Forum Post: Dismantling the Lobbying system in D.C. : Grover Norquist is the Centerpiece today
Posted 13 years ago on Nov. 20, 2011, 9:11 p.m. EST by HolyCrapNinjas
(1)
from Philadelphia, PA
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7389006n&tag=contentBody;storyMediaBox
For those who don't know or didn't watch tonite. I believe this is something you'll find very interesting. It puts a face to the lobbyist corruption in Washington and it brings the first cameras ever into the Republican think tank meeting. It confirms what we all suspected about Washington, or at least the republican party. It's nice to know where to start if the need to dismantle the lobbying system became a priority.
Thanks for the link. It was a revelation on the machinations that are holding Republicans in gridlock. For anyone who thinks that we should not raise taxes on the rich or that this would be a "redistribution of wealth," think again:
"Republicans seek to extend the Bush tax cuts indefinitely by preaching their gospel that adding more taxes to the rich is an injust form of taking and of redistributing wealth. In face of rising pressures against their tax ideology, conservative Republicans like to point out that, in the United States, the top twenty percent of the populace already pay eighty percent of the taxes!
"Sean Hannity recently argued against an Occupy Wall Street member by quoting a statistic that the top one percent of the population pay forty percent of all the income taxes gathered. In other words, the rich already pay more than their fair share, so keep your hands off their money! Pity the benevolent billionaires who are already forced to be generous to where it is nearly killing their hopes of a seventh mansion and a replacement for their private jet this year.
"The notion that the rich are already paying more than their fair share of taxes has been an ALMOST winning argument for extending rich tax cuts, but dig deeper into the numbers to find the truth (if you are brave enough to accept the truth when it flies in the face of your ideology): When you do, you find that the top one percent of the U.S. populace holds more than fifty percent of the nation’s private wealth. In other words, they make more money than all of the bottom 99% combined! So, if they are only paying forty percent of the income taxes, they are grossly UNDERpaying.
"This is WHY we actually do have a one percent and a ninety-nine percent as talked about by the Occupy Wall Street movement. We have a one percent that makes more than half of all the money made by individuals in the U.S. It also turns out that the top twenty percent make eight-five percent of the nation’s wealth. So, even the top twenty percent are clearly underpaying, as they should be paying a full eighty-five percent of the nation’s individual taxes just to be equal with the burden the middle class is shouldering. (See this study by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely.)
"What sounded like a great argument from Hannity, Limbaugh and other conservatives turns out to be nothing but a half truth that really illustrates just how bad things are when you dig out the other half of the truth. While the rich have higher nominal tax brackets that help them appear to be paying progressively more, they also have vast tax breaks, exclusions, write-offs, credits — whatever you want to call them — that bring their final tax bill lower as a percentage of their income than people in the middle class. The full truth is so bad that people hearing the Hannity argument do not stop to think that maybe the top one percent are paying forty percent of the income tax because they are making more than fifty percent of all the income!
"Because the full truth is almost inconceivable, the half-truth argument has been winning. That the disparity in income is THAT bad just doesn’t occur to anyone — not even the average person in the Occupy Wall Street crowd. So, when Hannity makes the statement that the top one percent pay forty percent of the income taxes, it does not occur to them that he has really just told them how much the top one percent are currently underpaying because of the Bush tax breaks.
"With one percent of the populace making more than the other ninety-nine percent combined, we have a more inequitable distribution of wealth today than was seen even in the days of the infamous robber barons that preceded the Great Depression. As if that is not bad enough, today’s robber barons also get an inequitable break in their taxes because of the Bush tax cuts. Just to make the tax burden equitable, the taxes of the rich should be raised another five percentage points for those in the top twenty percent so that those who make eighty-five percent of the wealth also pay eighty-five percent of the taxes; and the taxes on the top one percent need to go up more than ten percentage points just to make their taxes EQUAL to what the middle-class taxpayer is doling out."
(excerpted from my article on http://thegreatrecession.info/blog/2011/11/bushwhacked-by-the-bush-tax-cuts-for-the-rich/ )
--Knave Dave
Thanks for the link. Grover Norquist openly admitted that he determines which Republicans get elected and which are defeated. Not the voters, but Grover Norquist!
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