Janitor vs. CEO
Minneapolis janitor Rosalina Gomez said she didn't get it at first that she was cleaning up the offices of the CEO of the bank that had her foreclose her d home. The CEO is Richard Davis of Minneapolis-based US Bank, the nation's sixth-largest bank and recipient of $6.6 billion in TARP bailout funds. On Feb. 28, Davis received an "Executive of the Year" award from the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal -- just 11 days before Gomez and her family had to comply with an eviction order. Increasingly, America is beginning to resemble the Victorian era England that Charles Dickens wrote about. A few very, very rich and a lot of working poor. Reagonomics and Clintonomics and Tom Friedman's Flat Earth theory have destroyed the middle class of this country, and once it became known that Rosalina's eviction was related to the CEO whose office she cleaned, she needed a security detail to continue doing her job. Thanks, Ronnie, Bill, and Tom. And, so far, Barack.
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Comments
Thom,
In Canada we have just had our latest budget brought down by our embattled neo-cons trying to hold onto power.
Funny, seems you have also been governed by a Conservative Minority Government. I hope both their days in power are numbered.
The budget is basically holding on hoping that our relatively good economic position with regulated banks etc. will allow enough growth to make them look good. They really just avoided doing anything that would get them turfed out right now. I don't trust them, we have a great phrase here; 'lack of confidence', but I will give them credit for one positive tax measure.
I haven't looked into it in detail and I'm sure the well heeled will have ways around it soon, but the new budget restricts some of the stock option loopholes for CEOs etc.
You can search 'Globeandmail' for 'Ottawa closes stock option tax loophole'
theglobeandmail.com/news/national/budget/budget-cracks-down-on-tax-evasion-looks-to-close-loopholes/article1488229/
This is really just making it either a write-off for the company or a capital gains break for the CEO instead of both.. but it is a start and surprising from a Conservative Government..
It leads to something I have thought of for a long time for your system or ours.
Earned income gets treated differently for different people in our tax systems. Capital gains is treated differently, allowing the wealthy to pay lower taxe rates than the wage-earners.
Why not treat different sources of capital gains differently as well?
If you make money on the sale of your family home, fine. If you buy stocks and hold them a while before selling at a profit, sure.
If, however, you get stock options as a way to defer your income and flip them for an instant profit, maybe the tax rate should be more like what you would have paid for an actual salary.
I'm sure there would be cries of too much complexity but that will always be the case and along with realistic social security, medicare and other health-care contribution bythe higher income taxpayers, any steps would help.
So, what about a scale of taxes on capital gains?
Cheers,
Rick
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Why am I not surprised that there are no comments--support or otherwise--on the appalling circumstance of a Mexican family--yes, a family: Mrs. Gomez has children at home that she cleans offices to feed. To add insult to her injury, we read that Mrs. Gomez has to have security detail to continue cleaning up for the white rich man. This humiliation heaped upon her at this time of personal anguish is pathetically cold-hearted. I guess most Hartmann listeners care for the more sexy issues of environment, health care and democracy: Rosaline offers not much they can relate to...