Bar Stool Taxation--how it really works

[jmowreader]

I think we all know the old RW e-mail about the ten men who go out drinking every night, run up a $100 bar tab and are charged the way the tax structure works--the three poorest men pay nothing and the rich man pays $57. The bartender cuts their total bill by $20 and apportions the reduction based on the amount they were taxed to start with, which (in the conservative world) causes the guy whose bill went from $1 to free to lead an uprising against the rich guy because his bill went from $57 to $40 or whatever it was. Everyone beats up the rich guy, who stops coming and causes the other nine not to have enough money to pay the bill.

The moral of this story is, if we charge rich people their fair share of taxes they'll leave the country. They DO leave out the fact that there are only a few countries that treat the rich better tax-wise than the US, and in all of them you need to spend the money you'd have paid in taxes on raising your own army.

There are OTHER scenarios at work here.

The Reagan Plan: 10 men drink in a bar, run up a $100 bar tab and are charged according to their tax rate. The bartender reduces their bill to $80, apportioning it according to tax rate. The ten men still drink $100 worth of beer every night, so eventually the bar goes out of business because you can't sell $100 worth of beer for $80 for very long.

The Boortz Plan: 10 men drink in a bar, run up a $100 bar tab and are charged according to their tax rate. Then the bartender decides to implement the "FairTab" plan and charges each man $10 to drink. The three poorest men, seeing their bill go from zero to $10, quit coming because they can't afford it.

The Cartman Plan: 10 men drink in a bar, run up a $100 bar tab and are charged according to their tax rate. The richest man realizes he's paying $57 for two beers and says "screw you guys, I'm going home." The next night, they throw in for a case of beer and drink it at the rich guy's house, saving themselves $80 in the process and putting the bartender, who was stupid for coming up with this shit in the first place, out of business for being a dumbass.

The Value for Money Plan: 10 men go to a bar and drink, pay according to their tax rate and receive beer in accordance with the money they pay. Therefore, the three poorest men, who pay nothing, receive no beer from the bartender and the richest man receives 57 beers. The rich man donates six beers to the poor, drinks the rest and dies that night from a combination of alcohol poisoning, water intoxication and gastric detonation because no one can drink 51 beers in one night and live.

The Modern Republican Plan: same ten guys, same $100 bill...the bartender reduces the rich guy's bill to $30 because he can use the savings to create jobs. However, the bartender's wife threatens to beat the shit out of him unless he makes the tab revenue neutral, so the bill for each of the other nine men goes up. The poorest five men give up smoking cigars to compensate, and the cigar store goes out of business.

The Teabagger Plan: you know about the ten guys...the bartender decides to reduce the rich guy's bill to $30 so he can create jobs and reduces everyone else's bill to stimulate spending. Now the bar is running at a deficit, so it starts filling the glasses of all the other patrons to half-full because cuts have to be made. The other 90 people who drink there every night refuse to buy a half-full beer for a full-beer price and drink somewhere else. Eventually the bar folds.

The Other Teabagger Plan: the bartender decides he has to reduce the amount of beer sold to the patrons and buys smaller mugs so no one will notice there's not as much beer there as there used to be. This causes a decline in sales at the brewery level as every bar in America catches on to the same trick. Eventually the brewery goes out of business.

[eomer]

1. 100 men go into a bar. 99 of them have been working producing things of value that day.

The 99 men give all their earnings to the 100th man, because he is the "owner".

The 100th man takes the earnings of the 99 and buys them a few peanuts with it, but only begrudgingly. Then he lives it up on the rest of the money, from a separate, more appropriate part of the bar for a person of his wealth.

The next day the 100th man uses the surplus to "buy" another 99 men, even though he already can't possibly drink all the proceeds every night.

[EstimatedProphet]

2. The other other teabagger plan:

The other 9 guys and the bartender attack the rich man and drive him away because he's black.