How Unequal Are We? Redistribution of Wealth to the Rich

reply to post by Wildbob77


Prices are reverse taxes! Corporations are fascist -- on corporate property a person does not have any Bill of Rights protection. Yet prices are set through regional monopolies. Poor people pay taxes through corporate prices. Inflation is created by banks printing money to subsidize the wealthy investor class. Wage increases do not keep up with bank deflation of printing money.

Originally posted by dolphinfan
reply to post by elfie

 

The "average joe" is a part of this problem on the investment side of the equation as well and that includes folks like teachers and union folks.

During the run-up of the market based on speculative practices, CDOs and the like, investors were pushing their pension fund committees for higher and higher return vehicles. The pension funds which are large institutional investors pushed the asset management firms for more return on their investment. That was one of the reasons that these banks continued to push the envelope of risk within their portfolios. In an asset management, fee based environment the loss of a large public employee pension account like Nevada's teachers or CALPERS means $billions of lost assets and millions of lost revenue and these firms were doing what they could to keep their clients.

Did all of these shops do that? No and they lost significant asset base and many were either bought or went out of business.

You never hear about the retired Teamster who shows up at his union pension committee annual meeting and pounds the table about inadequate returns on his pension account. "Why did we get an 8% increase on our fund when the XZYZ Janus fund was up 90% year over year?" If you don't think that has an impact on the risk that portfolio managers take, you are wrong.

Keep in mind that the folks running these public pensions are highly paid and have a significant stake in happy account holders. Some of these gents hire outside firms to manage the cash and some have staffs that manage the staff, but either way they stood to lose their jobs because the account holder, e.g. teacher or plumber was demanding more money out of them.

The greed in this deal was not just at the top, but at the bottom as well.

Hate to sound like a peck, but again I wonder what motivates you to come to the elites defense and place the blame and responsibilty on the pensioners plate? Sure there is
risk, but we are talking positions that are extremely wreckless, postures assume by the managers. Then we find that "insiders" are hedging against the positions they helped
construct on behalf of customers. IF I perpetrated a similar concept I would be locked
up, period.

I.E (I love examples now) I am an electrician, I wire a house, I do so faultily with purpose and then take out a fire insurance policy on this customers property.

Collect on the policy once the place goes up in flames.

"The damn customer should have followed me around and made sure I wired the house properly, their fault!"

Conceptually how has this economic debacle been any different?

More so, why do you and others defend this with watered down proxy speculation?
What good is this moral hazard concept if there is not a shred of morality involved?

This is in its very basis Criminal theory, legitimized with suits and Ferraris.

Conservatives want this society to become more dependent on natural economic process, but here you are standing up for those who make this political reality impossible.

At the end of every road it seems I keep finding these utopian copouts, with reality
and actual functionality being completely ignored. Without fail I go down this rabbit hole
and find these bedazzled ideological rest stops but no toilets, no running water; hey but those lights and signs are cool







[edit on 22-4-2010 by Janky Red]

[edit on 22-4-2010 by Janky Red]

Originally posted by Wildbob77
reply to post by Zosynspiracy

 

If you're only making $25,000 per year you're not paying 65% in taxes.

Remember, the bottom 47% don't pay taxes.

My previous reply suggested a flat tax. We all pay the same percentage.

Right now, it's the middle class and up that pay all the taxes. The poor don't pay any.

Bull!

Unless I happen to live in a twilight zone where all the 6 CPAS I have retained over the years are completely incompetent.

I too have to wonder about that "47% don't pay taxes." My mother-in-law receives about $19K in retirement earnings and she still ends up paying Federal Income tax...so I was a bit confused when I heard about the 47%. Strange indeed.

reply to post by Janky Red


Hey, I'm with you.

To your example, if you get three electrical bids to wire your house and they are all +/- $200 and three weeks and then a gent comes in at 50% of that rate and tells you it will be done in 5 days and you hire him, I think you know you're getting sub-standard work. In that situation, should someone die in an electrical fire I would consider you criminally negligent.

Of course it is the ultimate responsibility of the electrician to do quality work and work to the standards of the profession, but the person who hires the electrician has some responsibility to ensure that they are hiring a qualified professional.

