[quote=ctr70][quote=CA renter]And “capitalists” who speculate on commodities, stocks, bonds, etc., and house flippers, etc. are “hard workers”???[/quote]
You lose all credibility with this comment. Typical Dem who has a low financial IQ & has the poor mans mindset of how all the rich are evil. Flippers work their butts off and are entrepreneurs that take risks and help fix up neighborhoods and renovate houses to make a profit. But you wouldn’t get something like that. Maybe if you posted a little less on this board and hustled a little and got out there and started a business you might make over $250k and get the privilege of paying most of the bills in this country as you get skinned alive with income taxes. And you might also learn a little about S Corps and how passive income is taxed vs. w-2 income, and why Romney and others with high financial IQ’s pay 13% tax rate as they are incentivized to by the U.S. tax code.
These comments remind me of my dad and sisters who are far left and clueless about ecomomics or business and hate those “evil rich people” making over $250k who start companies create jobs, research cancer, perform heart surgeries in ER’s, etc… All they know is to go out and get their w-2 wage slave jobs and “rail” against those evil rich and vote for politicians to tax them more. Why not? It’s not them that have to pay all this extra shit like prop 30 and Obama Care. It’s those evil rich people making over $250k that have to shoulder it.[/quote]
Hate to burst your little bubble where you think your financial IQ is higher than others, but we’re not poor, and all of my earnings are from investments. That being said, even I can discern that those who make the world go ’round are the wage-earning workers of the world, not the speculators who create boom/bust cycles and who destroy economies while expecting everyone else to clean up their mess.
Perhaps your superior financial knowledge has blinded you to the fact that the mess in Europe and here in the U.S. was caused almost entirely by speculators, not workers and their pensions (though the Wall Street takeover of pension funds did get them into serious trouble as they chased yields as the Fed manipulated rates in an effort to boost asset prices and goose speculative investments).
BTW, you do realize that the $100K+ club comprises only ~2% of CalPERS retirees, don’t you?
FYI, you might want to check out why “the rich” are paying more in taxes than those who have no money to pay taxes:
The Wealth Distribution
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2010, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 35.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 53.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 89%, leaving only 11% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.1%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details, drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2012).
