Yesterday I haphazardly tuned into a morning radio show on 97 Rock and
heard a couple of smart ass, low achievers mocking a City of Buffalo plow
driver. The plow driver said he needed a pay raise. The mock jocks were
blaming the plow driver for the economic mess our country was in. They were
all over the plow driver like he was the down fall of the western world.
Then they spouted out about how unions are the cause of the financial
failure of the big three, U.S. automakers. There was not one mention of how
the corporate bosses of the automobile companies flew to Washington on
their corporate jets and cried poor. Now this should lead to another
discussion of sharing knowledge and the public air waves and not putting
newspapers, radio stations, and television stations into the hands of a few
owners. It goes beyond sharing the wealth and sharing information.
I turned the dial and searched to hear new music and all I could get was
the same songs being played by the future Lee Atwaters.
It won't be too soon before Obama gets sworn into office. I hope he acts
like former responsible Presidents with selfish, corporate leaders. They
need to pay for all the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the pending pirate
wars in Somalia. The ceo's of the major corporations need to summoned by
the President of the United States and read the riot act in the oval
office. The richest are acting like Roman, profligate, emperors while the
barbarians are at the gates and while millions lose their jobs.
This past Presidential Election broached Willie Horton with the Obama's
minister. Then we got our fill of Ayer guilt by association propaganda.
What turned the election for Obama was millions of Americans quietly voting
for Obama based on the financial melt down that mattered far more in the
end. To have cast a vote for McCain was indeed carrying forth more Bush
failures.
Lotteries and casinos are not the solution to enriching our people,
expoitation of the world's environment and people to produce Pacific Ocean
floating plastic waste dumps and dependentcies on mass consumpton are a
sham degradation of the planet.
There is hope now for fairness again.
Getting a Grip |
Class Warfareby Michael I. Niman |
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Class is the invisible signifier. In the United States, we just don’t speak of it, unless, of course, we’re talking about the ubiquitous “middle class,” with which we’re all supposed to identify. This all changed with “Joe the Plumber from Ohio,” who was actually a man named Sam who worked as a plumber’s helper after moving to Ohio from Arizona. Whatever his name and whoever he was, this iconic grunt was used by the McCain campaign as a Hail Mary play to paint Barack Obama as a Bolshevik, “the redistributor-in-chief.”
Forget the logic, or lack thereof. The story went like this: There was a plumber’s helper in Ohio who dreamed of one day earning over a quarter million dollars per year—making him middle class in John’s McCain’s reference group. This would put him in the Guinness Book of Records as the best-paid plumber’s helper in the world and qualify him for a millionaire’s tax increase under the Obama economic plan. His tax levy would then be used to offset Obama’s plan to lower taxes on lazy poor folks making, for example, $80,000 per year. This was as far as our discussion on social class progressed: Obama wanted to declare “class warfare” on the poor rich folk.
The problem with the McCain campaign’s failed strategy was that American voters seemed cool with that idea. The more John McCain and Sarah Palin called Barack Obama a socialist, the higher his poll numbers went. Maybe the electorate was digging the idea of, as McCain kept putting it, “redistributing the wealth.” Of course there were surreal moments at McCain campaign stops in Appalachia, where crowds of seemingly poor would-be beneficiaries of any such redistribution cheered on the millionaire candidate as he railed against such dreams. But, for the most part, people ate up the notion that some sort of “socialism” was coming.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. It’s no accident that socialism has a bad rap in the US. Our public airwaves are managed and monopolized by private for-profit corporations. Capitalists. Even our token public TV and radio presence are underwritten and heavily influenced by corporate money. More capitalists. Our political campaigns depend on corporate money to pay for advertising—media bought from the private controllers of the public airwaves—paid for by capitalists.
Digging the Donald
This isn’t supposed to bother us because we all buy lottery tickets, leave our money at casinos, watch Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and believe in the American dream. We’re all going to be rich one day, so we need to fight against any nasty redistributor who will hinder our ability to amass untold fortunes and have servants wax our many fine automobiles. We don’t want “class war” because we relate more to Donald Trump than we do to our family, our neighbors, our lovers, and our co-workers.
