Tuesday, October 16, 2012

The Cost of Deregulation (clue: we don't have a spending problem)!!

Common Dreams posted this easy to understand list of reasons why the wealthy elite are going for all the apples this election season. I can't answer why voters don't get it, or aren't just a little curious why the rich are spending so much to elect their candidates. Low information conservative taxpayer must think it's their lot in life to pay higher taxes than those millionaire/billionaire business types:
Five Ways Deregulation Is Ripping America Apart:
1. The tax loss from one scheming businessman could have paid the salaries of 30,000 nurses. The lack of regulation allowed hedge fund manager John Paulson to conspire with Goldman Sachs in a plan to create packages of risky subprime mortgages and then short-sell (bet against) the sure-to-fail financial instruments. The ploy paid him $3.7 billion. Deregulation in the tax code allowed him to call his income "carried interest," which is taxed at a 15% rate. More deregulation allowed him to defer his profits indefinitely. The lost taxes of $1.3 billion (35% of $3.7 billion) could have paid the salaries of 30,000 LPNs, 10 nurses for every county in the United States. Instead, one clever businessman took it all.

2. The 10 richest Americans made enough money last year to feed every hungry person on earth for a year … Didn't the rich people EARN their money through hard work and innovation? No, they didn't. 60 percent of the income for the Forbes 400 came from capital gains. A lot more of it came from other forms of deregulatory subterfuge. CEOs have used carried interestperformance-related paystock options, anddeferred compensation to make off with extra money that is only available to the beneficiaries of diminishing government.

3.  Avoided taxes could pay off the deficit -- or pay for 20 million jobs … Corporations doubled their profits to $1.9 trillion in less than ten years, but since 2008 they've reduced their tax payments from a twenty-year average of 22% to just 10%. That's a dropoff of over $225 billion. The Tax Justice Network estimated that up to $32 trillion is hidden offshore, untaxed. Add it up, and it's almost the size of the U.S. deficit. 
Oh yes, there's more:
4.  An unregulated trading industry costs us another $350 billion a year in taxes. For a $10.00 purchase of children's clothing, mothers pay up to a dollar in sales tax. For a $10.00 purchase of financial instruments, investors refuse to pay one cent.

5.  Redistribution is destroying entrepreneurship in America Entrepreneurs come from risk-takers in the middle class. But with financial deregulation causing a redistribution toward the top, the money has been taken out of the hands of middle-class innovators, resulting in a 53% decrease in the number of entrepreneurs per capita since 1977.

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