Rich – The Burning Platform

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“In its quest for prosperity, the Party of the People declared itself wholeheartedly in favor of a social theory that forthrightly exalted the rich—the all-powerful creative class.

To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you’ll need in the society of the future.

Professional-class liberals aren’t really alarmed by oversized rewards for society’s winners; on the contrary, this seems natural to them — because they are society’s winners. The liberalism of professionals just does not extend to matters of inequality; this is the area where soft hearts abruptly turn hard.

Of course Republicans do it too. The culture wars unfold in precisely the same way as the liberal virtue-quest: they are an exciting ersatz politics that seem to be really important but at the conclusion of which voters discover they’ve got little to show for it all besides more free-trade agreements, more bank deregulation, and a different prison spree.”

Thomas Frank

“What is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class.”

Alexis de Tocqueville

“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Continue reading “QUOTES OF THE DAY”

Don’t Be Fooled by Stories that the Rich Pay Eighty Percent of the Taxes

Guest Post by David Haggith

Year after year around tax time, a tired war horse of a story gets trotted out about how the heavily burdened rich already shoulder eighty percent of the tax load. Poor rich. They are oxen doing the heavy pulling to make things easier on the rest of us dumb cows. Thank God we have them!

Don’t believe a word of it!

The tax burden of the beleaguered rich

Or, more importantly, look at the words that are not being spoken by the lap cats of the super wealthy who like to croon over this story around tax time. One recent rendition of it appears in The Washington Free Beacon:

While … top earners contributed almost four-fifths of the total amount of individual income taxes, they represented only 16 percent of the total number of individual income tax returns reported to the IRS.

In other words, a little shy of 20% of the populace pays 80% of the individual income taxes. That sounds grossly unfair. What an enormous burden the powerful are carrying for the rest of us. Let’s hope we always have them here to support us. According to the article above, only a liberal could love this unfair saddling of the rich with the load created by the rest of us:

“Liberals say that high earners pay a high share of taxes only because they have high incomes,” explains Chris Edwards, a tax policy expert at the Cato Institute. “But high earners also pay much higher tax rates than everyone else…. The [Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development] has found that the United States has the most ‘progressive’ or graduated income tax among all high-income nations,” Edwards said. “If Congress proceeds with major tax reform next year, it should focus on making the tax code more equal and proportional. The level of progressivity in the tax code has become extreme.”

Odd because the OECD has also found that the US has the greatest wealth disparity of any nation in the world. Apparently, then, the nation’s “progressive” tax structure is not crippling the opportunities of the rich to rise even higher after all. (That would seem to be the right way of putting those two statements by the OECD together harmoniously in order to look at the full truth in what they say, rather than just the convenient part as Edwards did.)

Continue reading “Don’t Be Fooled by Stories that the Rich Pay Eighty Percent of the Taxes”

Greenspan Admits The Fed’s Plan Was Always To Push Stocks Higher

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/18/2016 12:40 -0400

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted in an interview with Sara Eisen that quantitative easing did what it was supposed to do, which was to inflate stock prices and drive multiple expansion.

He was confused as to why things such as corporate earnings, capital spending, and productivity have declined given how much QE was pumped into the system. The answer to the riddle of course, is that QE was never intended to help fix anything fundamentally, it was as Kyle Bass said recently, simply a mechanism to transfer wealth and make the rich richer.

“Monetary policy has done everything it can, unless you want to put additional QEs on and QEs on, they’re not helping that much.

What ultimately determines whether or not you’re getting an effect from the QEs are what has happened to the price/earnings ratio, and that obviously has done what you’d expect it to do.

You bring long-term rates down, and the price/earnings ratios in the equity markets go up, which is exactly what they planned to do and it’s happened that way.“

All of this is precisely what we’ve been saying all along, which is that QE has always been about one thing, and that is to take wealth from many (savers), and transfer it to a select few (asset owners).

ICIJ’s Political Agenda May Backfire

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

Wile the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has clearly targeted Putin, in doing so when it is his aids rather than him personally calls into question what is their real political agenda. Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson resigned just 2 days after the papers were released. Reports say that 12 current or former heads of state are mentioned. Who are they protecting will be very interesting since targeting Putin makes this more of a political plot.

Nevertheless, this is coming precisely in line with the other side of 2015.75, which we warned would prove to be the peak in government. This is playing directly into the cycles where our model has been warning we are facing the collapse in confidence in government; i.e. politicians. This is truly the driving force behind Trump. But this massive leak may have far more political implications than merely targeting rich people who have a secret stash.

Continue reading “ICIJ’s Political Agenda May Backfire”

How Donald Trump Goes Broke …

Guest Post by Bill Bonner

A Fake Economy

AIKEN, South Carolina – Aiken is battened down. The wind is blowing hard… dark clouds race across the sky… trash bags tumble down the main street. “This is tornado weather,” said a local resident. “You better be ready to run.”

From poor to rich and back? Read on …

Photo credit: Enrique Ramos Lopez

No cyclone appeared. Meanwhile, in the stock market, prices went down and then back up, ending the day up 53 on the Dow. Commentators in the press said the turnaround was the result of news from the oil industry.

“Oil pulls out of dive…” was the start of a headline in USA Today. Last year, when oil was in the $50 range and diving, rising oil prices would have been regarded like a visit from Count Dracula on a stormy night.

Expensive fuel sucked the blood out of the consumer economy, said the experts. Now, by some magic, oil is only half of last year’s level, but the rising price of oil is considered good news.