This popular disdain for class warfare, however, obscures the fact that the richest Americans have been engaging in class warfare against the rest of us for more than a generation. Recent figures show that the richest 300,000 Americans “earned” the same total income as the poorest 150 million put together, with the richest one percent of the population receiving paychecks that average more than 400 times what the poorest 150 million got. This income gap has doubled since Ronald Reagan took office in 1980. Twenty-five years later, in 2005, 90 percent of Americans saw their real wages drop while the richest one percent got “raises” averaging $1.1 million apiece. That same year saw the richest 10 percent of the country earn a percentage of the national income not seen since 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression.
Back in the Roaring Twenties, the richest Americans paid 25 percent of their income in taxes while many looted an unregulated financial market. When the economy finally crashed, their tax rate jumped to 63 percent, which paid for New Deal jobs that preserved capitalism by heading off an uprising of unemployed workers and their hungry and sometimes homeless families. In 1936, with the economy still stumbling and with war clouds on the horizon, the maximum income tax in the US rose to 79 percent. With the US entering World War II, that rate rose to 88 percent. That’s because wars cost money, which is one reason why true fiscal conservatives often oppose them.
Eisenhower’s socialism
The US maximum tax rate hit 94 percent during the war, the dropped to 91 percent after the war ended. And that’s pretty much where it stayed throughout the booming 1950s, under the presidency of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, during the decade when prosperity reached America’s growing “middle class.” The Eisenhower tax rate financed not only the GI Bill, which underwrote America’s first real “ownership society,” but the construction of our now crumbling national infrastructure—things like interstate highways, irrigation and hydroelectric systems. State taxes pounded the rich in tandem, building the nation’s systems of public higher education (which remained free in some places until the mid 1970s), which in turn allowed more Americans to enter the middle class.
All this socialism came at the height of the Cold War, while our “redistributors” railed against Marxism and communism. There’s logic here, however. The best plan to fight socialism was to emulate some of its finest features in the name of capitalism.
The 91 percent tax rate held through the Republican years, then was finally cut back to 77 percent by the “liberal” Kennedy administration and then to 70 percent by the supposedly more liberal Johnson administration. Then came the Republican administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, both of which forwent tax cuts, opting to keep the tax rate at 70 percent. That’s because Republicans used to be fiscal conservatives who believed in balanced budgets. Jimmy Carter held firm to the 70 percent tax rate throughout his presidency as well, but cut the taxes on the poorest Americans from 14 percent to nothing.
Reagan’s Darwinism
Then along came the now iconic Ronald Reagan, who, engaging in what George H. W. Bush called “voodoo economics,” slashed the tax rate for the richest Americans by 20 percent, instituting the largest tax cut in history, with the maximum rate set at 50 percent. The working poor, people earning less than $2,750, got a tax cut of two percent, which amounted to $55 or less, while those earning $5 million or more got a cut of $1 million dollars or more. Poor and middle-class beneficiaries of chump change tax cuts saw themselves nickel and dimed ad nauseam by increasing fees, school tuition, and local taxes, all of which offset the lost income from the upper-crust tax cuts.
Reagan financed his cuts through deficit spending and cuts to programs that benefited the majority of working Americans, such as higher education. As the deficits grew, his administration cut more programs that served poor and middle-class Americans, using the “savings” to service the national debt and offset more tax cuts for the richest Americans.
In 1987 Reagan cut taxes for the richest Americans by 11.5 percent, to 38.5 percent, while raising tax rates on the working poor, with people earning $2,750 seeing their rate increase 36 percent, from 11 percent to 15 percent. Desperately poor workers—those earning a taxable income of between one penny and $1,500—saw their tax rate jump from zero percent, as in nothing, to 11 percent. I can only term this last part of the tax bill of 1986 as meanspirited and economically sadistic, netting insignificant revenue for the government while exasperating the economic stress on an already suffering population.
This was class war. Plain and simple. Class war and unabashed greed. This was those who could afford to live in luxury taking from those who couldn’t afford to live. I can’t see any other way to describe it.
A year later Reagan again cut the taxes for the wealthiest Americans by another 10.5 percent, while raising the taxes on the poorest workers from 11 to 15 percent. They didn’t teach you that in your high school history classes, did they?
This is where taxes stayed until George H. W. Bush raised them to 31 percent in 1991. Bill Clinton brought taxes back near 1987 levels, combating the federal deficit by raising the maximum tax bracket to 39.6 percent—still more than 30 percent less than it was when Reagan first took office. Then came George W. Bush, who cut the top rate to 35 percent while starting a trillion-dollar war.
