A lawyer friend explains why you SHOULDN'T HELP PUSH the People's Lobby 's Congressional Fair Tax Bracket Reinstitution Act (FTBRA) forward:
    "Listen you are hanging around too many stupid people.  I work hard and I spent long years in school after dropping out of high school.  And because I did not like where I was I worked even harder.  So to hell with your income distribution crap...GO GET EDUCATED OR A JOB AND THAT IS THE ANSWER...........  AND by the way where do you think job creation stems from?  YA... I know, you think the gov't should do that."
First, some economic history, which I guess many lawyers don't study, which laid the economic foundation under which Americans today labor, search for jobs, and borrow for an education.
Who do you think wrote the following and when?
The authors note the following unintended consequences of what was billed as humanitarian aid to the poor. Â Foreign aid has:
à ‚¬   Aggravated food shortages in some countries; reliance on food imports from the United States has discouraged home production.
à ‚¬  Subsidized sweatshop factories and textile mills in South Korea; instead of raising standards of living, as was intended, the sweatshops have lowered it, paying from 10 to 30 cents an hour.
à ‚¬   Entrenched the rich and powerful in foreign countries by aiding businesses controlled by them, thus widening instead of narrowing the gap between the rich and poor.
à ‚¬  Generated windfall profits for business and financial interests in this country.
à ‚¬  Led to the building of a gaming lodge in Kenya and a luxury hotel in Haiti with $150-a-day rooms, whereas the intent was to stimulate private investment that would aid the poor.
à ‚¬  Created a powerful foreign-aid lobby in this country made up of corporations, financial institutions, colleges, and others who benefit by funds appropriated for overseas relief.
Mega corporations' 2010 profits are at astounding record-setting highs. Â Heralded Supply Side Economics Trickles Down -- only maybe -- when you can't afford an umbrella and you and family are living --" or about to -- on a curb. Â Families scrambling for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd part-time jobs are being booted from their homes by a scamming financial services industry, whose lobbying power allowed them to merge, set up ponzi schemes, fabricate credit default swaps, induce phony credit ratings, and -- upon their exposure and failures -- get bailed out by taxpayers dollars; with which many banksters paid themselves huge bonuses. Â It's magic, like in Voodoo Economics.
So, from whom and when did the above quoted words come?
If you answered the Rape of the Taxpayer, published in 1972 by Philip Stern, you are probably not an attorney and didn't read his other books --" Great Treasury Raid (1962) and the Best Congress Money Can Buy (1988). Â Here's more from a guy who sternly studied the history of tax and economic rape as reporter, newspaper owner, author, philanthropist, and founder of the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Consider chapter 19, "Letter from an Indignant Taxpayer." Â This is a letter actually sent on August 9, 1972, by Philip Stern's secretary to Chairman Wilbur Mills of the House Ways and Means Committee and to Chairman Russell Long of the Senate Finance Committee. Â The letter tells what she has learned by typing Stern's book at a salary of $150 a week. Â On the $7,800 she earned in 1971, she paid federal income taxes of $1,057.50. Â She asks why she has to pay nearly 14% of her earnings when some millionaires get off for practically nothing. Â Granted the case of J. Paul Getty is an extreme one, but it certainly impressed Ms. Saunders. Â He is said to be worth over a billion dollars and reportedly earned up to $300,000 a day during the early sixties. Â Yet from what President Kennedy told two senators, Getty paid only a few thousand dollars in tax. Â She goes on to recite instance after instance, all documented in her boss' book, of loopholes that favor the rich. Â She also reminds Senator Long of how insistent he has been that welfare recipients ought to do a minimum of work. Â They might, he suggests, clean up "their filthy neighborhoods." Â Why, then, is Mr. Long not bothered by the fact that those who get what amounts to a free gift in tax savings are not required to do any work? Â Specially privileged capital gains and tax-free municipal bonds are prime examples of work-free welfare. Â She proceeds to ask similar questions about the billions that corporations like General Motors and IBM will save over a period of years by investment credit and such wonders as "asset depreciation range.""That's old crap!" my lawyer friend will probably say, and not bother researching policies when he can be told by Rush, an inflammatory, un-researched, consistently factually wrong oxycotin-contented talk show host, compensated at over $58 million per year, that taxing him and those like him will kill jobs. Â Â
So, even though well-researched tax expert Philip Stern pointed out four decades ago that "America's richest 3,000 families get an average of $720,000 in tax welfare," my attorney friend will probably find such facts worth ignoring. Â And he'll ignore Warren Buffet decrying the inequity that allows him to pay a 17% effective tax rate while his secretary pays 30%. Â Ah, for generations from Getty to Buffet not much has changed to reward the bulk of hardworking Americans and make the race for family security a little fairer.
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