In the Christmas spirit of giving, President Obama, along with a majority of Senators and Representatives from both parties, bestowed gifts in the form of gigantic tax cuts to our fattest cats. This flies in the face of our omnipotent mediator’s campaign promise to bring “change you can believe in”. Now we know he really meant short-changing the huge majority at the bottom of the heap. No “change” in their pockets!
A number of these fat cats feel sheepish about this huge bounty. Many also resent the presumptiveness of Obama et al to act on their behalf. After all, they already acquire most of their wealth from huge sources of unearned income, so why gild the lily? They don’t want to appear overtly greedy or ungrateful for this huge windfall, particularly when so many people across the nation are looking for jobs, defaulting on their mortgages and losing their homes, falling far behind putting bread on the table for their families, and massively failing to pay their bills. So they decided to look beyond the political fray and do something about this whole sordid fiasco. They found a mathematician who has long studied and agonized over the extremely inequitable tax system. He was asked to create a new tax structure on gross income that would enable the poorest cats a much fairer share of the immense wealth accumulation at the top. On their minds was the widespread knowledge of the fact that the urgent needs of the bottom 80% should not force them to be left twisting in the wind while the wealthiest, having an average annual gross income of $40 million, live in opulent luxury. "How many bottles of Lafitte Rothschild wine at $2,500 per crack can we buy", said one. Another said, "I only need one Ferrari, not three, and besides, I'm exhausted from taking care of five getaway mansion retreats - two are plenty." Many said that in the spirit of this holiday time, doing what we ask the mathematician to do is akin to what Christ would do.
So there you have it, straight from the mouths of those who really know.
This unknown mathematician has attached the tables that create a more level playing field. Some said, "You're going to tax the fattest of us at only 50% of our gross income? It should be more like what FDRput in place - 91%! But we'll go along with it for starters - we can add increases as we go along. After all, $425 billion in added annual income tax revenue amounts to $4.25 trillion in ten years, and that should give a kick start for education, for sending kids to college, for building free urban public transit systems in all our cities, for providing free health care for all, for rebuilding our crumbling highways, tunnels and bridges, for expanding and improving our national and city recreational areas parks, and -- you know – for lots of good stuff that has been sorely neglected."
Write to as many fat cats as you can, and tell them you’ll fight hard to make this new tax structure a reality so that they can realize their dream of each becoming a real Mensch.
You should also write to President O’Give-Half-Away-And-Give-The-Other-Half-Away-Too and his partners-in-crime to tell them about this new tax structure. Perhaps they may have a pang of conscience like the fat cats have.
Don't you just love this FOXNEWS style of slanted reporting. Providing liquidity for legal, illiquid assets for willing sellers is in no way evil. Securitization of these assets provides a real reinsurance market service by mitigating real risks.
BTW, Goldman's decision had absolutely nothing to do with BanksterUSA. The reality is that proper securitization requires time and specialized expertise. The ramp up just took too long in an industry in the middle of a financial crisis of it's own. Besides the life settlements industry is too small and have overpaid for policies. So these "vultures" are losing money and these poor dying souls are living longer and making money. Reason enough.
This story's assertions and conclusions would make O'Reilly proud.
I think we should all be appreciative of you for parroting some right-wing talking points regarding taxation, but you fail to miss the point.
The role of government (remember the Constitution says the government can tax to promote the general welfare) is to ensure that all citizens have economic as well as political and civil rights.
A Progressive government (I, by the way, still believe President Obama is a progressive and is looking out for the 98% of Americans that don't live on trust funds inheritances and capital gains) hopes to create an economic system that allows everyone the opportunity to perform meaningful work and be properly compensated. A strong progressive income tax is an important tool for achieving that.
If, as working class America, we want both (not just one) working adults in the family to earn a 'family wage', have good health care benefits, vacation and holiday pay (or if we want people to be able to find any job at all); then tax breaks for the rich are in conflict with these principles.
If achieving these things means that billionaires need to be half-billionaires or quarter-billionaires, then I think that is moral. Progressive income taxes induce corporations to provide more generously to its employees, because they have little to gain over certain threshholds.
For billionaires to become billionaires, they have to exploit actual working people somewhere along the line. Wealth isn't created from nothing, it is created by people applying human labor to inanimate material and producing some good or service or value.
It is also important to remember that this is a discusion over the income tax, not a revenue tax. If a business is getting started and not profitabe it won't have tax liabilities. Only when rich executives extract money from the company (which reduces the likelihood of generous employe benefits and security) is the money taxed as income.
7kidchaos is referring to a common right-winger,Faux News opinion that because the bottom 50% pay a small share of the federal income tax, that all those people are involved in the "informal economy" and are, thus, gaming the system.
The informal economy can include things from drug trafficking to prostitution all the way to babysitting and a construction worker building his or her neighbor a deck for cash. The concept of the informal economy is that money and service are changing hands that are not subject to taxes or Department of Labor tracking.
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