Originally Posted by James50

I know I am whining again. Many people would love to be in the situation I am in. I also recognize the income inequality problem. Still, the whole focus on the 1% sets my teeth on edge as we attempt to decide who is in the 1% in a good way and who is in it in a bad way. And I also struggle with the sense that whatever the political system ends up doing will involve coming after people like me and leaving untouched the class of people and systems that are actually the problem.

James50

So your afraid that you will pay the price of what some of the actual 1% did and are doing to this country?

Originally Posted by Deb C

So your afraid that you will pay the price of what some of the actual 1% did and are doing to this country?

Sorry Deb, but I have learned my lesson about using the word "afraid" or "fear". Let's just say I am a bit anxious.

James50

Originally Posted by Deb C

So your afraid that you will pay the price of what some of the actual 1% did and are doing to this country?

Elizabeth Warren is in the 1%. What should be done about her?

James50

Originally Posted by James50

Once you start talking about the 1%, pretty soon you begin picking favorites. Sports stars, entertainers, news readers, and academics who get rich are forgiven. Even politicians are forgiven if they are on the correct end of the political spectrum. They "earned" it. On the other hand, employers who actually build companies and hire high school graduates to do manual work should be taxed, regulated, and spurned at every turn. The 1% who never get their skirts dirty and who hold to the correct political opinions are forgiven. Those of us who take on the role of employer in the day to day real world are just slave masters by another name.

Its how the game is played.

You can bet that Elizabeth Warren will never seek to reduce or regulate the power, income, and influence of academia and never mind the number of millies who will indenture themselves to pay off the loans that support her life style.

James50

EDIT: No, I am not in the 1%, but would like to be someday.

James, I would be more than happy to go to 90% marginal rates over $2 million a year for everyone and I would guess Professor Warren would be too.

Originally Posted by James50

Sorry Deb, but I have learned my lesson about using the word "afraid" or "fear". Let's just say I am a bit anxious.

James50

As Amy says regarding the word police, stepped on a land mine, huh?

I can surely try to understand your concerns. It appears that when new laws are introduced, at times, they go overboard in their sweeping broadness. It's that pendulum swinging too far to one side or the other before it eventually finds its center.

Originally Posted by James50

Why arguments about the 1% will ultimately go nowhere.

1% Elizabeth Warren can't have it both ways.

This is a really common misconception about those seeking to discredit OWS and with all due respect, it's getting old. I don't believe in general there is a feeling that no one should be rich, or that the mere fact of being rich makes you the "enemy." The "enemy" is when those with wealth and privilege seek to buy the government and legislators in order to get favorable legislative treatment that will make the playing field even less level.

Ms. Warren is on record as saying she believes there's nothing wrong with being rich in and of itself -- just that those who are wealthy have benefited a lot from a system that allows it to happen, and that there should be a moral duty among the most privileged to consider those who are less fortunate rather than buying up all the legislation they can to widen the gap between haves and have nots even more.

To be in the top 1% incomes, you need to be pulling-in about $350K each year.

With the exception that about 1/2 of these folks live in my town (a good pre-school here is about 30K per year!) , there is a lot of diversity amongst this group -

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/bu...h.html?_r=1&hp

I would assume that a large portion of these folks are hard-working and major contributors to society.

Then there is the top 0.1%. You need to be pulling-in about $5 million each year to get into that group - that cut-off being about 15 times bigger than the relatively paltry $350K cut for the top 1%.

The diversity of the top 0.1% group is pretty minimal with at least 70% of them being large corporate executives, financial professionals, lawyers. and real estate owners.

http://www.indiana.edu/~spea/faculty...TopEarners.pdf

Most have an address in NYC or surrounds. My guess is that for every Buffett, Jobs, Gates, you have more than just a couple Wall Street sociopathic dirtbags in the group.

A 90% marginal rate on $1 million/yr and certainly at $2 million per year, would not touch most of those in the top 1%. As for the top 0.1%, the majority of their overall wealth-generation doesn't show up on their individual tax return as "taxable income" but rather as "deductable expenses" on their various businesses' tax returns - I don't thing you need to shed too many tears for them.

On the other hand, none of this wished-for increases in federal taxing of anyone is going to do anything for the economy. The federal govt doesn't need to increase taxing in order to spend what is necessary to get the economy rolling again. I realize that's not what people want to hear – however, you should just consider that makes it easy to manipulate you away from recognizing and demanding the real solution of increased federal deficit spending – "but, but, but that would cause inflation and we would all die!!!!!!!!!!!!" Yea, right.

