Inequality like this is unsustainable

by slimboyfat 91 Replies latest social current

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  slimboyfat

  Botchtower the reason rich people pay more tax (in absolute terms) in the US is because rich people are proportionately much richer in the US than elsewhere! So your table is merely a reflection of the fact that inequality is much greater in the US than elsewhere, not that there is greater redistribution. What you want to look at is not the absolute amount but the percentage of their income that rich people pay. As we know from the Romney case, rich people may be paying millions in tax, but proportionally it amounts to a lower rate of tax than for ordinary workers. Call that redistribution if you wish but it is statistical nonsense.

  Again if you think it is fair that all the wealth is concentrated in a few individuals so long as they pay more tax in absolute terms then just how far do you want to take it? Why stop at 100 individuals having 50% of the wealth? Why not one person having 99% of the wealth? As long as that one person pays 50% of the nation's tax then that would be fair and square, right? According to your table, a country like that should be regarded as the most progressive on earth!

  And again I don't think higher taxes is actually the main solution. We need to redraw the rules that allow a few individuals to grab such obscene amounts of wealth in the first place. Hard work should certainly be rewarded, but not using the rules of the system to benefit from the labour of others.
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  BizzyBee

  Thomas Paine has some very interesting thoughts on the subject, published in his last pamphlet, Agrarian Justice":

  http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/paine_agrarianjustice_01.html

  A brief description:

  In this work, his last great pamphlet published in the winter of 1795-1796, Paine continued the discussion he began in Part II of the Rights of Man of the problem of the elimination of poverty and developed further his proposals for limiting the accumulation of property. The crux of the entire question of eliminating poverty, he points out, lay in the institution of private property, for this principle was the source of the evils of society. Landed property and private property, he argued, were made possible only by the operation of society since whatever property men accumulated beyond their own labor came from the fact that they lived in society. "... The accumulation of personal property," he wrote, "is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it; the consequence of which is, that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence." God had never opened a land office, he held, from which perpetual deeds to the earth should be issued. He spoke, he boldly declared, for "all those who have been thrown out of their natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property." It is of some interest to note that Thomas Jefferson observed, in a letter to Rev. James Madison in February, 1787: "Whenever there are in a country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate the natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be provided for those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not, the fundamental right to labor the earth returns to the unemployed...," [Philip S. Foner, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Selections from His Writings, pp. 56-57.]