What Recession? ( Archived) (31)

In response to: What Recession? 400 Richest Americans Lined Their Pockets with $30 BillionBy Les Leopold
AlterNet, Oct 1, 2009
Straight to the Source It's great to know that during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans, according to Forbes, actually increased by $30 billion. Well golly, that's only a 2 percent increase, much less than the double digit returns the wealthy had grown accustomed to. But a 2 percent increase is a whole lot more than losing 40 percent of your 401k. And $30 billion is enough to provide 500,000 school teacher jobs at $60k per year.

Collectively, those 400 have $1.57 trillion in wealth. It's hard to get your mind around a number like that. The way I do it is to imagine that we were still living during the great radical Eisenhower era of the 1950s when marginal income tax rates hit 91 percent. Taxes were high back in the 1950s because people understood that constraining wild extremes of wealth would make our country stronger and prevent another depression. (Well, what did those old fogies know?)

Had we kept those high progressive taxes in place, instead of removing them, especially during the Reagan era, the Forbes 400 might each be worth "only" $100 million instead of $3.9 billion each. So let's imagine that the rest of their wealth, about $1.53 trillion, were available for the public good.

What does $1.53 trillion buy?

It's more than enough to insure the uninsured for the next twenty years or more.

It's more than enough to create a Manhattan Project to solve global warming by developing renewable energy and a green, sustainable manufacturing sector.

And here's my favorite: It's more than enough to endow every public college and university in the country so that all of our children could gain access to higher education for free, forever!

Instead, we embarked on a grand experiment to see what would happen if we deregulated finance and changed the tax code so that millionaires could turn into billionaires. And even after that experiment failed in the most spectacular way, our system seems trapped into staying on the same deregulated path.

Instead of free higher education, health care and a sustainable economy, we got a fantasy finance boom and bust on Wall Street which crashed the real economy. We have our 400 billionaires, and we have 29 million unemployed and underemployed Americans. We have an infrastructure in shambles. We have an environment in crisis. We have a health care system that would make Rube Goldberg proud. And we have the worst income distribution since 1929.

SonofDavid: HL,

I am not sure I understand the point here. Is Mr. Leopold suggesting that we steal from the rich and give to the poor? It seems to me that was tried in Sherwood Forest. Did it work?

SonofDavid: HL,

I am not sure I understand the point here. Is Mr. Leopold suggesting that we steal from the rich and give to the poor? It seems to me that was tried in Sherwood Forest. Did it work?

calmheartseeks: You wouldn't if it was YOUR money he was robbing.

Problem is, it's not just the "rich" that are being fleeced. Many are struggling to pay bills while the tax man takes obscenely large chunks from their income to pay the guy who doesn't work while watching Oprah, who btw also wants them to pay for his health insurance (as he munches chedder cheese potato chips). The only ones who like this "helping" arrangement are people with very low income BECAUSE THEY DON'T WORK, pay little taxes (if any), and really believe we owe them a living. They even complain that they aren't "given" enough money.

All the others have to pay - the poor working force - out of their ever shrinking income.

Watch out, Robin's coming to your 'hood!