Oh, For F*** Sake!

[rabid1st]

This just in off the wires....

All 47 Senate Republicans, joined by two of President Barack Obama's fellow Democrats and one independent, stopped a piece of Obama's popular $447 billion economic stimulus plan.

The $35 billion proposal would increase taxes on millionaires to create or protect 400,000 jobs for teachers, firefighters, police officers and other first responders.

So, fewer teachers, firefighters and police officers, but all of our millionaires are hiring, I guess, so it doesn't matter that 400,000 more ordinary people will be out of work.

I'm sorry but if you have 73% of the wealth you should be paying 73% of the taxes. And here I don't mean a tax of 73 percent, any more than Fox means that when they say 1% pay 50% of the the taxes. They mean of the total money collected, 50% of it comes from the people with 73 percent of the money. while those of us with 27% of the money pay the OTHER 50% of all taxes collected. No. That's not very fair. Not to mention we 99% are the ones put out of work and denied needed services like first responder services. So, let's be really fair...let's charge a percentage of the total taxes collected equal to the total percentage of the national income that you have.

Edit To Note That the only totally independent figures I could find put my 73% of the wealth with the top 10% of Americans. Still, they only pay 38 percent of the tax burden, according to a conservative think tank called The Tax Foundation. In those same Stanford figures, 40% of all Americans have only 1% of the nation's wealth. These would be the people Fox News and the Republican Candidates are talking about when they say 50% of American's pay NO taxes, but then, they don't have much of the money.

Comments

[jonesiexxx.livejournal.com]

re 73% paying 73 %. can't remember the exact numbers, but the top 5% pay something like 95%.

[rabid1st.livejournal.com]

It is very easy to get confused by all this, but an independent (totally non-partisan) look at this tells the tale. And where your figure comes from...

http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html

Another indicator of this reversal in the income and tax shares of the top 1 percent is that during 2007, the top 1 percent had actually paid more in federal income tax than the bottom 95 percent, a comparison that was much remarked on a year ago. But the diminished income of the top 1 percent in 2008 means that the comparison no longer holds. During 2008, the bottom 95 percent (AGI under $159,619) paid 41.3 percent of the total collected, a larger share than the 38.0 percent paid by the top 1 percent (AGI over $380,354).

The top-earning 5 percent of taxpayers (AGI over $159,619), however, still paid far more than the bottom 95 percent. The top 5 percent earned 34.7 percent of the nation's adjusted gross income, but paid approximately 58.7 percent of federal individual income taxes.

It wasn't that they were paying 95% of the taxes. They were paying MORE than 95% of the people. But then...they had a lot more money than those people. Which is what I was talking about...the share of the wealth that the top 1% hold.

Here is a link to the Stanford University assessment on the last census of Wealth Distribution. This is on the top 10%...so my figure was off, but the highest earners in the top 1% would have a greater amount of the wealth than 73%, in that case.

http://stanford.edu/group/scspi/cgi-bin/fact15.php

And don't get me started on how very painful 9-9-9 will be for everyone. But consider only this...you currently pay about 12.24 percent of your income to the federal government. 9 + 9 for all consumers = 18 percent, while 12.25 - 9 (which is his plan for corporations) lowers their tax rate.

Rae
enjoys math. :grin:

[rabid1st.livejournal.com]

And WHOOPS! Before I get yelled at by my liberal friends, my other half has informed me that The Tax Foundation is a conservative think tank, not non-partisan. This is what I get for trying to boil all his economic talk down into easy links. But in a way it makes even more of the point for me...because they are on the conservative side and still they are saying the top 5 percent paid only 58.7 percent of the taxes.

And the Stanford chart shows that the top 10 percent have 73% of the wealth. I need to find that census info from 2010 about the top 1%, but it is hard to find non-partisan references online.

[ladypeyton.livejournal.com]

I hope that means they're going to have a hard time being re-elected with that on their voting record.

[gwendolynflight.livejournal.com]

That's unbelievably frustrating. ::rage::

[maniacalshen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was my first headdesk of the day.

Between that and the anti-women crap they keep trying to (or suceeding in) pushing through, I'm so over the GOP right now. I can't even be polite about it anymore.