Did you Vote?

[Shaden]

If you are the kind of person who just wants to read the summary, rather than the entire article, here is the main point the author is making:

And now we have arrived at the point I want to make. If the top 1% of households have 30-35% of the wealth, that's 30 to 35 times what we would expect by chance, and so we infer they must be powerful. And then we set out to see if the same set of households scores high on other power indicators (it does). Next we study how that power operates, which is what most articles on this site are about. Furthermore, if the top 20% have 84% of the wealth (and recall that 10% have 85% to 90% of the stocks, bonds, trust funds, and business equity), that means that the United States is a power pyramid. It's tough for the bottom 80% -- maybe even the bottom 90% -- to get organized and exercise much power.

There are many other interesting points in that article, I strongly encourage you to read it. Among them is the huge discrepancy between CEO salaries versus the lowest-level production worker. It's out of control in this country, and applies to what I said before regarding AIG. These people do not DESERVE their wealth--not while they are cutting pensions and laying off employees and taking all-expense-paid trips to some sunny locale. I don't think that the rich are evil. But those who are willing to lay off employees so that they can tuck an extra million under their arms--when an extra million might have saved those jobs--are selfish, spoiled, and completely undeserving of my respect.

[quote='Ughmahedhurtz',index.php?page=Thread&postID =148775#post148775]Again, why is it inherently evil to have enough money that you have more cushion to protect you from predatory taxation by the imperial federal (and sometimes state/local) government? You're right, the principle is quite simple: government taxes us so they can "run" the government. I don't recall anywhere in our constitution that it says "government shall tax the richest 5% and give that money to ACORN (to the tune of $8billion+) for screwing people out of loan equity."[/quote]
Or you could get up in arms about the U.S. military, who consequently spends more money in our national defense than every single other country in the world COMBINED. There's a lot of waste and excess in our spending, and we could both argue where that waste is found--but that doesn't invalidate the concept or need for taxes. You don't think that our military spending is out of hand? We spend almost 500 million dollars a day in Iraq alone. That's your tax dollars at work right there. And the U.S. Army has never, ever, successfully passed an audit. There are billions of dollars unaccounted for, that they can't explain where the money went. Why don't we demand some accountability for those expenses? Why aren't people up in arms about our socialist military's out of control spending habits? Because military expenses are politicized, that's why--largely by the Republican party, who insists on framing every cut in the miltary budget as the opposition party being "soft" on national defense. The only winners in this scenario are the arms manufacturers, who consequently have a strong lobbying arm in this country, like just about every other major industry. War profiteering is rampant, and criminal, and everyone should be outraged by it. But instead we'd rather chase down bogeymen, like the throughly discredited "welfare queen with a cadillac" scenario that Reagan just made up--or your equally implausible scenario of someone owning a luxury condo and living on foodstamps. Sources, please.

Also, I never used the word 'evil'.

[quote]Sure! Everyone affected by this "tax the rich" mentality who will end up paying confiscatory rates on "real" income. When I say "real" income, I mean income earned from their businesses and investments and risked-money earnings. Now, guess who gets the shaft when the "rich" decide that it's just not worth it to stay in business or invest or risk money any more? Yep, you guessed it, those same "poor" who you think this will help. "Rich" people will just put it in relatively safe low-interest bonds and savings accounts or "tax shelters" such as trust funds for family. Which means they're no longer spending that money on hiring "poor" people or investing in startups started by "poor" people through venture capital and such. In the end, raping the "rich" has always shown the unintended consequence of retarding growth in the US's capitalist society. [/quote]
Says you. I actually provided sources that seem to indicate otherwise. Where are your sources?

[quote]I can't help people being ignorant of the facts; that requires folks to actually go get edumacated.[/quote]
If you mean plagiarizing unsourced conservative think-tank reports and Rush Limbaugh, I'd rather get educated elsewhere.

As for your ludicrous assertion that Clinton enjoyed a boom because of Reagan's tax cuts, you're really stretching it there. I agree that presidents receive too much credit overall for boom/recession during their term as president, but let's back up a moment with [url='http://www.pkarchive.org/column/81600.html']some reasoned analysis[/url] and some perspective on the saint of the Right, President Reagan:

But Ronald Reagan does hold a special place in the annals of tax policy, and not just as the patron saint of tax cuts. To his credit, he was more pragmatic and responsible than that; he followed his huge 1981 tax cut with two large tax increases. In fact, no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people. This is not a criticism: the tale of those increases tells you a lot about what was right with President Reagan's leadership, and what's wrong with the leadership of George W. Bush.

The first Reagan tax increase came in 1982. By then it was clear that the budget projections used to justify the 1981 tax cut were wildly optimistic. In response, Mr. Reagan agreed to a sharp rollback of corporate tax cuts, and a smaller rollback of individual income tax cuts. Over all, the 1982 tax increase undid about a third of the 1981 cut; as a share of G.D.P., the increase was substantially larger than Mr. Clinton's 1993 tax increase.

The contrast with President Bush is obvious. President Reagan, confronted with evidence that his tax cuts were fiscally irresponsible, changed course. President Bush, confronted with similar evidence, has pushed for even more tax cuts.

Nothing like a little historical perspective, eh?

poverty,[/url] ....

Okay, now I have to call you out on this one. I was talking about how there was a wealth disparity. You agree, and then say it is a 'problem' that I haven't mentioned all the GOOD things our economy is doing versus the rest of the world. Uh no, it's not a problem. It's actually a distraction from the point. I wasn't saying that our economy screws over the rest of the world. I was saying that our country--this one, not some other one--has a huge wealth disparity between rich and poor. This doesn't invalidate the good things we do around the world. Far from it. In fact, it has absolutely NOTHING to do with that.

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