http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29790058/
Oh yeah! Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd has guilt written all over those AIG bonus sweetheart deals. No one is responsible? Read on.
"Some of the worst blows came amid the furor over $165 million in bonuses American International Group Inc. paid some of its employees while receiving billions of dollars in federal bailout money. After first denying it, Dodd admitted he agreed to a request by Treasury Department officials to dilute an executive bonus restriction in the big economic stimulus bill that Congress passed last month. The change to Dodd's amendment allowed AIG to hand out the bonuses and sparked a blame game between Dodd and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
Dodd was guarded Thursday when asked about Geithner.
"This is obviously a matter that obviously should have been dealt with differently, but we are where we are," he said.
Republicans branded Dodd's reversal "astonishing and alarming" and fingered Dodd as the top recipient of campaign cash from AIG employees over the years.
The GOP is slamming Dodd, claiming he is cozying up to Wall Street insiders, raking in bundles of their campaign cash, shirking his banking panel duties and running for president as the economic crisis erupted in 2007.
He's also under investigation by a Senate"
In addition, executives at AIG all claim they are not responsible. Obama last night on Jay Leno admitted he is ultimately responsible for what happens on his watch. That's impressive. Someone taking responsibltiy. It's about time. Good for Obama.
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Comments: 64
In the end, though, it will all be Bush's fault.
Let Obama take responsibility with his words, and then go on picking who he thinks is going to win in sports.
This is sarcasm
Personally, I'm not mad at AIG. They had contracts with these people and they fulfulled the contracts.
It's supposed to be unconstitutional to target one select group like they did for that huge tax percentage. I hope they fight it, personally. Otherwise, they're liable to decide that other bonuses - that have nothing to do with bailouts - should be taxed that way too.
And...Obama fans will think it is right and proper to take and take and take from anyone who is making a successful living.
Anyone knows that you don't loan money to anyone without some kind of stipulations about what the money is for and how it will be paid back. Gifts? I'm not so sure.
As for the rich, I am for them paying their fair share. As has been pointed out by many on Gather, the rich were taxed at a higher rate on income and capital gains back when Reagan and Clinton were in office and they did well and the economy was strong. The Bush administration gave the rich and corporations many loopholes and tax cuts. Look at the economy now. Is it better? Also, more jobs went overseas under Bush than any president that has ever served.
Dodd will be the "fall guy" for having compromised but little or nothing will be done about the Treasury for their role! It's all about finding a scapegoat in Washinton!
That's true if talking purely about the percentage of their personal income paid. However, if you look at the total federal tax burden, the percentage paid by the "rich" actually went up under GWB.
How did this happen? Because Bush's tax cuts removed 11 million low income workers from the federal income tax roles completely. That meant that those left paying taxes picked up a larger share of the total pie.
Patience. So what? (Ian Dury song).
All this being/taking responsible stuff is fine too, however... when will they start holding people accountable? My bet says never, just as it has always been. No change there...
"...the same people who are moaning and groaning about these bonuses pitched a fit when Obama tried to limit executive compensation."
I think a distinction is necessary here, at least for me. I have a problem with government attempts to limit executive compensation in private companies as a general principle. If the company is receiving taxpayer funded bailout dollars, however, it is a different story.
Please provide a source on this comment.
From the business section of the Dallas Morning News; it gives a nice breakdown of who pays income taxes. Here are some excerpts, with a link to the full article at the bottom:
"Perhaps we can learn something by examining how much we pay in taxes, who pays them and how our tax payments have changed in the last 20 years or so. We can do this pretty easily, thanks to the Internal Revenue Service."
"Every year it examines all the returns that are filed and analyzes changes in the patterns of tax payments. The latest year for which the data are complete is 2005."
"Today, fewer people pay income taxes. In 1986, Americans filed 103 million federal income tax returns. Of those, 84 million had to pay some taxes. That's 81.5 percent of all returns. By the time Mr. Clinton took office, the percentage of filers paying taxes had declined to 75 percent. During the Bush years, the percentage of filers who paid taxes continued to decline. It fell to only 67.4 percent in 2005."
"While the number of households filing returns rose by 5 million, the number of households actually paying income taxes fell by 6 million. Basically, 11 million lower-income households don't have to pay income taxes that would have had to pay taxes before the Bush tax cuts."
Did you catch that? Eleven million lower-income households that paid taxes before the Bush tax cuts do not pay taxes now? But Bush's tax cuts were only for the wealthy, right?
