It doesn't matter if its gone or not yet. The point is its clearly leaving. Wages are decreasing, prices for food, gas, school, health care, housing, taxes are all going up. More money is being amassed in the 1% and less in the 99% (this article is one example of why) and none of these trends show any signs of reversing.
Solution is simple too, just tax the rich more and redistribute that wealth where its needed. There's no reason to feel guilty about this, we fight their wars, work in their factories, guard their houses and build their roads, if they want to keep this the greatest country on earth they need to invest more in the middle class, like they used to [1].
As someone in the upper-middle class (I guess), I would love to pay more taxes to allow the state to help out the less fortunate. But until they stop bombing the shit out of foreign countries and chasing whistleblowers around the globe, I'm never supporting said initiatives to increase my liabilities to the state.
I will just donate the money that would be paid in tax to charities like Habitat for Humanity (my preferred one, as I volunteer there on a yearly basis in the summers).
I say this all the time - I would gladly pay substantially higher taxes if that money went towards things like universal healthcare, public education, infrastructure and social programs for the 90%+ of the population that will never have to worry about paying substantial income taxes.
Today's conservatives and libertarians remind me of Captain Hadley in Shawshank Redemption, when he tells his men that his estranged brother left him $30,000 and immediately proceeds to curse the fact that the government will take a large chunk of it. Perspective, my friends! If you make enough money to qualify for the top income tax bracket, be happy about it! It should be an honor to pay more than "your share" of taxes to support your nation, community and less fortunate countrymen.
John Kenneth Galbraith said it better than I can:
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
My personal feelings are that I am more economically conservative and socially liberal, aka a typical right-leaning libertarian. However, I am first and foremost a civil libertarian (Greenwald-esque), and I am willing to compromise on the economic side so long as it means civil liberties are protected.
So if that means the birth of socialism and the like just so we stop bombing brown people the government doesn't like, I can deal with that. Some things are more important than quibbling over econometrics.
Luckily for you, political positions in favor of helping the less fortunate, political positions in favor of a more peaceful foreign policy and political positions in favor of a more transparent government all tend to fall under the same party rubrics right now. You sound like a social democrat.
I consider myself a civil libertarian and nothing else. I don't much like the idea of coercing others to pay for things I agree with, much like I don't like paying for the bombings of foreign countries.
But economically I'm fine with most forms of governing if it meant that we stopped killing people.
Not really sure to be honest. I started with them when I was in HS and helped build houses. I was impressed that they actually gave me a nail gun and stuff to do instead of stand around and pretend like I was doing something. Any organization that empowers youth and makes them feel like they are doing something is one that I want to patronize.
So I go back and just do the same thing for a week or so every summer - build houses.
I once read an article that taxing all the rich by a %100 rate won't help the govrnement run for more than a couple days. I don't remember the link, but it'll be helpful if someone could.
In the UK pre-Thatcher the highest rate for income tax was about 83% as memory serves. Since that was canned income inequality has gone up a lot[0], but (and the article I think draws out this point) it's wealth inequality that really institutionalizes the divide.
The highest rate of income tax was during WWII. It was an eye-watering 99.5%
During the 50s and 60s it was a "more reasonable" 90%.
> The highest rate of income tax peaked in the Second World War at 99.25%.It was slightly reduced after the war and was around 90% through the 1950s and 60s.
I'm in favour of income tax, and I've spoken strongly against people who avoid their tax to extreme levels. But 90% is just nuts. I'd much rather have a 25% and actually collect it from everyone than 40% and only collect it from people who don't pay accountants to avoid it.
There's a really interesting series on UK Channel 4 called "Skint" about a poor neighbourhood in Scunthorpe. It's grim, depressing, watch.
From that article, the top quintile paid an average rate (not their marginal rate, of course!) of 25.1% of their income in federal taxes, and that these payments made up 68.9% of all federal income taxes. A little arithmetic there shows that if you upped their federal taxes by 50%, they'd lose 12.5% of their gross, and that would cover 100% of the revenue currently generated by federal personal income taxes. So if you wanted to tax the rich and not tax the poor, and by "tax" you mean "federal income tax", it's hugely doable!
If you're wondering how much of total federal revenue is personal income tax, it appears to be around 40% to 50%.
