From MyRightWingDad:
Subject: Fwd: Father/Daughter talk
A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many
others her age, she considered herself to be a very liberal Democrat, and
among other liberal ideals, was very much in favor of higher taxes to
support more government programs, in other words redistribution of wealth.
She was deeply ashamed that her father was a rather staunch Republican, a
feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had
participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt that her
father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to keep what he
thought should be his.One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on
the rich and the need for more government programs. The self-professed
objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she
indicated so to her father. He responded by asking how she was doing in
school. Taken aback, she answered rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA,
and let him know that it was tough to maintain, insisting that she was
taking a very difficult course load and was constantly studying, which left
her no time to go out and party like other people she knew. She didn’t even
have time for a boyfriend, and didn’t really have many college friends
because she spent all her time studying.Her father listened and then asked, ‘How is your friend Audrey doing?’ She
replied, ‘Audrey is barely getting by. All she takes are easy classes , she
never studies, and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular on campus;
college for her is a blast. She’s always invited to all the parties and
lots of times she doesn’t even show up for classes because she’s too hung
over.’ Her wise father asked his daughter, ‘Why don’t you go to the
Dean’s office and ask him to deduct 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your
friend who only has a 2.0. That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and
certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA.’The daughter, visibly shocked by her father’s suggestion, angrily fired
back, ‘That’s a crazy idea, and how would that be fair! I’ve worked really
hard for my grades! I’ve invested a lot of time, and a lot of hard work!
Audrey has done next to nothing toward her degree. She played while I worked
my tail off!The father slowly smiled, winked and said gently, ‘Welcome to the Republican
party.’If anyone has a better explanation of the difference between
Republican and Democrat I’m all ears.
Subject: Fwd: Father/Daughter talk, remix*
A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. From a working poor family, she was the first generation to attend college and though her father could afford to contribute very little to her higher education, he was very proud of her. Like so many others her age, she considered herself to be a very liberal Democrat, and among other liberal ideals, was very much in favor of higher taxes to support more government programs, in other words redistribution of wealth. based her political views on her parents’. She was deeply a little ashamed that her father was a rather staunch Republican apolitical, a feeling she openly rarely expressed because much more importantly in her eyes, he was a loving and supportive dad. Based on the lectures that she had participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, family political round-tables as she grew up, she felt that her father had for years harbored a evil, selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his. disillusion with the government in general and the current administration in particular.
One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich and the need for more government programs. asking her father, unusually directly, what his political beliefs were. The self-professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she indicated so to her father. She didn’t get the idea to do so from college; she was an engineering major and the only two non-technical, science or math courses in her program to date had been a pre-Civil War US History class and a literature class focusing specifically on Shakespeare–she was inspired herself by the historic nature of the upcoming election and had been wondering if it was enough to pull her dad out of his usual irritable cynicism towards politics. He responded by asking how she was doing in school. Taken aback, A little surprised but happy to assuage his interest in her doings, she answered rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was tough to maintain, insisting that she was taking a very difficult course load and was constantly studying and holding down two part-time jobs to finance said education, which left her no time to go out and party like other people she knew. She didn’t even have time for a boyfriend, and didn’t really have many college friends because she spent all her time studying and working.
Her father listened and then asked, ‘How is your friend Audrey doing?’ She replied, ‘Audrey is barely getting by. All she takes are easy classes , she never studies, and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular on campus; college for her is a blast. She’s always invited to all the parties and lots of times she doesn’t even show up for classes because she’s too hung over.’ Her wise father asked his daughter, ‘Why don’t you go to the Dean’s office and ask him to deduct 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your friend who only has a 2.0. That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA.’ is Audrey able to do this and you aren’t?”
The daughter, visibly shocked by her father’s suggestion, angrily fired back, said slowly, ‘That’s a crazy idea, and how would that be fair! I’ve worked really hard for my grades! I’ve invested a lot of time, and a lot of hard work! “Well, Audrey’s parents are paying for all her tuition, books, housing and fees, plus giving her an allowance. They’re going to help her get an off-campus apartment next year; she’s only on-campus now because all freshman HAVE to live there. They’re giving her a car, too. Audrey’s parents don’t really care what she does while she’s at college, only that she finishes up with some kind of four-year degree. Audrey has done next to nothing. She played while I worked my tail off! …but why shouldn’t she? She’s not penalized for it and when she graduates with her degree in Communications or Business Management or whatever, she’ll step right into an HR or admin position at one of her dad’s friend’s companies. I can’t do that, though; we don’t know anybody who would just give me a job, and even with both part-time jobs and every scholarship and grant I’ve been able to find, I won’t have enough money to finish my last two years unless I start taking out loans. College tuition keeps going up, every semester, five or more percent! By the time I graduate I’m going to owe my first two years’ salary in loans. And I have to keep my grades up or I’ll lose the scholarships I have and the only recommendation I’m going to have going into this depressed job market is my grades. And my job performance at my two part-time jobs, so I better never miss a day. I’m thinking about taking a third job so I can afford to enroll in the university-sponsored health insurance plan since our family doesn’t have any. I can’t afford to get sick, ever!”
