This makes the stock market little more than an arcane gambling system, designed to fleece the unwary, while providing a stomach acid churning living for Wall Street's equivalent of dealers, croupiers, and pit bosses. The only real winners in this gambling free-for-all in recent years are the con-men and the house, who have learned to successfully game the system, or make most of their money skimming it off the top in fees. Unfortunately, perhaps, the con-men who are caught end up in Club Fed rather than an unmarked grave in the desert, even if they have bilked hundreds of millions of dollars from innocent investors.
Mario Puzo was right: a man with a briefcase can steal more in an hour than a man with a gun can steal in a lifetime. And probably win "Businessman of the Year" awards while doing it.
This gets us back to capital gains and estate taxes. Estate taxes are paid by less than one-half of one percent of all estates in this country. Most of the tax involves large scale capital gains realized by the estate over the course of many years. I usually refer to the estate tax as the "Paris Hilton Tax." It is a tax of which Thomas Jefferson would have approved, because it helps to prevent the establishment of a hereditary aristocracy in the United States.
I believe Jefferson would have approved of the capital gains tax for the same reason. The capital gains tax is not about taking away wealth, but rather limiting it, in order to prevent (or at least slow down) the creation of what is in essence an overbearing hereditary aristocracy.
The people most effected by this tax, the so called "investor class," scream that they are being punished for providing the means to make the American economic system work.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The investor class will invest their money where it will realize the highest possible return. Unfortunately, this has meant the flavor du jour of economic bubbles in the United States financial world for more than thirty years. Enron, the housing market, World Com, the savings and loans, derivatives, the dot coms and various markets (stock, commodity, etc.) have been the focus of investors within this country, not manufacturing or anything that might help create a self-sustaining economy. Their investments in this regard have been leaving the United States to help Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, India, Malaysia, Mexico, etc., establish their manufacturing base wherever cheap labor with no industrial regulation can be found. Unfortunately, in the name of "free trade," we have eliminated virtually every tax and tariff penalty that once existed for American investors, that had been created to keep our nation's investment capital at home. And if you do not think that the loss of investment capital overseas is important, look at what happened to Great Britain at the end of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.
What this essentially means is that most of the industrial jobs that permitted a single wage earner to provide the money to realize the "American Dream," have left the country. It now requires at least two incomes per household to maintain a middle class lifestyle.
Our household incomes, adjusted for inflation, have remained stagnant or declined over the last thirty years. However, when you consider that two important areas of household expenditures have increased much faster than the rate of inflation in that time period, you begin to realize how much our incomes have really declined.
Housing and healthcare.
While the bursting of the housing bubble is bringing the cost of owning a home more in line with inflation, rentals are still nearly twice the cost they should be, once you factor in inflation. A three bedroom apartment in a nice neighborhood in Denver in 1965 was $85.00-100.00 per month. Same sort of apartment today will cost $1000.00-1200.00 per month. Inflation has only increased costs six or seven-fold since 1965, not twelve-fold.
Healthcare, since it became a for profit enterprise starting in the 1970's, has seen its costs increase at roughly two to four times the rate of inflation. If we had received commiserate improvement in the quality in our healthcare during that time, we would have far less to complain about. But the reality is that in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality, we are at the bottom of the pile when you look at the Cold War's Western Democracies, including Germany, Japan, and Italy, who lost the Second World War. Overall, the United States is not even in the top thirty nations in terms of the quality of our healthcare.
We have a steadily declining number of physicians, nurses and hospitals to take care of an ever growing population. More than one-quarter of our population was without health insurance at some point in 2008. Almost one-sixth of our population has no health insurance coverage. What we are doing now is not working!
The only ones benefiting from our current corporatist healthcare system are the CEO's and shareholders of the largest health insurance companies, healthcare facility management corporations, BigPharma, and the shillselected and unelectedwho work for them.
Our current system is costing us jobs, money, and most importantly lives. Our only hope is for some audacity, from ourselves as well as our Representatives and Senators. I would encourage every single person who reads this article to pass it on to friends and family. I encourage you to call your Representative and Senator's local office at least once a week during this August Vacation, and encourage them to support single payer healthcare, and to accept, on pain of being voted from office, nothing less than a strong public option in the final healthcare reform act. I encourage you to attend any town hall meetings that your Representative or Senators may have, prepared to ask tough questions about what they will support, as well as shout down the Astroturf conservatives that are being brought in to disrupt these meetings. Always keep it peaceful, but ask these Teabag Party rejects where they live, and if its outside the district, insist they not be called on. (By the way, a good shout down in my opinion is "No More Floridas!")
If We the People lead, the politicians will have a choice to make: follow us, or get run out of office. Do not permit party hacks and media nay-sayers attempt to bamboozle you or tell you that it can't be done.
