In life, it is not the absolute amount of taxes paid that is important, but the buying power that remains after you've paid your taxes. In that regard, the top 1% is doing rather well, whereas the bottom 95% is not doing well at all. The U.S. doesn't seem to be going in the right direction, assuming the standard of living is at all important, as the statistic you quote is moving in a direction that will eventually move the U.S. further down the list in terms of living standards.
The entitlement class? The only reason that exists is that the Social Security tax is regressive and the Medicare tax is flat. That makes the marginal tax rate for people going from being dirt poor to being working poor sky high. The credit you're looking at is to make the marginal cost of joining the workforce less, so that people aren't actually making less from working than they would from, as you say, sitting on their asses. The other solution would be to raise the minimum wage so as to make employers pay something decent. Couldn't have that, though, could we? BTW, the idea for this came from the right. I think it was Friedman, but it might have been someone else. Either way, it's an implementation of a right-wing economist's idea. You guys aren't happy even when you get your way.
You mean to tell me poor people dont benefit from the same free society i do? They can make the decision to do something with their lives any time they want to, but inevitably they never make that choice, then people like you/poor people bitch and moan because i took advantage of a free society and they CHOSE not to. Plus we already do pay the most, by a long shot, but people like you keep getting greedier and greedier and wanting more and more of my money.
Im not right wing, I favor a flat tax. It is the only really fair way to raise revenue, but this robin stuff has got to go. Is it right wing to know that lower taxes stimulates business? Is it right wing to know that welfare creates a dependency class, that we have to then carry on out backs, and since they can they breed faster than the rest of us, with all that free time and resources you know. Go thru your local hood or trailer park sometimes. Guess who is paying for all that? You are..... If you like that, fine. I want as much of my money as I can to go towards me and mine. Do you know that there are people who actually will try to get fired so they won't go over the limit to keep their benifits??
Flat tax is right wing. You're obviously young. Educate yourself. As to folks who quit to keep their benefits, of course they exist. What you have to understand is that the effect of these penny-ante fools (because that's what they are) doesn't do anything to the economy. What does is the CEOs of Enron, World Com, Global Crossing, AIG and Citi, who collectively destroyed far more wealth than anything these pikers could conceive of in their wildest wet dreams. It's the difference between anecdote and data. Don't get caught up in the anecdotes; data counts.
1. Enron, World Com, Global Crossing: all of them looted the 401k's of their employees to keep themselves going. A simple law to make it illegal to force employees to keep more than 10% of their retirement savings in company stock would solve the problem. 2. Citi: Glass-Steagall. It only prevented a major meltdown for what? sixty years? 3. AIG: bring insurance companies into Glass-Steagall. That was simple. Anything else?
Remind me again, because my memory is fading, under whose watch did Glass-Steagall get repealed? The funny thing is that dems continue to play the game of "blame someone else" but the fact of the matter is that "glass-stegall" was repealed under clinton. And that was the leading cause of the housing bubble.
While it is true that Glass-Steagall died while Clinton was a lame duck, i'm afraid you can't pin it on Clinton as it was an entirely a Republican initiative headed up by Phil Gramm. It was done at the eleventh hour of Clinton's presidency by slipping it into a must pass appropriations bill just before a congressional recess. There was hardly any debate on the floor, and I doubt many grasped, at the time at least, the significance, assuming they were even aware of what Gramm had pulled off.