Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Cole, when it comes to calico cats, restraint is overrated.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

Chutkan laughs. Lauro sits back down.

It’s a doggy dog world.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

“Let’s not pretend [Trump] wants to engage in high-minded discourse.”

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Fight them, without becoming them!

So many bastards, so little time.

Books are my comfort food!

White supremacy is terrorism.

Republicans don’t trust women.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.

I desperately hope that, yet again, I am wrong.

You are here: Home / Politics / Domestic Politics / Soak the Super-Rich

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108Comments

  2. 2.

    BGinCHI

    I like red wine with pie charts and vodka with Venn diagrams.

    And if I don’t get a drink soon after reading that graph, I’m gonna punch a millionaire.

  3. 3.

    beltane

    If all Americans were consciously aware of the actual distribution of wealth in this country things would be a lot different. I’d love to see this compared to the wealth distribution patterns of, say, 14th century England on the eve of the peasant uprisings.

  5. 5.

    WyldPirate

    @BGinCHI:

    And if I don’t get a drink soon after reading that graph, I’m gonna punch a millionaire.

    Well, BGinCHI, don’t click the link to the rest of the graphs before you have several stiff drinks. The data depicted in them is even more disheartening than the one E.D. shared here.

  6. 6.

    BGinCHI

    @E.D. Kain: That page of charts is stunning.

    What kinds of charts does the right look at?

    Or are they just too busy high-fiving each other to make any?

  7. 7.

    Martin

    The unions should take their % of dues used to support candidates and create a single 30 second ad that shows that graph as a barchart, a pie graph, a big stack of money, etc. with a voiceover repeating: “Actual distribution of wealth. What Americans think it is. What Americans want it to be. Vote accordingly.” over and over. And run it nonstop for the next 18 months.

    Turn it into the Head-On ad of 2011-2012.

  9. 9.

    MattR

    A quote from an NPR interview with Michael Norton (one of the two scientists who did the study that created the chart above). It should be nothing shocking to anyone here, but it is a quite good, succinct explanation of the problem.

    Mr. NORTON: That’s exactly right, and I think one of the reasons that we see people having a disconnect between understanding how much wealth inequality there really is, is this very strong American belief in the ability to be socially mobile and to be mobile with your wealth. So people have very strong beliefs that across generations and even in their own life they can go from rags to riches.
    __
    And it’s certainly possible. I mean one of the fantastic things about America is that that is in fact possible. But it’s much, much rarer than people believe, and especially wealth transmission, so money that goes from generation to generation to generation is very flat. So it tends to perpetuate a great deal over time.

  11. 11.

    agrippa

    Those articles describe reality and the why of it.
    Not very many americans have any awareness of this reality. I do not expect that to change.

  13. 13.

    Martin

    @BGinCHI: Actual distribution of abortions. What Americans think it is. What Jesus would like it to be.

    Actual distribution of firearms. What Americans think it is. What Ted Nugent would like it to be.

    Etc.

  16. 16.

    Kryptik

    The last graph in Kevin’s article, about the share of revenue each tax stream made up, is just galling. Look how the corporate tax rate shrunk, shrunk, and shrunk, and yet supposedly the corporate tax rate is so outrageously high that businesses refuse to pay.

    Hint, maybe you pay so much from such measely tax rates because you make so much goddamn filthy lucre.

  17. 17.

    schrodinger's cat

    Of the top 20% the wealth is most concentrated among the top .01%, about 35,000 families in the US. If I find the chart I will post the link

  18. 18.

    jpe

    W/o comparisons to other countries, this just isn’t useful. Presumably what we’re supposed to think is that policy can remediate this, but w/o looking at comparative figures from other countries whose policies the progenitors of the info would have us imitate, this is pretty much entirely useless. It’s just pretty colors and arbitrary numbers w/o some sort of baseline. (notably, we’re never given comparative baselines)

  19. 19.

    Martin

    @jpe: Actually, if you go to the source page, you have a comparative baseline – ourselves historically. Or is comparing us to Pakistan supposed to provide greater justification of the data than comparing us to us, 20 years ago?