So that means that the 25.1% of income paid by the top quintile makes up 0.68*0.42 == 28.5% of federal revenue. It's pretty clear that if you kept the second-to-top quintile taxed as they are now (12% of federal revenue), cut payroll taxes in half (to say 20% of federal revenue), and kept the non-tax revenue (roughly 10%), that the remaining 58% could be met by slightly-worse-than-doubling the taxes on the rich.
Again. Double taxes on the richest quintile, keep taxes as they are on the next richest quintile, halve payroll taxes, and keep non-taxes, and you're done. You can set corp taxes to zero, and also income taxes for the bottom 60% to zero.
So. If you want to tax just the richest 1%, you can't run the country on that. But you absolutely can run the country just by taxing the rich. If you wanted to.
(Note: this was a thought experiment, not advocacy. I am not a fan of this proposal. I just want to demonstrate that videos like the one I've seen, saying it's impossible to just tax the rich, are using shaky math.)
So, the thing is, I can't reply to the comment you wish you had written. You said "the rich", I think it's pretty clear that the top quintile (collectively earning more than the rest of the country put together) are rich. I'd say they're "the rich", even. I know, I know, people in the 99th percentile think they're middle-class because they can't maintain three houses and a jet, but they're stupid and crazy to think that.
BUT ACTUALLY, even your completely ludicrously irrelevant claim is still false!
The top 1%, earning nearly 20% of income, got taxed at 29.5% in 2007, which made up 28.1% of federal individual income taxes. Obviously if you crank that to 100%, and cut all other forms of government revenue, you can run the country for, uh...
1/0.295 * 0.281 = 95.25% of 2007 total individual income taxes
0.9525 * 40% or so of total federal 2007 revenue = 38%
Looks to me like the budget deficit is under 24%, that is 901B / 3803B (figures according to requested budget for FY2013, which is obviously complicating things since my previous numbers are from 2007, but I'm attempting to take the worst-of-both-worlds to make my claim as hard-to-prove as possible).
0.38 * 2.902/3.803 = 29%
0.29 365 = about 105 days. 3.5 months.
If you taxed the top 1% at 100% (but no wealth tax), and you cut ALL OTHER FORMS of government revenue, including corporate tax, payroll taxes, fees, businesses, everything.... AND you won't let me use the same deficit spending that the current real-life government uses.... AND you take wealth distributions from 2007 (which is less extreme than today, but better-documented) and combine it with the insane spending habits of this year (i.e. worst-of-both-worlds).... you can STILL run the federal government for more than a quarter of the year.
So any claim that taxing the top 1% at 100% will only last the government for a few days is... guess what.... totally bullshit. Let's try to have a fact-based discussion, instead of just quoting completely-preposterous hearsay that some wingnut blogger posted.
Note, again, that the reason all this math works, of course, is that the rich already pay most of the taxes (nearly half of fed indv inc paid by the top 5%). That, in turn, is due to a very-mildly-progressive tax schedule, combined with absolutely insane income distribution.
(aside to intended: no one should be discussing this, exactly as you said, but I won't let that stop me!!! bwahaha!)
If you stick to income tax then of course it wouldn't. The rich don't want or need a large income - they have their wealth already, and are generating more from it in more tax-efficient ways than conventional income.
You have to tax not just income but wealth. And even if it'll work for only a short while, that's OK. It increases the amount of money available to regular people. Suppose that it turns out that there's no need to wage a war 2 more days, or spend a couple more days sorting IRS forms. Well, that's more cash to something else. It adds up. And after that's paid for, the cash is in the hands of individuals, to spend as they see fit.
The government does kinda tax wealth, any time it creates currency ("printing money") beyond the (I'd guess very small) rate at which it vanishes, e.g. by banknotes getting shredded in the wash, weird computer errors, etc.
(Because when there's more money around, prices and wages go up, and currency-denominated assets like money in bank accounts become less valuable. It's not clear that this does much to the assets in which wealthier people are more invested -- stocks and real estate -- so I'm not arguing that it's a good way of taxing wealth.)
if that number were true, then I would be all for it. even with a restrictive definition of "rich", and even at the current rates (top marginal of 39.6%), 2 days out of 365 days of spending is less than 1% of govt expenditures, and even a small number of "rich" people would be paying more than that.
Solution is simple too, just tax the rich more and redistribute that wealth where its needed. There's no reason to feel guilty about this, we fight their wars, work in their factories, guard their houses and build their roads, if they want to keep this the greatest country on earth they need to invest more in the middle class, like they used to [1].
[1] http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2012/08/pdf/middle_cl... - first chart