Gothic horror writer Stephen King and his author wife Tabitha own property in both Maine and Florida. K8ing blasted Republicans at a recent rally according to Kennebec Journal:
So, you’ve got LePage in Maine, Walker in Wisconsin, you’ve got Scott in Florida. Larry, Curly and Moe. That’s what we’ve got here,” he said, according to a video of the event posted on YouTube.
The multimillionaire also questioned why he isn’t asked to pay more in federal taxes.
“As a rich person, I pay 28 percent tax. What I want to ask you is, why am I not paying 50 percent? Why is anybody in my bracket not paying 50?” he said. “Well, you know what? The Republicans will tell you — from John Boehner to Mitch McConnell to Rick Scott — that we can’t do that. Because if we tax guys like me, there won’t be any jobs. It’s bull. It’s plain, old bull.”
King said he and his wife, Tabitha, try to make up the difference between what they pay in taxes and the 50 percent threshold they feel is appropriate by making charitable donations to support libraries, schools, fire departments and veterans.
King ended his five minute speech by praising unions for gains made for workers:
“Remember, when these people talk to you about it, if you like the weekend, thank a union guy. If you like a 40-hour week, thank a union guy. If you like a day’s honest pay for a day’s honest work, thank a union guy,”
How many more people did Scott Walker turn in to union sympathizers during the three week bully ordeal in Wisconsin? King comes from humble beginnings but has enjoyed a 40 year stint as a popular fiction writer. According to Huffingtonpost:
Both national and Wisconsin-based Republican operatives tell the Huffington Post the party is being dramatically outworked and out-organized by Democrats in the recall campaigns being launched against state Senators.
The operatives, who raised their concerns out of hope it would jar the GOP into assertiveness, argue complacency has taken over after Governor Scott Walker successfully shepherded his anti-collective bargaining bill into law. While the Wisconsin Democratic Party, with major assists from progressive groups and unions, has harnessed resentment towards the governor into a full-throttled effort to recall eight GOP Senators, neither the enthusiasm nor organizational acumen exists on the Republican side of the aisle.
Does King speak for many people who have acquired wealth or is he a lone voice out there?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704164204576203242339123856.html
Voters Recall Florida Official
As for the above; I support whatever Mr. King wishes to do with his money. That’s his business.
If King wants to pay more in taxes, what’s stopping him? From now on, if he pays less than what he thinks is right and necessary, he is a complete and utter hypocrite. Nothing is preventing him from putting his money where his mouth is. He just wants OTHER people to have to do it.
He gives to organizations like libraries, veterans, schools, firefighters. Don’t you think that is more practical?
If you are a Wisconsin union sympathizer now, do you support the violent, illegal, and harassing activities of the unions there and elsewhere now? Their response to losing a political battle is to harass people at their homes, spray paint buildings, intimidate non-union people, tear up recall petitions, barge into government meeting s in Tennessee, vandalize businesses, and issue death threats.
Yep. A real sympathetic bunch.
@cargo
It seems to me when something happens to prevent those public servants from earning a decent living, they might tend to not take it too well.
On the other hand, I haven’t followed the public servants torturing the politicians. All I know is there are recall efforts. If people are making death threats or vandalizing then they should be arrested. Civilized people don’t condone that type of behavior.
“As a rich person, I pay 28 percent tax. What I want to ask you is, why am I not paying 50 percent?”
He can pay 50% anytime he wants. All he needs to do is write a check and send it to the US Treasury. Someone else in that tax bracket might not choose to pay 50%. Why should Mr. King or anyone else dictate to someone else and deprive them of their freedom of choice in matters of money they have earned?
Moon makes a good point that illustrates the nonsense in Mr. King’s statements. As Moon wrote, he is already giving to libraries, veterans, etc. Mr. King is certainly making better decisions on how to use his own money for public purposes than the government ever could. It puzzles me that he is now being so generous and making a positive difference, but wants to turn the power over the use of the money he has earned to politicians and bureaucrats. We all know what good stewards they are of our money. Makes no sense.
@NTK, I sure don’t think I meant to make the point you credited me with.