As it relates to the financial scenario, of course the gents running these firms and funds are at the top of the heap and many should have been held criminally liable and should currently be in prison.

All I am saying is that any fool knows that getting a 90% return on investment over a medium or long term knows the investment is either unbelievably risky or shady. Hell, there were Janus funds that were up over 200% year over year. There are investors, and millions of them who were happy to take the disbursements from these gains, but are now crying the blues because the bottom fell out of the portfolio. I used to work at an asset management who had a large union pension fund as a client. Every quarter retirees were at pension meetings screaming about the fact that they were getting 8-12% returns when other funds were performing in some cases 10x that. We did not change our strategy, they continued to get 8% and we made the decision that if they wanted to fire us, so be it that we would do what we thought was right, whether or not the client liked it. They yanked 1/2 of the assets from us and we lost a lot of revenue. They took an absolute bath on the 1/2 they took out and now have the money back at my old shop, getting 6-10% returns.

Is the asset management profession complex enough that it is not totally reasonable for the average pensioner to understand what is going on in their portfolios? Absolutely and there are millions who never even look at their statements and got hammered. There are also thousands of professional money managers who were dumping millions into commercial paper who did not know what was in the money market fund. Should they be held liable? Yes, they should at minimum lose their liscence.

The blame here is all over the map, but we are digressing from the original intent of the thread.

reply to post by bowlbyville


Notice the constant mantra of that figure yet NO ONE gives a link or reference, etc. haha Yet I have a whole thread on the super rich taxing you to death:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

O.K. let's put this 47% b.s. to rest:

www.nytimes.com...

Even if the discussion is restricted to federal taxes (for which the statistics are better), a vast majority of households end up paying federal taxes. Congressional Budget Office data suggests that, at most, about 10 percent of all households pay no net federal taxes. The number 10 is obviously a lot smaller than 47. The reason is that poor families generally pay more in payroll taxes than they receive through benefits like the Earned Income Tax Credit. It’s not just poor families for whom the payroll tax is a big deal, either. About three-quarters of all American households pay more in payroll taxes, which go toward Medicare and Social Security, than in income taxes.

Typical that everyone reiterates the right-wing corporate-state A-hole kissers and the mass media propaganda posing as grassroots uprising! haha. FASCISM!

[edit on 22-4-2010 by drew hempel]

reply to post by drew hempel


Here is some info from the US government

usgovinfo.about.com...

Note this data is from 2002, the last year data was available

•The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 33.7 percent of all individual income taxes in 2002. This group of taxpayers has paid more than 30 percent of individual income taxes since 1995. Moreover, since 1990 this group’s tax share has grown faster than their income share.

•Taxpayers who rank in the top 50 percent of taxpayers by income pay virtually all individual income taxes. In all years since 1990, taxpayers in this group have paid over 94 percent of all individual income taxes. In 2000, 2001, and 2002, this group paid over 96 percent of the total.

•The share of taxes paid by the top 1 percent of taxpayers will rise from 32.3 percent to 33.7 percent.

reply to post by dolphinfan


Yep -- income taxes! You got it -- NOT PAYROLL TAXES. That'd be the Working Class -- not the passive investors sitting on their A-holes paying capital gains tax while getting their dividends and write-offs for depreciation, etc.

Hello? We weren't born yesterday.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

In the 1950s the marginal tax rate on those earning more than $3 million a year (in today’s dollars) was 91 percent. By 1990 it was 28 percent. The IRS says that the top 400 richest tax filers actually paid a rate of just 16 percent in 2007 (the latest numbers we have). Yep, the richest earners — people who took in an average of $343 million each — probably paid a lower rate than you did. Something to consider as you sign your 2009 return.

[edit on 22-4-2010 by drew hempel]

[edit on 22-4-2010 by drew hempel]

reply to post by drew hempel


Payroll taxes are for services like social security and medicare. Payroll taxes are not used to fund things like federal departments, defense and the rest of what it takes to run the country. Payroll taxes are for services that are to be RECIEVED by the person paying the taxes. Most of the folks paying payroll taxes will extract far more from the systems they are paying into than they ever put in themselves.

Thats why when someone gets an income tax refund who does not pay federal taxes, which are 47% of folks what they are getting is called a hand-out, welfare, what ever you prefer to call getting something for nothing.

The vast majority of the top 1 percent are small business owners, not folks sitting on their boats looking at their Bloomberg terminals and counting their dividends

reply to post by dolphinfan


Dude social security has been RAIDED since Ronald Reagan for the MILITARY:

www.wri-irg.org...

www.nysun.com...

Surpluses, which in theory should fund benefits for future retirees, are instead raided by Congress and squandered on unrelated spending programs. The late New York senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, called this "outright thievery." Here's how the raid works: The surplus payroll tax dollars go into the Social Security Trust Fund, which in turn uses them to buy special issue bonds from the U.S. Treasury.

[edit on 22-4-2010 by drew hempel]

That is some good information. Thank you for posting it. However, I feel there is little new to it for those who pay even the slightest attention. "The wealthy horde the wealth"? Nope, nothing new there. If you want to work hard, play fair, and make money that is fine in America. Go for it. But...

I get sick of those who defend greedy, back stabbing, and criminal behavior and call it "Capitalism". I am sick of those who circumvent or ignore laws designed to protect the nations economy and call it "God's Work". I am sick of those who blatantly rig and game the system and then claim "Market Forces" are at work. I am ready to puke if I hear one more time these pieces of garbage on Wall Street never broke the law so nothing wrong was done.

I cannot claim any or all of those who are in those top percentiles fall into the above categories. I will not even try to do so. However, there is some truth to "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime".

www.alternet.org...

While the story made national headlines, the government targeted an operation that catered to little guys, the poor and lower middle class. However, they failed to focus on some big-time tax cheats whose fraud was much greater, but who happen to be top-tier Republican contributors. What the press conference should have announced was: "Swift Boat" financier Sam Wyly cheated the U.S. of at least $300 million in taxes." And, "The money that paid for the "Swift Boat" campaign was your money!"

In 2000, Bank of America, the country's second-largest commercial bank, began offering a tax shelter called STARS, which the IRS has ruled illegal. Among the happy clients were Wyly and his brother Charles, who controlled the $5 billion Michaels Stores, the arts-and-crafts retailer with 900 shops. The idea was to evade taxes by giving themselves stock options and transferring them to offshore corporations controlled by secret trusts in the Isle of Man, that famous British tax haven in the Irish Sea. "Manx" companies are routinely fakes; one of the front men on the boards of all the Wyly entities is a sheepherder, who picks up cash for use of his name.

Every major private banking department offers a product called the "private placement offshore of variable annuities."

Those numbers are probably low: According to a Tax Justice Network report quoted by the Senate investigation and based on statistics from Merrill Lynch/Cap Gemini's "World Wealth Report" and the Boston Consulting Group's "Global Wealth Report," 16.2 percent of the private wealth of North Americans, $1.6 trillion, is held offshore. The overwhelming reason for that is tax evasion.

[edit on 22-4-2010 by drew hempel]

reply to post by Wildbob77


You must not have understood me. If I'm making $30K a year and some rich puke is making oops I mean "earning" $2 milllion a year and we are both paying a flat tax that still doesn't matter. Unless his "flat" tax is higher than mine. If I have to pay 47% in taxes and he does as well he still has a hell of a lot more money left over than I do. Hence my point about a wealth/money cap on human beings. Because let's face it when you strip away all the veneers of society we are all human beings put on this earth for the same reason. There is absolutely no need for one human being to be a billionaire. It's disgusting and unnecessary. But we as human beings will learn our lesson soon enough.

reply to post by drew hempel


Yes it has been raided. That has nothing to do with my point. You get money out of those services by virtue of paying into them via the payroll tax. What happens to the the money during the period of when you take it out and when you put it in is irrelevant.

The funds were rated because they needed it to fund social programs targeted at the folks who are not paying income taxes

Originally posted by dolphinfan
reply to post by drew hempel

 

Yes it has been raided. That has nothing to do with my point. You get money out of those services by virtue of paying into them via the payroll tax. What happens to the the money during the period of when you take it out and when you put it in is irrelevant.

The funds were rated because they needed it to fund social programs targeted at the folks who are not paying income taxes

OR

B. They raided the funds to pay for a Trillion dollar + conquest
C. They raided the funds to out spend a communist threat by using communist principles

reply to post by dolphinfan


Social security is raided for the military!

www.warresisters.org...

This is a distortion of how our income tax dollars are spent because it includes Trust Funds (e.g., Social Security), and the expenses of past military spending are not distinguished from nonmilitary spending. For a more accurate representation of how your Federal income tax dollar is really spent, see the large chart (top).

www.counterpunch.org...

The 2011 military budget, by the way, is the largest in history, not just in actual dollars, but in inflation-adjusted dollars, exceeding even the spending in World War II, when the nation was on an all-out war footing. This military spending in all its myriad forms represents 53.3% of total US federal spending.

www.counterpunch.org...

In all, military spending for the fiscal year 2002 has risen by nearly $54 billion over the initial 2001 level of $291 billion, an increase of almost 19% percent. For the fiscal year 2003 it will amount to $376 billion, the highest item in the Federal budget (of approximately $2,130 billion). [7] (Officially, military spending is the second highest item in the Federal budget after Social Security payments. But Social Security is a self-financing trust fund. So, in reality, military spending is the highest budget item.)

www.veteranstoday.com...

As there is no money to be made from the poor, Wall Street fleeces them by yanking away their entitlements. It has always been thus. During the Reagan administration, Wall Street decided to boost the values of its bond and stock portfolios by using Social Security revenues to lower budget deficits. Wall Street figured that lower deficits would mean lower interest rates and higher bond and stock prices.

[edit on 22-4-2010 by drew hempel]

[edit on 22-4-2010 by drew hempel]

[edit on 22-4-2010 by drew hempel]

reply to post by drew hempel


Give me a break, using some war protestor site. You can get different numbers from different sources. Here is one that suggests that we spend 24% of the total in defense.

www.whitcam.com...

Others lump in foreign aid and the State Department into the figure and call it "defense and international obligations" and so forth.

I think we can agree that its too much

reply to post by dolphinfan



Right the source I gave had TWO graphs for budget -- the one you reference is based on the Congressional Budget Office.



We know that -- but it does not include PAST military costs.





[edit on 22-4-2010 by drew hempel]

I agree with those who consider their debts as their own, and don't want to be burdened by the debts of others, except as a charity when it comes to money. It may be script, but it still holds it's value, and value hasn't been dropping overnight. The reason it's variable is as a fair reflection against the market, and unfortunately, the markets greed. Regardless, if those are the terms and conditions we agreed on, ignorance of the balance or the laws notwithstanding, then we are bound to our contracts.

That's in-the-box thinking, because it's honourable. I guess you can look outside the box, but a debt's a debt is a debt. Give to Caesar what is Caesars unless you're going to claim such a gross misrepresentation that it invalidates everything.

Having said that, Morgellons etc. might just be the evidence, nanotech in supermarkets, FEMA camps, etc. Priorities seem to be changing; myself, I'd rather just pay back my monetary debts in good measure. I guess things get left in the wayside if they don't, and I for one won't feel so bad if they do.

reply to post by 12GaugePermissionSlip


Your words are refreshingly true! Some of the insane generalizations of poor people on this thread leave me speechless almost. Most of our poor are working at underpaid jobs of $6.50 or 10 an hour in areas where they can not afford a place to live or food to eat. I refer to Babara Ehrenriechs book: Nickel and Dimed. And that was written quite awhile ago.

Yes the gulf between haves/have nots is increasing. Read Rachels Children. The truth of poverty is more complex than what judgmental and racist rants convey. We have folks on this site who are white and living at poverty wages. but still working. Something is terribly wrong.

Truly rich, wealthy people do not work. They live off of capital. Those who are truly rich have all sorts of tax havens that the poor only wish they had.

Thanks 12gauge.