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Meanwhile, a Study by University of Chicago professors Steven Kaplan and Joshua Rauh points out that Inside the top 1 percent the disparity continues between overpaid CEOs, on the one hand, and Wall Street financiers --" hedge-fund managers, private-equity managers (think Mitt Romney), and investment bankers --" on the other. Â More than twice as many Wall Street financiers are in the top half of 1 percent of earners as are CEOs. Â The 25 highest paid hedge fund managers are paid more than the CEOs of Standard and Poor's 500 largest companies combined. Â Over decades, CEO pay has grown to be outrageous, especially when compared to workers' pay. Â So, how far beyond outrageous is hedge and private-equity pay, where several of these fund managers/gamblers are taking home more than a billion dollars a year.
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Do you think a well-researched lawyer could make a strong case that our well-lobbied tax policy has been redistributing income, wealth, and opportunity upward for a long time?
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America's best paid, who escape taxes making 100's of millions and more, are those who set up the incomprehensible-to-most Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and Collateralized Debt Obligations, (and CDO) etc. Â They should have been taxed just on principle, for doing much less honest work than Philip Stern's typist, my mom the retail clerk, or James the mechanic. Â But, unfortunately, most Americans, like a frog being cooked in a warming kettle, have not paid attention to how long and drastically Uncle Sam has been snookered into allowing income, wealth, and consequently opportunities for growth to be redistributed to the obscenely comfortable at the itty-bitty top.
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Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi offers a response to my attorney friend who probably believed Robin Hood should have only been allowed some gripping and maybe a few arrows for shooting sparrows, but not legislation to help his serfs and farmers build peaceful villages, schools, shops, and decent lives. Â
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By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. Â There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Â Literacy is power. Â In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. Â By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system -- transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.
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For generations the super rich have been accumulating uber-riches without working harder or relying on stellar character. Â They link their unearned increased income, capital gains, and dividends with inherited and accumulated wealth and connections to fill the halls of Congress with well-paid lobbyists, Â Â who write laws that benefit them. Â This allows them to gamble and play rather than work simply and honestly, as most successful small business people do. Â While the rich and powerful dominate our tax and economic policy, hard working Americans are among those losing their earning and educational opportunities, while the mega-rich and giant corporations accumulate more power and wealth. Â
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If you think something's wrong with this country's income and wealth disparity, why not push Congress to start fixing it by introducing PLI's Fair Tax Bracket Reinstitution Act (FTBRA).
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