[circumscise]: : Another factoid for you: we only tax income, not wealth. If we were to tax wealth, then we'd be taking money from where the rich get most of theirs: stocks, bonds, the like. Watch them howl then.
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: Or leave the country taking their wealth and business acumen with them. Which I would wholeheartedly support.
Me too. Good riddance! There are plenty of small business people and left academics who know how to run businesses, and they'll do a far better job at incorporating social responsibility than the Chainsaw Als of the world. By the way, where do you think they'll flee? Singapore? I hope so -- they could all use a good caning.
: Envy is the second of the Deadly Sins, right after Pride.
How I wish I were an arrogant, greedy, selfish S.O.B.! *sob*
: : Also, if the top 10% of the nation owns 90% of the wealth, we're not doing a very good job of redistribution, are we? Crumbs, Frenchy, that's what the truly wealthy throw us.
: No, your not paying attention; I said that most of the government's taxes come from the upper quintile of earners and that's what is being redistributed.
Wrong, I was paying attention, which is why I pointed out that most of the wealthy's wealth is not in the form of taxable income -- that's the lucre we should be taxing. Furthermore, you haven't responded to the fact that the top 10% owns 90% of the wealth, which as I've already pointed out, is proof positive that any redistribution we need ain't happening and is in fact, as SDF pointed out, flowing upwards in the wrong direction.
: Instead of waiting for someone to throw crumbs to you, why don't you get another job?
I love my present job, and make a solid middle class salary, which is what I think EVERYONE should have.
:Or create a service that others would be willing to buy?
I already provide a valuable and socially useful service, but as it turns out, I also have created another profitable service: been to the movies lately. ;)
: : Lastly, if like me, you cherish democracy, then this very uneven wealth distribution should concern you. Money is power, and when you concentrate too much money in a small minority, they get too much power, and the result is the bought and paid for Congress and President (and elected judges) we have today. That ain't good for our democracy, and as I like to point out, just because we've had democracy for 200 odd years, there's no guarantee we'll retain it. Most of the world's history has involved non-democratic nations, so the big D is a fragile thing. We need to protect it, not justify those things, like grossly uneven wealth distribution, which harm it.
: The only thing worse in history than the supposed fragility of Democracies (and here I mean the kind we have here, coupled with a Bill of Rights, etc.) is the disasters that schemes dreamed up by misfits like Marx have brought.
Marx wasn't a misfit, he was a brilliant thinker. Now, no one is denying the catastrophes that certain communist countries have been, and still are, though the reasons for their failures are not all their own -- the West did its best to crush them, and in doing so, created its own enemies. However, you must agree with me that our own democracy here in the U.S. is not set in stone, and if it goes, while it may not be as bad as Stalin's USSR, it still won't be good, and could be awful.
: You don't know what poverty is unless you've been out of the US.
I've seen miserable poverty outside the U.S., and very bad poverty in the U.S., but that's apples and oranges. I've never said the U.S. is the worst place in the world -- far from it; the pity is, we could be so much better.
