🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 16:59:33 -0500, Scott Hedrick wrote:

> Amazingly enough, these are also the same people that pay a
> disproportionally large share of taxes. The top 1% of earners pay 34% of
> income taxes. Tax-breaks for the rich are *really* tax breaks for the tax
> payers.

Really? Does the money trickle down from the super-rich to everyone else
too? How does that happen? Oh, I know. Sam Walton's daughter comes to work
one day, opens her mail, and says, "Well, ah'll be dammed. I got me a big
tax cut from the Federal govermment. Whatever will I do with it?" She's
quickly reminded of her natural egalitarian inclinations when she sees the
puppydog expression of George, the burly foreman at the factory she owns
that makes those little seeds that can be planted in the ground to grow
into big Wal-marts that poison the ground water to get rid of local
competition. George reminds her that his workers all have a family to feed
and make barely enough to feed, clothe, school, and buy movies and video
games for their children, not to mention fill up their cars with gasoline
to get them to church every Sunday. Naturally, Mrs. Walton decides to
donate x percent of her 7-8 figure tax cut to making sure her workers make
an extra 25 cents an hour. 

I don't know that 34% would be terribly backbreaking for the top 1%,
considering they probably control way more than 34% of the personally-held
wealth in the U.S., and perhaps control a lot more when you take into
account all the wealth in the hands of limited liability corporations.
That's not to mention all the money that these people control that
probably isn't even considered taxable because it's kept overseas or
whatever. Considering the manner of present economic growth, it looks like
people are just losing their jobs, not getting money "trickling down" to
them, and the people who are getting jobs are getting them at Walmart
saying hello to those kind folk who walk in to buy a back massager because
it's illegal to own a vibrating dildo in Dallas. 

Here are the numbers we need though before we can fairly draw any
conclusions:

(1) How much wealth is available to the top 1%?
(2) How much of that wealth do they keep after taxes?
(3) How much wealth is available to the bottom 99%? 
(4) How much of that wealth do they keep after taxes?

Even those numbers would probably end up being rather misleading. The 1%
of highest income earners, I believe, include people who make billions and
people who make merely hundreds of thousands. And while $380,000 is a lot
of money, I'm not sure it's enough to be considered independently wealthy. 

And if you want to look superficial property rights, you might want to
consider how the top 1% makes their money. Do they depend on the labor of
those in the bottom 99%? Or does it just magically appear?