  20. 20.

    slag

    @jpe:

    (notably, we’re never given comparative baselines)

    Actually, you’re almost always given comparative baselines. You just choose to regard only the ones you agree with. Here’s another comparative baseline for you (pdf):

    Paternal earnings had the least effect on sons’ earnings in Canada, Norway, Finland, and Denmark, where less than 20 percent of income advantages are passed onto children. The implication of these statistics is that in these countries it would take three, not six, generations to essentially cancel out the effects of being born into a wealthy family.

  21. 21.

    MattR

    @jpe:

    Presumably what we’re supposed to think is that policy can remediate this

    I don’t think that was the author’s goal. The study starts off by stating:

    Disagreements about the optimal level of wealth inequality underlie policy debates ranging from taxation to welfare. We attempt to insert the desires of “regular” Americans into these debates, by asking a nationally representative online panel to estimate the current distribution of wealth in the United States and to “build a better America” by constructing distributions with their ideal level of inequality.

    (EDIT: The study also found that 92% of respondents preferred the wealth distribution of Sweden over that of the United States. Additionally, this number did not vary much by gender, who they voted for in 2004 or income, though the lowest support for Sweden of any demographic was 89.1% among those making more than $100K)

  23. 23.

    JPL

    I would like someone to ask potential Republican candidate Hermann Cain how much he paid his employees while amassing his wealth. He is also the one pushing the unFair Tax that is a sales tax. How much money do these folks want?

  25. 25.

    Violet

    @Martin:

    The unions should take their % of dues used to support candidates and create a single 30 second ad that shows that graph as a barchart, a pie graph, a big stack of money, etc. with a voiceover repeating: “Actual distribution of wealth. What Americans think it is. What Americans want it to be. Vote accordingly.” over and over. And run it nonstop for the next 18 months.
    __
    Turn it into the Head-On ad of 2011-2012.

    Yes. This. The voiceover could also play off the “This is your brain on drugs” ads from whenever that was and say, “This is your wealth distribution on Republicanism.” Or “conservatism.” Either one. Or both.

  26. 26.

    Violet

    @E.D. Kain:

    yeah a drink sounds pretty good right about now.

    Drink now. If the Republicans/teabaggers/conservatives/Kochs (they’re all the same to me these days) have their way you won’t be able to afford that drink in a few years.

  29. 29.

    James E Powell

    I suspect that, even after these charts were explained to them, most Americans would not draw the same inferences that most of us posting here are drawing. Minds confronted with data that conflict with their beliefs will hold onto the beliefs more tightly.

    But, hell, it is worth a try, no?

    Somebody ought to set up a website where people can go and try out “What is the wealth distribution in the US?” and “What do you think it should be?” Only after completing this exercise do they find out the truth.

  30. 30.

    Jesse Ewiak

    I appreciate your shift over the last couple of weeks ED, but quite frankly, I think some of these posts would be more interesting on Ordinary Gentleman instead of on here where you’ll get a whole bunch of fuck yeahs. I mean, it’d be entertaining if nothing else.

  32. 32.

    Comrade Dread

    @BGinCHI:

    What kinds of charts does the right look at?

    The same ones.

    They just label the chart as: “Which group works the hardest and is entitled to keep every goddamn penny from the money grubbing parasites constantly bitching about how they can’t afford food, heat, gas, or to retire before they’ve been dead for 20 years*.”

    *It’s a little known fact, but all of the major banks have been buying up copies of the Necronomicon in anticipation of raising debtors from the grave so they can continue to work off their debt as zombies.

  34. 34.

    bago

    Occasionally we do get benevolent kings, Like Bill Gates, and his foundation.

    Bill Gates: Well, the first thing was the decision that it probably wouldn’t be good for my kids, for it to go to them, and so then the question of–

    Stephanopoulos: Will they get nothing?

