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"because we can"...
The 0.1% only use small bills to light up their cigars... any more would be a waste of money...
We Are the 99.9%
“We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general.
If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population.
And while Democrats, by and large, want that super-elite to make at least some contribution to long-term deficit reduction, Republicans want to cut the super-elite’s taxes even as they slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the name of fiscal discipline.
Before I get to those policy disputes, here are a few numbers.
The recent Congressional Budget Office report on inequality didn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, did. According to that report, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent.
For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite’s share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 — and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains.
Given this history, why do Republicans advocate further tax cuts for the very rich even as they warn about deficits and demand drastic cuts in social insurance programs?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/opinion/we-are-the-99-9.html?pagewanted=print
Republicans: "Because we can..."
- By Gus Leonisky at 26 Nov 2011 - 9:59am
- Gus Leonisky's blog
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the rest can drown...
More and more of our lives are in the hands of a small band of super-rich individuals. And they’re getting richer all the time.
According to figures published at the weekend, the collective wealth of Britain’s 1,000 richest individuals increased by £77billion in the past year — a jump of 30 per cent at a time when most of us have seen any savings or pensions hit hard by the recession and Gordon Brown’s stealth taxes.
Small wonder that, according to a report last month, London has become the most unequal city in the Western world, with the gulf between the super-rich and the poor creating a wealth gap not seen since the days of a slave-owning elite.
This takeover by the super-rich seems so different from the world I grew up in, where public limited companies reported to their shareholders every three months, shares were largely owned by pension funds we effectively financed, and a democratic government was not in thrall to a new class of international and unaccountable tycoons.
It was only when I began researching a book on the subject that I discovered just how widespread — and pernicious — the influence of the global ultra-rich has become.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1269041/Age-plutocrat-How-Britain-thrall-billionaires-pernicious-influence-public-life.html#ixzz1elULjrhd
platypus moments...
The chief executive of the biotech Pharmaxis sold half of his shareholding in the company just days before its shares plunged 74 per cent in one day.
Just after Robertson disclosed he had offloaded 500,000 shares for $1.48 million, Pharmaxis announced that it received a ''negative trend vote'' over its application for its cystic fibrosis treatment in the European Union.
''Although this is not the final stage in the application process, we are clearly disappointed with the outcome of this trend vote,'' Robertson said in a statement.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/rockin-shocking-the-markets-hits-hype-and-horrors-20111230-1pfeo.html#ixzz1iCEnTucY