It never sucked to be rich
Mull over these numbers. Think about the Eisenhower tax structure, whereby the richest Americans paid 91 percent of their income in taxes. Think about the Nixon and Ford administrations, when they paid 70 percent. Even under those tax structures—rates that, if restored, could both rescue Wall Street and underwrite a modern New Deal for Main Street—it didn’t suck to be rich. It really didn’t. CEOs did not quit their jobs to enjoy lower tax rates as taxi drivers. Maybe their private jets were smaller than they would have liked, or perhaps they couldn’t afford that eighth house (sorry, John the Senator), but life didn’t suck, at least not for want of luxuries.
So yes. There is class war in America. We—those of us who work for paychecks—didn’t start it. Nor have we even been fighting it. We’ve just been ducking low in our foxholes and enjoying whatever crumbs came our way. That’s because life hasn’t really sucked for the American middle class, either. You see, while we’ve been taking a hit in the American class war, we’ve been kicking ass in the global class war.
Dreaming of exploitation
My favorite sociologist recently explained this to me. We’re all supposed to aspire to be middle class. It’s the American Dream—dreamt for us before any of us were born, and drummed into our heads by corporate mass culture. We are supposed to aspire not to restore social equality at home, but to exploit social inequality in the global free market. The American dream is an endless supply of cheap booty manufactured by the hungriest, most exploited people on the planet. While our share of the national wealth has been shrinking, our standard of living has been buoyed because we benefit from the nose-dive their share of the global wealth has taken.
These are the people who ultimately pay for the obscene standard of living that the beneficiaries of the Reagan tax cuts enjoy today: the child laborer working 20-hour days assembling garments in one of Mumbai’s zari factories; the 1.5 million girls breathing toxic plastic fumes in the toy-making sweatshops of China’s Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces; the electronic waste sorter knee-deep in silicon dust in Nanyang; Haitians toiling away making Mickey Mouse garments in Port au Prince; and Hondurans picking bananas amid carcinogenic pesticides in Atlántida. This is how Wal-Mart keeps prices low enough for struggling American workers to afford Christmas.
Sure, the American middle class is hurting. And it’s shrinking. But it’s not hurting nearly as badly as the people who stock the stores where middle-class consumers will be shopping for bargains this Christmas season. It’s good that Barack Obama talked about the middle class. But for his presidency to succeed he has to make sure that this is where the conversation begins, not where it ends.
The real conversation has to be about social justice, about making America truly shine once again as a beacon of hope. We need to make healthcare and education accessible and put people to work building a 21st-century, environmentally sustainable infrastructure.
This is more important than buying island getaways for billionaires. We need to restore hope. And to restore hope, we need to restore a tax structure that can rebuild opportunity and sustain hope. We can begin restoring hope by repealing not only the Bush tax cuts for the rich but the Reagan tax codes that ushered in this meanspirited era. The richest Americans, the one percent that have soaked up so much of the world’s wealth, will be fine. And they won’t take their marbles and run off. They’re part of America just like we are. They need to understand that the era of greed is over. We’re all in this together. It’s not about redistributing the wealth. It’s about sharing the wealth and working together to tackle the challenges we face.
