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If only fifty percent of our population is paying Federal Income Tax, the One Percenters have no one to blame but themselves. When one in six Americans live in poverty, and roughly one in three qualify as "low income"--according to the Census figures I noted above--how can they expect anything else.
In case you have forgotten your basic arithmetic One Percenters, one-sixth (49.1 million Americans rounded up), plus one-third (97.3 million Americans rounded up, which is also two-sixths), equals three-sixths or one-half. So stop your whining, and pay your taxes out of the twenty percent of the nation's wealth you've acquired from the rest of us over the last thirty years. Or you can pay it out of the fifteen percent of additional national income you haven't shared with the 99 Percent over the last thirty-five years. (See Robert Reich's 2010 book Aftershock, for more on this phenomenon, or go check the original Census Bureau numbers that Professor Reich used if you're feeling more ambitious.)
So, now that the oligarchs have turned back the clock in America to the years just before the Great Depression, what happens next? The oligarchs are in the driver's seat, and the rest of us are walking or, if we're lucky, taking the bus. And the oligarchs are the ones who are complaining about how much it costs to keep their cars on the road. ( CLICK HERE for more on this sorry state of affairs.)
Bastards.
If you don't believe my analysis, check out this paper from the Institute for Policy Studies and Wealth for the Common Good by John Cavanagh , Chuck Collins, Alison Goldberg, and Sam Pizzigati, " Tax Day 2009 Reversing the Great Tax Shift : Seven Steps to Finance Our Economic Recovery Fairly;" (Research Assistance by Chris Hartman; Institute for Policy Studies and Wealth for the Common Good; April 8, 2009). The following statements come from that report:
" America's most affluent 1 percent--taxpayers who averaged $1.3 million in income in 2006, the latest year with IRS data--paid 22.79 percent of their incomes that year in federal income tax. In 1986, the top 1 percent of taxpayers averaged $507,520 in income in inflation-adjusted dollars, and paid taxes at a 33.13 percent rate. (Authors' calculations based on data in Individual Income Tax Rates and Shares, 2006, by Kyle Mudry and Justin Bryan, Internal Revenue Service Statistics of Income Bulletin, Winter 2009, Table 5.)
The top 1 percent of taxpayers have seen their tax burden shrink by one-third since 1986. Over those same years, the top 1 percent of taxpayers doubled their share of the nation's income, from 11.3 percent of the total in 1986 to 22.1 percent in 2006. (Authors' calculations based on data in Individual Income Tax Rates and Shares, 2006, by Kyle Mudry and Justin Bryan, Internal Revenue Service Statistics of Income Bulletin, Winter 2009, Table 5. )"
" In 2006, the 139,000 taxpayers reporting at least $2 million in income paid taxes, after taking advantage of every loophole they could find, at a 23.21 percent rate. In 1955, taxpayers who made over $2 million in 2006 dollars paid taxes--on their total incomes--at over twice that rate, just over 49 percent. (Authors' calculations based on data in Individual Income Tax Rates and Shares, 2006, by Kyle Mudry and Justin Bryan, Internal Revenue Service Statistics of Income Bulletin, Winter 2009, Table 2.)
U.S. taxpayers who made over $2 million in 2006 averaged $5.9 million in income. If these taxpayers paid taxes at the same rate as their 1955 counterparts, the federal treasury would have collected, in 2006, over an additional $202 billion. ( Author's calculations based on data from Individual Income Tax Shares and Average Tax Rates, 1951-1986, Statistics of Income Bulletin, Volume 8, Number 4, Spring 1989, by Janet McCubbin and Fritz Scheuren , Table 1. Taxpayers who reported over $250,000 in 1955 made $1.9 million in 2006 dollars. We use this group as the 1955 counterpart to taxpayers who made over $2 million in 2006.)"
Lori Montgomery's October 12, 2011 article in the Washington Post , "Report: One in Four Millionaires Pays Less in Taxes than Some in Middle Class," siting a report by the Congressional Research Service, demonstrates that the statements in the above report from 2006 are not exaggerations, and may well be understating the facts.
" Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
John F. Kennedy (1917--63), U.S. Democratic politician, President. Speech, March 13, 1962, The White House.
I do not know the exact situation in the Western European Democracies, but if it is half as bad as it is here, their bankers and Governments had better back away from their "austerity measures." If they do not, they may wake up one morning and discover large numbers of their friends and acquaintances twisting in the wind from city lamp posts by their 100 -- silk ties, with a sign hanging by a cord from around their necks saying " Bankster " or "Plutocrat".
I know of no sane person who wants that, including myself. The biggest problem with a violent revolution is you never know for sure whether you will get a George Washington or a Maximilien Robespierre running the country at the end of all the fuss.
The Western European Democracies have, over the last fifteen years, all followed the United States in making the same mistake that we made over the last thirty years. With Great Britain leading the way, they have reduced the taxes on those who are best able to pay them, the top One Percent of income earners, and transferred the tax burden increasingly to the middle class. The well-being of the middle classes of those nations are more closely tied into their social safety net than ours are, so it took less time for the rot to appear. (See my OpEdNews articles "Mayday! Mayday!" (August 26, 2011), and "Regress of Grievances" (December 8, 2010), for sources that go further into Europe's problem.) And now the vultures of the plutocracy are circling over Europe's social safety net, hoping to feast upon the pickings when those nets implode from tax starvation taxes they should be paying.
The oligarchs will complain that redistribution of wealth is morally wrong. My answer to them is if that is the case, then they should return the 20% of the wealth that has been transferred from the bottom 99 Percent of Americans to the top One Percent over the last thirty years here in the United States. This redistribution has been accomplished through the collusion between elected members of the government and the oligarchs, specifically by, but not limited to: 1) the Reagan era restructuring of the tax code; 2) the Savings and Loan debacle and bailout in the late 80's and early 90's, which should have warned everyone what would happen when the Glass-Steagall Act was effectively revoked; 3) the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which destroyed the controls imposed on banks by the New Deal Era Glass-Steagall Act; 4) the Dot Com and Derivatives Bubbles on Wall Street; 5) the No-bid Contracts given to defense contractors, most notably to Halliburton, its subsidiaries and cronies, during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars; 6) Enron; 7) the massive bailouts of the largest financial institutions during the 2008 Economic Crisis by the Federal Reserve, which according to one source amounted to $29 trillion over the last three years.