"Today, the rich pay more, the poor pay less. Bush tax rate cuts notwithstanding, those with high incomes pay at much higher marginal tax rates than those with lower incomes. They also pay much more of the total tax bill, a reality that has escaped Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Only 953,000 taxpayers – about 1 percent of the total who paid taxes – paid at the top 35 percent tax rate in 2005. They paid $315.4 billion in taxes on their $1,094 billion in income."
"In 2000, the top 25 percent of all taxpaying filers paid a whopping 83.6 percent of all income taxes. By 2005, they paid 85.6 percent of all taxes. So in spite of tax rate cuts for the well-off, the share of taxes paid by the well-off has risen."
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/columnists/sburns/stories/DN-burns_04bus.ART.State.Edition1.4603045.html
So why wouldn't the top few pay more? They have all the money. Why do the poor pay less? They have no money. They live in poverty. And don't kid yourself. The wealthy have many loopholes that don't show up in your statistics.
They do. The question is how much more? The top 25% of wage earners account for something like 86% of the TOTAL federal income tax bill. The top 50% account for 97%. So basically the top half is footing the bill for the bottom half.
"They have all the money."
You say it like it magically appeared or was given to them. What about the fact that THEY EARNED IT? A recent Forbes study found that the number of "old money" families, ones who inherited their wealth, is a tiny fraction of the total number of millionaires. Those who made their millions through work, by themselves, make up the vast majority.
As for the loopholes, they are accounted for. The numbers are the totals and percentages ACTUALLY paid.
Can you quantify these statements with some data and some more definition? You're making awfully broad characterizations that sound more like speculation than fact. What is the dollar cutoff for poor? If they buy at Salvation Army and Goodwill, are they not consumers? By definition they are.
Do they all (whoever they is--that still has to be defined and qualified) receive food stamps and go to community thrift stores? What about items not covered by food stamps? Do the "poor" not consume them? What about the lady in line at the grocery store in front of me the other day who used food stamps for her food and cash for her cigarettes and beer? Is she not a consumer?
How do you know the wealthy "often" purchase large items from other countries? What are the large items and how frequent is "often?"
How do you know a small percentage of their income is actually consumable product and that they "no doubt" add it to their business expenses? Are you their accountant (for all the wealthy, given the generic nature of your comment)?
Sorry, Elsie, but you don't get to post speculative comments that have no factual backing and just get away with it. I will call you on it every time.
AC, what the article fails to point out is that the income disparity between rich and poor has grown so much that millions of people are actually removed from the tax rolls. The government already gets 99% all wages through the payroll tax but only about 70% of investment and business income.
The share of total income going to the top-earning 1 percent of Americans went from 8 percent in 1980 to 16 percent in 2004. Household medical costs rose 50% between 1970 and 1990. Real consumer spending devoted to transportation rose 300% from 1930 to 1990. Housing costs increased eight fold between 1950 and 2000. From 1990 to 2005, CEOs' pay increased almost 300% (adjusted for inflation), while production workers gained a 4.3%. While worker productivity was up 20% from 2001 to 2007, median wages were stagnant. The lower 50% of wage earners did not fare well under the Bush administration.
The share of wealth held by top 1% in the United States has been steadily increasing since the Reagan years. About 70 percent of the wealth in the US is in the hands of 10 percent of population.
I refuted this notion once before. It is not true that people were removed from the tax rolls because they got poorer. It was because Bush adjusted the tax tables so that they would not have to pay income tax.
"The share of total income going to the top-earning 1 percent of Americans...."
You make it sound like someone is giving to them. THEY ARE EARNING IT!!!!
Not sure what you're getting at with that statement.
By the way, how did you become the expert on all topics?
Sorry, but I'll take statistics over speculation any day.
Do movie stars, baseball players, AIG executives, stock brokers, insurance brokers, etc. not work? Is acting not work? Are the AIG executives sitting at home collecting checks, or are they going to the office and "working?"
How much these jobs are worth is determined by how much society values them. That's true of any job.
"...how did you become the expert on all topics?"
I read and I research. Knowledge is power.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
Sometimes values conflict. For example, a particular circumstance might compromise—or appear to compromise—professional judgments. Maybe a researcher has a financial interest in a particular company, which might create a bias in scientific decisions affecting the future of that company (as might be the case if a researcher with stock in a company were paid to determine the usefulness of a new device produced by the company). Or a scientist might receive a manuscript or proposal to review that discusses work similar to but a step ahead of that being done by the reviewer. These are difficult situations that require trade-offs and hard choices, and the scientific community is still debating what is and is not proper when many of these situations arise.
