Saturday, June 18, 2011

I liked this post from Jesse's Café Américain...

....this post right here, because it fits well with this great George Carlin rant that a friend sent over to me last night.


Here's an except from the Jesse piece. Read it then watch Carlin, because they say the same thing. The styles are somewhat different though.

"The effective tax rates of the super wealthy are less than 15 percent, because they draw a major portion of their annual increase in wealth from capital gains and dividends, and unrecognized entitlements. as well as a wide menu of tax avoiding schemes.

"And while they moan about the nominal headline tax rates, paid only by the 'little people' even if they do not know they are little, corporations and the truly wealthy have not enjoyed just low effective tax rates in the post WW II era. And yet it is still not enough.


"In light of the severe unemployment problems plaguing a large portion of families, austerity seems like a cruel joke, a
coup de grâce delivered by the bankers to the income producing classes who depend on labor in the creation and delivery of real products, and not artificial arbitrage and gaming the system.

"But on the other hand, stimulus seems just another excuse for the special interests to put on the feedbag once again to the detriment of the many of the next generation. There is no comparison between the Obama Administration and the New Deal in terms of real change and productive innovation.


"There has been a very strong recovery in corporate profits in the non-financial sector, and the financiers barely missed a beat in distributing a healthy chunk of GDP to themselves in bonuses, while the ashes of the financial crises which they caused still glowing.  And their behaviour in the mortgage and derivatives markets has been despicable.  I am appalled that people put up with this sort of thing, much less defend it out of some mistaken belief in neoliberal 'free markets.'"

Read the whole thing here