An artcle in the NY Times found:

Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000.

Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000.

From 1950 to 1970, for example, for every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162, according to the Times analysis. From 1990 to 2002, for every extra dollar earned by those in the bottom 90 percent, each taxpayer at the top brought in an extra $18,000.

The analysis examined only income reported on tax returns. The Treasury Department says that the very wealthiest find ways, legal and illegal, to shelter a lot of income from taxes. So the gap between the very richest and everyone else is almost certainly much larger.

..some of the wealthiest Americans, including Warren E. Buffett, George Soros and Ted Turner, have warned that such a concentration of wealth can turn a meritocracy into an aristocracy and ultimately stifle economic growth by putting too much of the nation's capital in the hands of inheritors rather than strivers and innovators.

Bruce R. Bartlett, an advocate of lower taxes who served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations [said] "As long as people think they have a chance of getting to the top, they just don't care how rich the rich are."

And that my friends is how the dumbest president in living memory is able to pull this off. Every Joe Lunchpail thinks he has a chance to get rich. We need to not only make the point that the rich have the game rigged in their favor BUT ALSO that they are keeping everyone else from getting richer.

# posted by Jon Easton : 7:26 AM  1 comments