While I do think 50% is too much for anyone to be taxed, I do think that the rich are protected far too much. I mean the super rich….who could afford to be gouged a little more. I do not understand why Republicans are going to such desperate lengths to protect the super rich.
If they create all these jobs,, where are said jobs? This is a crock because we all know how many millionaires are in congress. This is a self-serving gesture that throws the rest of us chumps to the dogs and jackals.
Here is a guy who remembers where he came from and the struggles his mother experienced. The reality is the middle class wage has stagnated for THREE DECADES! When I a hardworking self made multi millionaire admonishes the government because he is not required to pay more in taxes, that should make a pretty strong statement. This just in guys, NO ONE on this blog falls into that category that Obama would expect to pay more. However, I have VERY good friends who would, and guess what, they voted for Obama expecting their taxes to go up.
I find it reprehensible that so many would ask the teachers to “give” their supposed fair share when NO ONE else is being asked to do the same. What benefits and salary have people on this blog been forced to share?
When a millionare/billionare only pays 15% in capital gaines taxes, call me crazy, but that just seems a tad on the, hmmm, what word am I looking for, disgusting.
Should more people model themselves after Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and Stephen King, sure they should. But that our country has to rely on good will of the super rich is what I find unacceptable.
@Elena
Lots and lots of middle class people are in the 28% tax bracket. They don’t have nearly the wealth of Stephen King or many others. Yet they are being taxed the same. There is something wrong with this picture. I am not saying to take all the rich’s money. However, returning to the Clinton tax structure surely isn’t too much of a hardhship on those who have so much.
Take a look at how much an election costs. This money comes from somewhere–I am guessing corporations and individuals. Yet politicians feel its appropriate to gouge public employees. Screw all of them.
Why are middle class Republicans defending these people. Help me understand that?
The problem is not the tax rates, but how some people are able to amass the wealth in the first place. The problems of non-competitive markets and political influence-buying are far more detrimental than Steven King paying only a 28% marginal tax rate.
As examples:
I was very disappointed with Dodd-Frank because it did not go far enough in strengthening financial regulations and oversight. As I’ve written in this blog before, I want to see a return to the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investing banking. The combination, which started under Clinton, reduced competition and allowed powerful people to make far more money than they could have done in a competitive financial marketplace. This subject is worthy of an entire book, but I’ll just cite this one factor.
Outsourcing allows U.S. firms to move productive activities to areas where cheap labor and lax environmental controls prevail. The U.S. tax structure then rewards them for doing so. The result is a loss of American jobs and depression of American wages.
Legal immigration allows corporations such as Microsoft to import engineers, increase the supply of them to reduce wages, and expand its profits on the savings. Yes, I know Bill Gates is now a great philanthropist, but we would be better off if immigration were more restricted and he had to pay Americans better compensation. By the way, that move would also create more incentives for young Americans to study and work harder, and become proficient in math and sciences.
Illegal immigration is not enforced at any level of our government. I’ve posted here many times that the best measures to control illegal immigration are those cracking down on illegal employers. However, because political influence-buying is allowed on the part of greedy, unscrupulous employers, nothing is done. The result is no jobs for unskilled Americans trying to put their foot on the first rung of the ladder and businesses fattening their bottom-lines with the cheap, illegal labor.
Steven King should not be subject to a 50% tax rate. He earned his money through his creativity, hard work and by producing something many people voluntarily chose to purchase. If he chooses to donate much of his fortune to causes he supports, or even mail it in to the U.S. Treasury, he is welcome to do so. That’s his choice.
What’s the point of making a thread about what this douche bag thinks? Does anyone really care?
@NTK, then get your Republican buddies to go along with your suggestions.
While you are at it, get them to stop declaring war on all the public servants in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Florida…..This is a huge problem. Until that happens, I will treat it as war.
Outsourcing should have the snot taxed out of it.
And I maintain that the tax rate is still a problem, when multimillionaires are protected from nominal increases and war is declared on public servants.
I suppose it is just a different set of values.
Mando, actually, he might say the same ting about your comments.
King is a Sox fan. Need I say more?
