Don't We Have the Right To Earn and Keep Unlimited Wealth?

The Greatest Thing About America is the Right To Earn (and Keep)
Unlimited Wealth.  (Yes, sarcasm.)

From "Achieve Unlimited Wealth"

Posted by Facebook friend John L:

I read recently that the tax rate on the wealthiest Americans in the 1950's was 75%. Interesting. I didn't know that we were a Socialist country back then. In grade school at about that time they taught us we had the strongest and fastest growing economy in the world. Just won WWII, too. Hard to imagine we could do all that without any billionaires in our population.

Now any real patriot will tell you that the greatest thing about America is the right of any citizen to earn unlimited wealth. It's pretty obvious that if a person can earn a billion or so in this economy he, or she, really deserves to keep it. Imagine anyone thinking that such wealth should be shared. How unAmerican! Our best collective hope is that the billionaires have a good New Year so that some of the profits will finally start to trickle down to those of us relegated to the lower 99%. 

When you're doing that last minute shopping this Christmas, please don't forget the billionaires.

My reply, dripping with sarcasm at two in the morning: 

Of course, John! Those guys earned every dime! They "worked hard", "made good choices", and "planned ahead". And the rest of us are just low-life slackers. 

We could all be billionaires living off the slave labor of the workers who died in the fire of the garment building in Bangladesh. Oops.. sorry, my fingers went a little wild there... I meant to say that we all could have been billionaires if only we had "worked hard", "made good choices", and "planned ahead"...  like the Walmart kids .... Oops.. sorry again, well, those fingers.. It's just late at night and they just take off on their own... That's right, the Walmart executives and the Walmart kids claim they had nothing to do with that fire in Bangladesh! Somebody was scamming them! They only want their slaves to work in SAFE buildings... Oops, not slaves, actually; they make $38 a month. You can't be a slave if they PAY you $38 bucks a month.

And the Walmart kids say that if only those workers had just "worked hard", "made good choices", and "planned ahead", well, they started working for $38 bucks a month just like the Bangladeshi workers... Oops... I have to stop this; my fingers are just not getting things right. No, the Walmart kids did not start working for $38/month: The Walmart kids got their money from Daddy! Well, that's a different story then. DADDY was the one who "worked hard", "planned ahead", and "made good choices", so of course, it's perfectly O.K. for the kiddos to drive around drunk... Oh, sorry, it was only Alice who drove around drunk, not the other ones, and she has been such a wonderful philanthropist! I wonder how much she "donated" to the family of the woman she killed back in the early 90's.

But that fire was in Bangladesh! If you have the misfortune of being born in Bangladesh, you are royally screwed.  The billionaires know that and they don't care.  This is the US!  If only people here in this wonderful land of opportunity would "plan ahead", "make good choices", and "work hard" for $38 a month right here in the good old US of A, then we wouldn't have all of these unemployed people and factories relocating overseas... and those Bangladesh workers would not have died in that fire! 

If only the governments and the workers themselves hadn't insisted on safer working conditions, fire and building codes, well, then those 112 garment workers could have been working... and could have died right here and not in Bangladesh... just the way they did back in 1911 in the Triangle factory fire.

Lower tax rates help the economy?

The rich guys and their Republican friends keep trying to tell us that lower tax rates, particularly lower tax rates paid by the richest among us are going to help the economy!  Yeah, just the way that such low tax rates helped the economy in 1928 and now, since the early 2000's.  We've all seen how many millions of jobs those tax cuts have created!  The only thing that correlates with low tax rates is the recessions that follow a few years of tax cuts for the rich.  It happened in the late 1920's and it happened just a few years ago.  

I don't know what that Grover Norquist character smokes, but his knowledge of basic economics and basic history is sadly lacking.

Low taxes lead to rampant income inequality, bubbles, and ultimate recessions... and not that many jobs.