Taxing the rich can pay for everything

In this post at Working-class Perspectives, the blog of of the Center for Working-class Studies at Youngstown state Universtiy, author Jack Metzgar demonstrates how taxing the rich can pay for everything.

Taxing Only the Rich CAN Pay for Everything

It’s time for everybody who wants to say anything about “Obamacare” and taxes to tell the rest of us their income class. I live in one of the 13.5 million households with a six-figure income between $100,000 and $200,000. I could afford to give back the annual $2,500 tax cut George Bush gave me in 2001 and 2003, but our current president has pledged that he won’t allow my taxes to increase by a single dime.

I thought this was foolish and unfair when candidate Obama promised it, but now I understand why he put himself in this trick box. My income class serves as a sort of buffer zone to protect the working class from being attacked with taxes on their health insurance and soda pop. The only way to ever have a discussion about what to do about our rapidly growing income inequality is to leave us, the vast majority of middle-class professionals, harmless.

Read the whole post here...

Income inequality skyrocketing under right-wing rule

The Economic Policy Institute reported yesterday that income inequality is still on the rise, and growing sharper.

"The ratio of the wage income of the top 1% of earners to that of the bottom 90% more than doubled between 1979 and 2006, increasing from a ratio of 9.4-to-1 to 19.9-to-1."

By contrast the previous 3 decades (1947-1979), when labor unions had larger influence over the struggle for wages and benefits, "there was relatively little change in the earnings disparity."

But zooming in on the wealthiest sections of American society, reports EPI, "the upper one-tenth of 1% earned 70.4 times as much as the average person in the bottom 90% of the income scale." Just 30 years ago, that ratio was 21 to 1.

There is no doubt that this jump in income inequality is the result of 30 years of ultra right wing rule characterized by slashing anti-poverty programs and public education, anti-union policies, anti-minimum wage policies, free trade and outsourcing policies and the like. Time to bring it to an end.