Chip Bok for September 29, 2017

What Mr. Bok fails to note is when you have too little and no income, the taxes are quite low. So if those poor picked-on billionaires want to lower their taxes, they just have to give away their money and investments. Very simple.

And how to pay for tax cuts for the rich? It’s obvious. Tax increases and benefit cuts for the poor. It’s only fair.

It is a false argument. You pay more because you get more. And the wealthiest get much much much more from the government than they put in. That’s why they have been accumulating ever more wealth. That’s why the gap between rich and everybody else has been growing. They whine because they don’t want you to see how much they’re stealing.

They always try to use absolute numbers rather than a percentage of income. 0.05% of $10,000,00 is more than 20% of $50,000. So therefore the tax rate for the rich is unfair.

The bottom 90% of tax payers are making the same amount of money they made in 1980. We are into the second generation of Americans who shouldn’t expect to do better than their parents, unless they can get in on the Wall Street hustle. The top 1% are paying a lighter tax burden than they did in the 50s through 70s, but their incomes have grown at the expense of everyone else’s.

The GOP pushes the policies that have tilted the income flow into the hands of of a very few. One of the fig leaves they’ve used to cover the naked greed is the Earned Income Tax Credit that means working Americans with very low incomes pay practically no income taxes. They designed the system to work the way it’s working, but of course their donors want more. Cut taxes now, push a huge deficit on future generations & make sure you’re out of town by the time it blows up.

We’ll see a few of the usual suspects pushing the various nonsensical accusations & misdirections to distract from these facts. If you want the top 1% to pay a lower portion of the total tax burden, you need to think about getting more income in the hands of the bottom 50%.

Don’t tax you, Don’t tax me. . .

Tax that fellow behind the tree. . .

Much given. . .

Much expected. . .

Is Bok “The Champion of the Over-Dog and the Up-Trodden?”

There’s a new generation of suckers out there who’ve never heard of trickle-down.

So according to Bok math, the bottom 49% pay 3 percent of the Federal income taxes collected. How is this fair ?

Republicans want to take away your standard house deduction so they can give more money to rich people like Mr. Trump.

Everybody pays something. Nobody gets back all of the income tax they pay. However small or big the refund, you do NOT get back all of what you pay in income tax. AND – you do not get ANY refund for what you pay in Social Security and Medicare taxes, retirees and claimants aside. This “zero” share is a bunch of baloney.

Could the trumpster’s proposal that favors the rich reek of conflict of interest?

“So what happens is, this guy falls off right on his face, hits his head, and I thought he died. And you know what I did? I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting,’ and I turned away,” said Trump. “I couldn’t, you know, he was right in front of me and I turned away. I didn’t want to touch him… he’s bleeding all over the place, I felt terrible. You know, beautiful marble floor, didn’t look like it. It changed color. Became very red. And you have this poor guy, 80 years old, laying on the floor unconscious, and all the rich people are turning away. ‘Oh my God! This is terrible! This is disgusting!’ and you know, they’re turning away. Nobody wants to help the guy. His wife is screaming—she’s sitting right next to him, and she’s screaming.”

Thank God for the Marines. “What happens is, these 10 Marines from the back of the room… they come running forward, they grab him, they put the blood all over the place—it’s all over their uniforms—they’re taking it, they’re swiping [it], they ran him out, they created a stretcher. They call it a human stretcher, where they put their arms out with, like, five guys on each side,” shared Trump.

“I was saying, ‘Get that blood cleaned up! It’s disgusting!’ The next day, I forgot to call [the man] to say he’s OK,” said Trump, adding of the blood, “It’s just not my thing.”This story more than any other demonstrates the utter shallowness, lack of normal human development and utter absence of character, not to mention human decency, of Donald Trump. He is a disgrace to humanity.

The richest 1% of Americans own 35% of the nation’s wealth. The bottom 80% own just 11% of the nation’s wealth. Seems like the richest 1% are being taxed at a fair rate, it is the bottom 80% who are getting screwed. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the economy was booming, the wealthiest Americans paid a top income tax rate of 91%. Today, the top rate is 43.4%. So lets make America great again, and have the top income tax rate go back to where it was when we all could share in the American dream. The richest 1% pay an effective federal income tax rate of 24.7% in 2014; someone making an average of $75,000 is paying a 19.7% rate. The middle class is being screwed out of their dwindling stagnant paychecks, while the top are collecting more and more wealth. The average federal income tax rate of the richest 400 Americans was just 20 percent in 2009. What a disgrace that our country has just decided to funnel all the money to a handful of families.

Instead of everyone always complaining about how little someone else gets taxed, I’d like to see folks stand up and throw down more money above their own share first. We’d all be better off if the government weren’t empowered to spend, because then it couldn’t misspend and engage in crony socialism. But instead everyone keeps yelling for more benefits, but points to someone else to pay for them. Well guess what, the chickens are coming home to roost….

The main issue is: who decides what is fair?