Continue reading “How Donald Trump Goes Broke …”

45% of Americans pay no federal income tax

This isn’t actually a shocker. When 40% of the working age population doesn’t work and another 10% only hold part-time jobs, they aren’t paying any Federal Income taxes. They are paying sales taxes, gasoline taxes, excise taxes, toll taxes, phone taxes, etc. If it was up to me, I’d scrap all income taxes and replace it with a consumption tax. The politicians would lose a tremendous amount of corruptible power. The more you spend, the more you pay. Savers wold be rewarded. I do favor a High Frequency Trading tax on the Wall Street criminals, just like Bernie. We could use it to build Trump’s wall.

Guest Post by Catey Hill

77.5 million households do not pay federal individual income tax

Many Americans don’t have to worry about giving Uncle Sam part of their hard-earned cash for their income taxes this year.

An estimated 45.3% of American households — roughly 77.5 million — will pay no federal individual income tax, according to data for the 2015 tax year from the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington-based research group. (Note that this does not necessarily mean they won’t owe their states income tax.)

Roughly half pay no federal income tax because they have no taxable income, and the other roughly half get enough tax breaks to erase their tax liability, explains Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.

Despite the fact that rich people paying little in the way of income taxes makes plenty of headlines, this is the exception to the rule: The top 1% of taxpayers pay a higher effective income-tax rate than any other group (around 23%, according to a report released by the Tax Policy Center in 2014) — nearly seven times higher than those in the bottom 50%.

Continue reading “45% of Americans pay no federal income tax”

Financing Bernie Sanders’ $18 Trillion Spending Plans (Not Enough Personal Income To Finance It)

Guest Post by Anthony Sanders

The Democrat Party debate the other night presented two candidates with pretty much identical views of what they will do as President: give away everything for free!! Free college tuition, healthcare tax subsidies for illegal immigrants, etc.

Here is the 2013 breakdown of Federal taxes paid by income bracket: 13in12ms

Bernie Sanders at least has gone on record saying he wants to spend $18 trillion over a decade. Odd, when the national debt is already over $18 trillion.

Of course, these big spending plans will have to be paid for with a massive expansion of Federal debt. Raising corporate tax rates is a non-starter since the US already has a high tax rate compared to other countries.

So the usual Sanders/Clinton mantra is “Tax The Rich” of which Hillary Clinton is one.

The problem with soaking the rich is that there just isn’t enough money for Bernie and Hillary to spend. Here is a snapshot of 2013 Federal tax filings. ‘The total Federal taxes paid by households earning $500,000 and over per year amounts to $50 billion. Even if Bernie/Hillary doubled the tax rate on those making over $500,000 per year, it would raise only $100 billion per year. That is far short of the $18 trillion that Bernie wants to spend (over the next decade).

Continue reading “Financing Bernie Sanders’ $18 Trillion Spending Plans (Not Enough Personal Income To Finance It)”

The Rich, The Poor, & The Trouble With Socialism

Authored by Bill Bonner (of Bonner & Partners), illustrated by Acting-Man’s Pater Tenebrarum,

Rich Man, Poor Man

Poverty is better than wealth in one crucial way: The poor are still under the illusion that money can make them happy. People with money already know better. But they are reluctant to say anything for fear that the admiration they get for being wealthy would turn to contempt.

“You mean you’ve got all that moolah and you’re no happier than me?”

“That’s right, man.”

“You poor S.O.B.”

We bring this up because it is at the heart of government’s scam – the notion that it can make poor people happier. In the simplest form, government says to the masses: Hey, we’ll take away the rich guys’ money and give it to you. This has two major benefits (from an electoral point of view). First, and most obvious, it offers money for votes. Second, it offers something more important: status.

…and ending up moping.

After you have food, shelter, clothing, and a few necessities, everything else is status, vanity, and power. Extra money helps us feel good about ourselves… and attract mates. It’s not just the money that matters. It’s your relative position in society. From this point of view, it does as much good to take away a rich person’s money as it does to give money to a poor person.

Either way, the gap closes. Never, since the beginning of time up to 2015, has government ever added to wealth. It has no way to do so. And no intention of doing so. All it can do is to increase the power, wealth, or status of some people – at others’ expense.

Continue reading “The Rich, The Poor, & The Trouble With Socialism”

Why Most Rich Bastards Won’t Go To Heaven

“I’ll say it again–it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!” —- Matt 19:25

Another fluff piece. Ya’ll can go to hell if you don’t like it. Quite frankly, I’ve about reached my limit on gloom and doom. Yup. The world sucks, Amerika sucks, and we’re On The Highway To Hell. Can’t do anything about it, frankly. Getting tired of reading about it, posting about it, talking about it. My cup runneth over. I’d give a shit if I could … but I gave away my last shit. I have no more shit to give.

So, about the vid below …… I had a summer job (1977) driving a big ass Caddy Limo. Mostly airport runs to JFK … for people in very wealthy sections of central Noo Joisey. The cost was about $100 – $150. Certainly not chump change in 1977. You want to know the truth? About HALF the time I got ZERO tip. ZERO!! Most of the other times I’d get about $5. Five lousy fuckin’ bucks for about an hour trip. If I was really lucky I would also have a passenger to drive from the airport back to their mansion in NJ … another five bucks, if I was lucky. Ten bucks … for two hours of driving hell, plus the hourly pittance the limo owner paid. Whoopdy fuckin’ doo!!! This was the very beginning of my journey in hating the rich. The rich are like Neegrows …. the more you’re around them, the less you want to be.