02.14.14
Pity the Billionaire, the song that never gets old
If you don’t like my song you’re a moron and should not be reading this blog.
From CNN Money, Tom Perkins, who is now doing it just because it gets him video attention:
“The fear is wealth tax, higher taxes, higher death taxes — just more taxes until there is no more 1%. And that that will creep down to the 5% and then the 10%.”
“The Tom Perkins system is: You don’t get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes.”
“But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?”
I thought that last bit was already true. Many think the same, no?
This puts Perkins in company with others, notably Ted Nugent, who has lobbied twice for the reciprocal: denying the vote to those who allegedly pay no tax.
Nugent means the poor, the 47 percent, anyone on the left and everyone not-white. And they actually do pay taxes, lots of them. Payroll, sales, regular state-administered car fees, phone service taxes, etc.
“Let’s also stop the insanity by suspending the right to vote of any American who is on welfare. Once they get off welfare and are self-sustaining, they get their right to vote restored. No American on welfare should have the right to vote for tax increases on those Americans who are working and paying taxes to support them.”
He’ll use his NRA clout to make it law that everyone who buys a gun at a gun show go through a background check if the rest of us will campaign for and help enact law that takes the right to vote for presidential and congressional candidates in elections away from people who pay no income tax.
In his blog, and today in his column at the New York Times, Paul Krugman has been working over the same issue:
In fact, the people who seem least inclined to respect the efforts of ordinary workers are the winners of the wealth lottery. Over the past few months, we’ve been harangued by a procession of angry billionaires, furious that they’re not receiving the deference, the acknowledgment of their superiority, that they believe is their due. For example, last week the investor Sam Zell went on CNN Money to defend the 1 percent against “envy,??? and he asserted that “the 1 percent work harder. The 1 percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society.??? Dignity for all!
And there’s another group that doesn’t respect workers: Republican politicians.
“[When] it comes to Americans down on their luck, conservatives become insultingly paternalistic, as comfortable congressmen (in this case, he specifically aims at Paul Ryan) lecture struggling families on the dignity of work,” Krugman adds.
And then there’s the whole thing of denying health care for the poor through the Medicaid expansion because of hatred of the president and … freedom.
The malevolence is personal.
Last month’s World Economic Forum at Davos will be remembered as the one where the rich realised that incomes were unequal. One suspects the rich had always been dimly aware of this fact, but even they seem to have been astounded by the degree of inequality.
There is clear evidence that the decline in budget deficits was followed by increases in inequality.
Fiscal consolidations are followed by an increase in long-term unemployment.
The past three decades have been associated with a steady decline in the number of restrictions that countries impose on cross-border financial transactions …
What happens to inequality in the aftermath of these episodes? The evidence is that, on average, capital account liberalisation is followed by a significant and persistent increase in inequality.
It is a short and easy to grok read.
Sam Zell — from the archives.