Standard and Poors: Record Income Inequality Biggest Dampener on US Growth

Interesting chart I found on teh Twitter:



Clearly, supply side was a great success, totally solidified the oligarchy.

I'm not sure why reducing income equality and market forces have to be regarded as mutually exclusive

It's in everyones benefit to reduce that equality, but not especially beneficial to rely on government to do that.

Example, in the UK we have tax credits - this was a wheeze dreamt up by Gordon "I saved the world" Brown, whereupon people are taxed, and if you qualify for a rebate you get one. Of course this needs an expensive IT scheme, lots of new staff with salaries, sick pay, holiday pay, pensions, new equipment, new offices, marketing budgets... So it's safe to say the amount returned isn't going to be a very sizeable portion of the amount taken.

This is how governments like to redistribute, take under assumed mandate, salt some to those who've funded them, to those they'll expect to vote for them, and parcel the remainder out to the proles who funded it in the first fucking place.

The wealthy and businesses on the other hand, like to invest their money in expectations of a return. It's why they'll place it in the hands of those who exist primarily as a letter box on the Caymans and why they'll also place it in Government Bonds and the like.

A sensible chap may also note that honey attracts things better than vinegar, so rather than spending small fortunes and increasingly dubious cross-border reaches to claw back taxes, the trick is getting them to give you their money in exchange for something. Maybe it gets parcelled back in amounts, maybe it offsets taxes, maybe... Plenty of options. A company like Apple isn't going to bother if they get their capital and interest back on several billion dollars over a period of decades, after all they'll hide in it a infinite loop of bank accounts for the decades it takes to get a sweetheart deal from the US for bringing back onshore.

Work with the wealthy, with the big businesses, to get their money heading back onshore and invested in the people. Taxation and redistribution is a godawfully blunt instrument.

This is fascinating, I had never understood the death tax as a tool for democracy.

From my understanding, most rich folks hide all their shit in a trust or some other foundation to avoid the death tax anyway.

You're a victim of propaganda, as your use of the term "death tax" proves.

Of course anti-aristocratic tools are tools for democracy.

Yeah, but I had never heard it explained as an anti-aristocratic tool in the first place.

Yep. Which makes you wonder why politicians and the media need to continually terrorize the middle class with "if we raise their taxes, they'll send yer jobz to China."

Actually, no, it doesn't.

That's the entire purpose of it. Like Liet suggested, it is propaganda that has refashioned the concept of protected inheritance as a populist reform.

Of course it's populist, people don't like paying taxes.

As usual this is the Megarich/Republicans/FoxNews playing off the ignorance of their base.

The estate tax doesn't even start until after $5,320,000 is transferred tax free.

Not exactly Mom and Pop's Feed Store we're talking about here.

I think I'll stop trying to reply on my phone, I can't get nearly the words out that I need!

That is true. But, at the same time, I find myself questioning if it is right to force a family into having to sell a company that was started by a parent, or grandparent etc. in order to cover the tax burdon forced upon them. That is one of the reasons that the Los Angeles Dodgers is no longer owned by the O'Malley family.

Obvious graph is obvious.

Income is income. We have enough loopholes for the megarich, they don't need another.

If that's what actually happened, they must have had lousy accountants.

And Peter O'Malley had no trouble inheriting it from Walter...

Not seeing any weeping and wailing on the way to the poor house here...

If you look at generally what happens with large family fortunes, one generation will create it, the next generation will manage it, the generations after that will piss it away. The Hilton family is a prime example of that. Can you really see Paris running that company after her father retires? I can't either.

About the only country in the world where can find family owned business which continue to grow and thrive over multiple generations is Japan. And they cheat.

Lots more at the link.

Tuckerfan is exactly right about generational wealth. The third generation is born into wealth and have not a clue where it came from, nor do they appriciate it. I'll grant Paris Hilton is ahead of 99 percent of her peers, since she has her other products to make money from (not just the hotel that one of her other sibs will run).

And while the Japanese take it up a notch as to not leaving the company to a blood descendanr, it's not a new idea. Warren Buffet didn't bail his kid out when he went bankrupt and none of them knew how how rich he was till they graduated and made something of themselves--without a handout from him.

After their country was founded in large part to get rid of a king, it's amusing how many Americans are in a rush to entrench a new royalty.

It suggests an alternative history in which the local feudality just wanted to get rid of the old king, and perhaps of monarchy in favour of oligarchy.

One of the wealthiest men in the country was George Washington, and according to some historians, only became interested in the cause after he figured out he stood to gain financially from independence.

If I work and you don't and you don't like the income inequality, get a fucking job. Nothing has my contempt more then those who have no desire to work hard or at all complaining about what others have. When you pay a bag boy at a a Kroger more than a person with skilled trades then you do the real harm, but people are too ignorant to understand that.

Kill yourself.

No

No you. If you want wealth, work for it. If you don't then, sit on your lazy ass and complain about what you don't have.

This may surprise you, since you can't remember shit, but I've taken shitty ass jobs because I can't stand being unemployed, even though I was drawing unemployment and could have sat on my ass and drawn a check. So, again, I say, kill yourself.

Whether or not he wants wealth or can work for it is irrelevant. He wants you dead, that stands alone.

Why do so many not want to pull their own weight but have others do it for them? That is not a right, that is bullshit.

Just curious, would you agree with the statement that the top 10% pay about 70% of the taxes?

And who are these "deadbeats"?