Good Rich People!
Appalling facts, sensible solutions
“ I’m not any more altruistic than the next guy.
I’m just greedy for a different kind of country. ”
MORRIS PEARL, CHAIR, PATRIOTIC MILLIONAIRES
Thanks to Daniel Solomon. He and I are often involved in the same substack comment boards such as HCR’s “Letters from an American” and Hubbell’s “Todays Edition”. Daniel turned us on to this website:
Mr. Pearl testified at a Senate hearing and here is an excerpt from the video:
”The original sin of our tax code is the way we value money and wealth over work and wages. Your constituents who work for a living have taxes deducted from their paychecks every single week. I earn money by just watching the numbers on my brokerage statement go up, and I can decide to have that income become taxable if and when I feel like it. We do not tax capital gains until the time of sale, which means for people like me, taxes become essentially optional. We can take out low-interest loans to fund living expenses, never realize the capital gains so never pay taxes on them, and when we die, thanks to the step up in basis, we’re able to pass that wealth on to the next generation completely free of income tax…”
Please watch this:
About 2/3 of our economy is driven by consumers. People buying food, paying rent, purchasing the products we have learned to want or need. A TV, a cell phone, a game console - or medicines and medical care. If the bottom 90% of Americans have much less to spend than a few years ago, what does that do to the “economy”?
The extreme anger felt by MAGA followers is partly fueled by the fact that they are losing financially. They are suffering. And they are RIGHT to be angry.
But the morbidly rich have redirected that MAGA anger at immigrants (who are NOT stealing their jobs) and Democrats (who are NOT telling them how to worship or who to have sex with or what books to read) and the government (which is NOT the problem - Reagan lied).
The bottom 90% of Americans are suffering because the oligarchs and uber rich have used their lobbyists to write a tax code that allows them to pay very little or nothing at all. THAT is where the anger should be directed. The Republican response to that tax revenue shortfall is - guess what? - cut social programs for the 90%. Cut food assistance for the working poor and their kids, cut child care help, cut help with educational debt, cut help with health insurance, cut Medicaid, cut Medicare, cut Social Security. Cut, cut, cut!
America doesn’t have a “spending problem”. It has a revenue problem. And a few very rich people have a better idea. Tax them appropriately!
https://patrioticmillionaires.org/
Very good, Bill! I would argue, though, that we do have a spending problem AND a revenue problem. A lot of the deficit could be reduced if we were more diligent about waste, fraud, and abuse. A small investment in that area (like more funding for the IRS to go after tax cheats - funding the Repugnicans want to cut) would pay itself back in spades. Another area of opportunity is to review programs periodically and see if they're still doing what they were intended to do and are still financially viable (not require them to be reapproved like some of the Repugnicans want). Oh, and balance the damn budget and pay down the debt so that our second biggest expense isn't interest on the loan we shouldn't have taken out in the first place!
Another thing that's appalling is that while the morbidly rich are avoiding taxes and passing on their stepped up wealth, some of the rest of us are getting caught up in the Alternative Minimum Tax net, which still doesn't seem to catch the billionaires we're subsidizing. My wife and I wound up paying AMT on our meager income for several years, and it really sucked.
A straight up progressive tax code would be the fairest. VAT taxes are retrograde and hit the low income people.