Except…. NTK – bingo. Corporations are not required to track outsourced jobs. So no one really knows the true numbers except the corporation. Taxed??!! Rots of ruck.
Business has a market role in this economy. They need to step up to the plate as well. It can’t all be balanced on the backs of the middle class benefits, salaries, weather reports and PBS as it is going…
Defunding of NPR was voted on this afternoon. I don’t know how that worked out. I guess PBS is next.
War has been declared on teachers, on public servants, and I guess anything that smacks of cultural exposure.
War has been declared on unions – not teachers, unions – not public sector workers
Public sector unions
Unions that corrupt politicians.
Unions that use violence
Unions that use intimidation
Unions that, because they use tax funded dues to influence elections, get politicians willing to give them ever increasing benefits
Public sector unions have an inherent conflict of interest with the taxpayer.
Middle class, middle class, middle class, middle class, middle class, middle class
proletariat, proletariat, proletariat, proletariat, proletariat
And when you declare war on said unions, you have declared war on teachers and other public employees.
Not all unions use violence and intimidation, any more than all politican activists use violence and intimidation.
I don’t know a thing about tax funded dues. What do you mean by that? Unions at the pac level are just another lobbyist.
The unions in Wisconsin were able to get the dues owed them directly from the employer. The union members are employed by the taxpayers. Their salaries pay the mandatory dues. One cannot be a teacher/public worker in WI without being a union member. Thus, the taxpayer pays the dues. The dues supports the Democrat party.
How is declaring political war on a political entity that abuses its power and enforces mandatory hiring rules declaring war on teachers and other public employees? How many of those union members would like to have a choice about quitting said union? Especially since the unions/union supporters are starting to commit crimes.
I have absolutely no beef with public workers. My mother was a teacher. I would like to be a teacher. But I also believe that public unions, especially as they are in some states, have a conflict of interest. The public workers are hired to be public servants. Unionized workers work against the public good when they influence the elections of their bosses through union money. There may be a right to join a union. There is no right to be a public servant.
I’ve seen way too much about the abuses that the unions are causing because they don’t like the idea of state gov’t’s fighting back against union influence. The biggest thing that the unions are against is not the reduced collective bargaining. Its that the unions will not have their dues automatically take from pay checks anymore and that Walker is trying to make the state right to work. He’s killing their money supply.
Go take a stroll through http://althouse.blogspot.com/
She’s a moderate liberal law professor that lives in Madison. Read the comments. She’s been interviewing the protestors. And because she doesn’t automatically declare her support and she’s asking some hard questions, she’s now getting threats.
You say that Walker’s rhetoric has pushed you into supporting the unions. Well, the actions fo those union members, whatever their job, have pushed me even more into wishing that all public sector unions were forbidden. I’d actually like to see those schools privatized and paid for by vouchers.
Walker saved their jobs. He could have fired them. And then re-hired them at lower rates.
I rest my case. Perhaps the war isn’t just on teachers. They are just obstacles in the way. The real war is on public education. Kill it off and the voucher system would replace it.
That was done in Virginia during and following massive resistance. It was declared illegal by the courts.
Cargo, using your line of reasoning, any good or service that a public servant purchases is owned by the tax payer. So if I am a local librarian, my car isn’t really MY car. It belongs to the taxpayers because my salary came from them.
Many jurisdictions collect association/union dues via payroll deduction. That doesn’t mean the taxpayers aka winos are paying those dues. It means that the jurisdiction is collecting. That’s all– the same as if you are insuring a child on a policy.
It doesn’t matter if you live in an open or closed shop state, you still pay your own union dues unless I am way off the mark. I would need to see it in writing to the contrary. I know how it works in Virginia.
When you rob the teachers of the ability to have collective bargaining, you rob them of income potential. That sounds like war on teachers to me. You admit the war on public education.
@Moon-howler #12
I tend to irritate Democrats and Republicans. Establishment Republicans don’t like someone threatening their bottom lines through more financial market regulations and cracking down on cheap labor. Establishment Democrats don’t like the idea that people should have a right to decide for themselves how to dispose of the fruits of their own labor.
