[quote=Paul0373]First of all, define “rich.” Greater than $250k/yr? Greater than $100k?? Oh, that is sooooo rich. Soooo rich. Well, at least in the eyes of our government, it is. I can tell you that in california, it isnt! Well, say everyone who makes over $250k pays 25% more taxes…. Is that going to solve your debt problem? How do you deal with a drug addict? Give him more drugs? You really, really think giving the government more money is really going to fix the problem??? More wars, more waste, more confiscation and redistribution, more poverty, more fraud, more bureaucracy, more social welfare program failures, more post office economic failure, more $500 hammers, more $100k/yr lifeguards, more irs investigators, more bailouts, more “stimulus” and on and on and on. This country is a mess from all this big government, progressive, socialist, social engineering garbage. How about less govenment, less taxation and more sanity? Cut it out with all the class warfare hate speak. It’s sickening and wreaks of old style communist propaganda. It sounds pathetic actually.[/quote]
Under no circumstances would I ever justify spending on $500 hammers, bailouts for banks, or wars where we don’t belong, etc. What some seem to miss is the fact that we have emptied out our country of the majority of what were middle-class jobs, and this has been done solely to enrich the very wealthiest individuals in this country. Now, these wealthiest individuals don’t want to pay for the damage they’ve wrought, and are demanding even more tax cuts when they are already paying the lowest tax rates since the 1980s (even that was for a brief time; before then, they were paying far more).
———- My column this week notes that tax rates on the affluent have fallen more in recent decades than tax rates on other groups. Here are the details:
The total effective federal tax rate for the top 0.01 percent of earners — that is, the top 1/10,000th of earners, a group that began at $8.6 million in annual income — was 31.5 percent in 2005. (That’s the last year for which the Congressional Budget Office has released data for very high earners.) That includes income taxes, as well as payroll taxes, taxes on investments and other taxes. It’s the lowest such tax rate since the mid-1980s, when the rate on the top 0.01 percent was briefly below 30 percent.
In 1979, the first year of this C.B.O. tax data, the total federal rate for the top 0.01 percent was 42.9 percent. And research by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two economists, suggests the rate was even higher before 1979. As recently as 1995, it was 40.9 percent.
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If corporations and households taking in $1 million or more in income each year were now paying taxes at the same annual rates as they did back in 1961, the IPS researchers found, the federal treasury would be collecting an additional $716 billion a year.
In other words, if the federal government started taxing the wealthy and their corporations at the same rates in effect a half-century ago, the federal debt to investors would almost totally vanish over the next decade.
Similarly stunning numbers have come, earlier this month, from MIT economist Peter Diamond and the University of California’s Emmanuel Saez, the world’s top authority on the incomes of the ultra-rich. These two scholars have shared some fascinating “what ifs” that dramatize how spectacularly the incomes of our wealthiest have soared over recent decades.
In 2007, Diamond and Saez point out, taxpayers in the nation’s top 1 percent actually paid, on average, 22.4 percent of their incomes in federal taxes. If that actual tax burden were to about double to 43.5 percent, the top 1 percenter share of our national after-tax income would still be twice as high as the top 1 percent’s after-tax income share in 1970.
What’s pathetic is that these pigs have managed to somehow convince the ignorant masses that they belong to the same clan as the wealthiest 1%. They desperately need these very average Americans to do their bidding, because if people actually understood how wealth and income have been skewed as a result of “trickle down economics,” they would revolt.