"On Being a Scientist: Responsible Conduct in Research, 2nd edition (1995)"
Research on any subject can be found to substantiate anything you want it to. My point was to reinforce the fact that research often is only as good as the money behind it and we all must take care in reading research. This is a basic premise taught in Statistics 101.
AC, repeating an inaccurate statistic does not make it correct. While it is true that 6 million low-income people were removed from the income tax rolls by the Bush tax cuts; 15 million taxpayers of federal payroll taxes were excluded. If Bush had truly wanted to help low-income wage earners, he could have opted to cut the payroll tax. The bottom 40 percent of families pay less than 1 percent of income taxes, but about 4 percent of payroll taxes. Many low-income families pay no income tax, so a whopping income tax cut does not improve their life.
The Congressional Budget Office reported that in the year 2005 after-tax incomes of the top 1% of households jumped by an average of $180,000 while middle-income households rose by $400 and lower-income households rose by only $200. Median income dropped during the Bush years while both the poverty rate and the percentage of Americans without health insurance went higher. Wages fell for most low and middle-wage workers (and have not increased since 2000), while wealthiest 1% of Americans reaped a 21.1% record share of the nation's income.
Income inequality intensified under Bush. The administration chose to remove millions of low-income people from the income tax rolls because it had no impact on revenue and it made the tax bonanza for the top 1% politically palatable.
You're still attacking the source and not refuting any points.
"If Bush had truly wanted to help low-income wage earners, he could have opted to cut the payroll tax."
Nothing's good enough, right? He removed 11 million low income earners from the federal income tax rolls entirely. That's 11 million more than Bill Clinton did. But that's insufficient, right?
"The bottom 40 percent of families pay less than 1 percent of income taxes, but about 4 percent of payroll taxes."
Huge disparity, huh? Again, the wealthiest paying the lion's share. How little should the bottom 40% pay, Baby J? Should the top 50% or 60% foot the bill for everyone else? If that's your stance, fine. Then just say it. But don't try to imply that the wealthiest are not paying their fair share.
"Income inequality intensified under Bush."
There is no right to income equality. Different people bring different skill sets to the market, and the societal value of those skill sets is what determines wages. Should the garbage man be paid the same as the guy who runs a company of 200 employees? Or 500 employees? Or 5,000 employees?
"...for the top 1% politically palatable."
Yeah, I'm sure the top 1% really appreciated their total share of the federal tax burden INCREASING under Bush.
The Growing Gap in the United States
Between the Rich and the Rest
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Interview with Edward Wolff
Edward Wolff is a professor of economics at New York University. He is the author of Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can Be Done About It, as well as many other books and articles on economic and tax policy. He is managing editor of the Review of Income and Wealth.
In the United States, the richest 1 percent of households owns 38 percent of all wealth. Multinational Monitor: What is wealth?
Edward Wolff: Wealth is the stuff that people own. The main items are your home, other real estate, any small business you own, liquid assets like savings accounts, CDs and money market funds, bonds, other securities, stocks, and the cash surrender value of any life insurance you have. Those are the total assets someone owns. From that, you subtract debts. The main debt is mortgage debt on your home. Other kinds of debt include consumer loans, auto debt and the like. That difference is referred to as net worth, or just wealth.
MM: Why is it important to think about wealth, as opposed just to income?
Wolff: Wealth provides another dimension of well-being. Two people who have the same income may not be as well off if one person has more wealth. If one person owns his home, for example, and the other person doesn’t, then he is better off.
Wealth — strictly financial savings — provides security to individuals in the event of sickness, job loss or marital separation. Assets provide a kind of safety blanket that people can rely on in case their income gets interrupted.
Wealth is also more directly related to political power. People who have large amounts of wealth can make political contributions. In some cases, they can use that money to run for office themselves, like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
MM: What are the best sources for information on wealth?
Wolff: The best way of measuring wealth is to use household surveys, where interviewers ask households, from a very detailed form, about the assets they own, and the kinds of debts and other liabilities they have run up. Household surveys provide the main source of information on wealth distribution.
Of these household surveys — there are now about five or six surveys that ask wealth questions in the United States — probably the best source is the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances.
They have a special supplement sample that they rely on to provide information about high income households. Wealth turns out to be highly skewed, so that a very small proportion of families owns a very large share of total wealth. Most surveys miss these families. But the Survey of Consumer Finances uses information provided by the Internal Revenue Service to construct a special supplemental sample on high income households, so they can zero in on the high wealth holders.
