Timed correctly perhaps we can get both the Rapture and the Going of Galt to happen on the same day. Synchronize watches…now.

I fail to see how reducing one’s workload in response to higher payroll taxes makes any sort of sense at all.

As far as property taxes, you can either own property or not; I suppose the equivalent here is selling off some property so that other people shoulder the tax burden. But who wants to buy property if all that will happen is you’ll wind up paying taxes on it?

This is their worldview, their shibboleth, and it is absolutely nonsensical.

Go Galt? Rush looks like he ate Galt.  </rimshot>

You’re wrong, Amanda. When the inheritance tax was first imposed, rich people stopped dying in droves. The sudden increase in lifespan was reported as a miracle in all the medical journals.

More seriously, back when the top marginal tax rate was 90%, there certainly were some high earners who decided that a couple weeks more vacation were worth more than a couple weeks working, but that’s so far from the current situation as to be laughable.  “I’m not going to work an extra hour, because if I do, I’ll only get $60.40 instead of $65!” just isn’t what you would call a rallying cry.

More seriously, back when the top marginal tax rate was 90%, there certainly were some high earners who decided that a couple weeks more vacation were worth more than a couple weeks working,

Then they should thank the government, seriously.  Probably saved many people from stress-related illness.

I long for a day when you can ask, “Who is Rush Limbaugh?”, and get nothing but puzzled looks from everyone within listening distance.

Sadly, that probably won’t happen in my lifetime.

I am a strong proponent of the Go Galt movement, basically because any asshole who thinks they’re so important to the continued existence of civilization on earth that we can’t live without them has demonstrated through their self-importance and arrogance exactly why they aren’t fit to live among us.

GTFO, my friends…and don’t just talk about it, do it!...

Well, see, I find Rush’s move to be sensible, given how much money he has.  It’s expensive to live in NYC and he doesn’t need to live there to do his job.  Moving someplace where he can keep up the same, or better, standard of living for less money is the smart response to losing more of his income to taxation. I probably wouldn’t have picked Florida, just for the cost of living and the hurricanes.

He needs to be closer to the docks to prevent his Dominican drug shipments from being reduced by greedy middleman/dockhands.

Many people are working less not because of the slightly higher marginal tax rate but because of the recession brought on by policies that Limbaugh helped bring about.  Having a high income means that you can work less if you want.  Most people don’t have an option of working less, and many of us would be working more if we could.

I’d love to pay the top tax rate.  I’d be willing to pay it on an unlimited amount of money too.  Billions.  If I could work a few more hours and make a couple of million bucks I wouldn’t be complaining that I had to pay three percent more on those millions than people making less.  Then again, maybe I would.  Maybe money chances people.  I’d change salaries with Rush anytime though, and take on his tax burden.  I’d even change houses with him.  He could worry about rent and I’d worry about his tax bill.

Hasn’t Limbaugh already been in Florida for the last decade?

Isn’t Florida where he got into drug trouble?

I was also amused by the latest Murdoch press spin in the Boston Herald Unamerican - they have his cousin who is a liberal out saying that he ain’t such a bad guy in person.

Really. 

With all this hoopla about his demanding tribute from the RNC chair and apologies from lawmakers and throwing fits over Rahm playing him like a fiddle, seems there are more than a few people who think he’s Jabba the Hutt or the Seven Deadly Sins Incarnate.  Got to rehabilitate that image and forget all about the whole mess with viagra and underage Domincan prostitutes and hillbilly heroin addiction after saying all addicts should be executed.

Moving to Florida?  limpbag built a mansion and a studio down there a long time ago.  I thought he did most of his broadcasting from there anymore.  Moving?  Like going galt, he’s all hot air and narcotics.

“Folks, it’s axiomatic: when you raise taxes on an activity, you reduce that activity. People start doing that activity less. In this case: working.”

Right. I remember in the ‘80s when my dad’s payroll taxes went up to pay for Reagan’s tax cuts for rich people. He told his bosses he was only going to work 30 hours a week from now on. They were totally cool with that.

Seriously, why isn’t this guy serving time for buying prescription drugs illegally. Shouldn’t he be ion his fifth or sixth year by now? What a jackass.

It’s amazing how little work got done between 1940 and 1980

That explains why we have no infrastructure today.
High taxes kept highways from being built.  Kept Appalachia from being connected to the electrical grid.  Kept us from putting a man on the moon.  Kept us from practically eliminating polio.  Didn’t help us rebuild Europe and Japan.  High taxes even kept us from developing commercial jet aircraft, errection medication and tropical resorts.

I thought Limbaugh already lived in Florida and broadcast from there.

Anyone arguing that he (or she) won’t work if subjected to a higher marginal tax rate because maximizing their return on his labor is their paramount value, is basically proclaiming that he is a lazy fuck who, if you did hire him, would spend the day maximizing his return on his labor by doing as little of it as possible, conducting personal business on your time and stealing office supplies.

Sorry -  . . . maximizing his return on his labor . . .

I fail to see how reducing one’s workload in response to higher payroll taxes makes any sort of sense at all.

It makes sense to people who get all confused at the sight of numbers in general.  Sadly, many extremists have very poor basic math skills.  Studying math generally gets pushed aside when you’re all wrapped up in hating people or figuring out how to take advantage of them for your own benefit.

Limbaugh is really a tease.  He starts going on about how he’ll just leave and then when I really start getting excited about it, I realize he never intended to leave in the first place.  If a woman started to get Limbaugh all excited and then didn’t follow through, I bet he’d think of plenty of names to call her.  He should call himself those names now.

catgirl, part of me wonders if people who think this somehow failed to overcome the developmental stage child psychologists know as Conservation of Quantity. They’ve somehow decided that two pennies are worth more than one quarter, because, you know, there are 2 of them.