Originally Posted by KaiserD2

James, I would be more than happy to go to 90% marginal rates over $2 million a year for everyone and I would guess Professor Warren would be too.

Would you restore all the writeoffs and loopholes into the tax code, just as they were when we used to have that 90% marginal rate?

One can't honestly talk about the "good old days" of 70-90% marginal tax brackets without accepting that those writeoffs were part of it -- and as a result, few of "the rich" ever sniffed those brackets, and some even paid less than they would in terms of percentage of overall income than they do today.

Originally Posted by playwrite

To be in the top 1% incomes, you need to be pulling-in about $350K each year.

With the exception that about 1/2 of these folks live in my town (a good pre-school here is about 30K per year!) , there is a lot of diversity amongst this group -

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/bu...h.html?_r=1&hp

I would assume that a large portion of these folks are hard-working and major contributors to society.

Then there is the top 0.1%. You need to be pulling-in about $5 million each year to get into that group - that cut-off being about 15 times bigger than the relatively paltry $350K cut for the top 1%.

The diversity of the top 0.1% group is pretty minimal with at least 70% of them being large corporate executives, financial professionals, lawyers. and real estate owners.

http://www.indiana.edu/~spea/faculty...TopEarners.pdf

Most have an address in NYC or surrounds. My guess is that for every Buffett, Jobs, Gates, you have more than just a couple Wall Street sociopathic dirtbags in the group.

A 90% marginal rate on $1 million/yr and certainly at $2 million per year, would not touch most of those in the top 1%. As for the top 0.1%, the majority of their overall wealth-generation doesn't show up on their individual tax return as "taxable income" but rather as "deductable expenses" on their various businesses' tax returns - I don't thing you need to shed too many tears for them.

On the other hand, none of this wished-for increases in federal taxing of anyone is going to do anything for the economy. The federal govt doesn't need to increase taxing in order to spend what is necessary to get the economy rolling again. I realize that's not what people want to hear – however, you should just consider that makes it easy to manipulate you away from recognizing and demanding the real solution of increased federal deficit spending – "but, but, but that would cause inflation and we would all die!!!!!!!!!!!!" Yea, right.

I saw the Times graph too, and this is an interesting point. Although $350,000/year is a lot more than I have ever made, and I have had all I want, I don't begrudge anyone that. So maybe we are setting the bar too low. On the other hand, I do wonder what the top 1% is based on net worth. I'm sure it's way over $1 mil. Anybody have a source for that?

Originally Posted by James50

Once you start talking about the 1%, pretty soon you begin picking favorites. Sports stars, entertainers, news readers, and academics who get rich are forgiven. Even politicians are forgiven if they are on the correct end of the political spectrum. They "earned" it. On the other hand, employers who actually build companies and hire high school graduates to do manual work should be taxed, regulated, and spurned at every turn. The 1% who never get their skirts dirty and who hold to the correct political opinions are forgiven. Those of us who take on the role of employer in the day to day real world are just slave masters by another name.

Its how the game is played.

You can bet that Elizabeth Warren will never seek to reduce or regulate the power, income, and influence of academia and never mind the number of millies who will indenture themselves to pay off the loans that support her life style.

No, we went through this a long time ago. I have no problem with people who make money by earning it. My problem with high earners has to do with unearned income being taxed too lightly and undeserved income, typically given as a de facto pay-off for activities tha may be just a bit shady ... or worse. I didn't see anything on the list you posted about Warren's earnings that fit in either category, hence my blanket OK. In fact, I'll wager that the time frame of the payments, and even moreso the efforts that were compensated, ran well outside a single year. How much is enough to be a 1%er? According to the article, household income of >$360,000 only gets you into the top 2%; it takes >$506,000 to get into the 1%.

Originally Posted by James50 ...

EDIT: No, I am not in the 1%, but would like to be someday.

OK, but if you make it, will you admit that you are well healed? Will you plead for special tax rates, so you can transfer money to yourself as carried interest?

BTW, I'm OK with an actor, baseball player or enterpeneur making a few million a year, if they earn it. Hustling it from others isn't earning it. I assume you're not a hustler.

Originally Posted by James50

I know I am whining again. Many people would love to be in the situation I am in. I also recognize the income inequality problem. Still, the whole focus on the 1% sets my teeth on edge as we attempt to decide who is in the 1% in a good way and who is in it in a bad way. And I also struggle with the sense that whatever the political system ends up doing will involve coming after people like me and leaving untouched the class of people and systems that are actually the problem.