MM: How do economists measure levels of equality and inequality?
Wolff: The most common measure used, and the most understandable is: what share of total wealth is owned by the richest households, typically the top 1 percent. In the United States, in the last survey year, 1998, the richest 1 percent of households owned 38 percent of all wealth.
This is the most easily understood measure.
There is also another measure called the Gini coefficient. It measures the concentration of wealth at different percentile levels, and does an overall computation. It is an index that goes from zero to one, one being the most unequal. Wealth inequality in the United States has a Gini coefficient of .82, which is pretty close to the maximum level of inequality you can have.
MM: What have been the trends of wealth inequality over the last 25 years?
Wolff: We have had a fairly sharp increase in wealth inequality dating back to 1975 or 1976.
Prior to that, there was a protracted period when wealth inequality fell in this country, going back almost to 1929. So you have this fairly continuous downward trend from 1929, which of course was the peak of the stock market before it crashed, until just about the mid-1970s. Since then, things have really turned around, and the level of wealth inequality today is almost double what it was in the mid-1970s.
Income inequality has also risen. Most people date this rise to the early 1970s, but it hasn’t gone up nearly as dramatically as wealth inequality.
MM: What portion of the wealth is owned by the upper groups?
Wolff: The top 5 percent own more than half of all wealth.
In 1998, they owned 59 percent of all wealth. Or to put it another way, the top 5 percent had more wealth than the remaining 95 percent of the population, collectively.
The top 20 percent owns over 80 percent of all wealth. In 1998, it owned 83 percent of all wealth.
This is a very concentrated distribution.
MM: Where does that leave the bottom tiers?
Wolff: The bottom 20 percent basically have zero wealth. They either have no assets, or their debt equals or exceeds their assets. The bottom 20 percent has typically accumulated no savings.
A household in the middle — the median household — has wealth of about $62,000. $62,000 is not insignificant, but if you consider that the top 1 percent of households’ average wealth is $12.5 million, you can see what a difference there is in the distribution.
MM: What kind of distribution of wealth is there for the different asset components?
Wolff: Things are even more concentrated if you exclude owner-occupied housing. It is nice to own a house and it provides all kinds of benefits, but it is not very liquid. You can’t really dispose of it, because you need some place to live.
The top 1 percent of families hold half of all non-home wealth.
The middle class’s major assets are their home, liquid assets like checking and savings accounts, CDs and money market funds, and pension accounts. For the average family, these assets make up 84 percent of their total wealth.
The richest 10 percent of families own about 85 percent of all outstanding stocks. They own about 85 percent of all financial securities, 90 percent of all business assets. These financial assets and business equity are even more concentrated than total wealth.
MM: What happens when you disaggregate the data by race?
Wolff: There you find something very striking. Most people are aware that African-American families don’t earn as much as white families. The average African-American family has about 60 percent of the income as the average white family. But the disparity of wealth is a lot greater. The average African-American family has only 18 percent of the wealth of the average white family.
MM: Are you able to do a comparable analysis by gender?
Wolff: It is hard to separate out husbands and wives. Most assets are jointly held, so it is not really possible to separate which assets are owned by husband and which by wife. Even when things are specifically owned by one spouse or another, the other spouse usually has some residual lien on the assets, as we know from various divorce proceedings. If a pension account is owned by the husband and the family splits up, the wife typically gets some ownership of the pension assets. The same thing is true for an unincorporated business owned by the husband. It really is not that easy to separate out gender ownership in the family.
What we do know is that single women, or single women with children, have much lower levels of wealth than married couples.
MM: How does the U.S. wealth profile compare to other countries?
Wolff: We are much more unequal than any other advanced industrial country.
Perhaps our closest rival in terms of inequality is Great Britain. But where the top percent in this country own 38 percent of all wealth, in Great Britain it is more like 22 or 23 percent.
What is remarkable is that this was not always the case. Up until the early 1970s, the U.S. actually had lower wealth inequality than Great Britain, and even than a country like Sweden. But things have really turned around over the last 25 or 30 years. In fact, a lot of countries have experienced lessening wealth inequality over time. The U.S. is atypical in that inequality has risen so sharply over the last 25 or 30 years.
MM: To what extent is the wealth inequality trend simply reflective of the rising level of income inequality?
