We went $14T into debt to make the rich, fabulously, fabulously rich.

[krispos42]

That was the sole purpose of the Reagan tax cuts.

Fourteen teradollars. If you had a 700 gigabyte hard drive, you'd have to sell every single byte for $50 each to make the national debt. That's six bucks for every single bit of information. For every 1 or 0, $6. Imagine that. That's even more than AT&T charges for a text message.

* * * * * * * * * *

In the early 80's, when I was reading the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mystery novels, the elected representatives of the United States made a deliberate, conscious choice:


We will no longer tax the rich.

We will instead BORROW from the rich.

We will borrow from the rich by selling US bonds, so that the rich could get their money back, with interest.

We chose to do this instead of simply saying to them "You got rich because of the system set up by the people of the United States and the governing and economic system we have set up, and it is time to pay your dues."

We should have said "You are wealthy because there were plenty of people with disposable income to buy your goods or services." But we didn't.

We should have told them "It is the LIBERAL system of government, the regulated capitalism with the socialist safety net, that gave you vast numbers of comfortable customers to purchase your goods and services." But we didn't.


Instead, we chose to tax less and borrow more. With interest. And that interest now costs well over $400B a year, and most of it goes to the top 2 percent.


We didn't borrow because of a major war, or a major economic collapse, or because of a major natural disaster.

Just... because. Why not, after all?


So any time somebody says "we can't afford..." I say "NO!"


We can afford it. But we WON'T afford it.


The Congress is the guy living a lavish lifestyle on credit because he only works 32 hours a week. He could work 40... but he chooses not to. It's there for the taking... 8 more hours a week. The work is there. The money is there. But he refuses to even consider going to work on Fridays. Not on the table.

The only thing stopping him is... him.

No, he'll continue to spend and tip generously at restaurants and bars, malls and websites. He'll let friends wander into his house and help themselves to whatever they like. He'll add to his collection of firearms. He'll continue to pay far too much for health insurance because he can't be bothered to look around for a different carrier.

But he won't. Work. One. Hour. More.


Just... because.


* * * * * * * * * *

The politicians say "can't afford", but all I hear is "won't afford".

If the wealthy don't want to pay higher taxes, of course, they have an option that 99% of us don't have.

They can retire.

They can retire and live off the money that has already been taxed. Their savings and investments. Millions, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars available. And really, if you can't live comfortably on a half-million dollars a year for the rest of your life, then your ego is getting in the way of your own happiness.

Fortunately, there's a pill for that.

It's okay to retire. Really. It is.

For every one of them there are a dozen more ready, willing, and able to take their place. I am not worried one whit about that; NOBODY is irreplaceable. The free market will produce people to fill the voids left by retirements, of that I have no doubt.

But I know many of them will not retire because they are addicted to the power, control, and influence being a financial big dog gives them. They will refuse to relinquish that power.

So they will continue to work, and pay the higher taxes.

And that is what scares them... that the public will see that they are addicted to the power of their position, of which titanic salaries are only just a part. And then the media-induced fear of taxing the "job creators" will disappear, and their elite status will be damaged. Their egos, remember, do not take reduction well. Not at all.


:rant:

[FiveGoodMen]

1. So true. So stupid. So awful.

[n2doc]

2. And our reward is them spitting on us and telling us "to live within our means"

Which is how the plutocracy always responds, throughout history from Roman times on. Probably back to caveman times.

[krispos42]

3. What's the Latin phrase for "bootstrap"?

;-)

[chervilant]

25. Probably?

I think you would appreciate "Stone Age Economics" by Marshall Sahlins.

One of my fave quotes:

The market-industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely unparalleled and to a degree nowhere else approximated. Where production and distribution are arranged through the behavior of prices, and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending, insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity. ... Consumption is a double tragedy: what begins in inadequacy will end in deprivation.