James50

Paul Krugman made a good point about this very topic. Why concentrate on the 1%, other than the aliterative effect it has when chanted? We should worry about the 0.1%, and even more about the 0.01%. These are folks with serious money. They are often in a position to influence or even bribe officials to see things their way. In short, they have the swag to make things bend their way.

Among the many in this group are the auto-traders, who basicaly live on the arbitrage in mico-changes between prices. They take the profits before they even exist. They're parasites. That we allow this is, frankly, criminal.

Originally Posted by ziggyX65

Would you restore all the writeoffs and loopholes into the tax code, just as they were when we used to have that 90% marginal rate?

One can't honestly talk about the "good old days" of 70-90% marginal tax brackets without accepting that those writeoffs were part of it -- and as a result, few of "the rich" ever sniffed those brackets, and some even paid less than they would in terms of percentage of overall income than they do today.

It's interestng that the rates and the loopholes forced the wealthy to either pay up or be responsible. If they kept their money working, they got to keep it, so the idea that they created jobs was actually much more valid at that time than it is now.

Romney has just admitted that he pays about 15% of his income in taxes. I pay quite a bit more than that.

Originally Posted by KaiserD2

Romney has just admitted that he pays about 15% of his income in taxes. I pay quite a bit more than that.

So do I.

Regarding the mortgage deduction. That deduction is one of two reasons why I bought a condo.

Originally Posted by James50

Once you start talking about the 1%, pretty soon you begin picking favorites. Sports stars, entertainers, news readers, and academics who get rich are forgiven. Even politicians are forgiven if they are on the correct end of the political spectrum. They "earned" it. On the other hand, employers who actually build companies and hire high school graduates to do manual work should be taxed, regulated, and spurned at every turn. The 1% who never get their skirts dirty and who hold to the correct political opinions are forgiven. Those of us who take on the role of employer in the day to day real world are just slave masters by another name.

Economic reality requires that extremely-talented and effective performers get extreme pay. So it has long been with touring opera stars, for which the term prima donna is named. It is far easier to pay people who can quit and leave an enterprise -- even a theatrical one -- ruined than to cater to every whim as a substitute for money. So it was with such performers as Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill in the circuses of their times. Baseball teams paid their stars badly before the Black Sox scandal and found to their surprise and disbelief that corrupt gambler Arnold Rothstein could pay them more to lose. The likes of Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby, and Walter Johnson started getting paid like opera stars because the consequences of not paying them well included another Black Sox scandal. In the Silent era of feature films, movies could be made quickly enough that they could be completed before film stars could even think of breaking their contracts -- unless the star was Charlie Chaplin, who owned a big chunk of his film studio along with some other stars who eventually formed United Artists Corporation. When movie-making became so complex and protracted, studios had to lavish money on film stars. Creative people who can make or break a publishing house (like Mark Twain or Cole Porter) had to be paid well. If you need effective engineering and scientific research, then that also costs money.

If economic powers don't pay people extraordinarily well for extraordinary achievement, the extraordinary achievement tends to disappear. If I could write fresh symphonies that people want to listen to (I can't even make the ones that people don't want to listen to) then you could imagine what I would be doing with my time -- and what sort of dealing I would do with publishing houses, orchestras, and recording companies. Sure, I would have every incentive to ensure that the work is of high quality. Maybe I would structure my rewards so that I became a sort of capitalist. But if I weren't getting paid well and still had the talent to do something else to make a comfortable living, then I would do something else.

Its how the game is played.

With the obvious exceptions like Jimmy Stewart or Aaron Copland in the recent past, and of course such people as the finest of medical practitioners, it is a general rule that capitalism works best when only the capitalists get rich. American capitalism worked better when corporate executives weren't able to live like sultans. I remember when a dominant company in one business -- this was in the 1960s and 1970s -- had its executives making about twenty times as much as income as the people working in the factory. These people were in their fifties and sixties and often had started on the assembly line. They had nice houses and cars, but by then they were too old to appreciate the sports cars, trophy wives (anyone who got a divorce was suspect for bad judgment or disloyalty in those days -- it was a black mark for corporate advancement), and hunting lodges of contemporary executives. Their kids had typically just completed college and perhaps graduate or professional school. College was then comparatively cheap, so kids of the factory workers could attend a land-grant college like Michigan State and become clergy, schoolteachers, county ag agents, or officers of the fish-and-game department.

YES, IN MANY WAYS THAT WAS A BETTER WORLD.

