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Actually, I'd like to make $249,999/year and not a dime more. Otherwise, I'll join that infamous "millionaires and billionaires" club.
Re-consolidation at many levels. It only took the Seven Sisters 100 years to outlast the political will behind anti-trust regulation, and merge back together.
Actually, I'd like to make $249,999/year and not a dime more. Otherwise, I'll join that infamous "millionaires and billionaires" club.
Home ing Run.
LOL @ classwarfare against the rich. Get back to me after someone looks at how the rich manipulated the financial sector into the economic crisis.
I can't remember the exact quote, but whom ever said something to the effect of socialism never sticking in the United States because here the average worker wasn't a proletariat but a rich man who was only temporarily poor nailed this mindset.
"The problem with Socialism is that eventually, you run out of other people's money." -Margaret Thatcher
There are a lot of them and they don't seem to mind...From this week's Lexington in the Economist
Fat cats and corporate jets: Why is it so unrewarding for politicians to bash the rich in America?
THE corporate jet gets a lousy press. In the James Bond classic, “Goldfinger”, the eponymous villain is sucked out of the window of just such an aircraft. In 2008 the bosses of Detroit’s moribund car companies did themselves no favours when they flew in their gleaming jets to Washington, DC, to beg Congress for bail-outs (they drove the next time). And in his present face-off with the Republicans over the federal debt ceiling, Barack Obama is bashing the jets again, because to the man in the street the corporate jet is a perfect proxy for a fat cat. “I’ve said to Republican leaders, you go talk to your cons uents and ask them, ‘Are you willing to compromise your kids’ safety so some corporate-jet owner can get a tax break?’.”
Needless to say, Mr Obama is now accused by the aircraft manufacturers of scapegoating a successful industry that employs more than a million Americans and by the Republicans of launching a populist “class war”. But this raises a question. If an authentic populist movement exists in the United States today, it is not composed of impoverished class warriors braying to squeeze the rich until their pips squeak. It is the tea-party movement, whose crusade to slash taxes and pare government to the bone far outweighs whatever distaste it might feel towards those magnificent fat cats in their flying machines.
Why is bashing the rich such an unpopular form of populism in America? The normal answer falls back on culture. Bill Galston of the Brookings Ins ution notes that Americans are repelled by the notion of inequality in worth or status. That men are created equal is, after all, “self-evident”. They are, however, far less perturbed by unequal wealth, a form of inequality that is the inevitable product of the free-market system in which most still profess an abiding faith. According to Tom Smith, director of the Centre for the Study of Politics and Society at the University of Chicago, surveys still show Americans to be more sympathetic than Europeans to the idea that unequal pay encourages people to work hard, for example, and less sympathetic to the idea that governments should try to smooth such inequalities out.
That said, you might think that the normal answer would no longer do in such abnormal times—after a great recession and with 14m people still looking for work. And, sure enough, every week brings a flood of complaints in the media about the rich getting richer while the incomes of the middle class stagnate or fall. A survey for the New York Times has just reported that the median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last year was little shy of $11m a year—a mouth-watering 23% rise since 2009. Joseph Stiglitz, the holder of a Nobel prize in economics, claimed in Vanity Fair that the top 1% of Americans were taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income and controlled 40% of its wealth, though others dispute his numbers.
As to whether such disparities should matter, that question has puzzled philosophers at least since the Enlightenment. This column proposes no definitive answer this week. The point here is only that Americans do not seem to mind about the widening inequality of income and wealth as much as you might expect them to in current cir stances. By and large, they have preferred opportunity to levelling; equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. The trouble with this is that America is a long way from providing equal opportunity. Children born into the bottom fifth of the income distribution are nearly five times as likely to end their lives there as those from families in the top fifth. Indeed, social scientists are no longer sure whether it is still easier to climb the ladder in the “classless” United States than it is in the supposedly class-hobbled lands of Western Europe.
What are vote-seeking politicians to make of this? That the American people appear to have kept faith in the hardest of times with the idea of leaving it mainly to markets rather than governments to allocate life’s material rewards strikes many Republicans as a marvellous thing—the glorious opposite of what happened in the 1930s, when the economically stricken turned to government for succour. In the case of the recent collapse, runs the Republican argument, misplaced government intervention—such as the egalitarian nonsense of extending credit for home-ownership to those who could not really afford it—was at least as much to blame as the excesses of the private sector. That, to judge by the eruption of the tea-party movement, is the verdict of many non-aligned Americans too. So the Grand Old Party is betting on this anti-government wave restoring it to power in 2012.
Not so exceptional, after all?
There are those on the Democratic side who urge Mr Obama to place precisely the opposite bet. His great mistake, they say, is failing to see that, beyond the din the tea-partiers make, most Americans deeply resent the bailing-out of the bankers and the rest of the undeserving rich who led the economy to the abyss, and would rally to the president if he only found the courage to mete out the punishment these villains deserve. Only thus can he summon up a populist wave for himself and ride it to re-election.
