by Noah
Pleasant thought of the day: If only we could fire some of these multi-billionaire clowns off into space and not allow them re-entry until they pay their fare share.
On the one hand, these Dr. Evil types do have the right to spend their money as they want but the arrogant "Hey look at me! In your face, I'm in space!" is sooo 10 years old. It's downright bratty. Then when you consider what good things these clowns could do with the same amount of money that they spent on their joyride, it becomes a moral issue but you have to have morals to begin with, not just ego in the service of out of control self-glorification. Lots of people have that flaw. When combined with unholy amounts of money, it's like feeding a tumor.
Sixty years ago, the tax rate for the super wealthy was 91%. In recent years, it has been hovering between 36% and 39% and the richer the rich get, the worse it gets. Between 2014 and 2018, just five years, Jeff Bezos' fortune grew by 99 BILLION dollars and he paid only 0.98% of that amount in his taxes. You and I can go ahead and calculate what we paid but I'll just go ahead and guess that all of us paid a much bigger percentage. And don't give me any bullcrap about billionaires giving $100 million here and $50 million there to a cause. To them, that's just loose change money that their fortune earns back by the end of the day. It's just cynical tax-deductible PR.
The end result of this is that our constantly corrosive ever-mounting tax breaks for corporations and people like Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Elon Musk is that the results of years and years of less money being available for child care and higher education for the rest of us is taking its toll on this country's position in the world while dumbing its citizens down which is "probably" the goal anyway. I've said for over 40 years, it's all about creating a world of lords and serfs. Well, here we are. We can just look out the window and see a feudal world over on the horizon. That's what the likes of Jeff Bezos want and see when they look down on us from space. That is their vision.
Let me put this another way: An increase in taxes of just 2 cents per tax dollar for Jeff Bezos and anyone else that has $50 Billion dollars or more would not be at all painful to them no matter how much they squeal like little piggies. In the case of Jeff Bezos, he would pay $5.4 Billion dollars on his total fortune of $181 Billion dollars. Within about one week, his remaining money would have earned that $5.4 Billion dollars back and he would again have his addictively self-aggrandizing security blanket of $181 Billion dollars. He could then watch that amount soar over $200 Billion dollars in a matter of just months. That kind of money makes money without effort. Don't shed a tear for Jeff Bezos. Tax him. The same tax on America's 100,000 richest families would raise about $3 Trillion dollars. Child care, nursing home money, infrastructure, and even tuition-free public college and/or a technical school education would all be within reach. Not doing this amounts to class warfare. Not doing this is continued economic suppression that goes hand in hand with voting suppression.