When you drill down to the center of what most motivates a traditional conservative, you will find that they are terrified by the idea of changing the way they view the world. It is a mentality that prevented 13th century Europeans from sailing ships too far in any one direction. They were fearful of sailing off the edge of a flat earth. The idea of a flat earth was the only way they could see it. Once they overcame their fear and made it to North America, the conservative American Tories were too terrified to declare independence from Great Britain because that change was too dramatic. A king was all they knew – All they could accept. Lord knows how frightening ideas like evolution, the United Nations, Lady Gaga, and Obama has to be for the die-hard conservative. Understand it was that same kind of inflexible fanatic bunch of social, political conservatives who wanted to murder Galileo and Copernicus because they had new ideas about how the world worked.
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What he stated before. The Tea Partiers have mangaged to find a way to have their gatherings without needing to designate certain areas “anti-rape zones”.
BTW
In 2009, the top 1 percent of all income tax returns with a positive adjusted gross income pulled in a total of $1.3 trillion. Of that amount, 24 percent was paid in federal income taxes, or $318 billion. The top 1 percent received a hefty 16.9 percent of all income and paid 36.7 percent of all federal income taxes.
The bottom 75 percent of all taxpayers, which is any household with an adjusted gross income under $66,193, had a total of $2.75 trillion in income. On that amount, they paid $110 billion in federal income taxes, about 4.1 percent of their income.
These figures strongly suggest that we have a progressive income tax: People earning more pay a larger share of the tax burden. Quite simply, the top 1 percent pays six times as large a portion of their admittedly larger income than the bottom 75 percent. (Our tax system, if the hodgepodge of charges and levies we struggle with can be called a system, is virtually flat when all taxes are considered, but that’s another column. Suffice to say that we have a big regressive employment tax that both parties have enlarged over the decades.)
Who was in the top 1 percent? Well, you needed to have $343,927 in adjusted gross income to be a member. There was no other requirement. If your household income was $154,643 or more, you were in the top 5 percent; $112,124 put you in the top 10 percent; $66,193 won entry to the top 25 percent. Earn less than $32,396 and you were in the bottom 50 percent. (Adjusted gross income is the income you have after off-the-top deductions such as retirement account contributions and alimony.)
Of course, 2009 was a bum year for the top 1 percent. Their income fell from $2 trillion in 2007 to $1.3 trillion in 2009, a loss of $700 billion. During the same period, the income of the bottom 75 percent fell from $2.75 trillion to $2.67 trillion, a loss of $75 billion.
Can the top 1 percent afford to pay more? You bet, and probably should. With a starting point of $343,927, the bottom of the top 1 percent is very well off, even if private jets and mega-yachts are beyond reach.
But that’s beside the point. It’s way more than the other 99 percent have. So how much of their $1.3 trillion can we take? And, once taken, what can we do with it?
Here’s the arithmetic:
Only $1 trillion is left because they’re already paying $318 billion in taxes. Since the official federal deficit is estimated at $1.315 trillion for the 2011 fiscal year, it should be clear that even if the top 1 percent paid 100 percent of their income in taxes, the federal budget would not be balanced.
In other words, there would be no spending “dividend” from taxing the 1 percent at 100 percent. Any lesser tax would leave an even larger deficit, suggesting that we have a serious “can’t get there from here” problem.
Then there is the persnickety question of whether $1.3 trillion in income would actually show up once the 100 percent tax rate was known.
Let me guess. It’s unlikely. The top 1 percent didn’t get to the top 1 percent through stupidity. The bottom line here is simple. The 1 percent versus the 99 percent is a powerful sound bite, but it’s deeply trashy economics.
Scott, what evidence/proof do you have that Mike is lying and is hateful, and what evidence/proof do you have that repudiates Mike’s arguments?
Lies and hate rule Papantonio’s mind.
It’s always either/or with teabaggers, conservatives, and republicans. Anything beyond that paradigm triggers even more fear into their minds because they don’t like change, progress, and evolution (much less believe in evolution).
I see conservatives post online their complaints over people using too many food stamps, they don’t want their tax dollars funding abortion, and the usual “Obama is a socialist” and “Obama’s birth certificate is FAKE!”
Now with Obama acknowledging and now advocating for gay marriage, I wonder how much of an uproar there is going to be in the religious community. Obama may be thinking he’s lost the religious/evangelical vote like LBJ said that he’s lost the south after signing the Civil Rights Act into law.