Wages are meaningless to talk about growth. What matters is standards of living.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/StandardsofLivingandModernEconomicGrowth.html

Standards of living have SKYROCKETED and companies producing new products (which they need cash reserves and profit incentive to do) is what increases standard of living. Someone in 1970 may have earned more on an inflation adjusted term, but they are living a more lavish life today with less money and have better health and more life expectancy to boot. How many people in 1970 had a color TV? A car with airbags? A cordless phone? A place to argue with other people around the world?

Corporations are not hurting anyone when they have lots of cash on hand. You act like corporations are people, but they aren't... That money will eventually get spent for salaries (taxed), capital investment (taxed), buying back shares (taxed), dividends (taxed), or other investments (taxed). Sitting on it simply gives the company greater stability and long term growth. But our government is not good at planning for the long term. Hell it seems like they can't see past the next election most of the time. Companies want to be around for the long haul, most aren't in business to make a quick buck and be gone tomorrow.

The problem is that there is tax on everything, and thus at the end of the day it is impossible to fathom or calculate how much of a total item is actually government revenue (or deadweight loss as economists like to call it). It screws up the pricing information and doesn't tell people how valuable something is, but rather how much the government values it. This is why some things are much cheaper than they should be (electric cars, ethanol, etc) and some things are far more expensive than they should be (alcohol, tobacco, etc).

The question is why you think taxation should be used as a method of equalizing wealth or driving an economy rather than funding government operations. Realistically, I think the best option should a property tax (based on your land and the value of items on it) and a use tax (for roads, public services, etc). Since the government is defending your property through laws and the military, the value of property protected is really the only claim they have for you to be forced to compensate them or in the case of use taxes, you pay for what you use. However, in that society, maybe only landowners should be allowed a vote since they are the ones for whom the government is benefiting and likewise who primarily funds the government. However, since that will never happen in our society, I believe a sales tax is more fair than an income tax.

As to your other point, why is idle wealth a bad thing? Why should I be taxed on savings, emergency funds, retirement plans, etc? Saving up money for a rainy day or future consumption is a GOOD THING, not a bad thing. The government has been creating a huge debt bubble and encouraging people to take out more loans, spend more money, and dear lord, don't save anything. How is this a good long term strategy? You can't solve a credit crisis by relying on more credit.

Perhaps you didn't actually read the fair tax and the fact that you get a prebate to cover taxes basically to the poverty level. Or the fact that a rich man paying 20% on Christmas presents is significant if he is buying expensive presents.

More importantly, the VAT in Europe is ON TOP OF income taxes, not a replacement for it. The idea is that taxes discourage things (yes, economics says if you increase the cost of something, the demand goes down). Thus if you have to discourage something, you should discourage consumption (sales), not production (profit, income).

That's why the "fair tax" is more fair. http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer You can actually see the amount the government is taking at the consumer end transaction. It makes it much simpler to keep track of taxes and know how much the government is actually getting.

http://www.epa.gov/nrmrl/wswrd/dw/smallsystems/pubs/625r04108.pdf

Warning, large PDF. This is the EPA guidelines for reuse of water. They all have to meet certain standards, additional treatment may need to be done to meet those standards. If you hooked up the outlet of a waste water treatment plant (what I call a poo processing plant or 3P) to the inlet of a water treatment plant (my term is a chlorination and filtration emporium), you'd have better quality water in most cases.

It's a common problem among liberals...

The only reason it's not good for the USA is because we are one of those high tax nations. If we lower taxes, businesses will want to keep money here and we'll be on the winning side of things while all the rich people leave Europe.

Not really an apt analogy. Capitalism is about mutually beneficial voluntary transactions. Stealing does not fit into that category. Speaking of stealing, that's why avoiding taxes isn't applicable to shoplifting because it would be more akin to keeping a fake wallet in an easily accessible pocket with a few bucks in it for pick pockets where you keep most of your money in your shoe. You are preventing the thieves from taking all your money while giving them enough to think they got away with something.

So if you openly admit it's a double tax since every dollar of profit a company makes gets taxed eventually again, then why shouldn't the corporate tax be zero?

Are you telling me you don't take any deductions or credits? No standard deduction? Do you pay a use tax in your state for all the online purchases you made and did not pay sales tax on? That's not even legal, yet most of us do it to avoid taxes. Every company should avoid paying every dime of taxes they can. It's the only defense we have against government growth short of a revolution.

Even better, apply it to sales instead of income and make it easier as then you can see the direct effect of taxes at every transaction rather than hiding it in several layers of transactions. See http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer

I'd drink the effluent from a waste water treatment plant. It's clean... Cleaner than the water in the river it's being discharged into. In fact, if it weren't for squeamish people like you, we'd save a ton of money chlorinating that effluent and pumping it right back into the drinking water supply, but instead we contaminate it by putting it back in nature and sending it downstream to the next treatment plant that has to spend tons of money just to get all of the nature filtered back out of it.

Actually most animals that are going to extinction aren't allowed to be hunted or raised for food. If we allowed people to hunt or eat pandas maybe they wouldn't be endangered... I mean bison haven't been endangered since they have started being raised on farms. Deer sure aren't hurting either.

What makes you think the whole length of recorded temperature data is long enough to be significant on the scale of climate?

Note, I'm not saying we aren't warming, just saying we haven't been recording data that long.

I'm not a warming denier, I'm a disaster denier. We have more evidence warming is better for life a on the planet than we do for actual warming yet somehow we have a consensus that warming will be a disaster. I quite frankly am enjoying the warming.