Reader Comments
John Q. Blogger 20 Nov 2008, 13:22
Dan R. 20 Nov 2008, 20:34
Wow, where to begin? First of all, I feel very sorry for Dr. Niman's readers. If he is going to present an ideology, he ought to at least properly label it. Hiding the ideological grounding for his points beneath a shallow veneer of emotional appeal is simply disingenuous. He ought to come right out and present his points on an intellectual and explicit level instead of sneaking behind implied agreement from his audience. Anyone who isn’t already on the same page with him will be left out in the cold on this diatribe, as one must have drank the kool-aid to even get in the door. What am I talking about, you ask? I'll explain. Let us start with the emotional appeal and the intellectual holes. Dr Niman glibly attributes the desire of Americans to not exorbitantly tax the rich to some naive belief that each American secretly believes that he or she will someday be fabulously wealthy and therefore would like to keep their potential windfall. This assertion is insulting and revealing. It implies that Dr. Niman believes that Americans cannot operate on the basis of fairness. If I am white and I see a law being proposed that would unfairly treat blacks, would Dr. Niman suggest that my only motivation in opposing it would be the belief that I might someday become a black person? How little must he esteem the moral faculties of the average American? But this is only half of the equation. If Dr. Niman is not disparaging the average American, the question becomes: does he seriously believe that a wealthier person’s money is up for grabs simply because they have more of it? He seems so comfortable with this thought, but it is an issue that ought not to pass unexamined. Such a belief might have an emotional appeal, but it turns to dust in the hands of any intellectual scrutiny whatsoever. Lowering tax rates for the very wealthy constitutes class warfare, he states. How? The only shred of evidence that Dr. Niman offers to justify how moving from letting the wealthy keep a nickel for every dollar they earn to letting them keep 70 cents victimizes the poor is a single cited incident where those "working poor" making $2750 received a tax increase from 11% to 15% in 1987 and those "desperately working poor" making $1500 went from 0% to 11%. Now let us just pause and take a deep breath, because things are about to get a bit sticky in this part. First things first. Although I had originally thought it was a typo, it occurs twice. As a read his point about the "working poor" making $2750, I thought to myself, "Wait a minute, that can't be right." So I looked up the minimum wage in 1987 and my suspicions were confirmed. A worker making minimum wage ($3.35/hr) would earn $2750 in a year only if he or she worked about 20 hours per week, which is part time. My curiosity was piqued at this point. I wondered, "Where did Dr Niman get this number? Why did he pick this number? Why not the wages of a full time worker?" A little poking around revealed that the tax rate was raised to fifteen percent on those making $29,750 or less. Did everyone out there catch that? I said twenty-nine THOUSAND seven hundred and fifty dollars, not twenty seven HUNDRED fifty dollars. Dr. Niman is off by a magnitude of 10, and he makes the same mistake twice in this article. I wonder if he would have caught the mistake in the other direction. Would he complain about the plight of those people whose taxes were raised making $297,500 per year? I feel that this is an extremely important point, lest a bunch of trusting ArtVoice readers hit the streets and start repeating such falsehoods. ArtVoice itself ought to be ashamed for not catching such a glaring error. After all, surely someone working there could remember if $2750 per year was a typical laborer's income. Right? Either way. Pretend that we are still talking about someone making $2750 per year. Isn't Dr. Niman aware that the earned income tax credit existed at the time, and would eliminate nearly all the income tax burden of someone making such a meager income? Please Dr. Niman, there is no need to be shy on such points unless you had an intellectually dishonest interest in omitting facts that prove damning to your central argument. And there you have it. That's it. This is the only shred of evidence cited in this entire screed that makes the point that the rich are engaging in class warfare against the American poor aside from numerous examples of instances where income tax on the rich was lowered. Notice, however, that Dr. Niman never observes that the tax code goes regressive or even flat. This point might serve his argument if it were true. But this leads well into the main complaint I have with this article, namely that it veils an ideology behind emotional draw. The ideology is Marxism. Pure and simple. Now, please. Allow me a moment to air a disclaimer. Marxism has become one of those, terms, like Nazi, that has been bandied about so often as to lose most its meaning and is generally paraded around by poor rhetoricians for the sake of trying to score cheap points through guilt by association. I do not refer to Dr. Niman's ideology as Marxist because I am trying to publicly tar and feather him. No. I do so because he simply assumes tenets of Marxism within his diatribe and attempts to pass them off as commonsense ideas. Dr. Niman makes several references to the notion of labor exploitation overseas, and, as he often does in other articles, defines the success of the rich as gained on the surplus value of the poor. This point has long been discredited. Economic growth is not a zero sum game, and wages are highly correlated with productivity. Any economics professor can tell you these things, but the notions of labor exploitation and surplus value of labor are at the heart of the Marxist ideology. When Dr. Niman appeals endlessly to the collective and uses phrases like "social justice," (what is that? justice for societies?) he seeks to disintegrate the notion of American society as a collection of free individuals seeking the way of life that advances their particular ends, and to, through the power of the state, rebuild America as some monolithic hive working together in a manner similar to the Amish raising a barn, but only on projects he deems acceptable. Most Americans look around and see other Americans. Dr. Niman looks around and sees class. Rich and poor, bourgeois and proletariat. Since the rich make their money on the backs of the working class, they have no real right to it. Therefore, we have a right to take it. Whatever we let them keep, they should be lucky to have. After all, it doesn't such to be rich. Right comrade?