The father slowly smiled, winked and said gently, ‘Welcome to the Republican party.’
(*Yes, this is semi-autobiographical.)
I’ve got another one:
How about, grades are a semi-good indication of a combination of effort/intelligence and money is a horrible one?
Fantastic.
So “Democrats think they ought to live in a society where success is determined solely by personal merit; Republicans think they already do.”
Andrew: That’s just perfect.
Hey, I really enjoy most of the articles on here. However, my dad owns his own business and there are a few things I don’t like about what has been suggested. I grew up very poor. My mom worked as a figure skating coach and my dad worked for large companies as a manager for most of my childhood. When I hit my teens, my dad started his own company, while my mother went back to school to become a firefighter/paramedic. We were so poor that we nearly had to sell our house. If it weren’t for both parents working hard together, we wouldn’t have been able to eat. Recently, my father’s company has made quite a bit of money. And, in Canada, companies are taxed VERY heavily. My dad had to pay one million to the government outright. Before he paid himself, his employees, or reinvested in the company. Cash flow is one of the most important aspects of a company. If someone takes that sort of money out of a company’s account, it can kill it. To death. So, I guess what I’m saying is, why should hard working entrepreneurs who profit share, provide benefits for their employees, and treat employees like family (we paid our project manager, who is an alcoholic, his salary while he got help. We also kept a field worker on salary after his son died, so he could recover. If you know anything about the nature of construction, you’ll know that this is a HUGE benefit), cough up there hard earned cash to help people that barely get up and go to work in the morning? I’m not saying that everyone is like this…but, it’s starting to feel like a great, big punishment for small and large companies alike.
I’m all for large monopolies getting what’s coming to them. I don’t like companies that treat their employees and customers like shit. CEOs who layoff 80% of their employees so they can pocket 3 million extra. But I still don’t think it’s fair to put small companies in such turmoil, because some government official deems it successful enough and stable enough to tax the fuck out of them. The bottom line is, companes are there for one reason: to make money. And these owners work their fucking balls/ovaries off to get where they are. Anyway, that’s my beef. Otherwise, I totally understand the struggling student idea. My dad makes more than the average individual and I still have a full time job while I go to school, just to pay the rent and scrape by. It sucks, but it’s the nature of the beast, I guess. Not many of us get free rides, though…
Hi Samantha, thanks for the good words!
My feeling is, if a company is pulling in more than a quarter of a million in profits, then they can stand a modest tax increase. Nobody is proposing taxing any company that isn’t making at least that much, nor that any company fork over one million dollars off the bat, that I’m aware of. Do you disagree?
I have a question. When someone asks a question like this, why is their hard earned cash always going to support some lazy leech on society (one of Reagan’s “welfare queens”, no doubt)? I just went on Unemployment – like so many offices on Wall Street, the Law Office where I was a paralegal was forced to have some layoffs, and I got the axe. Unless I find a job in the next couple weeks – no easy task in New York right now – someone’s hard-earned cash is going to help me keep a roof over my head and food on my table. And I assure you, I got up and went to work in the morning every day. And I worked. Does that make me worthy of help?
And if this is your reason for voting Republican, why are you okay with coughing up your hard earned cash to support subsidies, tax breaks and no-bid contracts for much larger companies than yours? A war that we got into for no good reason, and has cost us untold billions because it wasn’t planned properly? Make no mistake, Republicans spend at least as much money as Democrats, they just borrow instead of tax, so Democrats are left to raise taxes when the bill comes due. That, and Democrats think that at least some of the money should go toward helping actual citizens.
Yes, it sounds like you were desperately poor. He was only a manager? How did you survive?
Out of how much revenue?
It sounds like you want to draw a line at your particular level of income and say, “everyone who makes more than this should pay high taxes. Eveyone who makes as much as me should pay less.”
The fact is, there are countries where the tax and regulatory burden on businessmen is extremely light. We know these countries collectively as “the third world.” If your dad had a business in Mexico, the Philippines, El Salvador, or Indonesia, he’d be paying a whole lot less tax and he’d be subject to a lot less regulation. The downside is, people who aren’t born wealthy in those countries have very little chance of earning enough to start their own businesses.
Samantha, how do you want to differentiate between companies who lay off people so the management can pocket some extra cash, and companies who reinvest wisely and treat their employees ‘as family’? Do you want the IRS to send detectives to determine how a given company treats the workforce? Which criteria should be used to determine whether a company has to pay taxes (or how much they have to pay)?