BTW, many of those who denigrated Sahlins' work had a vested interest in protecting their precious hegemony, and could ill-afford to have the hoi polloi get a clue...

[russspeakeasy]

26. Just be quiet and eat your peas..

:sarcasm: :sarcasm: :woohoo:

[truedelphi]

4. This is one of the top reasons that those who are disenchanted with the DLC

And with Obama are pissed off.

We know that now. Our TV Talking Heads didn't tell us this; our radio show hosts (with a few exceptions) didn't tell us this.

The internet let us visit specific financial sites and learn what schmucks the American Middle Class has become. That we are being fleeced by every President from Reagan on down. When Bill Clinton signed off on the Bank Reform Act of 1999, you realize how little difference it makes, from an economic point, of whether our elected officials have a "D" or an "R" after their name.

The rich have had their damn tax cuts for thirty years, and not a single job has come from that, with the possible exception of sales people at the luxury car and boat sales places.

And now we have a President who pledged to his base that he would end NAFTA, and lst night he let us see what fools we were for voting and believing in him. He is now wanting so badly to have "free trade" with Korea. Just what the hell is going on - that we have allowed for the Flintization of the USA - all our major paying jobs are out sourced, while we are told we need "retraining?" Or maybe, the ability to work as an intern for free if we want the unemployment that is the only benefit most of us see from our goods being manufactured elsewhere.

[krispos42]

9. Thom Hartmann lays it out pretty well.

I don't agree with him 100% overall (maybe 95%) but I think he's been absolutely correct on the national economy.


Him and Dr. Ravi Batra, who should be the White House economic advisor.

[Broderick]

5. Bow to your corporate masters please.

Our overlords have an army behind them ready to correct your speech, in infancy at this point, but growing everyday.

Want a picture of what is in store for America so they can protect the .1 percent???

Here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1907824


Get used to it, and work on your bowing skills please.

[krispos42]

19. Hey, it's a paying job, right?

Strikebreakers, security guards, Gestapo, etc. All paying jobs.

[shanti]

6. yes, so wealthy that they have essentially

bought this country for themselves. we scramble for the crumbs....:(

[krispos42]

18. The wealthy always have power far in excess of their physical numbers.

And that always will be in cultures that have money.


And there's arguably some merit to that, in that they're probably better educated and better motivated and understand how things work better than, say, the bottom 1% of the populace.

However, there's a point where it goes from being useful to be destructive. And we're way past that point. The counter-balance to the wealthy, the politically and economically powerful middle class, is declining rapidly.


Ronald Reagan and Larry Niven fretted about the masses using the power of money to simply vote wealth for themselves in elections, but none of them seemed to worry about the wealthy using the power of money to purchase even more wealth for themselves from the government.

[Initech]

7. Bush was selected to make that happen. Been downhill ever since.

Something is rotten in Washington and I don't like it.

[krispos42]

10. Clinton set the ball, Bush spiked it. *bam*

"Wartime preznit, heh heh".

[yardwork]

12. Great metaphor!

And Obama kept the ball in play.

[hifiguy]

8. You have described the scam/robbery perpetrated

by the overlords to a tee. Excellent post!!

[krispos42]

13. It's pretty obvious in hindsight.

But it's almost never presented this way, that instead of simply taking from the rich via taxes, we borrowed from the rich via bonds.

I think it needs to be stated that way by, say, Bernie Sanders.

[SammyWinstonJack]

11. K&R!

:grr:

[hfojvt]

14. shouldn't that be $20 per byte?

This is a good rant, except for a couple of things.

First, we do still tax the rich. Their tax rate has been cut by 50% or so. It has not dropped to zero.

Second, the other group of people that "we" must tax, are the people that some others refuse to call rich. Not just the top .1%, or the top 1% - but the rest of the top 25% too. They have gained considerably from the Reagan and Bush tax cuts, and they are also considerably more prosperous than the rest of us 75%, even if they will not admit it.

