A GREAT IDEA! RULES
FOR THE RICH!
Reading
today how the WORLD BANK always makes their loans conditional on
the PRESIDENT of this needy third world nation HANDING OVER THE RIGHTS
to water, electricity, natural gas so that the BANKERS' chums in LONDON
or Wall Street or Texas can OWN the resources of that poor, strapped country,
I note that heroic, "GANDHI OF THE ANDES" BOLIVIAN
PRES EVO.
MORALESlaid
down the law to the WORLD BANK. You want to loan us money? Here's
the riff, guys. YOU WILL NOT, CANNOT make UTILITY CORP GRABS on my country.
No more such GREEDY resource grabbing CONDITIONS laid down to us, at least
not to Bolivia or the other members of the PROGRESSIVE LATIN AMERICAN PRESIDENTS
SOCIETY: Correa (Ecuador), Chavez (Venezuela), Ortega (Nicaragua ), Kirchner
(Argentina) and Lula (Brazil), all of whom are, with different styles,
the true hope for Latin America.
USA won't be the "overseer" of these countries any more. See:
http://boliviatransitionproject.blogspot.com/2009/04/morales-criticizes-g-20-hubris.html
HOORAY EVO! We clearly need more MORALES.
And more MORALS and more CHUTZPAH to demand the SUPER RICH HAVE a little
MORALITY themselves! Let's collect a list of egregious
sins that the SUPER RICH traditionally commit -- and make them
illegal! HOWSABOUT THEM APPLES, planet? HUH?
And if you can think of any more RULES to make, actual LAWS to confine
the rich to their palaces, write me, I'll add them to this page, Anita
Sands Hernandez at the "PLANET
FIX WEBSITE" .
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NEW RULE #1 THE UNIVERSAL TAXMAN.
Tax Day: You Pay Your Taxes -- Why haven't the Rich paid Their Share?
By Chuck Collins and Sam Pizzigati, AlterNet
Posted on April 15, 2009, Printed on April 23,
2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/136592/
Our nation needs a plan to pay for long-overdue investments in
education, health and
retrofitting our energy infrastructure. Nothing could be more
obvious. But, just as
obviously, we need a plan to pay for those investments.
Short-term borrowing, during an economic downturn, certainly
makes sense. Long term,
we need to do much more than borrow. We need to totally reverse
30 years worth of
federal tax
and budget policy.
George W. Bush, over his eight years, took tax and budget policy to the
crony-capitalist
limit. His White House racked up $5 trillion in national debt by waging
reckless wars,
shoveling lush contracts and bailouts to corporate and Wall Street insiders,
and, perhaps
most arrogantly of all, slashing already-low tax rates on the incomes of
the super rich.
Few Americans realize just how incredibly little, historically speaking,
our nation's wealthy
now pay in taxes.
In 1955, the year April 15 became the IRS tax-filing deadline, America's
top 400
taxpayers paid three times more of their income in taxes than the top 400
of 2006, the
most recent year with IRS data available.
According to a new Tax Day report that we co-authored, if the top 400 of
2006 had paid
taxes at 1955 rates, the federal treasury would have collected -- from
these 400 taxpayers
alone -- an additional $35.9 billion more in revenue in 2006.
The 139,000 U.S. taxpayers who made over $2 million in 2006, our report
also notes,
averaged $5.9 million in income. They paid 23.2 percent of their total
incomes in federal
income tax. The comparable rate for equivalent high-income Americans in
1955: 49
percent.
If the over-$2 million set in 2006 had paid taxes at the same rate as their
1955
counterparts, the federal treasury would have collected $202 billion.
We've now lived through 30 years of "shrink, shift and shaft" federal budget
and tax
policies. Right-wing pols, aided by Democrats who should have known better,
have
shrunk government and the share of taxes paid by the wealthiest 1 percent.
The tax
burden, consequently, has shifted off wealth and onto wages, off the federal
tax system
and onto the regressive tax systems of states and localities.
The direct result: States and localities have gotten the budget shaft --
and that has forced
years of chronic underfunding for mass transit, education and myriad public
services.
So what can we do, as a nation, to start turning this situation around?
Our Institute for
Policy Studies report -- "Reversing the Great Tax Shift" advances a set
of specific steps
that would generate over $450 billion in annual revenue, dollars that would
help finance
our recovery fairly.
We recommend that lawmakers:
Tax income from capital gains and dividends at the same rates as wage income.
Under current law, income from investments gets taxed at 15 percent. Income
from work
gets taxed at up to 35 percent. No coherent moral justification exists
for such an enormous
tax preference for income from wealth. According to Citizens for Tax Justice,
taxing all
forms of income the same would generate $80 billion a year.
Create a new top tax rate for incomes over $2 million. Presently, a person
with an
income of $300,000 faces the same tax rates as a person with an income
of $3 million.
Instituting a top tax rate of 50 percent on incomes over $2 million would
generate more
than $60 billion a year.
Levy a progressive estate tax on large fortunes. The federal estate tax,
our nation's
only levy on grand accumulations of private wealth, will expire in 2010
and revert to the
2000 status quo. Lawmakers aren't going to let that happen -- if, for no
other reason, to
take inflation into account -- and that reality creates an opportunity
to make the estate tax
more progressive.
One reform would be to institute graduated tax rates on large estates,
while exempting
estates worth less than $2 million, $4 million for a couple. Such an approach
would
generate over $100 billion a year a decade from now -- while taxing no
more than 1 of
every 200 estates. All these steps, we believe, would enjoy widespread
public support.
Our grandparents seriously taxed the rich. Why can't we?
Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and
chairman of
the Working Group on Extreme Inequality, an emerging coalition of religious,
business, labor and civic groups concerned about the wealth gap. He is
co-author,
with Bill Gates Sr., of Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should
Tax
Accumulated Fortunes.
Sam Pizzigati is the editor of the online weekly Too Much and an associate
fellow at
the Institute for Policy Studies.
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