And as for cashflow – if taxes are part of the system, the company knows that beforehand and can plan accordingly. It is not as though someone in the government decides randomly that yes, this week we’ll tax all companies in this county/state/province x% of their revenue/turnover/market capitalization or whatever, send the collection thugs out to collect the money, catching poor, honest companies unawares and giving a shit whether companies go bust because of the tax. It just doesn’t work like this, does it?
Andrew: Strong, man, very strong. I think you’ve pretty much nailed in one sentence the journey that took me from “Atlas Shrugged” to “Dreams From My Father”, from Ayn Rand to Desmond Tutu and from laissez-faire to single-payer.
Also, let’s be honest here: the father was really just trying to find out when Audrey might be coming home for a weekend visit. Frankly, you should always be just a little creeped out when your dad asks, “How’s your friend {hot friend’s name} doing?”, especially when your answer involves mentioning the frequency and severity of her drinking habit.
Ah, I remember this one. Saw it on Conservapedia once, though the daughter was a little girl, “Audrey” was a homeless guy, and the task at hand was cleaning up dog shit. The rest of the “parables” are worth a read as well, though you might want to place a soft object on your desk first, so you don’t damage your skull.
Kawakami:
You’re me. I went from Objectivism and Libertarianism (which are compatible, despite Ayn Rand’s claims) to being pretty far left within a couple of years. The largest part was in watching people that I knew being kicked in the ass in the real world, even though they had plenty of merit on their own. Ayn Rand wrote beautifully, yet she seems to have had no understanding of the reality in which most people live.
Those conservative parables mostly don’t make any sense. Seriously, I can’t discover even the POINT in them, much less how they apply to conservatives/liberals.
Antigone, I think I can discern the point to most of them. I mean, there’s glurge, but that’s not all.
“The Desperate Smoker”: When you know what’s best for other people, and publicly tell them so, it makes you a better person.
“The Fasting Woman”: Carrying guns saves lives.
“The Troubled Pregnancy”: If you carry a dangerous pregnancy to term, Jesus will reward you by making the kid awesome. You won’t be consigning a child to a lifetime of disability and pain. Also, women have better ways of knowing than doctors, and abortion robs us of awesome football players.
“The Lost $40″: I misplaced cash and feel really dumb for doing it.
“The Flop”: If everyone tells you you’re wrong, you may in fact not be. Also glurge.
“The Difficult Science Problem”: Past failure is no indication of future performance, maybe? That, or, depending on what “finding” the answer in a book means, cheating is awesome.
“The Wall”: Reagan knocked down the Berlin Wall with his swingin’ cod. Hail Reagan!
“Welfare”: The government takes your hard-earned money and gives it to lazy people.
“The University Assignment”: If your work sucks, don’t fix it–work the ref!
“The Conservative Conference”: Conservatives are brave and rational and faithy. Also, oodles of glurge.
“The Convert”: Books and math are for suckers. And Ronald Coase is awesome, because the invisible hand is super awesome.
That sounds about right to me.
But as values they all sound pretty, well non-sequitorish.
Samantha, here’s the problem with living in a liberal democracy: you, the individual, don’t get to decide whom to help.
Your dad’s taxes go to supporting the roads his company’s trucks drive on, and the roads his supplers’ companies’ trucks drive on. They go to support the schools that you very likely attended (unless you attended privately funded schools), and the arenas at which your mom very likely coached figure skating. They’re supporting the university that you’re attending (if you are indeed attending a Canadian university—they’re all largely supported by government funding, with your tuition covering something less than fifty percent of the cost of your actual degree.) They’re going to support the Employment Insurance infrastructure that manged the payments that seasonal workers receive when they’re seasonally unemployed. They’re supporting the hospitals and medical centres where we Canadians receive medical treatment without having to pay for it. They’re supporting cheap drugs for seniors and desperately poor people. They’re supporting people who’ve run through their E.I., and still haven’t found a job. because there are no jobs in their fields. They’re supporting the paltry sums on which people who have debilitating disabilities live. And yes, some small portion of the taxes your dad pays goes to ensuring that people who can’t or won’t work can put food on the table while they’re they’re getting their crap together (or possibly never getting their crap together, and living on the dole forever, but, as taxpayers, we can’t really tell who needs assistance for what reason).
It benefits all of us to have people who don’t or can’t work taken care of to some minimal standard of care. They’re not going to go out and get jobs if they receive less social assistance—many of them are living hand-to-mouth already, and really aren’t living it up on their social assistance payments. If they can’t pay rent and eat, then they simply won’t pay rent, and then landlords will have to evict them, and they’ll need emergency shelter, and supported housing, or they’ll find squats, or, if they’re lucky, be able to prevail upon friends and family. It doesn’t help anyone to have people homeless. It doesn’t help anyone to have kids in school who don’t have enough to eat—they get rangy and disruptive, and their teachers end up having to bring food to school for the entire class. It is not to the benefit of the nice homeowners in the nice developements that your dad or his colleagues may build to have their impoverished friends and relations asking to crash on their couches for months on end, or wandering the streets and camping in the ravines if they happen to have run out of friends and relations.
