One place I download the catalog and drool over is Fedco seeds. They are a co-operative in Maine. Anyway, this is from their current catalog:
Do you know that from 1954–1963 the marginal income tax rate for individuals in the top bracket was 91% and from 1965–1981 70%? These rates didn’t prevent our nation from enjoying its longest period of relative prosperity, in fact they aided and abetted that outcome. Now we hear dire forecasts from the Tea Party that President Obama’s modest proposal to restore the rate to a whopping 38.5% from its present 35% will cripple the economy even though it affects only our wealthiest 2%. He ought to raise it to 60%!
Change I can believe in?
• Redistribute our income through fair progressive taxation.
• Revamp global trade agreements to bring back our jobs.
• Rebuild our infrastructure to manufacture real goods.
• Revitalize our food system to de-centralize, re-localize and re-energize.
–CR Lawn, Sun. Oct. 31, 2010
<idle musing>
I agree! and now, back to our regularly scheduled programming...
</idle musing>
3 comments:
I can't resist asking, to use an analogy, would you then be amenable to the government (local or federal) coming to your house and removing 60% of all those wonderful fruits and vegetables you've been blogging about stocking away in your cellar (http://anebooks.blogspot.com/2010/09/its-fall.html) so that they might be redistributed to those of us who have not worked all summer to make similar provisions?
If you needed the food-no.
I don't find the taxation burden too heavy when I compare it to the benefits that I receive. Do I want higher taxes? Not really, but I am more afraid of the gov't spending money they don't have and mortgaging my grandkids than I am of higher taxes.
James
But there you get at the heart of the matter . . . I have no doubt that if I were in need of it you would share your food with me, but do you trust a government agency to decide who needs and who does not? The more government becomes a large, centralized bureaucracy, the more checks and balances are needed so that those who get their "food" from government don't simply make it their focus to get what they can from you for themselves. Hence the place for the body of Christ to reach out itself and help those both in spiritual and in physical need.
I do, of course, share your concern for government spending, but like any average household, shouldn't the solution be to scale back spending (especially with a federal government who has increasingly taken away the control of things that are the proper domain of states) rather than going out and finding more money to take?
By the way, praying all goes well with the birth of your latest grandchild!
John
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