    Gates: They’ll get something, but not a substantial percentage. Then, the question is how to give it back to society to have the best impact. And so my wife Melinda and I talked about what was the focus in the United States that we think could have the biggest impact? And then we picked education and scholarships. And then on a global basis, what was the greatest inequity? And as we learned about these health issues, we realized that that’s where you can make a huge change and that has such a positive effect on all the other things.

    And then you have the viewpoint of the sons of Koch, millionaires who inherited a printing press of money and have fought long and hard to validate the legitimacy of inheritance and media manipulation.

    This is the difference between people that have a spare 34 million laying around. One spends it on preventing disease, and the other spends it on building the CATO institute.

  37. 37.

    asiangrrlMN

    You know, even when one knows the truth, seeing it laid out in bright colors is pretty damn depressing. I just don’t know how to break most Americans of the mentality that they can make it into the yellow section.

  38. 38.

    JPL

    @E.D. Kain: turn off the comments. The post did a fact check on the President supposedly apology tour and gave it Four Pinocchios. The comments are vicious.
    I assume you will see comments comparing the US with Somalia.
    One thing that they can’t do is compare us to other industrialized nations.

  39. 39.

    shortstop

    @General Stuck: Well, he has, but I keep thinking about how you’re supposed to make major life changes slowly so that they last.

    ED, I encourage you to approach this move toward the political light as you would weight loss. Instead of suddenly trying to run 10 miles a day, start with taking the stairs at work and parking farther away when you do your errands. Rather than eschewing all refined sugar, limit yourself to one reasonably sized treat a day. Take time to reflect on how these small adjustments add up to big, meaningful changes. We don’t want you to have the political relapse equivalent of binging on an entire chocolate cake, three bags of potato chips and five bacon cheeseburgers.

  43. 43.

    Bob

    I hope those charts and graphs will end the meme government can’t do anything right. Clearly government can redistribute wealth.

    On the other hand, the info does prove St. Ronnie correct, “Government is the problem.”

  45. 45.

    shortstop

    @asiangrrlMN: No, no, there’s no “allow” about it. Only ED can determine how many shifts he should make at one time. I’m simply urging a conservative (heh!) approach to change to minimize the chances of him having the mother of all benders. ;)

  46. 46.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    Recent conversation with my sister who lives in England “you live in a third world country, the people who live with you just haven’t realized it yet” (of course she said realised as opposed to realized but you get the point). She is right, we do, the regular folks live paycheck to paycheck and the uber rich live large. I only have to watch one episode of “Selling New York” to know that.

  47. 47.

    stuckinred

    Lil Bit has returned and guess what? A night on IV at the regular vet costs the same as a night at the emergency vet!

  53. 53.

    asiangrrlMN

    @shortstop: Yeah. I would hate for him to wake up one morning and see BJ littered with drunken, misspelled posts about how barbers are oppressed because they have to get a license, how the readership capture of BJ has finally done him in, and fucking trash collection, how does that work?

    @MattR: Ha! So true. We just like to rub it in his face.

    @stuckinred: Ouch. But, I’m glad she’s OK.

  54. 54.

    bemused

    The first chart showing $31,244 for average income for bottom 90% is one that all small and medium size business owners, not the large corps, should see. I don’t think most of them realize the income inequality is that stark.

  61. 61.

    stuckinred

    @JPL: The worst part is that this is from something she ate and not 10 minutes after we were home she pulled a piece of foil that was sticking out of the grill and was munching away on it. Her food obsession has increased incredibly lately.

  64. 64.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    @stuckinred: Nope from England, but I must have missed the thread about your cat, Lit Bit, believe me I am so with you on that. I have spent countless dollars and countless hours at the Vet with my cats.

  66. 66.

    JPL

    Earlier today I read Kevin’s Plutocracy Now and income inequality and although well researched, unless it is high-lighted on MSM, the numbers and charts will get buried.
    Fox viewers just don’t believe it. They think a national sales tax is fair.

    OT..I hope that we hear from some of our NZ friends soon. Christchurch is just devastated.

  68. 68.

    stuckinred

    @Litlebritdifrnt: Lil Bit is a cocker spaniel. I had a morning spot on the front page a while back.