The problem with liberal democracy is that we, as a society, do what we can to make the entire society work better. This means, unfortunately, that your dad’s taxes go to support the alleged welfare queens as well as the hardworking people who can’t catch a break, the downsized workers who can’t find a job, the kids who have the misfortune to be born poor to parents who don’t have the skills your mom and dad have, and any of us who’ve had the bad luck to need to be caught by the social safety net.
Samantha, I call bullshit. In this country revenues are not taxed, profits are.
You say: “My dad had to pay one million to the government outright. Before he paid himself, his employees, or reinvested in the company.”
But that is pretty much impossible in this country. Same with Joe the Plumber. The argument that they won’t reinvest in the business or hire new employees because of higher tax rates is rather bogus because plowing those profits back into the company instead of realizing them in some other way would shelter those revenues from higher taxes completely.
I don’t know anything about the tax code in Canada, but as a small business owner in this country, I can tell you that this story wouldn’t hold water.
Samantha, I know it’s a little out there, but I used the Google and looked to see if there was any publicly available information on Canada’s taxation rates for businesses. It was a shock to me, I can tell you, but Canadians also seem to have discovered the intertubes and have rather an extensive online guide to Canadian corporate taxes.
I’m no tax expert, but I was able to easily identify the fact that the T4012 – T2 corporate tax form walks the corporation at hand through the process of determining net income, not gross income, before determining their tax liability. Knowing the margins that the grocery business, for example, typically operates on (up to 3% if they’re lucky), and knowing that Canada does in fact have fully functional grocery stores (I even shopped in one on vacation in 2006), the assertion that the Canadian government taxes businesses’ gross income is absurd on its face.
Also at the link, there are full sections on small business deductions and calculating losses. Dig a little deeper and there are places where you establish deductions for incidental expenditures, charitable donations, resource deductions, capital deductions, amounts paid out in wages and salaries, and any provincial or territorial taxes your business is also liable for.
In several places, even the form you can find for determining the not-very-mysteriously-named tax on large corporations, it’s plain that the form aims to determine “taxable income.” The existence of this distinction would suggest to the rational person that all corporate income, which is to say gross income, is not, by definition, necessarily taxable.
I hope you’re getting paid well to make such an incredible fool of yourself, and your arguments, in public.
“why should hard working entrepreneurs who profit share, provide benefits for their employees, and treat employees like family…cough up their hard earned cash to help people that barely get up and go to work in the morning?”
Please stop equivocating “hard working” and “rich”. Plenty of rich people aren’t hard working–your real “friends” are the lazy rich trust-funders. Plenty of people used to be middle-class at the beginning of this “recovery”, and suffered the statistically predictable outcome of an economy where the median income has gained squat in 6½ years.
Oh, and speaking of Reagan: Doesn’t Obama want pretty much Reagan-era or Clinton-era tax rates? How badly did the rich suffer then?
If your dad will avoid a $30k raise because Obama would want $900 of it (starting at $250k income), your dad isn’t as smart as your description would have me believe. And if your dad is richer than that, he made out like a freakin’ bandit the last decade, compared to people who didn’t have the money to hire tax lawyers and accountants to play money games.
I kindof feel like we’re tilting at a plastic pitch here.
Violet, I think you’re right.
I wasn’t thinking when I posted my earlier comment.
(What? Someone on the Internet posting before they think things through? That never happens!)
A conservative parable:
A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age, she considered herself to be a very liberal Democrat, and found herself increasingly frustrated with her very conservative father. One day, they were having one of their usual political arguments and, gently, her wise father asked, “Why are you acting like such a fucking idiot? I know you’re smarter than this.”
She replied, “Well, we’re in a conservative parable, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Since we’re in a conservative parable,” she rudely interrupted, “Then there is no use in me being intelligent. My purpose is not to convince anyone of what I’m saying, it’s to convince them that I’m wrong. And not merely wrong—laughably wrong, obviously stupid, an object of pity and scorn. So I ought to be arrogant, condescending, and self-righteous. I should be transparently elitist. The more people hate me, the more likely they are to forward the story to every poor sod in their address book. And then they’ll have to read it, and their friends, and their friends’ friends. If this keeps up, some people will start to believe it’s true. It becomes part of pop culture. We become part of pop culture. And so do we become immortal.”
Her father chuckled at the arrogant youngster.
The moral of this story is that a woman must know her place to be taken to her reward.