Class War 101: We need a new progressive tax system

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

    It is time to set the top tax bracket above $1,000,000

    As you can see in the graph below, many people live in poverty compared to the few wealthy. Mind you, this graph does not include the Capitalist class of the top 2%

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    This next graph shows how income has grown by percentiles over the last few years. Notice anything?

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   That’s right. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

   If this is your first time, welcome to Class War 101

   Anyone with sense can tell that we can not pretend that the American dream is to be a $250,000aire. The dream is to own your own home, to have a family, to have health care when you need it and a retirement and education for our children.

    The way things are going, that will not happen anytime soon.

    40 + years of supply side trickle down free market economics have devastated states and federal budgets. It is time to face the facts. We need a progressive taxation system that adequately taxes the millionaires whose wealth would not be possible without America.

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    After living high on the hog for so long, the rich can not plead poverty

   It is time to get something back.

     

    I will keep this essay simple as I want to focus on the framing of the issue.

    We need a new tax bracket for millionaires.

    The bonus babies of bailed out Wall St do not get to have their cake and eat mine too.

    Our nation is in an economic crisis which is nearly entirely of Wall Streets making, and yet the super profits they will make this year will be entirely because of the Government bailouts that could have been used for education, health care and basically anything else.

   My first instinct is to get the pitchforks and torches, but on second thought there is an easy way to rectify the situation.

   Tax the millionaires.

   Inflation has hit our economy hard because of the high end inflation of many goods such as housing, health insurance and education. Though inflation is not easily perceived in small day to day goods like milk and bread, the price of housing doubled in the last ten years. So did health care and education.

   And as the super rich profitted during the Bush years and wages stagnated across the counry life became too expensive for us Joe and Jane Six Packs.

   But the class war goes on and the rich keep getting richer.

   We are now at a point where our nation will collapse financially without massive Government spending that will create jobs. Mere trickle down bailouts for the banks that cause and continue to cause these economic disasters will not do.

   And in order to do that someone has to pay for it.

   After 40 years of trickle down, now is the time to build from the bottom up.

   Now is the time to grow the base of the economy.

   If we create new tax brackets at 25 million, 15, 10, 5 and 1 million we can pay for all the vital infrastructure and social programs the future of America is depending upon at minimal cost to those tax payers while providing maximum return.

   That return will be in the form of a better more equitable society. Youth with better educations, parents with better retirements, a cleaner, safer environment, more scientific breakthroughs, more progress

   Isn’t that the goal?

   We can not continue to assume that no one has to pay for anything and the free market will provide for all. This is simply not true. Someone must pay. How it should be should be based on who has the ability to pay. The status quo as it stands now is untenable. It has not worked and never will, not as long as profits come before people.

   Therefore, I propose a Millionaires tax, as well as a fundamental progressive shift in our tax code which shifts the burden off the lower brackets by creating new, higher brackets.

   What those shifts are, how drastic they should be and how we will achieve it, I leave to be debated amongst you, my docudharmic peers.

   The floor is now open for debate.    

     

6 comments

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  1. Yes

    I gotch yer pony right here

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  2. if you tax them they will leave us! gasp!

    BTW, those ponies look like quarter horses.Maybe it’s the angle, what do I know. 🙂

    • jamess on July 21, 2009 at 07:12

    or better yet just let them sunset!

    They cost America around $800 Billion,

    in lost Revenue, while in effect.

    That would be plenty to fund Health Reform.

    The only thing Trickle Down ever managed to do,

    was siphon away Middle Class standard of living.

    It should have be called, Fitter Away —

    the American Worker’s hopes and opportunities!

    Great Charts, and reasoning MoT.

    It’s time to grow the economy,

    from the Ground up.

    The Rich had their chance — and they didn’t grow a thing,

    except their own bank accounts!

  3. I just want to point out that your title could also be ‘We Need a Return to the old Progressive Tax System’.

  4. and her article on the accumulation of capital. Since you state, correctly, that we will require job programs from the government to fight the rising unemployment rate – there are inevitably calls that these jobs come from the company that produce the weapons of war – which was debunked by a CNN segment I saw on the ability of military spending and its lack of effect on the economy – this apparently was known for quite some time Rosa Luxemburg wrote about it before 1910:

    What would normally have been hoarded by the peasants and the lower middle classes until it has grown big enough to invest in savings banks and other banks is now set free to constitute an effective demand and an opportunity for investment. Further the multitude of individual and insignificant demands for a whole range of commodities, which will become effective at different times and which might often be met just as well by simple commodity production, is now replaced by a comprehensive and homogeneous demand of the state. And the satisfaction of this demand presupposes a big industry of the highest order. It requires the most favourable conditions for the production of surplus value and for accumulation.

    In the form of government contracts for army supplies the scattered purchasing power of the consumers is concentrated in large quantities and, free of the vagaries and subjective fluctuations of personal consumption, it achieves an almost automatic regularity and rhythmic growth. Capital itself ultimately controls this automatic and rhythmic movement of militarist production through the legislature and a press whose function is to mould so-called ‘public opinion’. That is why this particular province of capitalist accumulation at first seems capable of infinite expansion. All other attempts to expand markets and set up operational bases for capital largely depend on historical, social and political factors beyond the control of capital, whereas production for militarism represents a province whose regular and progressive expansion seems primarily determined by capital itself.

    In this way capital turns historical necessity into a virtue: the ever fiercer ‘competition’ in the capitalist world itself provides a field for accumulation of the first magnitude. Capital increasingly employs militarism for implementing a foreign and colonial policy to get hold of the means of production and labour power of non-capitalist countries and societies. This same militarism works in a like manner in the capitalist countries to divert purchasing power away from the non-capitalist strata. The representatives of simple commodity production and the working class are affected alike in this way. At their expense, the accumulation of capital is raised to the highest power, by robbing the one of their productive forces and by depressing the other’s standard of living.

    Needless to say, after a certain stage the conditions for the accumulation of capital both at home and abroad turn into their very opposite – they become conditions for the decline of capitalism.

    Rosa Luxemburg: The Accumulation of Capital (Chap.32) (21 July 2009)

    http://www.marx.org/archive/lu

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