state.
Your comic reference to the "Microsoft tax" in one of your postings is so startlingly uninformed as to betray your ignorance of how tax revenues actually are collected: In a state with no income tax and a business and occupations tax that maxes out at 1.5 percent for manufacturers (before specific deductions for business services and high technology companies), we're not living on Microsoft alone. Far, far from it.
This Seattle Times article explains the Washington B&O tax and the difference in revenues compared to Oregon, which does have an income tax:
Had Bill Gates located his company in Oregon instead of Washington, Microsoft would owe that state's 6.6 percent corporate income tax; last year, that would have amounted to $588.7 million. Instead, the company pays Washington B&O taxes, which work out to about $313.5 million.By contrast, Seattle-based Amazon has racked up billions of dollars in sales since it went public in 1997 but has had only one profitable quarter. Last year, spokesman Bill Curry said, Amazon paid $4 million in state B&O taxes. Had Jeff Bezos chosen to start the company 170 miles to the south, in Portland, the company would have paid a $10 licensing fee.
Now, note, Richard, that Microsoft's contribution to Washington state tax revenues was only 16.9 percent of the B&O tax and only 1.52 percent of total tax revenues. Since Washington collects only 58 percent of its revenues from taxes, Microsoft, which had sales of $32.1 billion last fiscal year, accounts for less than eight-tenths of one percent of the state's revenues.Yet, at the same time, the tax burdern in Washington falls harder on the middle class and poor, through the very taxes I described and others, like the lottery, making the calls for a more business-friendly California by Arnold Schwarzenegger all the more patheticly similar to George W. Bush's claim that he is compassionate.
What you also refuse to see in California or here in Washington is that what we pay for as taxpayers -- what we invest in together -- has been decimated by the neocon attack on government as an instrument of social decision-making, beginning with Reagan and continuing with the same venal ferocity you bring to an argument. I think the people have had it with under-investment in our young, continuing education, and innumerable other programs that must be cut to support a healthy profit margin for companies. Remember, Richard, people work at those companies and they have to live in these communities, even if they are falling apart. They aren't blind to this, but you clearly are blind to the diminution of public services and attendant disproportionate increase in privately provided services, such as medical care, over the past 20 years throughout the United States.
What I am arguing in not liberal, it is simple economics. Californians' future were choked off by the Wilson administration's misguided energy deregulation policy, which promoted the looting of the state and consumers' wallets, siphoning off much need capital and a massive revenue surplus at exactly the moment it was needed to sustain public investment in education, infrastructure and other assets that have made California an attractive place to live and do business for several generations. If a people don't invest in themselves, they create a disincentive to invest in their region.
I'm tired of the accusations of treason and heresy leveled by neocons with anyone who has even a slight disagreement with them. You see taxation and state budgets through an ideological lens that distorts reality, plain and simple. If you can't understand that California got into this crisis because of a combination of factors that were amplified by the Wilson administration's energy deregulation policy, you're just willfully indifferent to reality, which is worse than being stupid.But, you made that point yourself in your latest reply: "Initially, I thought you were a demagogue, but looking at the desperate arguments you raise about things like cigarette taxes, while dodging the car tax, it's apparent that you're simply ignorant." You're a demagogue and refuse to see when you are beaten.
For a person purported, albeit only by himself, to be such a good engineer, you are remarkably inept with facts and numbers. I wonder how much of the rest of the Richard Bennett story is exaggerated? Are you like Bill O'Reilly, who claims he won journalism awards on his tabloid show that a.) he didn't win and, b.) the award the show did win -- a different award -- was given more than a year after he left, to the new staff? It'd be par for the course, based on my experience of people like you.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at October 21, 2003 12:16 AM | TrackBack