In 1986, the top 1% got 11.3% of the national income and the next 4% got 12.8% and the next 5% got 11% and the next 15% got 23.9%. For a total of 59% going to the richest 25%.

Now, in 2006, after twenty years of Reaganomics, except for a brief Clinton interlude from about 1991-1996, the top 1% was up to 22.1%, but the next 4% was also up to 14.6%. The next 5% was down to 10.7% and the next 15% down to 20.8%.

The top 1% got 22.1% of the pie, which is ridiculously huge, but the next 24% get a pretty good slice themselves at 46.1%. Collectively, they have more than twice as much money as the top 1%. They need to give up some of their Reagan and Bush tax cuts too.

In fact, they may be even more of a problem than the top 1%, because at 24% of the population, they are a huge voting block and they have been coddled by bother parties for decades. They feel entitled to the low taxes that they enjoy now.

They are just as willing as the top 1% to let poor people freeze in the cold before they pay another $100 in taxes. At least many of them are. Some of them may say that they are okay paying more taxes to help the poor, but they don't wanna pay more taxes because it will just go to the war machine. Many will have some excuse for why they shouldn't have to pay more taxes. Many of them are also quite willing to squeeze, exploit and ignore the 75% below them while they enjoy their higher income and look up at the top 10% with envy, wishing they could be as rich as them.

[krispos42]

15. *snort* yeah, I think you're right. I was doing it backwards

:dunce:

The 75-to-99 percentiles getting 46% is something that I really don't worry about that much, because the money is diluted considerably, and because it includes a lot of mid-to-upper-middle-class professionals that used to form the egalitarian political counterweight to the plutocracy of the top 1%.

If the top 1% got, say 9% of the national income and the 75-99% got 46%, then you're still leaving 45% for the bottom 75%. Currently they get about 32%, so we're talking in increase of about 2/5th of their average income.

Think of the increase in consumer demand... *sigh*

[hfojvt]

16. the point is though

that all of the budget problems cannot be solved just by extra taxes on the top 23% of income, those with 46% of the income need to chip in a few hundred extra dollars too.

[krispos42]

17. Oh, there's tons of stuff we would need to do to fix that.

Estate tax, STEP tax, treating earned and unearned income identically, and repealing NAFTA and getting out of the WTO so we could have some rational international trade policies and tariffs again...


I had an idea for a corporate tax rate that was variable not only on the amount of income make, but how that income related to the profitability of the company.

Small-revenue companies would be allowed to make high profit margins without much tax, but big companies wouldn't. On a sliding scale, of course.

My thinking was that by the time you become a big company, you've gone beyond simply finding and exploiting a profitable niche and begun doing the usual corporate schtick... repressing wages, not investing in new equipment, and giving out massive executive paychecks and bonuses.

It would also prevent conglomerates and keep companies focused on doing a few things well rather than a huge assortment of things crappily.

:shrug:

[FailureToCommunicate]

20. Disgusting. But true. That's the top reason Reagan is the WORST PRES

EVER!

Though Chimpy is a close second, for all the death and destruction he's caused...

[Marblehead]

21. and history

repeats itself again. Many good men died for our freedoms, all in vain.

[Rex]

22. Yep, the ruling party is corrupt and pulling us all down.

They make the working poor suffer for their benefit.

[pansypoo53219]

23. WELFARE KINGS!

the rich are welfare kings driving around ferraris instead of caddies. time we fought back in the class warfare STARTED after FDR.

[Mr Deltoid]

24. Republicans were not content with just stealing all the money

They stole all the money going way into the future too.

[PatSeg]

27. Well, if you're going to be Rich,

shouldn't you be fabulous as well?

But seriously.......

How much is enough for these people? At what point does money stop making your life any better or richer? And why do they continue to seek more after they reach that point? Questions that plague me on a regular basis.

[inna]

28. Error: you can only recommend threads which were started in the past 24 hours

sorry, i wish i could rec this