If your kids go to a private school you should not be paying local district school taxes. Also my grandparents have to pay school tax and they don’t even have kids in school anymore why should they have to pay for it? My feeling is that you should only be paying local district taxes is when your kids are going to a local district school.
so basically you want to end the socialist system of schools?
I went to a very expensive private school and I believe you should still pay local school taxes. If you don’t want to use our system fine, but you should pay anyway.
Is this not what we do now?
We are paying for your grandparents retirement, and we’ll never see that money. :gotme:
We are in this as a COUNTRY. Ya know, United as ONE.
You pay for school taxes to help pay for future generations of Americans. You do not pay or school taxes to specifically pay for your own kids education but for the education of our youth as a whole.
It is the responsibility of adults to give some foundation to the youth.
Aaron, I’d argue that in order to “control” wealth, you have to have it in the first place. If the poor had the power to change who had the wealth, don’t you think they’d apportion it to themselves (and by extension, no longer be poor)?
And I’m not sure if most of the rich particularly care about having to help the poor out - I just think most complain about being forced to. As a matter of fact, I’ve seen a report where those described as “conservative” tend to donate more to help the poor, than those described as “liberal”, who tend to donate more to the arts, etc. (I’ll post the link when I find it).
Very true, but they are also full of teachers who dont give a flying fuck if the students pass or fail, as long as they get their check at the end of the week.
Ah - from the extreme right-wing rag known as the New York Times:
Over the last 30 years, the trend has been to pare back income tax rates on the rich, federally and in the state. Since the mid-1970s, the state has cut its top tax rate from 15.375 percent to 6.85 percent. The top income tax rate in New Jersey is 8.97 percent, and in Connecticut it is 5 percent, according to data from the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal research group.
That said, the richest 1 percent of New Yorkers paid more than 40 percent of the income tax in 2007, up from about 30 percent in 1996, according to state data, though that figure is declining as the financial crisis makes the rich less so.
And then there’s this:
Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.
Other research has reached similar conclusions. The “generosity index” from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that red states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.
The upshot is that Democrats, who speak passionately about the hungry and homeless, personally fork over less money to charity than Republicans — the ones who try to cut health insurance for children.
“When I started doing research on charity,” Mr. Brooks wrote, “I expected to find that political liberals — who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did — would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.”…
…When liberals see the data on giving, they tend to protest that conservatives look good only because they shower dollars on churches — that a fair amount of that money isn’t helping the poor, but simply constructing lavish spires.
It’s true that religion is the essential reason conservatives give more, and religious liberals are as generous as religious conservatives. Among the stingiest of the stingy are secular conservatives.
According to Google’s figures, if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do. But Mr. Brooks says that if measuring by the percentage of income given, conservatives are more generous than liberals even to secular causes.
In any case, if conservative donations often end up building extravagant churches, liberal donations frequently sustain art museums, symphonies, schools and universities that cater to the well-off. (It’s great to support the arts and education, but they’re not the same as charity for the needy. And some research suggests that donations to education actually increase inequality because they go mostly to elite institutions attended by the wealthy.)
Conservatives also appear to be more generous than liberals in nonfinancial ways. People in red states are considerably more likely to volunteer for good causes, and conservatives give blood more often. If liberals and moderates gave blood as often as conservatives, Mr. Brooks said, the American blood supply would increase by 45 percent.
So my charge to all of you reading this (at least those die-hards who are still clicking the link)…
… go out and give blood. 
Right wing? are you high?
Thats a question that needs answering. This year we scheduled 13 parent teacher conferences, 6 showed 7 blew us off.
Of the 6 only 2 have put in effort to get their grades up and the parents of the 4 have not followed through on anything.
They won’t check their agenda to see if they have homework, they won’t respond to email concerns. Its pathetic. But their scores count just as much for the schools performance as those from kids whose parents give a shit.
Dude, think about that. If they’re tax rate went DOWN, that means the the income gap went UP. IE the rich have gotten RICHER as the poor have gotten POORER. The flip side of the “1% pays 40%” is that that 1% also earns that much of a majority of the income out there.
JEG - I believe he was joking so that the statistic wouldn’t be attributed to “right wing talking point”
David Archuleta didn’t win 
I’m interested in seeing where he is going to get the $$ for all these programs he’s calling for. This Government pisses away more money then it productively spends. I think it’s fairly unanimus that he’s going to raise taxes whether or not he says he’s going to, there’s no way he can’t, even if he brings forth 1/4 of these programs get the green light. We need to cut some serious spending. He says he will, but where?
He certainly talks a good talk, no doubt. But if serious change is to take place it starts with Governmental reform and I just don’t see much of that happening. He already created atleast one new cushy job. Lets see what he does. Time will tell…
Of course, it also is an indication of how we value things in this society. I mean, I’m not sure if anyone has bitched about how much Steve Jobs is making as (the currently on-leave) Apple CEO, especially when its products are seen as cool, popular, successful, etc and its employees are happy. Does that mean we should tax him at 50%, 75%, or 90% the more he succeeds? And since his documented salary is $1 (outside of his stock options and corporate perks such as the private jet), how would you assess that tax?
Of course, stock options are one way to encourage a CEO to be more invested (literally) in a company he manages, so that he in a way feels the pain the company would go through if managed poorly.
But if you assess Jobs’ stock options at higher tax rates, then what’s to stop him from demanding a higher salary, and making the stock tank so that he sees a (paper) loss and therefore doesn’t have to pay as much? At what level do we have to quantify benefits to tax? (Subsidized/free food, healthcare, cars, condos, jets, etc?)
In any case, I’m all for the richer to pay a higher burden of the taxes in exchange for the perks society gives them; the point I’m trying to make is that a blanket tax might wind up hurting, rather than helping society. It’ll be Obama’s (and for us here in NY, Patterson’s) job to put forth proposals that will minimize the pain / maximize the benefit to society.
And IMHO, as the rich tend to consume more than the poor (even those without a declared income - e.g. the “old rich”), then I’d argue a consumption tax (sales tax, VAT etc.) would do more to promote equity than just a straight income tax. It might even (horror of horrors) encourage savings and investments, rather than conspicuous consumption - something that’s lacking in American society.