JFlorio wrote:
What gives you or anyone else the right to confiscate goods and or services that belong to someone else if that said person obtained that wealth legally? By your way of thinking a homeless person should be allowed to take from you because to them you have more than you need.
Thats not it at all --a homeless person cannot take any bodies money, but nations have to tax its citizens to pay for its neds to provide services for the people and protection from is enemies, and maintain order.
There are only two kinds of rich-the criminal rich and the foolish rich; Theodore Rooswevelt.
Wealth and politics have a long history of intense interaction in the United States. From the 1780s on, foreign visitors remarked about Americans being money-fixated. John Stuart Mill, the English political economist, suggested in 1860 that in America, "the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting, and the other to breeding dollar hunters." A generation earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville had observed that, "Whenever the reverence which belonged to what is old has vanished, birth, condition, and profession no longer distinguish men, or scarcely distinguish them, hardly anything but money remains.... Among aristocratic nations, money reaches only to a few points on the vast circle of man's desires; in democracies, it seems to lead all."
Here’s the truth: The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich. Even if we got rid of corporate welfare subsidies for big oil, big agriculture, and big Pharma — even if we cut back on our bloated defense budget — it wouldn’t be nearly enough.
The vast majority of Americans can’t afford to pay more. Despite an economy that’s twice as large as it was thirty years ago, the bottom 90 percent are still stuck in the mud. If they’re employed they’re earning on average only about $280 more a year than thirty years ago, adjusted for inflation. That’s less than a 1 percent gain over more than a third of a century. (Families are doing somewhat better but that’s only because so many families now have to rely on two incomes.)
Yet even as their share of the nation’s total income has withered, the tax burden on the middle has grown. Today’s working and middle-class taxpayers are shelling out a bigger chunk of income in payroll taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes than thirty years ago.
It’s just the opposite for super rich. The top 1 percent’s share of national income has doubled over the past three decades (from 10 percent in 1981 to well over 20 percent now). The richest one-tenth of 1 percent’s share has tripled. And they’re doing better than ever. According to a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal, total compensation and benefits at publicly-traded Wall Street banks and securities firms hit a record in 2010 — $135 billion.