if the top 1% cover 50% of the taxes, dont you think they should have a say what happens... just sayin.
You honestly believe that the bottom 99% of the country has 50% or more of the control of the government in their hands?
Never said that.
Than what is your point? If the top 1% control 80% of the government and they pay 50% of the taxes, they're getting a damn good deal for their money -- a much WORSE deal than the bottom 99%. That's not being "punished for succeeding" -- that's being punished for not being in the top 1%.
Honestly, I dont believe you should be punished for succeeding. If you do good, you should get to keep your money imo. Doing good shouldn't mean that you have to get rid of more.
And that's the attitude that pisses me off more than anything else. Paying taxes isn't "getting rid" of anything. Taxes are how we pay for infrastructure. They're how we pay for schools. They're how we pay for our defense. Paying taxes isn't money disappearing, it's an INVESTMENT in your country's future.
The conservative attitude toward taxes is what has led the United States into the modern era of crippled schools and horrible education scores worldwide, of crumbling infrastructure that is increasing transportation costs and thus the costs of almost all goods, of empty Social Security bank accounts and Medicare benefits that don't keep up with inflation. In the post-WWII era, people in this country paid taxes gladly and often, and for decades, while that attitude held, America was the best country in the world in most measurable respects. We were in the top 5 in education, in GDP, in happiness, and in technological advancement.
Then, in the 80s, conservatism took over -- on BOTH sides of the political fence -- and now, where are we? The spin doctors have taught us all that the government is so inefficient that they don't deserve our money, and in turn everything that the government gave us -- the ridiculous prosperity and wealth of the 60s and 70s -- is shot to hell. The richest 1% of the country control 90% of the wealth, and they spend most of their time and effort driving to increase that already-stupidly-imbalanced proportion to 99.9%.
They don't invest money in America; even the businesses they're supposed to be 'trickling down' through (in what Bush Sr. mockingly called "voodoo economics") are trickling into Mexico, India, China, and basically anywhere that's not America. They have not only managed to steal, through clever financial tricks, most of the wealth of the bottom 99%, but they've managed to make us feel like we're the losers because we don't have any way to fight back. They control the government, they control the media, and through those two, they control the narrative.
The truth is far simpler and more chilling: rich people sell us the story of "successful people shouldn't be punished for their success", while at the same time, 85% of those people
never earned their own money. They either inherited it, or the they literally gambled and got lucky, or in many recent circumstances, they got it by defrauding people on a massive scale. Google "synthetic collateralized debt obligation" sometime.
These lazy criminals then use their money to paint themselves as hardworking victims when nothing could possibly be further from the truth, and we fall for it because no one in the media or in our country's leadership has the balls to say any different.
The fact is very straightforward: once you have enough money to pay for your everyday life and all of the stuff you want -- something that less than 60% of the country currently has -- you SHOULD pay more taxes than the people who don't have the means to pay for their own food and heat. The fact that the top 1% ONLY pay 50% of the taxes is the crime here. Straight up.
