You are the victim unless you are mega rich. Seriously, the Wall Street scum that invent fraudulent derivatives and Credit Default Swaps. That put their CEOs into offices inside of our government to water down regulations and push through lobbyist to get their companies advantages over consumers. Scummy loan offices that gave mortgages to people who couldn't afford them. Than those hedge fund managers who bundled those junk loans up and traded them. Yet, you sit and allow the Republicans to give you the sob story that by taxing the rich we are redistributing their wealth. While we can't even pay our bills. Don't give me the lie that Obama put us in this position. Did he invent SS, Medicaid, or how about Medicare? Did Obama manipulate and lie about intelligence to get us in IRaq? (watch the movie FAir Game if you don't know about this). Is Obama a CEO of a company can he hire anyone? How are the rich doing? Now lets compare that to the nation. If you are rich go sit on your money and enjoy life. I'm pretty sure that you are old so thanks for bankrupting my generation. And I hope they cut your social security check off first.
Rants like this, especially when you know nothing about your target, completely undermines you credibility. I lost my job due to the recession 3 years ago, and lost a mid-6-figure income in the process. I have now taken a job that amounts to a 35% paycut or so, after close to 2 years uemployed during which we lost our house to a short sale and had one vehicle repossessed and sold another at a loss just so we didn't have the payment any more. We have been living paycheck to paycheck for 3 years now and our savings and retirement are gone. But I refuse to be the victim. It is an attitude as much as anything else.
The "rich" you mentioned are a very small part of the complete compelement of people in this country that could be called "rich", yet you group them all together. Of course we can always say that I sure wish those rich people weren't rich or that they were forced to share their wealth. Of course, stifle it enough and then we wouldn't have Walmart (single largest employer in the country), or any of the other mega-companies that provide jobs. Jobs are not made out of thin air, no matter what political pundit you choose to listen to might say. They come from the work of others, building companies that last and are big enough to offer employment. It drives our standard of living. I agree 100% with your assessment of the Wall Street issues. That bailout was a farce of epic proportions. And for those few individuals they should have reaped what they sowed. But that does not mean that everyone who is a millionaire has some hidden agenda to rape pillage and plunder all us good old "regular" folks, who of course have no faults, always tell the truth, and have never lied or cheated on anything in our lives, not like those no-good, dirty rotten yellow-bellied varmint "rich folk".
Go check out how well Russia is doing after they finally dropped communism or go look at the 3rd world environment most chinese live in, in the strongest economy in the world...and remember, they do not really have the "super rich" like we do, their political environment would not tolerate it. Russia does now, but their economy is highly stifled, largely because it wasn't built on any lasting foundation. No this does not mean that an economy must have super-rich individuals to survive, but it does mean that an economy that will drive a high standard of living has enough freedom that those with enough ingenuity who are willing to put in the work can get rewarded at as high a level as they can achieve.
Without eliminating high earners, you will really never close the gap between "rich" and "poor", not without a wholesale change to the socio/political/economic structure America operates under. So my hyperbolic retort in my previous post is accurate, in a way.
Think about this. Do what it takes to drive the super-rich to not be super-rich any more, or to take much larger chunks of their income for "closing the gap" and how long is it until they move out of the country or otherwise work their incomes so they stop paying taxes altogether. You do realize the "super-rich" pay the vast lion's share of the tax dollars collected, right? Could we really afford to take the 65% of the total tax dollars they pay (depending on the income level at which you choose to draw the line) and distribute that load among the middle-class and poor, who right now pay about 35% of the total taxes collected?
Remember, fair and equitable is in the eye of the beholder. If you work harder than someone else and make the right connections and the right moves and build up some wealth, how is it equitable to cut that down to give it to the guy who decides welfare is enough for him and refuses to go find a job (yeah that is anecdotal, but I met more than a few of them while I was unemployed, and a decade and a half ago this was an epidemic-level problem in England, so don't think it means that doesn't happen).
This is a far bigger issue than simply "ugh...rich man bad...poor man good...ugh...give money to poor man, make rich man not so rich...everyone happy".
But I don't want to draw you into any discussion that may make you rethink your pat party-line rhetoric. Who wants intelligent discourse when we can just scream slogans that we don't really understand louder than the other guy?
By the way, I never mentioned Obama. You created that straw man out of your imagination somehow. This just shows how badly you want to rail against "the bad guys" and will equate anyone who disagrees with you to those bad guys. Pretty much party-line SOP.
Now let's see if you notice that I never mentioned a politcal party either.