    PurpleGirl

    She’s curled up beside me watching the Buckeyes kill my Illini!

  69. 69.

    shortstop

    OT, “Lou Sarah,” the Facebook sockpuppet Sarah Palin created, is entertaining. Especially amusing is the fact that she liked Sarah Palin before she liked Bristol Palin. Her selfless mothering knows no limits.

  70. 70.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    @stuckinred:

    I missed that! My Uncle and Aunt had a pair of Cockers, my Uncle used to say that they would charge out of the front door and then bark at a tree for absolutely no apparent reason. Apparently the tree was the devil.

  73. 73.

    Mnemosyne

    @bago:

    It really does come from the parents: IIRC, Bill Gates Sr. was very big on his children having to make their own way in the world and only getting a (relatively) small inheritance. (Gates Sr. is a millionaire (at least) in his own right.) So the Gates Jr. kids will probably also turn out okay since Bill is making the same decision his father did.

  75. 75.

    Mnemosyne

    @JPL:

    I have a couple of coworkers who are visiting NZ right now, but fortunately they were on the north island when it happened. The quake hit about two hours after they left Christchurch.

  82. 82.

    gwangung

    Earlier today I read Kevin’s Plutocracy Now and income inequality and although well researched, unless it is high-lighted on MSM, the numbers and charts will get buried.
    Fox viewers just don’t believe it.

    Yet, when they hear from fundraisers that it used to be that they got 95% of the funds from 5% of the people and now it’s 99% from 1%, they won’t put two and two together.

  84. 84.

    Suffern ACE

    Hmmm. When I wrote that we needed a new FP person to challenge from the left, I didn’t think it would be ED. Soak the rich?

    I understand that the charts show a problem, but what type of problem is it? it certainly creates a power imbalance since wealth has so much control over politics. But what else?

  85. 85.

    Calouste

    @slag:

    Paternal earnings had the least effect on sons’ earnings in Canada, Norway, Finland, and Denmark, where less than 20 percent of income advantages are passed onto children. The implication of these statistics is that in these countries it would take three, not six, generations to essentially cancel out the effects of being born into a wealthy family.

    6 generations? So there are still people living off the money that was made by slave owners?

  86. 86.

    someguy

    I think we should soak the fuck out of the rich, the top 20% or so. According to the NYT, that starts at $88k. You make more than that, you oughtta be on the one for you, one for us tax plan.

  89. 89.

    slag

    @Calouste:

    So there are still people living off the money that was made by slave owners?

    Yeah. Pretty much every white person in America. Oh…you mean directly living off slaveholder profit? Well, I suppose it technically depends on how they calculate generation (I didn’t look at that), but your assumption seems reasonable to me.

  91. 91.

    Jesse Ewiak

    @Calouste:

    Yes, it’s called the South. You go back to most of the powerful people in south of Pittsburgh and east of the Mississippi, you’ll find some plantations in their past.

  92. 92.

    Jesse Ewiak

    @E.D. Kain:

    Got ya’. I guess like freelancer, I was looking at more crossposting of these posts to OG, but if you’re working on a larger post to sum up things over there.

  94. 94.

    Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q)

    @stuckinred: Glad she’s better! I was wondering, so thanks for the update.

    Our 2 go for teeth cleaning (February is dental discount month at our vet, who also has a groomer on staff) followed by a bath once they are fully awake, so it will be a mostly dogless day chezQ.

  96. 96.

    tomvox1

    Drum’s piece is a knockout. Even a Teabagger should be able to figure that he’s been fucked in the ass after reading it, not to mention maybe even shaming one or two so-called reporters currently fishing for scraps from the Kings’ tables into doing their fucking jobs.

    Should be re-published every day for the next two years somewhere, goddammit, and preferably also as a full-body tattoo on Fred Hiatt.

  97. 97.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    @bago:

    This is the difference between people that have a spare 34 million laying around. One spends it on preventing disease, and the other spends it on building the CATO institute feeding their own disease.