I consider myself a free-market Republican. That means having a role for government to ensure markets operate in a manner that is as free and open as possible, and don’t give preference to powerful special interests. See my suggestions above.
I’m still working through the Wisconsin labor union issue. I believe in the basic right to collective bargaining. I don’t like the abuses of some of the labor unions, and their ability to manipulate the system to get what they want, any more than I like corporate power acting contrary to the interests of a free market. For example, tenure for teachers is a bad idea. Poor performance should lead to dismissal. I don’t have any such protection. As a small business owner, if my clients aren’t happy with me, they can leave and find a provider they like better. I’m happy to say that I have never lost a client but that’s because I provide quality service at a good price – not because a union is protecting my job.
We need a balance. Neither eliminating collective bargaining nor kow-towing to everything the unions want is going to work out well.
The argument King makes breaks down completely when exposed to reality. King is free to pay as much tax as he wishes. What King dislikes here is the freedom to choose. Unless King has already remitted his entire net worth over to the US treasury, his points are.completely invalid
Freedom to choose is the ultimate, underlying necessity here.
We do not have a truly free-market economy in the US. Our system is too subject to powerful special interests being able to get what they want – corporate and labor.
Corporate governance is a sham. I heard a report on the radio this morning that executive bonuses are at their highest levels in over three years. Shareholders’ power to influence the process is minimal. Special interests are able to buy off politicians and keep the financial markets in such a state that they can drive our economy nearly into a depression and walk off with hundreds of millions, or even billions for themselves, and skim off huge amounts of our retirement savings while providing virtually no value. Influential corporations can buy off politicians and keep the flow of illegal labor coming.
Unions can intimidate governments and employers to protect incompetent employees and get compensation packages far in excess of anything anyone who must actually compete and create value can get.
This is not a free market economy – it’s a special interest economy. It will remain so until we break big corporate power and big labor power.
@NTK sort of sounds like a corporate exec’s compensation package doesn’t it? (including the golden parachute for the escape route)
Funny how the worm turns when it is the rich guy rather than the worker bees.
NTK, I am going to go with one of your earlier statements about being torn between union demands and union busting. As I have said, I have never been very pro union until lately.
Perhaps we need to blame politicians and corporations for caving in to some of those demands that have left some areas so strapped. I don’t think union busting is the answer to those problems. I think some of the top end disposition of corporate wealth and even public wealth needs closer inspection. Do superintendants need to be making over a quarter of a million with a benefits package that makes the average worker drool?
The current PWC superintendant arrived with a benefits package that lasts a lifetime, if I am not mistaken. The people of Greece New York will pay for that for a long time. To me, that is just unnecessary.
@Slowpoke
I think you missed King’s point–those who have acquired great wealth have a responsibility to be more generous.
Right now, the emphsis is to take from the less wealthy and give to the rich. Reverse Robin Hood.
@ CATO true – middle class is now an income of $200k or more. Proletariat it is. Hard to spell though
If he truly feels that way, then he should have already written his check to the US Treasury, and should, by all means, encourage his fellow rich-folks to do the same. Now doing it through the IRS (at the other end of one of their Remington 870 shotguns) is another matter. By giving his wealth to the treasury and encouraging others to do the same, he sets an example. By saying it should be done by force is an entirely different box of frogs. That is anti-freedom (a core tenant of liberal Politics).
Slowpoke, you are so full of it. He is entitled to his opinion.
No one is arguing about paying taxes and you are trying your best to deflect the issue, which is why are rich people being protected from a higher rate when public servants are having the right to bargain for a decent wage denied to them.
If you truly had an answer to why this behavior is acceptable, you would share it rather than making up stupid crap about King writing a check to IRS. Nice try, no banana.
Why should richer people be subjected to a higher penalty? Are we not all equal under the law? Taxes should be flat across the board.
And Slow is right. King, instead of whining about why he and those like him are not being forced to pay higher taxes, should just cut a check and convince his fellow millionaires to do the same.
Cargo, what your searching for is..
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
Thank you Comrade Cato. Or, is that Comrade Equality 7-2521?
Spasiba!