About that pledge from the Billionaires....
I don't normally repost pundit-type stuff: there's anough of that here and much of it - The Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up and teacherken, for example - do it so well, I have nothing to add.
However, I came across this bit from Robert Reich, posted at Alternet, harping on what I am hoping is becoming a meme that IS entering the general American discourse.
And that is that the Rich are actually TOO rich. And they have gotten rich....unfairly.
I know... heresy!
The Rich are entitled to be rich and/or have done something brilliant to help mankind, right? RIGHT??
Whatever used to be honorable about working hard and doing well facially has been eclipsed by the unbridled greedfest of the past 30-some years. We have heard the facts a lot more lately about the massive chasm between the rich and the poor.
Reich talks about how the Billionaires were approached for the idea of donation to charity and how much money they are able to just give away while maintaining life as they they know it.It speaks to the unfathomable amount of money they have:
Forty of America’s richest families or individuals – almost all billionaires – have pledged to donate at least half their fortunes to charity. The total is a whopping $125 billion Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates reached out to some 80 members of the Forbes billionaires list, seeking their pledges.
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I’m also appalled at what this reveals about how much money is now concentrated in so few hands. It’s more evidence we’re back in the late nineteenth century when robber barons lorded over the economy and almost everyone else lost ground. The Vanderbilts, Carnegies, Rockefellers made so much money they too could give away large chunks to charity and still maintain their outsized fortunes and their power and influence.
He said robber barons. That's what caught my eye.
They have been with us for centuries.
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu - chapter 53
If I have even just a little sense,
I will walk on the main road and my only fear will be of straying from it.
Keeping to the main road is easy,
But people love to be sidetracked.
When the court is arrayed in splendor,
The fields are full of weeds,
And the granaries are bare.
Some wear are gorgeous clothes,
Carry sharp swords,
And indulge themselves with food and drink;
They have more possessions than they can use.
They are robber barons.
This is certainly not the way of Tao.
I suppose the Billionaires are trying to be nice or seem like decent society. I see Warren Buffet hailed and crucified in relative equal amounts. He did call for an increase in tax on people in his wealth strata.
Maybe I am too cynical, maybe I'm not. I don't have any real idea yet WHY they are electing to do it really; it's that they have so much money. Oceans of it.
it wasn't always like that in this country - not like it is now.
Reagan's policies are known for creating this.
"Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts—in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance—vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes," Stockman writes in a lengthy analysis of the current economic condition published Sunday in The New York Times. "This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one."
Where are Republicans really wrong right at the moment? In proposing to maintain the Bush-Cheney administration's massive tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.
It began with Reagan continued with the numerous gigantic predatory financial scams which are intertwined in all this and Bush was installed to Bush help the GOP push the rest of it through, the final nail in the coffin of the American Dream.
Basically we have been looted while the already insanely wealthy have, just coincidentally, I am certain, made another half-billion over the past YEAR.. EACH! ANd teh GOP wants MOPRE tax breaks for these people!
Reich:
Most telling is how much wealthier the richest have become over the past year. Forbes Magazine’s list of the world’s billionaires (40 percent of them Americans), show them with an average net worth of $3.5 billion – and an average increase of $500 million in the last 12 months.
That's your 'jobless recovery' at work. They are raking it in and everybody else is skidding downhill, if not backwards while it happens to them.
Most people are lucky to be treading water and paying bills.
These people gained fortunes in the last year.
The Bush Tax Cuts HAVE to be eliminated and the wealthy have to be progressively taxed.
If they can can just cough up that much money all at once - we'll wait and see how this transpires - they can certainly be taxed more aggressively without really feeling it.
Yes, they'll whine, and throw tantrums, and threaten Congress with financial deprivation and God-knows-what-else, but really, it's not like it kills them to pay taxes, especially when the tax burden on people making less than $40k or $30k or $20k or less is proportionately more impactful.
I DO NOTICE the taxes and deductions from my paycheck (now that I have one again). It seems like peanuts to the rich but I really could use the money: they have suggested that they can cough up half their fortunes and not skip a beat as far as living their lives.
They live, we struggle, and that can be corrected.