Whine whine, of the poor rich folks...

[n2doc]

Overtaxing the rich isn't the answer


By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Rich Trumka -- the AFL-CIO president intercepts any attempted honorific with an easy, "Call me Rich" -- comes armed with charts. His first one is, literally, in shades of gray. Its message is anything but.

Once, its bar graphs report, the middle class and the wealthy prospered in tandem. Between 1947 and 1973, the rich got richer, but the not-so-rich actually prospered more. The household income of the middle 20 percent of Americans nearly doubled, while the income of the top 20 percent of Americans rose the least of any group, 85 percent.

After 1973, the story changes dramatically. Income for the middle group inched up, rising 24 percent through 2006. But the top 20 percent grew at nearly three times that rate.

This graphic depiction of income inequality is, understandably enough, at the center of Trumka's worldview, a perspective that became clear when he came to lunch last week at The Post. Growing income inequality is troubling. It would be troubling in the absence of a budget crisis. But that does not mean, as Trumka would have it, that the solution to the nation's fiscal woes is always, or only, reducing income inequality.

In short, soaking the rich gets you only so far.
I'm all for a more progressive tax code. But consider: The Tax Policy Center examined what it would take to avoid raising taxes on families earning less than $250,000 a year while reducing the deficit to 3 percent of the economy by decade's end. The top two rates would have to rise to 72.4 and 76.8 percent, more than double the current level. You don't have to be anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist to think this would be insane.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/06/AR2010070603210.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Ruth, what you call "insane" - I call "a good start"

[stray cat]

1. the homeless or third world countries can say the same about you and I

[hedgehog]

2. One problem with projections like that in the article is the

assumption that money is a fixed object. Now, the $5 in my pocket or your pocket is pretty much $5. But, when you get to trillions and trillions of dollars like in the national economy, money does strange things. It grows, it shrinks depending on who has it and how it is used. What i am getting around to is this:

1. I don't think we'll have to get to the 72% tax rate at the top because for every percent rise in the tax rate at the top, X number of people will see their incomes increase and they'll be paying more taxes.

2. Even if we did get to a 72% tax rate, it would make no perceptible difference to the life style of those involved. What would be left over is a daily income unfathomable to most of us.

[Cresent City Kid]

3. I guess I'm insane

In the 50's we created the Interstate Highway System from scratch, today we can barely keep up with potholes. In the 80's we were told that helping the rich would help us. It turned out to be a simple two part plan: 1. Help the rich; 2. repeat.

Isn't insanity doing the same thing and expecting different results? See signature line.

[EstimatedProphet]

4. They're really in lie-overdrive mode

Wanna lower the deficit? PUT PEOPLE BACK TO WORK. More money in the economy means more money gets collected as income tax, demand goes up because people have more money to spend and can do so, the economy grows so the proportion of debt shrinks. Win-win-win. They know this because it's fucking obvious. The rich don't want people back to work though; they want to be an aristocracy and have complete control of all wealth. so they come up with an obvious lie: cut the deficit and the economy will grow. It's so blatantly untrue that it's anti-true.

[roxiejules]

5. Building Economies with Heart

It is unfortunate that Ruth Marcus doesn't care to grasp the higher calling of reallocation:


"We have enormous potential to improve the lives of all by reallocating resources from military to health care and environmental regeneration, from automobiles to public transportation, from investing in suburban sprawl to investing in compact communities, from advertising to education, from financial speculation to productive investment in local entrepreneurship, and from providing extravagant luxuries for the very wealthy to providing basic essentials for everyone.

The champions of Empire dismiss any such reordering of priorities on the ground that it will bring economic disaster and unbearable hardship. They ignore the simple fact that those results are already the lot of roughly half our fellow humans. The proposed reordering can avoid the spread of hardship and begin to alleviate the existing suffering.

Economic reallocation and democratization are no longer simply moral issues. They are imperatives of human survival and must replace economic growth and the pursuit of financial gain as the defining purpose of economic life.

The human species has reached a defining moment of choice between moving ahead on a path to collective self-destruction or joining together in a cooperative effort to navigate a dramatic turn to a new human era." - David Korten, YES magazine


http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/stand-up-to-corporate-power/living-wealth-better-than-money