They will incorporate income inequality into their campaign mantra. Perhaps they should shell out some personal wealth for the 99%.

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Michael Barone

November 28, 2011 12:00 A.M.
Taxing high earners won’t make the poor less poor.

What should be done about income inequality? That basic question underlies the arguments hashed out in the supercommittee and promises to be a central issue in the presidential campaign.

Supercommittee Democrats argue that income inequality has been increasing and can be at least partially reversed by higher tax rates on high earners. They refused to agree on any deal that didn’t include such tax increases.

Supercommittee Republicans offered a plan to eliminate tax preferences and reduce tax rates, as in the 1986 bipartisan tax reform. They argued that high tax rates would squelch economic growth.

They didn’t make the case that their proposals would also address income inequality. But House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, in a 17-page paper based largely on a Congressional Budget Office analysis of income trends between 1979 and 2007, has done so.

Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, makes the point that the government redistributes income not only through taxes but also through transfer payments, including Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, and unemployment benefits. The CBO study helpfully measures income, adjusted for inflation, after taxes and after such transfer payments.

Many may find the results of the CBO study surprising. It turns out, Ryan reports, that federal income taxes (including the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit) actually decreased income inequality slightly between 1979 and 2007, while the federal payroll taxes that supposedly fund Social Security and Medicare slightly increased income inequality. That’s despite the fact that income tax rates are lower than in 1979 and payroll taxes higher.

Perhaps even more surprising, federal transfer payments have done much more to increase income inequality than federal taxes. That’s because, in Ryan’s words, “the distribution of government transfers has moved away from households in the lower part of the income scale. For instance, in 1979, households in the lowest income quintile received 54 percent of all transfer payments. In 2007, those households received just 36 percent of transfers.”

In effect, Social Security and Medicare have been transferring money from low-earning young people (who don’t pay income taxes but are hit by the payroll tax) to increasingly affluent old people.

The Democrats, perhaps following the polls and focus groups, have been protecting these entitlement programs, which have done more to increase income inequality than the Reagan and Bush tax cuts put together.

Ryan makes three more points that may strike many as counterintuitive.

First, reductions in some transfer payments haven’t hurt the living standards of most low-earners. The prime example is the welfare reform act of 1996, which reduced transfers to single mothers but induced many of them to find jobs that left them better off economically and, probably, psychologically.

Second, Americans aren’t trapped in one segment of the income distribution. A Tax Journal analysis of individual income-tax returns found that 58 percent of those in the lowest income quintile in 1996 had moved to a higher income segment by 2005. This comports with common experience. We move up and down the income scale in the course of a lifetime.

Read the rest here.

Some woman is claiming she had a 13 year long affair with Cain. ROFL.

999

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXiRc3akxRI

$7.77 trillion was committed and the banks netted $13 billion in profits…

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Saving capitalism form crony capitalism

Congress should tax themselves into oblivion.

FULL STORY HERE 

Banks, analysts, and rating agencies are sounding the alarms; perhaps trying to get the EU in gear.

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The yellow brick road to printing has been found. Start your engines!

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“Defense minister Vahidi tells army volunteers ‘Israel has to be punished for what it has done to the Muslims in Palestine’

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Changing existing rules and mandates may take too long so the leaders of the EU are “planning more drastic means.”

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While many of you will question source, motive, etc; I think it behooves us all to look at current events from a different angle.

Gangsterism

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWu3mP2S3q0 450 300]

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmO7W8iC5LE 450 300]

There actually is an agenda; that seems to not have gotten out to the public. This agenda likely caused the federal government to advise and participate in how states and  cities can deal with protests.

A funny thing occurred to me; if the media is “liberal” then why did this message not get out there ? Could it be that the “liberal” media is controlled by a handful of conservative corporations that dictate the news via opinion and teleprompters ?

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All politicians should only be allowed to invest via a blind trust PERIOD!

Keep on protesting…..and don’t let your cause become a new voter base for either side of the aisle. Demand term limits.

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Merekl and Sarkozy have recently announced that they agree to disagree in private. They stated they will not talk in public about their disagreements, but want to change the EU treaties in order to instill confidence.

“We need to correct the fundamental floors in the construction of the eurozone. The situation is not easy — trust has been lost. And that is the reason why we, Germany and France, want to work on treaty change for the eurozone.”

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