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So was hitler. In fact many truly evil people fall into that category. Being successful shouldn't earn your respect. Being a good person should.
Yes. Many successfully evil people are uncannily ambitious, organized, convincing and intelligent. If they weren't they'd be just another angry, whiney proletariat at the bar. The successfully evil use their success to make their "virtuous" ideals come true.
As far as I can tell Paul Ryan isn't a genius either. He graduated with a bachelor's from an average Midwest school and went straight into politics (connections anyone?). But he's a great Ayn Rand minion snake oil salesman. And got very far because of this.
While I don't doubt there needs to be entitlement reform the guy seemed to have an insatiable lust for cutting programs to the very needy and giving tax breaks to his very wealthy donors. His revolting sociopathic tendencies and political connections will probably get him very rich on the backs of others in the private sector.
We'll see how that plays out, and how or even if the data on the following chart changes...
From what we know about the most recent IRS published tax return data, these are the actual facts on what percentage of the total income each income group earns vs. the percentage of the total federal income tax revenue they pay:
These figures you posted from the Tax Foundation only capture federal income taxes. The idea that there is a large class of Americans who “don’t pay taxes" at all is bogus. There are federal payroll taxes and medicare taxes. Not to mention the many state and local taxes which are overwhelmingly regressive. Once you factor in all of these taxes the overall picture is far different and more favorable for the highest earners.
All those figures show is that the federal income tax is one of the few taxes that doesn’t impose higher burdens on low- and moderate-income households than on upper income ones. The overall U.S. tax system is progressive only because the federal income tax is very progressive. Put differently, we’ve chosen to concentrate almost all of the system’s progressivity in the Federal income tax. Yet, Ryan and the ideologues on the right want to reduce the one progressive part of the tax system.
The share of taxes paid reflected in the Tax Foundation's chart is also useless as a measure of fairness. Consider, for example, a hypothetical village of 100 people. In this village, there is one rich man who makes $1,000 a year and 99 other villagers who each make $10 a year. Now imagine that everyone in this village pays exactly the same overall tax rate of 10 percent. The one man who makes $1,000—the richest 1 percent of the village—will end up paying more than 50 percent of all the taxes. Is that unfair? Most reasonable people would say no. He’s making more than 50 percent of all the income, and everyone is paying exactly the same tax rate.
When you hear or see the words “share of taxes paid” used in conjunction with an argument for why the rich already pay too much in taxes, then you can be pretty sure that the argument doesn’t hold water. Share of taxes paid is a misleading and fundamentally unreliable statistic that reveals little, if anything, about the fairness or relative burden of the overall tax system.
Well, I guess Mr. Ryan is done and is off to "spend more time with his family". Good for him. He's leaving a very rich man for someone in the public service.
If you check out this graph from Open Secrets, you can see in 2005 he started with a net worth of $1.78m which then skyrocketed from 2009 from $1.51m to $5.07m in 2010 and then leveled out to $5.94m in 2016.
That's good work if you can get it, especially for a public servant. I wonder what happened between 2009 and 2010?
Paul Ryan retires at 48 but wanted to raise the age for Social Security and Medicare benefits for tax paying, hard working Americans.
Quote:
Ryan couched his policy prescriptions in the context of "entitlement reform," employing an overused term for social insurance policies that include Social Security and Medicare, the costs of which Americans cover through payroll taxes during their working careers. He acknowledged that cutting Social Security benefits would be a tough lift, since that would probably require 60 votes in the Senate, where the GOP currently has only 52 members.
Ryan is damaged goods, he will find his way somewhere probably as a lobbyist and do quite well. He was a product of the Tea Party "take back our country" movement back in 2008, never had a real plan as we have seen but was a thorn in Obama's side for 8 years. Then the unimaginable happened and they took control of congress and the presidency, he reminds me of a 70 year old man chasing a 20 year old woman who finally catches her and cant figure out the next step.
Balanced budget, get rid of Obama Care and cut entitlements was all just a dream. Congress needs a 10-20 year plan to get the budget under control and it needs to be based on concrete numbers with shared suffering, not some increase in GDP pipe dream.
The OMB just indicated that interest on debt will exceed the Defense Budget in 5 years, they have some work ahead.
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Paul Ryan Retirement
