Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Our sad small town newspaper the Arizona Daily Star today picked up this AP (all propaganda) report that they captioned Federal taxes are at 30-yr. high for richest, group says. No really, they did. The "group" is The Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution founded by tax policy experts from the Reagan administration, the Bush the Elder administration, and the Clinton administration in 2002.
Igor Volsky at Think Progress has an analysis here. Associated Press Laments Tragic Plight Of The Very Wealthy. His conclusion: the Beltway conventional wisdom is "that raising revenue is a liberal solution that will hurt the rich,
while tough spending cuts to entitlements and discretionary programs are
necessary to stabilize the national debt." In short, GOPropaganda.
Samuel Knight at the Political Animal blog is even more dismissive of this GOPropaganda. “Historically high” tax rates for the rich expected? Good.
According to the AP,
Brookings’ Tax Policy Center is predicting that this year, the rich
will pay some of the highest tax rates since the Congressional Budget
Office began keeping track of the data in 1979.
* * *
It’s oh so difficult to feel even a subatomic iota of sorrow for the
rich here for so many reasons: 1979, of course, marks two years before
the start of the Reaganite consensus on executive worship and corporate
tax cuts; much of the rich’s income is derived from “unearned” rent-seeking; the elites should be happy to help pay for a society that has helped them prosper; and, due
to offshoring and the weakness of organized labor among other factors,
lower income workers’ wages haven’t kept pace with their productivity
explosion over the past few decades. In short, the wealthy have the money to comfortably pay these “historically high” tax rates — lower still than the high marginal rates that were commonplace throughout the rapid growth post-war era.
Moreover, high tax rates might actually spur growth, in the words of John Judis,
by discouraging “the wealthy from rerouting their savings into the kind
of speculative activity that helped create the Great Recession,” and,
in the words of one small business owner, by encouraging businesses to reinvest their profit before the end of the year.
The Star could have gone with this report instead, but it goes against the conventional wisdom of the corporate media. Corporate Profits Have Risen Almost 20 Times Faster Than Workers’ Incomes Since 2008:
Corporate profits hit record highs in the second half of 2012, but
that prosperity hasn’t led to the creation of jobs, since America’s
biggest firms are sitting on stocks of cash instead of investing them
back into the economy.
At the same time, wages hit record lows, and corporate earnings are rising nearly 20 times faster than disposable incomes, the New York Times reports:
As a percentage of national income, corporate profits
stood at 14.2 percent in the third quarter of 2012, the largest share at
any time since 1950, while the portion of income that went to employees
was 61.7 percent, near its lowest point since 1966. In recent years,
the shift has accelerated during the slow recovery that followed the
financial crisis and ensuing recession of 2008 and 2009, said Dean Maki,
chief United States economist at Barclays.Corporate earnings have risen at an annualized rate of 20.1
percent since the end of 2008, he said, but disposable income inched
ahead by 1.4 percent annually over the same period, after adjusting for
inflation.
From 2009 to 2011, 88 percent
of national income growth went to corporate profits while just one
percent went to workers’ wages, and hourly earnings for workers actually
fell over that time. And while they aren’t investing in job growth,
corporations are also paying taxes at a rate that hit a 40-year low in 2011.
This would be the same wealthy investor class for whom the AP (all propaganda) and the Arizona Daily Star would have us cry crockodile tears. The rich get the gold while the rest of us get the shaft.