Business Insider on the vanishing middle class

[unixronin]

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.  Cliché, sure, but it's more true than at any time since the Gilded Age.

So says Business Insider, and they show 15 graphs to support it. Granted, this is not entirely a balanced view; the two distribution-of-wealth pie charts show that almost the entirety of wealth in the US is held by

Comments

[rain_manpnw]

So, the top 1% holds 33% of the wealth, but is only paying 25% of the tax burden ... is that what you're saying?

[unixronin]

What I'm specifically saying there is that it's not as cut and dried as "Oh noez, teh rich haz all teh munniez!" I suspect most of those who scream loudest for all income to be "fairly" redistributed would scream and wail even more loudly were the tax burden to be redistributed on the same basis.

[jilara]

I have my reply to people who say "why impose heavier taxes on the rich?" I admit to deriving it from "Why do you rob banks?" but it's applicable: Because that's where the money is. You can take 80% of a lower-class income and it's spitting in the ocean. But 25% of the income of someone making over $400K is actually money you can see.

[unixronin]

Indeed, and that is very true. But anyone looking at any industrialized nation in the 20th century should by now surely have learned one crucial fact: When you set out to soak the rich, the rich leave, and they take much of the driving force behind your economy with them, as well as all of the tax revenues you used to get from them. I personally know of people who have not only left the US for other climes, but are seeking to renounce their US citizenship, in order to get out from under the taxes that the US still expects them to pay even after living for five years in a foreign country.

Of course, I'm not saying "soak the poor" here, before anyone pops up with that canard. I'm just saying, tax fairly, and remember that ofttimes the wealth of the wealthy is actually doing a lot more for the economy, behind the visible scenes, than it would be were the government to merely step in and take a bigger chunk of it to fritter away in bureaucratic inefficiency. Higher tax revenues feed more and bigger government, and government is

[jilara]

What did Perot say about the sucking sound of jobs leaving the country?

I've been following this ponzi scheme for a while, and we're in so deep that I suspect the only way out is to simply declare the whole country bankrupt and start over. Which isn't going to happen. Besides, everyone else has been players in the same scheme.

So where does it leave the rest of us, the formerly middle class? Well, there's a term I picked up from a 1930's movie called "Meet John Doe," and that's "healots." It was a term for Romans in a class that was above slaves but below citizens. We are all in a state of semi-slavery, much of the country eliminating the wealth and material goods accumulated in better times, as the middle class slowly (or quickly) declines toward the lower strata.