User Loser 21 Nov 2008, 06:27
The Barbarians wore three piece suits, and Rome is burning. And Chimpy is
rubbing another one off on his way out the door. With any luck the United
States is going to wind up owning some Auto Companies.
John Q Blogger 22 Nov 2008, 11:59
Every time I read "drinking the cool aid" I hear Lee Atwater, Carl Rove,
Rush, and local right wing talk radio. Thus I turn the channel because Obama won and he isn't a Marxist or a terrorist. This is what the election results proved resoundingly. Get a grip Herr Dan R. We arn't marching in lock step with you.
beat 22 Nov 2008, 18:18
Here's where you can view the raw tax rate data dating back to 1913: http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/151.html If you have any questions concerning the accuracy of this post, you can chose to believe Dan R or you can believe the official IRS tax rates condensed here into an easy to read table by the nonpartisan conservative Tax Foundation.
Dan R 22 Nov 2008, 21:58
How odd. beat presents the point that there a a conflict between the data
I've cited and the tax rates provided by the foundation. Please, anyone who doubts my analysis, go to the link posted above and view the changes to the tax code between 1984 and 1989, and you will see that by the time the '86 tax act finished its transition, the threshold for the 15% rate was $29,750 (a number, by the way, which is eerily close in form to Dr. Niman's mysterious $2750 figure). Also, my previous claim about the earned income tax credit remains valid, and therefore the tax burden described in Dr. Niman's analysis is exaggerated. Oh, and of course the point also remains that the quantity of households being supported on earnings of $2750 or less is statistically atypical anyway. In 1987, 80% of households received over $10,800 per year. So yeah, check all this stuff out for yourself. Here are the census data: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/h01AR.html P.S. Scroll down to the inflation adjusted income section below the current dollars section and watch the lowest quintile threshold over the last 40 or so years. Real income for the poorest fifth has risen over 20%. Class warfare, what a joke.
beat 22 Nov 2008, 22:43
Recheck the census numbers. First off they are for a 40 year period going
up then falling during the Bush years. Second, they are for household
income -- not per capita income. How many workers per household 40 years
ago vs. today? Hmmm. Now. look at the tax charts for single workers. Someone with a taxable income of $2,750 (taxable after factoring standard ei deductions on f/t wages inc. agr and res scales) was taxed at a rate of 11 percent in 1986 (income between 2,480 and 3,670) and 15 percent in 1987 (income range of $1,800 to $16,800). At the end of the '86 transition the 15 percent rate kicked in at 0 taxable income -- not $29,750 as Dan argues. Check the numbers from the article. The 29k number comes from the blog poster, not frm the AV article. The numbers in the article are bulletproof. It's a pretty simple argument. Not rocket science. Now, about the argument of class war.. . No more time for Dan. Bye.
rastamick 23 Nov 2008, 10:35
John Q. I am fascinated with the way corporate America has engaged so many
dupes to fight its cause against unions for them. Whenever I hear some
asshole making under 100K bad mouthing unions I have to ask if it's
anything more than simple jealousy. Not belonging to unions is what pisses
most of these people off. If anyone wants to see this dynamic in full
blossom, Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas diagrams the way
right wing corporate America has the very people whose jobs they've
outsourced, communities they've destroyed and health care denied, demanding
more power for -- for corporate America of course ! So your job get
outsourced to Mexico and you run out to vote for the very political camp
whose policies sent it there while blabbering about unions, immigrants,
abortion and gays. Bush pissed off so many people this last time even Rove
couldn't et him out of the mess he left.
John Q. Blogger 23 Nov 2008, 11:16
Yesterdays Willie Horton is this weeks union bashing for those who devide
and conquor and fly in private jets. Let's talk about the mysto hedge funders before we tar and feather union workers. Bring back the tax rates the rich used to pay during the time of Ike. That unselfish tax will return economic stability. How much money is hidden in offshore banks? Billions...
