The punch line the Right likes to use is that the wealthy pays most of the taxes. The answer to that is DUH? They have most of the wealth, they have most of the income. Then they ask why they pay the most taxes?
I will continue to remind folks of the following from an article I blogged and placed in the papers.
Through an aberration in our economic system and without justification 1% of Americans own 49.7% of all investment assets and 43% of all financial wealth. 10% of Americans own almost 90% of all investment assets and 83% of all financial wealth. The wealth and income disparity in America is the worst of all industrialized nations sans Switzerland. America’s meritless wealth must be progressively taxed. The economic activity generated by them paying back what is owed “we the people” will benefit them and society at large. It is time that we demand from those that have mined “we the peoples’” resources, blood, sweat, tears, and scars, the obligation to repair the damage they have caused.
So do not allow yourself to be fooled. Learn the facts.
NYTimes.com
Op-Ed Columnist
The Social Contract
By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: September 22, 2011
This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long-run budget deficit. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare.”
It was, of course, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it’s people like Mr. Ryan, who want to exempt the very rich from bearing any of the burden of making our finances sustainable, who are waging class war.
As background, it helps to know what has been happening to incomes over the past three decades. Detailed estimates from the Congressional Budget Office — which only go up to 2005, but the basic picture surely hasn’t changed — show that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That’s growth, but it’s slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II.
Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.
So do the wealthy look to you like the victims of class warfare?
To be fair, there is argument about the extent to which government policy was responsible for the spectacular disparity in income growth. What we know for sure, however, is that policy has consistently tilted to the advantage of the wealthy as opposed to the middle class.
Some of the most important aspects of that tilt involved such things as the sustained attack on organized labor and financial deregulation, which created huge fortunes even as it paved the way for economic disaster. For today, however, let’s focus just on taxes.
The budget office’s numbers show that the federal tax burden has fallen for all income classes, which itself runs counter to the rhetoric you hear from the usual suspects. But that burden has fallen much more, as a percentage of income, for the wealthy. Partly this reflects big cuts in top income tax rates, but, beyond that, there has been a major shift of taxation away from wealth and toward work: tax rates on corporate profits, capital gains and dividends have all fallen, while the payroll tax — the main tax paid by most workers — has gone up. […CONTINUED…]