Wolff: Part of it reflects underlying increases in income inequality, but the other significant factor is what has happened to the ratio between stock prices and housing prices. The major asset of the middle class is their home. The major assets of the rich are stocks and small business equity. If stock prices increase more quickly than housing prices, then the share of wealth owned by the richest households goes up. This turns out to be almost as important as underlying changes in income inequality. For the last 25 or 30 years, despite the bear market we’ve had over the last two years, stock prices have gone up quite a bit faster than housing prices.
MM: A couple years ago there was a great deal of talk of the democratization of the stock market. Is that reflected in these figures, or was it an illusion?
Wolff: I would say it was more of an illusion. What did happen is that the percentage of households with some ownership of stocks, including mutual funds and pension accounts like 401(k)s, did go up very dramatically over the last 20 years. In 1983, only 32 percent of households had some ownership of stock.
By 2001, the share was 51 percent. So there has been much more widespread stock ownership, in terms of number of families.
But a lot of these families have very small stakes in the stock market. In 2001, only 32 percent of households owned more than $10,000 of stock, and only 25 percent of households owned more than $25,000 worth of stock.
So a lot of these new stock owners have had relatively small holdings of stock. There hasn’t been much dilution in the share of stock owned by the richest 1 or 10 percent. Stock ownership is still heavily concentrated among rich families. The richest 10 percent own 85 percent of all stock.
As a result, the stock market boom of the 1990s disproportionately benefited rich families. There were some gains by middle class families, but their average stock holdings were too small to make much difference in their overall wealth.
MM: Apart from the absolute level of wealth of people at the bottom of the spectrum, why should inequality itself be a matter of concern?
Wolff: I think there are two rationales. The first is basically a moral or ethical position. A lot of people think it is morally bad for there to be wide gaps, wide disparities in well being in a society.
If that is not convincing to a person, the second reason is that inequality is actually harmful to the well-being of a society. There is now a lot of evidence, based on cross-national comparisons of inequality and economic growth, that more unequal societies actually have lower rates of economic growth. The divisiveness that comes out of large disparities in income and wealth, is actually reflected in poorer economic performance of a country.
Typically when countries are more equal, educational achievement and benefits are more equally distributed in the country. In a country like the United States, there are still huge disparities in resources going to education, so quality of schooling and schooling performance are unequal. If you have a society with large concentrations of poor families, average school achievement is usually a lot lower than where you have a much more homogenous middle class population, as you find in most Western European countries. So schooling suffers in this country, and, as a result, you get a labor force that is less well educated on average than in a country like the Netherlands, Germany or even France. So the high level of inequality results in less human capital being developed in this country, which ultimately affects economic performance.
MM: To what extent is inequality addressed through tax policy?
Wolff: One reason we have such high levels of inequality, compared to other advanced industrial countries, is because of our tax and, I would add, our social expenditure system. We have much lower taxes than almost every Western European country. And we have a less progressive tax system than almost every Western European country. As a result, the rich in this country manage to retain a much higher share of their income than they do in other countries, and this enables them to accumulate a much higher amount of wealth than the rich in other countries.
Certainly our tax system has helped to stimulate the rise of inequality in this country.
We have a much lower level of income support for poor families than do Western European countries or Canada. Social policy in Europe, Canada and Japan does a lot more to reduce economic disparities created by the marketplace than we do in this country. We have much higher poverty rates than do other advanced industrialized countries.
MM: Do you favor a wealth tax?
Wolff: I’ve proposed a separate tax on wealth, which actually exists in a dozen European countries. This has helped to lessen inequality in European countries. It is also, I think, a fairer tax. If you think about taxes that reflect a family’s ability to pay, a family’s ability to pay is a reflection of their income, but also of their wealth holdings. A broader kind of tax of this nature, would not only produce more tax revenue, which we desperately need, but it would be a fairer tax, and also help to reduce the level of inequality in this country.
MM: In broad outlines, how would you structure such a tax?
Wolff: I would model it after the Swiss system, which I think is a pretty fair system. It would be a progressive tax. In the United States, the first $250,000 of wealth would be exempt from the tax. That would exclude 80 percent of all families. The tax would increase at increments, starting out at .2 percent from about $250,000 to $500,000. The marginal rate would go up to .4 percent from $500,000 to $1 million, and then to .6 percent from a $1 million to $5 million, and then to .8 thereafter.
It would not be a very severe tax. In fact, the loading charges on most mutual funds are typically of the order of 1 or 2 percent. It would not be an onerous tax, but it could raise about $60 billion annually. Eighty percent of families would pay nothing, and 95 percent of families would pay less than $1,000. It would really only affect very rich families.
MM: Do you recommend non-tax approaches to deal with inequality as well?
