Monday, November 29, 2010

Tax cuts for the rich are not as important as the needs of laid off citizens & federal workers

Our priorities are backwards when tax cuts for Millionaires are more important than unemployment benefits for laid off citizens & pay for federal workers. The right is engaging in class warfare. Democrats shouldn't cave on these issues. I don't support Obama's pay freeze. If you are laid off, work for government or make less than 250K you should write you congressmen and women to pay employees & extend unemployment.

Once Reagan started cutting taxes for the rich in the 80s the deficit began to sky rocket. He pushed the theory of trickle down economics but it hasn't worked.

Clinton's budgets stabilized the deficits in the late 90s but the Bush tax cuts for the rich helped bring about rapid deficits again. People need to remember that a large portion of the stimulus under Bush in 2008 and Obama in 2009 was tax cuts too. Taxes are actually at an all time low.

I'm not even saying that I'm against renewing tax cuts for the poor and middle class at least on a temporary basis. They have been shafted over the past 30 years by outsourcing, credit card hikes, payday lenders and sub prime loans. We are coming out of a recession and people need a break.

Why are the Republicans willing to hold up tax cuts for everyone else so they can pass tax cuts for Millionaires? The average unemployment check is $290 a week that helps people skate by paying their bills and spending their money stimulating the economy. The average tax cut for millionaires is hundreds of thousands of dollars for people that don't need the money. Billionaire William Buffett paid 19% in taxes last year which is lower than most of his employees. That is why he is supporting raise taxes on the rich.

Why are we giving tax breaks to multi-national corporations to ship jobs overseas? Is that in the interest in the American people? Those corporations and the millionaires that fund the candidates (anonymously due to Citizens United) perpetuate this cycle of the government doing what is best for the rich (i.e. tax breaks) or the corporations (i.e. bailouts for companies with bad business practices that we're deemed too big to fail) while leaving middle class and working class Americans to fend for themselves.

In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. The top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.7%.

In 2003, just 1% of all households -- those with after-tax incomes averaging $701,500 -- received 57.5% of all capital income, up from 40% in the early 1990s. On the other hand, the bottom 80% received only 12.6% of capital income, down by nearly half since 1983, when the bottom 80% received 23.5%.

As of 2007, income inequality in the United States was at an all-time high for the past 95 years, with the top 0.01% -- that's one-hundredth of one percent -- receiving 6% of all U.S. wages, which is double what it was for that tiny slice in 2000; the top 10% received 49.7%, the highest since 1917.

The ratio of CEO pay to factory worker pay rose from 42:1 in 1960 to as high as 531:1 in 2000 at the height of the stock market bubble according to research by United for a Fair Economy. By way of comparison, the same ratio is about 25:1 in Europe.

The United States needs to look at the needs of the average citizen first if they want to avoid allowing our country to become a Third World nation.

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