A Trillion Dollars a Year to the Richest 1%: They didn't work harder than the rest of us.

[Better Believe It]

The Big Obscenity: A Trillion Dollars a Year to the Richest 1%
(That's seven times more than the budget deficits of all 50 states combined)
by Paul Buchheit
January 20, 2011

The richest 1% ($400,000 or more) didn't work harder than the rest of us. They profited from stock market gains, shrewdly designed financial instruments, and tax cuts.

The very wealthy insist that all their income will stimulate the economy. But low-income earners spend a greater percentage of their overall income on consumption, while high-income earners save more. Middle-class America has been led to believe that the growth at the top will eventually produce more jobs. But many of us have college-educated sons and daughters who can't find suitable employment. Fortune Magazine reported that the 500 largest U.S. companies cut a record 821,000 jobs in 2009 while their collective profits increased to a record $391 billion.

Who are the people making up the richest 1%? Bankers, CEOs, upper management, university presidents, Congressmen. They live in their own world, supporting each other's needs. They can no longer relate to the needs of average Americans.

Taxing them is not "soaking the rich." The greatest redistribution of income in history has taken place over the last 30 years, and the victims are beginning to make a fuss about it.



Read the full article at:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/20

[TBF]

1. Bush reduced taxes on capital gains from 20 to 15%, along with the

individual income tax cuts. He did exactly what his party put him in office to do, and now it continues under the current administration.

[Towlie]

2. The problem is money = power. If we could only separate the two we'd have a fair and just society.

[leftstreet]

3. No. We, the people, who generate their profits have all the power n/t

[blindpig]

18. But you see, that's how they do it.

By separating the economic from the political bourgeois democracy pretends that the workers is equal to the plutocrat. In a society where money is power that is an absurdity. The only way this an be addressed is to negate the money power, only then can we be equal.

[leftstreet]

4. K&R

[Richard Steele]

5. They have hardly ever 'worked' at all compared to most people I've ever met.

Most of the wealthiest 1% were born on third base;
their moms squirted them out onto a big pile of cash.
Born into privelege, "legacied" into free college degrees,
with daddy's phone calls getting them out of situations
that people like you and I go to prison for....

Their claims of 'working hard' are the sickest, saddest JOKE
since slave owners claimed that they were
"doing the brown people a big favor".


Edditted fer bad spellin.

[snot]

6. I saw a claim recently

That two years of the tax cuts just extended for the rich could have provided a $30,000/year salary to every single unemployed person in the U.S.

Unfortunately, the author cited no authority for this claim.

[Starry Messenger]

7. k&r

Taxes NOT vulture philanthropy.

[lonestarnot]

8. ++++++++++50 K

& R!

[Hannah Bell]

9. kr

[PufPuf23]

10. Sanity for the good of the Nation is dramatic tax policies to return

accumulated and current wealth to the public commons and go back to a mixed economy with optimum wealth distribution and a humane social safety net while the nation and world reduces population and develops nature friendly technology.


Isn't this obvious?

[BlueJazz]

11. The Bottom line is: If the Poor and the Middle Class can't input money to...

take down the debt, money for infrastructure, schools, Jobs..research..etc...Who Can ??

The obvious answer..Only the rich.
Nobody else has any money.

[bluestate10]

12. Marginal tax rates for people that earn more than $375,000

annually should be raised 2-5% for every $50,000 in added income. No rational person would dispute that need. What bothers me is overt wage warfare that I see some waging because they don't earn $30,000 per year. Rational tax policy is not going to come from emotions running hot.

[Better Believe It]

13. The real tax rates for the ultra rich are lower than tax rates for most working class people.

Tax loopholes for the rich!

And now the politicians want to reduce the top tax bracket for the rich while doing away with tax deductions for working people such as the mortgage interest deduction!

[maryf]

14. K&Rnt

[Quantess]

15. 1% is way too large

Does anyone think it is one out of every hundred Americans who are disgusting robber baron pigs? No, the number is much, much smaller. Otherwise, great article.

[Initech]

16. George Carlin was right.

"The rich make all the money, pay none of the taxes. The middle class pays all the taxes, does all the work. And the poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep them showing up at those jobs!!!!"

[Octafish]

17. The Treasury Department should make these numbers accessible.

There should be easy-to-interpret numbers available for all to see and ponder.

I don't remember any analysis on the issue of income inequality, let alone economic justice, by ABCNNBCBSFixedNAZINoiseworks.

[david13]

19. You are right. They didn't work harder. They worked smarter.

And if that includes buying politicians, then that's what they did.
You need to unlearn that great american parable (?) work hard; it should be don't work hard; work smart.
dc