A Simple Economic Truth America's Super Rich Don't Want Us to Know About

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/simple-economic-truth-americas-super-rich-dont-want-us-know-about



For the past 32 years, Americans have been living a lie. It's a lie that helps out rich people and screws working people, and it's a lie that needs to be called out.

The people promoting this lie - most all of them rich people themselves - have been so good at promoting this lie that pretty much everybody believes it. It's even asserted as fact, without contradiction, in the mainstream media. But it's a lie.

The lie is that raising income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies hurts economies and even leads to unemployment. The truth is that raising income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies actually helps economies and causes companies to hire more and more people, thus lowering unemployment.

What makes this lie particularly relevant right now is that the French Constitutional Council - their court that decides what's constitutional and what's not - has just agreed with the new socialist government that it's totally legal to raise the very top income tax rates on very wealthy individuals and hugely profitable corporations to 50 percent (effectively 75 percent when you add in their other taxes like our FICA that funds healthcare and retirement).

[malaise]

1. It's a huge lie but they have convinced a lot of stupid people that we don't need

society or government. Taxes facilitate the common good and the only good in the minds of the rich and their lackeys is GREED

[squicked]

2. The rich have assets and the poor have debt

Great story here: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-01-02/biggest-redistribution-wealth-middle-class-and-poor-rich-ever-explained

[rurallib]

6. welcome to DU

and yes, that is a great story.

[Major Nikon]

3. 70% of the economy is based on consumerism

When the consumers have no money, they don't consume and everyone suffers. The economy works exactly backward from the way the dipshit supply-siders claim. This is even more true today than in the industrial economy during and after WWII. The people at the bottom are the "job creators", not those at the top. Those at the top simply facilitate and when they are allowed to scrape all the cream off the top, everyone suffers.

[LisaLynne]

8. Well said. nt

[Brigid]

4. This is what happens . . .

When a pack of sociopaths gets a stranglehold on the economy.

[reddread]

5. which they do by owning the politicians

Now, how can we undo that propriety?

[Brigid]

7. I think it's time for the torches and pitchforks myself.

Trouble is, we don't know where these people live. This isn't like nineteenth-century Chicago where on Thanksgiving Day 1884, demonstrators marched up and down Prairie Avenue, where the rich had their mansions, playing the "Marseilles" and ringing doorbells. Ah, the good old days.

[LisaLynne]

9. "Trouble is, we don't know where these people live."

And that is probably not by accident!

[reddread]

12. They live in the halls of power

there is no other place to find the heads of these serpents.
I'll not argue the value of a bunch of dead bodies, but that seems to be a popular message elsewhere.
Not the best path forward.

[seabeckind]

13. Up until recently we knew exactly where to find him

in the White House sitting at the table across from our president.

Timmy.

[Snarkoleptic]

10. Thom Hartmann does a nice job exposing this...

[seabeckind]

11. So true...heard Thom present it before

The question is how do we change the policy to reverse the effects of the lie?

What happens when the rich are taxed (not just the human people but also the corporations people) that tax money goes into infrastructure which indirectly employs so many, who then also make enough to pay taxes instead of being a drain on the economy.

But the latest memes I've bee hearing, even parrotted on this forum is that the unemployment is our fault for not learning how to function in this environment. I even heard Axelrod paraphrasing it last nite. That unemployment is caused because:

technology did away with our jobs, not the investor who makes an extra half penny a widget by having labor somewhere else cheaper. Who found that rather than investing in his company he could get some idiot politician to use taxpayers money to build him a factory and supply all his infrastructure needs.

and...

it's our fault cause we didn't invest personally in the training we needed to take advantage of the jobs of the 21st global economy. Ignoring unemployment rate of college graduates and when they can't saying that they picked the wrong major.


Maybe we ought to elect some democrats. Real ones.