Dan R. 23 Nov 2008, 15:12
A few quick observations. Falling real wages during the Bush years is
irrelevant to the point I'm making. Wee can speculate on why real wages
feel then, but I'm only arguing that the general trend over the span of
time encompassed by Dr. Niman's article shows an increase in real income
amidst the lowest fifth of earners. This flies in the face of the larger
accusation he is making, namely that there has been a deliberate attempt on
the part of the rich to stifle this growth. Perhaps the point will be made
that the poor would have tripled their income without the onslaught of
class warfare brought on by the rich, but this is speculative and Dr. Niman
makes little, if any, effort to substantiate that point. He even makes claims that are demonstrably false. He claims "twenty-five years later, in 2005, 90 percent of Americans saw their real wages drop" but if you refer back to my cited link of income earnings per American household you will see real income rise for all quintiles over the 25 years to which Dr. Niman is referring. Now your point, beat, is that I use household income instead of per capita income, which, with the addition of a "hmmm," you imply is suspect. Allow me to show that using household income, in fact, understates my claim. The census numbers for per capita earnings over the same stretch of time imply that earnings per capita have doubled. ( www (dot) census (dot) gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/p01AR (dot) html ) But I don't like this number as it doesn't show stratification across different earning groups. This is why I prefer to use the aforementioned "household earning" data. Households are the superior economic metric because they take into account dependents, which are an important factor in earnings. On your point about the variation of workers within the American household, the implication is obvious: more women working in the family yields a lower "per worker" compensation package over the last however-many years and hence my numbers are distorted by the presence of more women in the work force. A few observations. First, over the last 40 years the average household has went from 3.25 people to 2.5. This change alone skews my figures so that the "per capita" income of individuals within households has risen higher than the amount I had formerly stated. No matter, your objection still stands. Women entering the work force would have a depressing effect on wages, and hence gains per worker might be a tad more muted than I might have suggested. However I think if you are smart enough to raise this issue, you ought to be smart enough to probe into it a little deeper. First of all, going back to Dr. Niman's claim that real wages have decreased over the last 25 years, taking into account the increase in women employment participation (it went from 49% to 55% of households over the last 20 years) a subsequent breakdown shows that women's wages have increased over the last 25 years, with men's wages climbing slowly. ( www (dot) census (dot) gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/p08AR (dot) html ) But let's understand that these figures are understated as well. That real wages have increased over the last 40 years along with the increase in the percentage of women working over the last 40 years is a testament to the degree to which workers wages have been increasing generally over time. Consider the fact that women have started entering the workforce in great numbers recently and this fact has created a tremendous surplus in the labor supply. Given a static quantity demanded we would expect to see a price drop in wages paid, yet workers have still seen their real income grow. beat, I think it is important that we aren't talking past one another on this issue. So let me clear what the main point is, so we can get back the the heart of this issue. Dr. Niman is taking an earner making $2750 as someone who serves to represent the lower class. I am arguing that this is an unfair claim, as this does not represent a sizable section of the population. Beyond this, he ignores the EITC wich would eliminate nearly off of the tax burden of someone making $2750 per year, which makes Dr. Niman's claims alarmist and deceiving. I am willing to wager that those crafting the new simplified tax code recognized that those earning quantities as low as those cited by Dr. Niman would be buffered from the effects of increased taxation by the Earned Income Tax Credit. And to be clear, I never claimed that the 15% started at $29,750. I claimed that $29,750 was the threshold of the 15%, meaning the highest end. The only reason I even mentioned $29,750 was that it is the only number that is even close to Dr. Niman's $2750 in form. As I mentioned originally, at minimum wage (a wage, by the by, that is overwhemingly earned by individuals under 25 and non-heads of households) a worker would have to work only 20 hours per week to earn such a meager income. The question is clearly: why are we interested in discussing the income of the lowest possible earner who keeps half-time hours? If Dr. Niman wanted to play the worlds smallest violin by picking an atypically low income, why didn't he talk about workers making $560 per year, or $143 per year? Of course if anyone had taken the time to read what I had written in the first place, they'd see that I am simply repeating myself at this point. My objection was always that $2750 is an absurd number and, while I've speculated on where Dr. Niman got it, the original point remains, it is too low for the purposes of sober analysis and the tax rate that Dr. Niman applies to it is not representative of the actual rate payed by earners at that wage anyway. But whatever, I'd hate to let all these facts get in the way of a hardheaded desire to uphold an ideology.
Connie 25 Nov 2008, 14:42
I thought this article was very well written, I enjoyed reading it. It made
a lot of sense to me. Great Job.
No More Class Warfare Please
15 Mar 2009, 12:16
Please read this article on the Individual Income Tax system and Class
Warfare for an interesting fact based analysis of the fairness in the U.S.
Individual Income tax system: NoMoreClassWarfare.com Leave a Comment:
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