Wealthy Former Google Employee Tells Obama ‘Please Raise My Taxes!’

stfuconservatives:

paxamericana:

 

It’s class warfare!
Yeah right. Three decades of laissez-faire economic polices have allowed the rich to double their share of the national income while paying tax rates a fifth lower than before. The result,notes Kevin Drum, was “wage stagnation for everyone else, a massive financial collapse that ravaged the middle class, an enormous deficits that they’ll be asked to pay off eventually.” If the millionaires tax is the only blowback, the wealthy should count their blessings.

It’s a tax on small business
“Don’t forget that most small businesses file taxes as individuals,” House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said on Fox News Sunday. “So when you are raising top tax rates, you are raising taxes on these job creators.” Except when you aren’t. ThinkProgress’s Pat Garofalo points out that fewer than 2 percent of the nation’s small businesses fall into either of the top two tax brackets. Plus, many of the small business filers in the upper brackets are merely investors who have nothing to do with running the business. And if small businesses don’t want to pay taxes as individuals, they can file always as corporations.

It reduces incentives to work and invest
Experience shows otherwise. As Nancy Folbre points out over at Economix, “average annual rates of growth in gross domestic product in the high tax era between 1950 and 1980 exceeded those of the last 30 years. Increases in the top tax rate under President Bill Clinton were followed by robust economic expansion.”

It’s an unstable source of revenue
A recent essay in the Wall Street Journal argued that the high volatility of upper-level income makes it impractical to rely on taxing it. But this concern is vastly overblown and can be easily dealt with by establishing rainy day funds.

It’s unfair
In the libertarian view, the rich are entitled to their gains because they worked for them. But this ignores how structural changes in the economy such as globalization, financial deregulation, and the rise of the knowledge-based economy has disproportionately rewarded the wealthy. At the same time, we’ve failed to reinvest in government programs that once leveled the playing field, such as financing for community colleges and public universities.

The rich will leave the country
Good riddance, writes Don Peck in a recent Atlantic essay on how to save the middle class: “America remains a magnet for talent, for reasons that go beyond the tax code; and by international standards, none of the tax changes recommended here would create an excessive tax burden on high earners. If a few financiers choose to decamp for some small island-state in search of the smallest possible tax bill, we should wish them good luck.”

ALL OF THIS

(via stfuconservatives)

wannabechomsky:

“Republicans on Sunday decried the notion of a new minimum tax rate for millionaires as “class warfare,” saying the proposal by President Obama may be intended to portray Congressional Republicans who resist it as being callously indifferent to the hardships facing many Americans.”

Okay, GOP, let’s clear up what qualifies as “class warfare,” shall we?

• when extreme budget cuts lead to the deterioration of benefit programs for the public, forcing thousands if not millions to the brink of poverty
• when trillions of the dollars of American tax-payers are given to banks and firms that lined their pockets at the expense of said Americans
• when compensation for CEOs soars as wages for ordinary workers plummet
• when corporations are allowed to spend unlimited amounts endorsing politicians, effectively ensuring that anyone who makes it to the national stage is a hand puppet of big business
• when the highest court in the land is occupied by people with obvious, unchecked conflicts of interest in favor of corporations
• when the megarich actively conspire to keep the “populations/the political process [from] demanding a more ‘equitable’ share of the wealth”

These are just a few examples of the class warfare being waged today. President Obama’s tax proposal? That’s more like deploying one infantry unit against a fleet of drones. And of course Republicans aren’t callous, don’t be ridiculous. Both they and Democrats keep themselves soft and smooth - just the way CEOs like their bedmates.

(via geekvariety)

(Source: inothernews, via liberal-atheist)