Michael Noire
These are the core responsibilities of the Rich. The Idea that the responsibility of the Rich is to pay higher taxes is an ethical fallacy, for it assumes the greatest good can be achieved by obligating the wealthy to pay into a system where their contributions are routed and redistributed largely to the collectors and through a system of political nepotism. This system makes sure the best possible solutions are never achieved, and the largest fraction of revenues are abused, rather than used.
Bull. The rich have no specific obligation except to spend the money they either have earned or simply have in the way they see fit. If they so choose to do public works projects, give to charities, or they enjoy watching children get blown up in third world countries, then that is their prerogative. The rich, like the upper middle class, the middle class, the lower middle class, and the poor working class have no specific obligation to be any more moral or upstanding than the rest of society. True, they receive more scrutiny when they aren't, but they hold no responsibility to be as such.
Now, onto taxes. The government, like any business or institution run on money, is always looking to make more money. How can they do that? Tax the crap out of people who don't have it? No, that has never worked well in the past as any Robin Hood or American Revolution will tell you. Tax the crap out of people who do have it? There we go. Is it fair? Not really. Is it a slapdash solution to a problem that took us years to get into and may in the future bear fruit and help us on the road to digging ourself out of quite the tremendous hole? Possibly. Only time will tell, and I have no crystal ball.
Michael Noire
A rich man doesn't get to determine if his tax dollars go to a space program or to blowing up children in some poverty stricken middle eastern territory. A rich man doesn't get to determine if his tax dollars are spent on the cure for his wife's cancer, or on a monstrous fund raiser and banquette with no actual dollars going to cancer research itself. Tax dollars are highly inefficient, and seldom beneficent.
Nor should he/she (after all there are rich women). After all, those rich people are not elected officials. As such, they should have no say in where their tax dollars go because that's not their job. However, I hate to say this. It may not actually be a fair system, but no one claimed it to be. In fact, even the commercials, are very propaganda-esque in the fact that they seem to be villifying rich people for the sake of being rich and saying that (just because they can pay more) they should pay more for the sake of the country they live in and to help the economy and the defecit. It's a cheap a** ploy to make rich people look like the Villains who got us into the mess to begin with. So, no one is really claiming it to be a fair system,
Michael Noire
The wealthy do have a moral obligation to better the world they live in, but that should not be construed as a responsibility to pay even more taxes that do little to improve our quality of life.
Once again, no they don't have any such obligation. However, despite it being unfair, it may just happen, so it needs to be dealt with head on. And, I'm sorry to say that, I know it sucks, and I know it's slightly unfair, but the rich will get through it. They most always do.