    Fix’t.

    This shit is pretty depressing to see. You know it’s bad but the statistics don’ lie.

    It’s worse than that.

    Today I heard that WalMart sales are were down. Again. For the seventh quarter. If people don’t have enough to money to buy the cheap crap they have at WalMart then you know we are really fucked.

  98. 98.

    Triassic Sands

    Unfortunately, you could pair these graphics with ones showing the difference between what Americans say they want and what they vote for. Needless to say, no one interested in a more equitable distribution of wealth would ever vote for a Republican. But then the keep winning elections.

  100. 100.

    Miro

    In the last week I’ve moved from the belief that with the GOP “It’s all about cheap labor” to the belief that with the GOP “It’s never enough; it’ll never be enough.” Unpaid slave labor wouldn’t be enough to make them happy. What they want is an endless supply of labor that, when it gets hungry and thus eats up capital in the form of food, … that it would just go away and die and make room for the next labor bot on the line.

    It’s never enough; It’ll never be enough. It’s the ideology of God as Greed.

  101. 101.

    Blast Dorrough

    The real issue here is that the lawless Corporatecrafters of monopolistic fixed-enterprise have yet to earn a single dollar of the trillions mostly stolen from the US Treasury via governmental welfare for the greedy wealthy of imagined nobility. Their cancerous culture of greed and corruption of the Corporatecrafters has afflicted every federal and state branch of government. They truly look upon the US working class, small business owners and senior citizens as hereditary property and serfs and thus “entitlements” to manipulate and exploit at will to their advantage and financial gain. This is born-again monarchy, an ancestor of communism, fascism and Chinese/American coummunist capitalism of cheap labor. Bear in mind that the American Revolution was not only fought against the evil of Kingcraft but the evil of Corporatecraft and the evil of man-revealed Christiancraft of “charlatanerie” as well. Evil Corporatecraft united with evil Christiancraft of “charlatanerie” are Public Enemy No.1 of the United States.

  102. 102.

    jdowd

    @Martin:

    actually, i think the public sector unions should stop trying to compete on the ad buy playing field where they are vastly outgunned. they should instead pay some of their members to start organizing the private sector. time to go on the offensive. i can’t even tell you how many friends and family members i have who don’t know what a union is or that they can form one.

  103. 103.

    TNGrits

    @beltane:
    on this graph what the American public would like it to be is call SOCIALISM. Distribute the wealth evenly… That isn’t what this country was founded on. It was founded on capitalism and the ability to make as much money as you can… which I personally like to do!
    I like charts too… so… This is from the 2008 IRS stats… Percentiles Ranked by AGI
    AGI Threshold on Percentiles Percentage of Federal Personal Income Tax Paid
    Top 1% $380,354 38.02
    Top 5% $159,619 58.72
    Top 10% $113,799 69.94
    Top 25% $67,280 86.34
    Top 50% $33,048 97.3
    Bottom 50% <$33,048 2.7
    Note: AGI is Adjusted Gross Income
    Source: Internal Revenue Service Based on 2008 Income Taxes Paid
    The bottom 50% of wealth pay only 2.7 percent of the taxes collected. The top 50% of the wealth pays 97.3 percent of all the taxes collected. The top 1% of the wealth in earnings in this country pays over 38% of all the tax collected. DID YOU GET THAT??? THE PEOPLE EARNING THE TOP 1% OF THE WEALTH PAY OVER 1/3 OF ALL THE TAXES COLLECTED!!!!! Actually 3/8 would be 37.5% and they pay more than that…How can you say they aren't paying their share?

  104. 104.

    aliceandthecat

    Mother Jones website has this an 10 other charts…….once upon a time in France all the poor people rose up andchopped the heads off the superrich….does anyone here have a schematic for a basic guilloutine?????

  106. 106.

    pj

    Think for a moment about the meaning of the “what they would like it to be” chart. Why would anyone ever work in that environment? Ask yourself, as well, would everyone want that distribution if the average were much lower than exists today (which it would be). Communism, good stuff.

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