(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%
This next graph shows how income has grown by percentiles over the last few years. Notice anything?
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.
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.
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Yes
I gotch yer pony right here
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. 🙂
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!
I just want to point out that your title could also be ‘We Need a Return to the old Progressive Tax System’.
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: