08/14/2011
Here I go again, looking at the issue that all of the talk about cutting the budget never seems to discuss - what to do with all of the unemployed government workers or industries that are dependent on the taxes we all pay. Are we losing touch and forgetting that unemployed government workers become unemployed Americans that are not paying taxes and may become financial support recipients that tax our ability to care for the less than fortunate in the USA?
I listened to a couple of talk shows this weekend, and read a number of articles, editorials, and reader emails to local papers, all talking about the need to raise taxes to cover expenses not allocated properly in the budget, the need to lower taxes to encourage businesses to invest, the need to decrease the size of government, the need to increase the oversight the government provides because of the crooked amongst us, on and on, you hopefully get the picture.
And then, for me, I heard the absolute most depressing news I could, Michelle Bachman had won the non- binding straw poll in Iowa. Talk about something that turned my stomach, can you imagine that people in this country would be so confused by a two-bit con artist that only knows one phrase, something that has to do with one term.
So, I thought I'd pull in some interesting things I learned listening, reading, or otherwise. They will be all over the board, but all will talk about the need for the wealthiest in this country to assist in employing the middle class of this country by contributing an equitable share, not moving their monies out of the country to avoid paying taxes, and generally figure out a way to help when the need is greatest. In the interest of space, I've compressed multiple paragraphs into one for each article, thought, etc.
From The Denver Post, reader mail:
The economy was in a virtual free-fall when Obama took office, losing more than 700,000 jobs in the month he took over. More than 2 million new private-sector jobs have been added in the last 14 months — with positive job numbers every month. The stock market has improved dramatically since Obama took office — with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, even after the recent sharp decline, up from 8,228 the day he took office to a close Friday of 11,269. According to the Commerce Department, American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.67 trillion in the third quarter — the highest figure since the government began keeping track 60 years ago. Corporate balance sheets are by far the strongest in U.S. history — with close to $2 trillion in cash.
Another from the Post:
There has been a great deal of debate about the role of tax revenue to close the federal deficit. Republicans feel our deficit problem is a spending issue and vow to fight any tax increases on the wealthiest Americans, labeling such action as job killing. Since we now have individuals making $1 billion in a year, I thought it would be helpful to offer a comparison of the job-creating benefits of this individual versus a group of middle-class Americans. For $1 billion, we could employ 20,000 people, each making $50,000 per year. These individuals would contribute over $76 million toward Social Security and Medicare and their employers would match this amount, while the billionaire would contribute approximately $15,300. If the billionaire is a hedge fund manager, he pays only 15 percent of his income in federal taxes, roughly equal to the middle-income earners. When you add in sales taxes, the middle-class tax burden is substantially higher than that of the billionaire. The 20,000 middle-class employees would generate many other jobs in their local economies as they spend their money on the essentials of living. The billionaire wouldn’t spend but a small fraction of his money on living and wouldn’t need to generate any new jobs. In fact, in the age of globalization, the billionaire is more likely to invest his money overseas than in the United States. In spite of Republican claims, there is not one shred of evidence that tax cuts for the rich generate jobs.
From The Atlantic Magazine:
IN OCTOBER 2005, three Citigroup analysts released a report describing the pattern of growth in the U.S. economy. To really understand the future of the economy and the stock market, they wrote, you first needed to recognize that there was “no such animal as the U.S. consumer,” and that concepts such as “average” consumer debt and “average” consumer spending were highly misleading. In fact, they said, America was composed of two distinct groups: the rich and the rest. And for the purposes of investment decisions, the second group didn’t matter; tracking its spending habits or worrying over its savings rate was a waste of time. All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets. It was this segment of the population, almost exclusively, that held the key to future growth and future returns. The analysts, Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh, had coined a term for this state of affairs: plutonomy.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/the-middle-class-is-mostly-invisible-to-the-elite/243232/ for the entire story.
To be continued.....
No comments:
Post a Comment