When you work more and you get more money, you get more money. The idea that going from one tax bracket to the next will cause you to take home less money than you did when you were in the lower tax bracket is a popular myth. Doesn’t actually exist.

If taxes on an activity reduce that activity, why not legalise drugs and then tax them?

I do, from a theoretical point of view, understand and have sympathy for the idea that increasing marginal rates could cause some workers in some professions to choose free time over additional work. However, the reality is that in your peak earning years, you should be dumping as much as humanly possible into your retirement accounts, and thus the rational reaction to decreased wages from higher taxes is to make more money.

Tyro:

The people who are threatening to go galt shouldn’t be constrained by the need to save for retirement (maybe they are, if their saving and spending patterns are really stupid, but in that case lower taxes won’t save them).

But yeah, for ordinary mortals the reaction when someone cuts your take-home pay is to figure out ways to earn more, not how to earn less.

More seriously, back when the top marginal tax rate was 90%, there certainly were some high earners who decided that a couple weeks more vacation were worth more than a couple weeks working, but that’s so far from the current situation as to be laughable.

Reagan had some anecdote about how he’d reach a point in the year where he’d earned so much that he’d start refusing scripts.  He had the time available, but since the gubbmit was going to get a huge chunk of the money, he decided it wasn’t worth it.

Thinking about that now, I don’t see why I’m supposed to feel sorry for Reagan at all.  He clearly had earned enough money that he didn’t need to work, and his not working meant that there were jobs open for other actors.  Plus his extra free time meant that he was probably spending money on luxury items or hobbies, so he was injecting more into the economy that way than if he’d been spending all that time working.  That argument only seems to work for people who can set their own hours and not worry about putting food on the table from day to day, so I’m not sure exactly why them being able to take home less pay is supposed to bother me.

The downside is, if his anecdote is true, that free time is probably what led him to go into politics instead of staying with acting.  So I think I may have found my first reason for disliking a giant marginal tax rate on the highest earners…

At one place I worked many, many years ago, there was a guy who asked that he not received more than a certain amount in hourly pay, so that he would not be pushed into a higher tax bracket.  As far as I know, this did not cause him to work less, only to be paid less. 

Yes, he was an idiot.

I remember in the ‘80s when my dad’s payroll taxes went up to pay for Reagan’s tax cuts for rich people.

That’s not why payroll taxes went up, but it definitely puts the kibosh on Reagan’s unearned reputation as a tax cutter.

Jon Stewart did a great bit on Rush this week.  It was hilarious.

Reagan had some anecdote about how he’d reach a point in the year where he’d earned so much that he’d start refusing scripts.  He had the time available, but since the gubbmit was going to get a huge chunk of the money, he decided it wasn’t worth it.

Proving once again that Carole Lombard was far, far more patriotic than Ronnie “What? Me fight overseas?” Reagan:

“Every cent anybody pays in taxes is spent to benefit him. There’s no better place to spend it. I enjoy this country and really think I get my money’s worth.”

Not to bring the thread down, but it looks like Limbaugh managed to get 12 people killed at an immigration services center today:

NY governor:  At least 12 killed in Binghamton

Apparently, Limpballs owns a palace in NYC and spends about 15 days a year in the city/state.  So he only pays income taxes on income earned in the state.

When Governor Paterson was informed of El Rushbo’s plan to sell his place in NYC because he didn’t want to pay any more taxes, the governor basically said, “don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”

I noticed nobody has mention the excellently nasty Jon Stewart snark telling Rush to GET THE FUCK OUT OF NEW YORK!?...It’s great!

Mnemosyne, your link didn’t work.

Here’s the story, via CNN:
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/04/03/binghamton.shooting/index.html

It’s a bit premature to pin this on Rush, much as I’d love to.  Another lone gun nut, himself a naturalized citizen shot up an immigration center, held 40+ people hostage, killed 14, wounded at least 5 more, and is now dead himself- story still developing, don’t know if it was suicide or police that killed him.  No indication that I can see from the few stories I’ve read about his motive or politics, other than the choice of an immigration center as his target.  Did he have it in for the immigrants or for the center itself?  Political grudge or personal?

Remember the guy who shot up the UU church last summer?  Turned out he actually had a personal beef with the church through his ex-wife, but he himself insisted it was an act of political terror
(“make no mistake; this was a hate crime,” he wrote) and thus, it became one.  So, instead of being just another pathetic but dangerous loser with a vengeful grudge, he gets to become some kind of patriot martyr for the far, far right, the guy who actually went out and shot liberals for being liberals.

Probably a safe assumption, even this early, that immigrants were this guy’s target.  Interesting that though his name is being reported as “Wong” or “Voongh”, but according to a co-worker he went by “Vaughn.”  A case of over-naturalization, perhaps?  Obsessively anti-Asian as a form of self-loathing?  Pulling-up-the-ladder-ism taken to its furthest extreme?

I’d put that sort of anti-immigrant hate more at Glen Beck or Lou Dobbs than Rush.  As Dave Neiwert has pointed out many times, these incidents keep happening because the likes of Beck, knowing there are genuinely unhinged people out there just waiting for a target and a motive, keep pointing out targets and rationalizing motives.

The genocide in Rwanda started with hate radio.

All that talk of “we surround them!” and “civil war!” and this is what we get.  Over and over again, yet each one is somehow an isolated incident that nobody could have foreseen.

Oh, and since Rush has owned property and lived at least part time in Florida for many years now, why did he wait this long to make it his official residence?  I’d have thought the lack of a state income tax would have been reason enough alone.  The guy makes 10’s of millions a year.