The NYT had a piece by Ben Stein today (hardly a raving liberal from what I've seen).
http://www.nytimes.com/...
I mentioned this in a comment but it really deserves more attention. When Ben Stein is quoting Warren Buffett to say something isn't right, well it's worth paying attention.
So...who's winning the class war? The answer is pretty clear but you'd be astounded at by how much the majority is losing.
more below.
The section that caught my eye was:
Put simply, the rich pay a lot of taxes as a total percentage of taxes collected, but they don’t pay a lot of taxes as a percentage of what they can afford to pay, or as a percentage of what the government needs to close the deficit gap.
Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.
It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”
I refer back to an old diary on WAGE distribution (ignoring all the income coming from investments):
http://www.dailykos.com/...
As we have moved up the ladder income-wise, I am astounded at the DECREASING burden taxes present. Social Security kicks out at what? somewhere under $60,000 a year? So a guy like Bill Gates stops paying into social security at somewhere like 12:01 AM on Jan 1? I heard an interesting analogy - in a lecture about the universe of all things, regarding the scale of numbers:
When we see money in the street, most of us will stop and bend over to pick it up. But as we get older and become more successful there starts to be a threshold - an amount that makes it worth our bother to stop and bend over. (The speaker was successful in his field - I would guess making somewhere between $100-200,000 - probably at the lower end). The speaker noted - "I don't bother with pennies.... I pretty much ignore nickles. But I'll probably stop for a dime - if it's easy to grab ... and will make an effort to stop for a quarter." For Bill Gates a comparable threshold - an amount averaging say 15 cents - would be $47,000.
Think about it. And while those in the top 1% are nowhere near the level of Bill Gates, their "threshold" is still a hell of alot higher than 15 cents.
Warren Buffett has spoken out against the changes made in the estate tax. Clearly he thinks the wealthy are not carrying their weight in our society now. You think this would get more coverage.
Instead we have the uber-wealthy doing all they can to preserve and pass on wealth. But what is the long term benefit of doing so? What good has inherited wealth done for most who inherit it? It is a near universal saying that wealth is made by one generation, preserved at best by the second and squandered by the third. Read biographies of the robber barons. Few of their descendents did well on their own, and much of their inherited wealth was gone by the fourth generation.
A few families may have taught real responsibility - nobless oblige - but this is unusual enough that the examples stand out. Rockefellers, Kennedys, and a few others..... the rest? Is Paris Hilton someone any family should be proud of?
The Bush family pretty much makes the case against inherited wealth and power. Prescott was a scheming and conniving sob - who made a nice fortune. George H.W. traded on the family name but did little more. W has had his ass bailed out more times than you can count.... Reminds me of a family locally. The grandfather made the $$$, the sons couldn't even manage to preserve it and the grandchildren are screw-ups, scrounging what they can from grandpa's estate.......
The telling quote from Stein's piece was this:
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
So...the wealthy are winning but for who and to what end? If all they're trying to preserve is squandered within two generations - bankrupting society in the process, doesn't everyone lose?
UPDATE
NY times has a related article Very Rich are Leaving the Merely Rich Behind front-paged today. Author is Louis Uchitelle. Couldn't come up with an online link but I'm sure it's out there