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This is a good example of income inequality; even as the tax rate for the top 1% has fallen, their share of taxes paid has increased due to their increased share of the national income.
This is a good example of income inequality; even as the tax rate for the top 1% has fallen, their share of taxes paid has increased due to their increased share of the national income.
You are right, which is why we need to limit benefits in terms of social welfare. The top income earners in this country work 70-90 hour weeks to get where they are, while the lower income earners protest against 40 hour work weeks!
Hard work and ambition gets a person to the top, and social welfare programs incentivize a person to not be ambitious.
Income inequality is being talked about alot nowdays but what do those who want to end it want exactly? Do they want all people to have equal incomes regardless of job skills and profession? Should an architect and brick layer earn the same to make them equal?
If income equality is the goal then what exactly does that mean and look like?
You are right, which is why we need to limit benefits in terms of social welfare. The top income earners in this country work 70-90 hour weeks to get where they are, while the lower income earners protest against 40 hour work weeks!
Sounds like a naive assumption to me.
Quote:
Hard work and ambition gets a person to the top, and social welfare programs incentivize a person to not be ambitious.
Nah. Hard work just gets you a paycheck. Getting loans from the fed gets you to the top.
From what I've been hearing, few of those that have been doing all the talking about "income inequity" really understand what it is. And, without a clear definition, they can not come up with an intelligent solution. They'll jump onto a conclusion and ride it over a cliff.
Income inequity is when the rise in the level of income does not keep pace with the increasing cost of the goods and services that are essential to survival. Some examples are:
In 1966, when I first began working, I was making $8,000 a year, and paying 17 cents a gallon for gas. Today's income for that same type of work is about $40,000 a year. But, the cost of gasoline has gone up to $3.599 the last I checked. So income has only gone up 500% in the last 45 years, but gasoline has gone up 2117% in that same time period. Look at insurance rates, housing costs, food prices, etc. In every sector, with every example, expenses have outpaced income. There is your income inequity.
In order not to have the economy bubble burst (during the Bush Administration), you would have to maintain the same ratio of income to expenses. That means that the average, middle class American should be making between $150,000 and $250,000 a year today.
To further contribute to income inequity, executive income has gone up some 600% over the last twenty years, between 1990 and 2010. So, the executive that was only making $60,000 in 1990 was making $360,000 in 2010. Then, add in their "Golden Parachutes" on top of that. So, it's not the banking industry that's to blame, and it wasn't "bad loans" that were at the bottom of the current economy. We've been coming to this point for the last 50 years that I know of.
I was talking about these statistics 15 years ago, when the term "income inequity" had not yet been coined. I was first alerted to it in the early "80s by a guy that died in 1987 in his mid eighties. He was able to recognize the trend and see it coming before many of you were born. On another forum, I have a "signature line"...
3,000 years ago, it was said:
Destroy the cities and they will be rebuilt.
Destroy the farms and grass will grow in the streets of the cities.
Today, destroy the economy of the blue-collar worker,
And, grass will grow in the executive suites.
The BILL has come due.
In order to reverse the trend that created the income inequity, it will take a complete restructuring of the tax codes to make it favorable for industry to pay better wages and discourage executive greed. I don't see that coming yet.
Just one more thing. Social programs are not the answer. They might even make the problem even worse. Income inequity was a problem decades ago, but didn't come to a head until recently.
And the middle class and poor working Americans pay a higher share of payroll taxes than they rich do because payroll taxes are capped at $110K per year.
I've seen this scam at least twenty times in this forum.......LOL
Last edited by padcrasher; 01-05-2012 at 03:26 PM..
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