Cenk Uygur: God bless ‘em. It’s America, we all wanna earn one billion dollars. The question is, does it make sense for society if they get to keep a disproportionate amount of that or if we can create more opportunities for more people to earn a billion dollars, if we redistribute it for education, etc.
Robert Reich: Cenk, you’re exactly right. My position is, even the rich will stand to to do better if they have a smaller share of an economy that is growing very fast, than if they have a big share of an economy that is basically static.
The point was also made that one fund manager's $1 billion income per year could finance 20,000 teachers. We are a society that will go out of it's way to create and maintain wealth for the uber-rich, yet bring an entire economy to its knees when taxation on the same uber-rich might rise 3%.
You need an entire society to grow, not just the top 1%. You need customers. You need orders. You need investors. You need capital to develop new ideas. You need growth. Shrinking everything Federal and decreasing the flow of capital, while increasing income disparity, in a expanding population is just crushing any domestic growth for the future.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett get this idea. While no one likes taxes, paying your share is good for the whole economy. Nothing trickles down. That is a fact.
2 comments:
A couple making $125,000 a year each is not rich, even though together they reach that magic $250,000 income level. In most cases, they haven’t been making $125,000 a year all their working lives. Far more often, they have reached this level after decades of working their way up from lower incomes — and now the government steps in to grab the reward they have earned over the years.
There was a time when most Americans would have resented the suggestion that they wanted someone else to pay their bills. But now, envy and resentment have been cultivated to the point where even people who contribute nothing to society feel that they have a right to a “fair share” of what others have produced.
So, the "rich" aren't paying their "fair share."
The top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing.
This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.
Post a Comment