http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/article...=102886,00.html Top 1-percent Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) break (TY 2008) [3,4] $380,354 [billion] Ummm... you could take 100 % of the Adjusted Gross Income of the top 1 % of Individual Income Tax Returns and it would still take you sixteen years to pay off the existing debt.
Me thinkst you are mis-informed. At best, Buffett pays a lower tax RATE than his secretary, not less in taxes. http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/07/warren-buffett-is-wrong-on-taxes.html
One has to look at in terms of percentage of income, raw numbers are meaningless. http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/07/tax-fairness
What % of wealth does the top 1% own. If it's more than 40.42% then there not paying a fiar share per-portion.What does the bottom 40% own, are children,students and people who don't earn an income included in that number. anybody can just put up numbers without looking inside The real question is can 1% of the population actually produce 40% of the wealth (real wealth not financial claims on wealth). Or are they rent extractors like Carlos slim . Classic economists like adam smith called this unearned income. When he talked about free markets in the wealth of nations, he talked about freeing the economy from unearned income. The land aristocracy of old Europe extracted all the economic surplus from the rest (serfs) by sitting on there ass and in-forcing self proclaimed land ownership rights by private armies. Unless adding to the productive output of an economy the money is unearned income through monopoly and legal claims . Adam Smith and other classical wanted to tax, yes tax all the unearned income out of the economy so it would be freed for productive income. Unfortunately the post industrial era is not producing more wealth just transferring (extracting) through financial and legal means.
Bullshit on you. The post-industrial society 'poor' (especially since the LBJ 'Great Society' mandates) certainly have free access to better health care and largess from the state in the form of personal welfare (food, housing, education, etc.) than pre-industrial 'poor'. No comparison.
Take all of it. 100 % of their annual adjusted gross income. It would still take you sixteen years to pay off the existing debt - not to mention the future debt and not to mention the unfunded obligations. Hence, the requirement to attack the problem from the entitlement spending side. And yes, I believe the tax code needs to be overhauled - either a flat tax without deductions or a progressive tax with no deductions.
certainly but your missing the point. are the gains in the area you speak of made because of extraction or increase in productivity and knowledge . Better housing and health care all because of increase in productivity and innovation not rents. Also if you take a look out side America it's hard to make your case, not much improvement from the low surplus societies of the past. It is almost cartoonish to make the claim that better quality of heath care for the poor is entirely the result of government "welfare" and not productive gains. There was no health care industry to speak of back in those days. The largess of finance has extracted it's wealth from the production class .more than the state ever took from them. no comparison do you want industrial capitalism ( production and consumption) or financial capitalism (rents) .
yes the debts grow at compound interest the economy grows at a linear growth. the two are incomparable. funny that no ever talks about private and corporate debt which dwarfs government debt. you could take the entire money supply and barley make a dent in it.