We could have a passive "voters" revolution inspired by Bernie and led by young people having little upward mobility and less prejudices accepting a more liberal agenda and democratic socialist government. The one thing I've learned is that trends change and pendulums swing. Just look at gay marriage, pot laws, the ACA.... things are moving and geezers are dying. Just look at the strength of Bernie's campaign nationally; Dennis Kucinich banged on that same door for 20 years without any national traction. Now things are moving, Climate Change, the banking meltdown and continued exposure of corporate lying and voodoo economics are exposing false patriotism. Time for a Carlin quote: "The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. "But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting farked by a system that threw them overboard 30 farking years ago. "You know what they want? Obedient workers people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shiattier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your farking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this farking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. "This country is finished."
Higher taxes on the rich creates a stronger SoL for the bottom 1/3 which in turn drives a stronger economy. Rich don't pay enough taxes, that's the problem. Solution - increase marginal tax rates back to Ronnie levels.
Increasing marginal tax rates isn't the most effective way to fix that. Eliminate the dividend tax rate and make it regular income tax and also make all long term capital gains taxable at the regular income tax rate. Those are the real "loopholes" that need to be closed.
Right but you are talking about money and I'm talking about poverty. To be fair, money is the subject of the thread but nearly everyone who has a problem with wealth concentration is actually talking about poverty i.e. what can your money buy, what kind of life can you live. If you think about it, there can be a time where $100 a day still has you eating cockroaches if food costs $1,000 a day. That's why these poorly chosen numbers/samples by the most biased organizations are irrelevant to the discussion of what portion of the world lives in unacceptable conditions - which is clearly growing. The # of people thatare falling from super rich to middle class standard of living is increasing, but not nearly as fast/many as people are slipping from a middle class to poor standard of living. The issue, for me and I acknowledge that this may not be what you're discussing, is the difference in standard of living between the wealthiest and the poorest. The gap is too wide to be sustainable and it's widening. We need a lower ceiling and a higher floor.
