15 thoughts on “Top 1% of taxpayers receive more income than entire bottom half combined”

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2. Pingback: Only government can boost the economy, and only taxing wealth can restore US prosperity | Under the Mountain Bunker

3. Enlightened self-interest is a wonderful and productive human-nature trait. The Idaho potato farmer doesn’t work long and hard in the field to help me. He does it for himself and his family, the people for whom he cares most. But that potato farmer cannot prosper without having provided enrichment in others’ lives. We like and demand potatoes, and the farmer produces them.

   The more that what one produces is valued and appreciated by others, the more he’ll prosper. Those who markedly enrich community, thus, can earn lots of money and, indeed, come to be “rich”. They don’t “receive” riches; they EARN riches.

   “The rich” aren’t a problem, aren’t an enemy, aren’t to be hated and plundered. They are a benefit, a source of widespread happiness, and to be admired and cheered. And copied.

   Society will be improved by the least-productive choosing and behaving more as the rich have to become so, not by plundering the productive and successful, the role models for the rest of us. Wealth in the marketplace is NOT a zero-sum game. Wealth is infinitely-expandable, based solely on expanding productivity.

   Wealth-envy and achievement-envy are ugly . . . and self-defeating.
   • You keep referring to the rich as the enemy — no one else here is doing that.

     I get that potato farmers produce potatoes. And people eat potatoes. Thanks for the economics lesson. What about, for example, Wall Street traders and speculators, the “people who are literally sitting with their feet up on their desks, sipping a latte, while a computer runs a thousand trades a second, based on algorithms—and makes tons of money“? What are they working ‘hard’ at, what are they doing to ‘enrich’ the lives of others? What product do they produce that I ‘like and demand’?

     It’s a fact that Bush’s tax cuts have unequally benefited the wealthy and widened an already existing income disparity:

     CBO data show that between 1979 and 2007, the average after-tax income of the top 1 percent of Americans grew by 281 percent, after adjusting for inflation, compared to just 25 percent for the middle 20 percent of Americans, and ­­16 percent for the poorest fifth of the population.

     No one is buying this tired, GOP bullshit that the wealthiest 1 percent have taken 281 percent MORE in income over the past 30 years because they work 281 percent HARDER than 99 percent of us.

     But, nice try.
4. There is no such thing as “tax cuts”. Congress may pass a change in income tax RATES, and a President may sign the bill or not. Then — though the CBO is required by law to ignore this reality — taxpayers adjust their lives accordingly. If you tax “the evil rich” (Was that redundant?) at a 100% rate the Treasury will reap from them exactly to the penny the same amount as if you tax them at 0%.

   By 2005, the Treasury reported, the top income (tax rate) bracket’s payments to the Treasury were almost twice what they were in 2001. Further, in any ten-year period the number of people at the beginning who were in the bottom earnings quintile who are still there after the decade is much lower than, say, those who are now in the third or fourth quintile. For almost all, “poverty” is much like pregnancy, a temporary condition.
5. You don’t seem to have gotten the “economics lesson” at all, UTMB. No one prospers who doesn’t produce what is valued by others. And those who produce lots of what others value a lot prosper even more. Those who are “poor” aren’t producing a lot of what others value. If “the poor” did what “the rich” do, they’d be rich too.

   My “Wall Street trader” son prospers because, and only because, he produces investment earnings for his clients around the world, even now as the President of the United States works dutifully to implode both capitalism and America as quickly as possible. If he weren’t producing what his clients value and were enriched by, UTMB, they wouldn’t be his clients. He prospers for exactly the same reason that the potato farmer does.

   Your final “281 percent” commentary, UTMB, is illustrative of your abject cluelessness vis-a-vis economics. It’s NOT how hard you work. It’s how much others value what you produce in a free market. Lots of teachers and janitors may work harder than kobe Bryant or Peyton Manning or Alex Rodriguez or Garth Brooks, but no one is willing to pay, say, $250 for a ticket to watch them work.
   • These FACTS have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with producing what others value in a free market, thedrpete:

     …if an investor such as Buffett pockets, say, $100 million of his income in capital gains, he pays only a 15 percent tax on all that money. For everyday working people, the 15 percent rate applies only to earnings between $8,500 and $34,500. After that, they’re paying a higher marginal rate than the multimillionaire pays on gains from investments. Oh, yes, and before Obama temporarily cut it by two points, the payroll tax added another 6.2 percent to the burden on middle-class workers. That levy doesn’t apply to capital gains or to income above $106,800, so it hits low- and middle-income workers much harder than it does the wealthy. — Why conservatives hate Warren Buffet

     Wealthy conservatives may be able to hypnotize their Teaparty-GOP voting base with that old saw, “If “the poor” did what “the rich” do, they’d be rich too.” No one else buys it. I cannot begin to imagine the disdain you must feel for 99% of us — the rest of us evil, socialist peasants. But we’re everywhere, we’re all around you, watching you, and you depend on us for so much of your privileged life. No one’s jealous of what you have — we want fairness. If people can’t take home as much of THEIR income as you do, with our current economic climate, then you should only be able to take home as much of YOUR income as we do. Elizabeth Warren said it best:

     I hear all this… well this is class warfare, this is whatever… No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you! But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and (have to) hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did. Now look: you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea — God Bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is that you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

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7. To acquire wealth, UTMB, one must earn by producing value for others. As ceo of Berkshire-Hathaway Warren Buffet did that while paying a marginal income tax rate of some 35-36% (well above the rate paid by his current secretary, incidentally). Now Buffet invests the remaining 64-65% of his earlier income, providing capital for others’ ventures which create jobs with incomes and taxes, and does so that his money earns money, i.e., capital gains. On the principle, already taxed at 35-36%, what he now earns in capital gains is taxed at an additional 15%.

   I know, UTMB, of the U.S. Constitution and thye rule of law, with the Constitution being the supreme law of the land. Your alleged “social contract” is a fiction of a liberal-progressive-moocher-gimmee mind.
   • Hey, nice job talking over everything I said in my response.

     Acquiring wealth isn’t just ‘earned by producing value for others’! Come ON! It has been accumulated over centuries through inheritance. It’s been stolen, obtained through slavery and Nazi investments and diamond mines in Africa at the expense of the lives of disposable people. And in the United States of America, if not the world, wealth of the few has been guarded and steadily increased through governments, laws, and politicians.

     And what’s valuable to others in any given moment is both subjective and relative.
8. What’s valuable to others in a given moment is both objective and measurable, UTMB. Price is the messenger, describing the relationship between supply (what I offer) and demand (what someone will exchange for it). There are approximately 400 American billionaires right now, UTMB, none that I can see fitting your characterization. The family with the most billionaires is the Waltons of Walmart fame, a company founded by Sam in 1962.

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10. Pingback: #OccupyWallStreet: Income from labor (99%) vs. income from investments (1%): class warfare via taxes | Under the Mountain Bunker

11. Pingback: #OccupyWallStreet: the top 1% take in more of the nation’s income than at any time since the 1920s | Under the Mountain Bunker

12. Pingback: #OccupyWallStreet: American Capitalism and the Plutocracy: Four Lost Decades (for the 99%) | Under the Mountain Bunker

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