Anyone remember 90% income tax?

Richard Wolff, author of Capitalism Hits the Fan, was a guest on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! last Thursday. Below is a very telling quote from the interview. I highly recommend you seeing the whole thing. It's in transcript form, plus there is an video of the interview as well:

The most amazing thing to me is that we talk about fixing a government budget that’s in trouble, and we don’t talk about the revenue side in a serious way. That is an amazing thing. If you look at what happened to the American budget over the last 20 or 30 years, the culprit is obvious. We have dropped corporate taxes. We have dropped taxes on the rich.


Let me give you a couple of examples to drive it home. If you go back to the 1940s, here’s what you discover, that the federal government got 50 percent more money year after year from corporations than it did from individuals. For every dollar that individuals paid in income tax, corporations paid $1.50. If you compare that to today, here are the numbers. For every dollar that individuals pay to the federal government, corporations pay 25 cents. That is a dramatic change that has no parallel in the rest of our tax code.


Another example. In the ’50s and ’60s, the top bracket, the income tax rate that the richest people had to pay, for example the ’50s and ’60s, it was 91 percent. Every dollar over $100,000 that a rich person earned, he or she had to give 91 cents to Washington and kept nine. And the rationale for that was, we had come out of a Great Depression, we had come out of a great war, we had to rebuild our society, we were in a crisis, and the rich had the capacity to pay, and they ought to pay. Republicans voted for that. Democrats voted for that. What do we have today? Ninety-one percent? No. The top rate for rich people today, 35 percent. Again, nobody else in this society—not the middle, not the poor—have had anything like this consequence.

So, over the last 30, 40 years, a shift from corporate income tax to individual income tax, and among individuals, from the rich to everybody else. To deal with our budget problem without discussing that, putting that front and center, making that part of the story, that’s just a service to the rich and the corporations. There’s no polite way to say otherwise. And there’s something shameful about keeping all of that away and focusing on how we’re going to take out our budget problems by cutting back benefits to old people, to people who have medical needs. There’s something bizarre, and the world sees that, in a society that has done what it has done and now proposes to fix it on the backs of the majority."

As for the current "crisis," it's very simple. At the end of it, the rich will be richer and the poor will be poorer.

What we're looking at is Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine tactics: Create a crisis, panic the people through media ("Stock Markets Tremble As Debt Ceiling Debate Rages In Washington" - headline in HuffPO), then push through the agenda (cut SS/Medicare/Medicaid, etc.) saying, "We HAD to do it to save the planet."

Have we ever had a moment's peace?

I really like what Patrick Smith, who writes the Ask the Pilot blog over at Salon:

I hate sounding conspiratorial, but it often feels as if these warnings serve little purpose beyond keeping the American populace frightened and easily manipulated, lest it regain consciousness and dare interrupt the torrent of cash pouring into the coffers of the security-industrial complex.

Personally, I don't think this idea is that conspiratorial. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is a great source to explain how this works.

For decades now our politicians have been utilizing the "Fear Factor" to push their agendas. I remember spending two thirds of my life under the umbrella of "The Cold War." Any day the Russians were going to drop their atomic bombs on us. We just HAD to HAVE a "mutually assured destruction" scenario to maintain the balance and thwart those bad guys. Thus, our Military/Industrial Complex (MIC) churned away accumulating massive profits as we constantly built up our weaponry.

Of course, once that threat was finally gone(Whew!), we felt relieved that it was over, and we could have peace across the land. Wrong!

Obviously, for the MIC, a new threat had to be found to keep the massive profits humming right along. Welcome to the nebulous, shadowy world of "Terrorism"! Now this is perfect! Its can never be fully extinguished. Someone, somewhere in the world will be hating the U.S. at any time. Voila! We now have a never-ending story for which the MIC can forever profit. Good one!

So here we are. The bottom line is what Mr. Smith says:

Nobody will admit what's obvious...that we cannot protect ourselves from every conceivable threat.

However, that is the sacrifice we must make if we are to be an open and free country.

You ain't in it!

George Carlin sums it up quite nicely (NSFW):

Solving our debt, naive though it may be

I'm am going to make this short and sweet. Excuse my naivete, but this is how it should work. If we're going to have income tax, it should be on a sliding scale. The lowest wage earners get the lowest tax rates, the highest wage earners get the highest tax rates (and I'm talking about the 90% range as it was in the 50s). The smallest businesses get the smallest tax rates, the biggest corporations get the highest tax rates (and I'm talking about corporations such as GE that didn't pay any taxes in 2010. In fact, it got a $3.2 billion tax refund!). No loopholes whatsoever.

We have a choice. As Chalmers Johnson says in his Blowback trilogy, we can be either an empire or a democracy, but not both. Therefore, we should cut defense spending by at least half, more likely three quarters and eliminate the majority of our bases around the world and in the United States.

According to the Defense Department's annual "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and HAS another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories.

We should quit invading and bombing countries that do not have any imminent threat against us.

We should not even THINK of cutting entitlements. I agree that we continue to try eliminating waste in the systems. That's always a good thing. However, cutting benefits is outright wrong. We are not animals who throw the sick and infirm out of the pack.

Any Senator or Representative who disagrees with this is not representing our country honestly and should be voted out of office. Of course, this goes back to my "people are not smart" opinion.

But this is how it should be.

MSNBC's "Moral Outrage"

So MSNBC suspended Mark Halperin last week for calling President Obama a "d*ck." The exact quote: “I thought he was a kind of a d*ck yesterday...”

Now I'm not going to get into the discussion that Halperin was goaded, that everyone on the set acted like a bunch of high school kids who were giggling over at a one-cheek sneak, or perhaps the Morning Joe new producer didn't know how to work the 7-second delay. Instead I want to address MSNBC's statement after the corporation suspended Halperin indefinitely;

Mark Halperin's comments this morning were completely inappropriate and unacceptable. We apologize to the President, The White House and all of our viewers. We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no place on our air. Therefore, Mark will be suspended indefinitely from his role as an analyst.

Inappropriate and unacceptable? Yet it was totally appropriate and acceptable to fire Phil Donahue for his anti-war beliefs leading up to the Iraq War? A war, I might add, that cost hundreds thousands of deaths and injuries, displaced millions more and sent the country of Iraq back into the Stone Age.

Here is a part of the memo which stated that Donahue was a

"difficult public face for NBC in a time of war......He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives."

Instead of canning him, how about having THAT kind of "high level of discourse"? Nope. Instead, MSNBC chose to gag any kind of discussion that opposed the war.

So calling the President of the United States a "d*ck" is inappropriate and unacceptable for MSNBC, but jumping on the War Wagon leading to the ruination of millions of lives is perfectly acceptable and appropriate.

"High level of discourse," indeed.