All that has improved for most of us since then is technological and medical improvements that have nothing to do with the rise of corporate sociopaths and political hucksters who have waxed fat by bamboozling or exploiting people (if not both). Giant entities have been squeezing small-scale entrepreneurs in manufacturing, retailing, and banking, in effect decimating the backbone of the old middle class that created the early strength of the American economy. Even the tax codes favor corporate giants and the bureaucratic elites within them to small business through near-flat taxes for incomes above $100K (not a great income for a family of five, mind you -- do the math)-- as well as the disruptive effect of an IRS audit upon a small business as opposed to some giant entity that has specialized accountants at the home office (in, for example, Bentonville, Arkansas).

You can bet that Elizabeth Warren will never seek to reduce or regulate the power, income, and influence of academia and never mind the number of millies who will indenture themselves to pay off the loans that support her life style.

She is running for the US Senate. By the way -- the academics at non-profit, selective schools do not make megabuck pay. Administrators at some for-profit entities (University of Phoenix, DeVry, Kaplan University) that have not-so-great academic reputations but are expert at enticing people to get huge loans for high-priced educational programs due to slick marketing that non-profit Harvard and Stanford -- or for that matter, state-supported Ohio State -- don't need.

EDIT: No, I am not in the 1%, but would like to be someday.

In most states, some lottery would love to sell you the best chance to be a multi-millionaire short of being born into the Right Family or being the next Meryl Streep, Eddie Van Halen, or Albert Pujols. Are you betting on reincarnation by any chance?

Originally Posted by KaiserD2

I saw the Times graph too, and this is an interesting point. Although $350,000/year is a lot more than I have ever made, and I have had all I want, I don't begrudge anyone that. So maybe we are setting the bar too low. On the other hand, I do wonder what the top 1% is based on net worth. I'm sure it's way over $1 mil. Anybody have a source for that?

Here's a brief overview by Catherine Rampell the Times, and a more detailed analysis by the same reporter.

Originally Posted by James50

Elizabeth Warren is in the 1%. What should be done about her?

James50

I can't say, but I'm dismayed that you linked to an article that referred to her derisively as "Lizzy."

Originally Posted by KaiserD2

Romney has just admitted that he pays about 15% of his income in taxes. I pay quite a bit more than that.

Most of us do and we need a streamlined tax code that eliminates the loopholes for the corporations and the wealthy. I think that a flat tax on all would be better than what we now have.

Originally Posted by radind

Most of us do and we need a streamlined tax code that eliminates the loopholes for the corporations and the wealthy. I think that a flat tax on all would be better than what we now have.

I don't. Graduated with almost no deductions.

M & L's link gives a higher income figure for the top 1% -- about half a million a year-- and estimates their net worth as a minimum of $20 million. I was right--that puts rather a different light on things. $20 million means $400,000 a year invested conservatively, of course.

Originally Posted by radind

Originally Posted by KaiserD2

Romney has just admitted that he pays about 15% of his income in taxes. I pay quite a bit more than that.

Most of us do and we need a streamlined tax code that eliminates the loopholes for the corporations and the wealthy...

Thought this was common knowledge that those who make money off of money have a much lower tax rate than those who work.

Best...

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

If economic powers don't pay people extraordinarily well for extraordinary achievement, the extraordinary achievement tends to disappear.

Wow, PB, we may make a free-booting capitalist out of you yet! So you must think that people who are extraordinarily gifted in money management or extraordinarily gifted in running a business should be compensated well. Good for you!

She is running for the US Senate. By the way -- the academics at non-profit, selective schools do not make megabuck pay.

Sorry, but this is simply untrue. The tenured faculty at these institutions do quite well, thank you, some even making it into the 1%. Warren has lived large on the boat floated by student loans and government consulting fees. That these kids may spend the next 20 years paying the loans back? Well, the education is worth it, right?? We got people lined up to pay it, right? Nothing to see here. Move along.

She represents a special interest which will do nothing to interrupt the gravy train. You will not hear any calls from her to reduce academic pay, tighten up on student loans, or make non-profit universities taxable entities. Of that you can be sure.

Now the adjunct faculty - that is a different story - but then they are the little people, right?

James50

Originally Posted by Child of Socrates

I can't say, but I'm dismayed that you linked to an article that referred to her derisively as "Lizzy."

I agree that is over-the-top language.

James50

Here we go, folks:

Democrats to file 1 million signatures for Walker recall.

This is exciting.

Originally Posted by Child of Socrates

Here we go, folks:

Democrats to file 1 million signatures for Walker recall.

This is exciting.

When would the recall vote happen? On November 6th, or sooner?

Originally Posted by The Wonkette

When would the recall vote happen? On November 6th, or sooner?

Good question. I think the goal would be to have it over the summer, but I'm sure the Walkerites will throw up all sorts of legal challenges and delay, delay, delay.