Abusive Taxation, the Worker’s Tax
Ted Folkert
December 26, 2014
The gap in wealth and income is one of our most talked about topics in the noise media these days. And rightly so. This supports the cliché that my parents used to quote, which has now become even more a reality – the rich get richer and the poor are still poor.
In order to figure out who to blame or thank for this, depending upon your place in the income/wealth stream, we can use some calculations from a tax guy – Joe, the tax guy.
Joe Anthony explains it to us in his recent article, “How to make taxes fair again”, published in the Los Angeles Times today.
Joe tells us about the tax policies that penalize us for being middle class or less and rewards us for being in the higher earnings bracket (or racket, depending on where you stand on the issue). He tells us that a married couple earning $150,000 from two jobs will pay three times as much federal income tax as another couple earning the same amount from an investment.
This all started about 20 years ago with Bill Clinton, or as some of us like to call him, Bull Cliptem. When Bull took office these two couples would have paid nearly the same tax, $35,650 for the wage earners and slightly less, $34,158, for the investors, a $1,500 bonus for not working.
By the time George W. Bush, or as Molly Ivins called him, Shrub, took office the amount of taxes for these two couples, thanks to Cliptem and his brilliant advisers, would have been $33,607 for the wage earners and $23,025 for the investors. I guess in order to understand how this came about and how it helped the Common Good we would have to interview Cliptem’s financial advisers, Larry Summers, Sandy Weill, and Robert Rubin, all Wall Street graduates, beneficiaries, and self-proclaimed spokesmen for the common good of the people. However, to avoid a lengthy dose of political hyperbole, financial bewilderment, and self-aggrandizement, we will omit that exercise.
Now, in 2014, after Shrub’s income tax cuts and rearrangement, and after Obama’s income tax rearrangement, the wage earners would pay $24,138 and the investors would pay $8,385, or about one-third of the tax paid by the wage earners. How does that sound? Yes – correct -unbelievable! But that is the way it is. Like my parents used to say, the rich get richer and the poor are still poor
Even in the 1920s, the era of the “robber barons”, the “roaring 20s’, the “gilded age”, the sentiment was in favor the wage earners. Even Andrew Mellon, filthy-rich (as Mom would have said), extremely wealthy, bank baron, Treasury Secretary, spoke of the distinction between the income from wages. whose earners’ only capital is their “mental and physical energy”, which is “limited in duration and is diminished by old age”, and those whose income continues regardless of health or age, and then descends to their heirs.
And for this one-more penalty for not being rich, one-more unneeded benefit for those born of wealth or born of greed, we can all thank the self-serving financial community and the self-serving leaders they elect with their campaign funding.
Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
Think about!
Read the article by Joseph Anthony: “How to make taxes fair again”, published in the Los Angeles Times today.