Tag: distribution of wealth

How bizarre.  About 8 in 10 Americans want to clamp down on Wall Street’s fraudulent behavior?  

Someone needs to help me understand what in blazes is going on here.  82% is a scary big super-mega-majority.  Where does a really big percentage, like 80% plus, come from?  Did someone pull it out of a hat?  Did someone conjure it from a lamp?  A crystal ball?  Ouija boards?  Playing cards?  Who in the heck is reading the coffee grounds around here?  Where on gawd’s green earth does a number like that come from?

I am appealing to you, the inside dopesters having a strong strain of frustrated idealism and just the right touch of hard-boiled cynicism, to lend me a hypothesis, a conspiracy theory, if you will, of who “we,” the 80% are, and who “they,” the other 20% might be.  Please try to cast your theory in a form that makes it virtually impossible to disprove.  

This could have implications for democracy, and who rules America.

The disparity in wealth in this country is obscene, and the failure to restrain the mindless and monumental greed that led to it has been our downfall.

The income of the 400 wealthiest Americans swelled in 2006, soaring nearly 23 percent from the previous year, to an average of $263 million, according to data released Thursday by the Internal Revenue Service. Since 1996, this group has nearly doubled its share of all income earned in the United States.

The top 400 paid just more than $18 billion in federal income taxes in 2006, or an average of $45 million, on a record $105 billion in total income – the lowest effective tax rate in the 15 years since the agency began releasing such data.

The New York Times