As I'm enjoying my Sunday morning breakfast, I pick up my weekly edition of the New Yorker and continued from where I left off last night. It was an article on why the super-rich hate the President, and reading it, I felt no pity whatsoever for them.
It's really hard to say what's more offensive. There's some of them who are just pissy about the "language" the President uses, like Leon Cooperman, and who claim they'd pay more taxes if he went about it nicely. Keep in mind, Cooperman said if the President asked nicely, he wouldn't mind paying more in taxes, yet he goes out of his way to avoid paying the ones he owes now by moving himself and his money around. Then there's people like T.J. Rodgers, the Silicon Valley investor, who said the President "should be mindful, as an African-American, to not be oppressive to others, given the oppression his race has suffered." Cooperman merely said that America elected someone, who at 47, hadn't worked a day in his life (apparently being a community organizer, attorney, law professor, state senator, and U.S. senator isn't "work" because he didn't get rich off those or something).
SAY WHAT?
We're about to have a problem here...
Nevermind the uselessness of those statements, one that goes right up there with Stephen Schwarzmann comparing the possible repeal of the Bush tax cuts on par with Hitler invading Poland. I strongly suspect that most people make unserious comparisons these days out of their ignorance of the impact of their words.
The idea that somehow the rich are being oppressed and treated like Adolf Hitler's victims is ludicrous. The idea that paying a slightly higher tax rate when "47% of the country doesn't" is unfair is an idea also based in ignorance. The soldiers fighting in Afghanistan are in the 47%. Social Security beneficiaries are in the 47%. Working poor are in the 47%, because they can't earn enough to pay beyond payroll taxes.
Furthermore, these people want to end the EITC (which the right's hero, Reagan, enacted), and the mortgage deduction, as part of closing loopholes to increase tax income. In doing so, they'd drive a lot of people OUT of jobs, because they'd no longer be able to afford child care, transport, etc. An article before last year's transit millage here in southeast Michigan showed that 40% of Detroiters ride transit OUT OF THE CITY to work. The EITC being cut would kill their earnings.
Meanwhile, what would a slight increase in taxes on anyone making over a million dollars do? Not much at all. They claim they'd cut back on their charitable donations, employees, etc., but would they really? I think they're bluffing. I think for 30 years, as one of Amazon's startup funders, Nick Hanauer, says in his new book, that the rich have enjoyed their own rules. That their enrichment is a precondition for everyone else doing better, and that their lower taxes are for the social good and not their selfishness.
Hanauer is quoted in the article, "If you are a job creator, your 15% tax rate is righteous. If you aren't, it is a con job. The idea that the rich deserve to be rich is a very comforting idea if you're rich." He goes on to add, in reference to "you didn't build that," "The notion that you built it yourself is what you need to believe to feel comfortable with yourself and your desire to not pay too much in taxes."
So, let's get down to numbers. If you are earning, after expenses, over a million dollars a year, you're not a small business anymore. If paying an extra 2-3% in income tax is going to make you lay off workers, you're greedy and don't care about those workers anyways. But most importantly, if 12 years of lower taxes hasn't spurred economic growth in America but has elsewhere, then you're playing us all for fools. If you can create millions of overseas jobs but not in America, despite your reduced tax burden, then you don't have a single right to complain that a slight tax increase is going to be the end of our world. You have lower taxes, oh almighty rich people, than you've had in generations, and yet because of the mere IMPLICATION they might go up, you're throwing a hissy fit. If you can spend millions on fighting this President, then clearly you have the money to pay in taxes, which would, ironically, COST LESS than the money you've thrown at fighting him.
I don't have sympathy for billionaire hedge-funders who pay 15% in taxes a year, when I make 28K doing a skill job and pay 19%. Last year, I OWED taxes despite months of unemployment. You want to tell me that's fair, Leon Cooperman? No, it's not fair at all. Y'all have had it good for 30 years in this country, played by your own rules, bought politicians, enacted massive loopholes in tax law, practically wrote whole laws regarding consumers yourselves, and you're going to bitch about 3%? Go to hell, sir. It's where you belong.
8:42 PM PT: Reclist? Thank you all very much!