And yet Mr Obama, as is his wishy-washy wont, is not biting. He still plans to end the Bush-era tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000. But for all his occasional digs at the fat cats and their jets, this president is not and will probably never be the avenging egalitarian the left of his party dreams of. His own bet seems to be that in the matter of inequality the American people are less exceptional than they like to think they are. They might be unusually tolerant of big gaps between the rich and poor, but they expect the rich to pay their way and the state to offer a helping hand to those who cannot rise without one. This middling bet might not be the most exciting reading of America’s mood. But it may be the shrewdest path to re-election.
Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
-John Steinbeck
Thinking that a clear majority of Americans should pay income taxes is hardly class warfare. Everybody's taxes need to go up.
"Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member". --Groucho Marx
Yeah, I quoted Marx in a thread that touches on class warfare.
HAH!?!
Seriously, though it reminds me of the white Southerners who supported slavery, even though they didn't own any.
I dunno, I think the fact that social mobility here sucks should say volumes, as has been pointed out. Time to change game plans.
CG, to be fair I think everyone's taxes should go up but the fact remains that if we had created wealth over the past decade instead of just redistributed it to the upper x% more people would be paying higher tax rates.
Dumping cap gains rates would go a long ways towards correcting that imbalance IMO.
Capping deductions would also be a good thing to do.
Outlawing Dutch sandwich accounting would help too.
I read that they're thinking about reducing, but not removing, the tax deduction for employee health insurance. That would hasten a lot more companies to drop health plans, pushing employees to exchanges and be a great motivation for a hardcore public option. Obviously, for-profit health insurers are avidly against dropping the tax deduction. Probably won't happen.
Dropping the tax deduction for mortgages would raise a lot.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 07-11-2011 at 08:35 PM.
Well if Republicans are refusing any tax increases... doesn't that make them obstructionist?
To Republicans, compromise means the Democrats caving.
Curious who here is actually a millionaire. Raise your hand and state your position.
The millionaires I know realize and are honest that they can spare a bit more in taxes than anybody else.
Of course they hate paying taxes because it "contributes" to what they see as "a government corrupted by corporate interests".
I would also point out that technically, we aren't in a recession.
A lot of people miss that.
"A lot of people miss that."
Nearly all economists and the Fed "missed" the credit/mortage/housing bubble, so yes, their "technical" definition of "recession over" that leave 9%+ unemployed and man millions more mal/under/partially employed proves what bunch of silly, Fed-Dominated assholes they are.
Tell it to the jobless.
I don't really see a practical difference. Taxes are taxes. Whether state or federal, they are supporting the government. The burden is the same. The percentage of their income doesn't change. Just because the more impoverished only pay to the local government in terms of sales taxes is something the state and federal governments need to address amongst themselves. To say they don't pay is dishonest. You just don't like where they are sending that money. That isn't the taxpayers' problem, unless he has the choice to simply move somewhere else. Even illegals pay these taxes!
Try telling your local county tax assessor that you'll be sending your next property tax check to the federal government instead of them and let me know how that works out for you. Be sure to point out that taxes are taxes and that as long as you're sending that money to some government, it doesn't matter which one you send that money too.
No, it's not. Someone paying state sales taxes is not carrying the same burden as someone paying state sales taxes and federal income taxes.The burden is the same.
It's been resolved. The states have their taxing mechanisms, the federal government has theirs. Paying towards one doesn't free you from obligations to the other.The percentage of their income doesn't change. Just because the more impoverished only pay to the local government in terms of sales taxes is something the state and federal governments need to address amongst themselves.
Actually it's true.To say they don't pay is dishonest.
Incorrect. I don't like that 50% of the country doesn't have to pay federal income tax. If you're making the median income in this country, you are not poor. You can afford to pay something in federal income taxes, regardless of what you're spending on state & local taxes.You just don't like where they are sending that money.
You do have the choice to simply move somewhere else.That isn't the taxpayers' problem, unless he has the choice to simply move somewhere else. Even illegals pay these taxes!
Tax burden fundamentally takes into account percentage of income. Someone paying both sales and income taxes has a far smaller percentage burden coming from that sales tax relative to their total income.
You can choose to differentiate the taxes between the federal and state governments, but I am not sure the taxpayer cares who is taking their money, just that a government is taking it.
And as far as moving, if they are so impoverished as not to be able to pay income taxes, it follows they likely do not have the means to 'move'. Hence my comment.
Again, whether it is state or federal, that is between those 2 and how the voters decide how that is divided.
I think we are going to have to agree do disagree here.
raise taxes, more like introduced a new tax like carbon emissions tax while cutting some rebates and welfare handouts while bumping up the tax brackets to offset....thats what did in australia this past week, just another tax and the public is already hating the pm.
i think usa is going to introduced a emissions tax soon.... fkn pathetic when the market would just pass the expense down to the consumer...
Won't happen. Republicans don't want it and union labor democrats don't want it. Together they're too big of a majority for environmentalist democrats to overcome to get something like that pushed through.
Its the new reality, not a recession.Tell it to the jobless.
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