Wolff: I think we have to provide a much broader safety net in this country.
There are lots of things that we should do to strengthen our income support system. We can expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is now a fairly substantial aid to poor families, but which can be improved.
The minimum wage has fallen by about 35 percent in real terms since its peak in 1968. We should think about restoring the minimum wage to where it used to be. That would help a lot of low-income families.
The unemployment insurance system is in a real mess; only about one third of unemployed persons actually get unemployment benefits, either because they don’t qualify or because they exhaust their benefits after six months. Typically the replacement rate is about 35 or 40 percent. In the Netherlands, the replacement rate is 80 percent. Our unemployment insurance system is much less generous than in other industrialized countries and can certainly be shored up.
Of course, the welfare system is in a total state of disrepair, since it provides very restrictive coverage. Even before the switchover from AFDC to TANF with the 1996 welfare reform bill, real welfare payments had declined by about 50 percent between 1975 and 1996. So we had already experienced an enormous erosion in welfare benefits, even before we adopted this new system.
We are much more unequal than any other advanced industrial country.
You have this fairly continuous downward trend from 1929, until just about the mid-1970s. Since then, things have really turned around, and the level of wealth inequality today is almost double what it was in the mid-1970s.
If you think about taxes that reflect a family's ability to pay, a family's ability to pay is a reflection of their income, but also of their wealth holdings. A wealth tax would not only produce more tax revenue, which we desperately need, but it would be a fairer tax, and also help to reduce the level of inequality in this country. The stock market boom of the 1990s disproportionately benefited rich families. There were some gains by middle class families, but their average stock holdings were too small to make much difference in their overall wealth.
That doesn't answer the question: should he be paid the same as the CEO?
Unfortunately, the author doesn't tell us anything we don't already know, namely that there is a disparity in income and wealth in the United States. What he ignores is what causes that disparity: different skill sets allow different workers to earn different wages. Not everyone brings the same knowledge, skills and abilities to the table, and therefore society values their contributions differently, and rewards those contributions at differnent wage levels.
The rest of the article is nothing more than an advocacy piece for European-style socialism. The author favors the top few bearing the burden for everyone else through the forced distribution of wealth (a tax targeted at the top and expanded social benefits for those at the bottom).
He's making a moral argument. That's fine. It's also one I vehemently disagree with. All men are created equal. What happens after that is determined by opportunity, personal decisions, education, etc. There is no guarantee that we will all remain equal.
So you think it is our government's job to make us all equal? And you agree with reaching that goal through the forced redistribution of wealth?
Are there no men among minorities? I ask that simply to point out that your statement borders on ridiculous because I was not excluding anyone, but using a "men" as a synonym for the human race.
"Citing it, as I did, doesn't mean that I think our government should force people."
Then why post it given that his point in the article was to argue for forced redistribution of wealth?
"Why are you advocating that the rich not pay their fair share?"
I'm not. I think they already pay their fair share. They bear a disproportionate share of the federal tax burden already. The top 50% pay 97% of all federal income taxes. How much more would be "fair?"
"And you are only talking about income, not wealth."
Still, the wealth is THEIRS. Are they not entitled to keep it?
What are these loop holes? Can you give me some specific example from the tax code that is not available to every member of society? I've done my taxes at varying income levels throughout my life, from when I made virtually nothing to in excess of $150,000 per year and the questions for my return have always been the same, no matter how much I earned. I'd be interested to know what I've been missing.
See ya! (not)
AC, you make my point. If you know that there is not a guarantee of income equality, why would you be surprised that society would tax different income levels at different rates?
Democratic government is society's marketplace of values and ideas. Bush's tax cuts removed 6 million from the tax rolls. Part of the cuts came in the form of a tax break for married couples (marriage penalty) and a doubling of the tax credit granted for each child under 17, to $1,000 per child. There was nothing to benefit unmarried taxpayers like elderly widows and widowers. Why did married couples and families with children benefit? I suspect it was because those who wrote the government's tax legislation valued marriage and families.
I would suggest that if those elected, and who write this country's tax legislation, valued paying off the deficit, funding farm subsidies, or paying for the war in Iraq, government funds would go toward these endeavors. If society determines that irresponsible behavior by bank and non-bank financial companies can cripple this country, it will take steps to provide regulation and oversight.
I'm not surprised. Where the disagreement comes in is over what the tax rates should be.
"I suspect it was because those who wrote the government's tax legislation valued marriage and families."
You suspect? No evidence to support that notion?