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 interest, performance-related
pay, stock 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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