So this is it. The democrats solution to one in six with out a job is to divide and concour. Convince the middle class that people with money are evil. They are so evil we need to rob them of there wealth. I hate to bust your bubbles but the majority of pensioners make money with money. So by raising tax on capital gains you are going to reduce the standard of living of your seniors. So instead of reducing governments rediculous spending habits like spending millions of dollars to kick a farmer off grazing land in the middle of nowhere for no reason you would rather punish seniors. Way to go Thom you it a all time low. remember the money invested is after tax money It has already been taxed once. At least make the tax rates progressive so you only tax the wealthiest seniors. There is no reason why one senior should have a better life then any other one. That who be to capitalist.

Palin this is exactly what I am talking about the ones who earned there wealth by UN ethical ways of course should go to jail but they are a very few. The majority of people with wealth made it by starting a small business and growing it. The pay there employees a decent wage and give them the best benefits they can.

I have said a thousand times if you are stupid enough to invest in stocks you deserve everything you get. You are right Wall Street is just a scam for the rich to get richer. But don't punish the hard working middle class who has done well honestly for those crooks.

Kend: I don't dispute that there are a lot of, perhaps, medium rich people that are merchants or other business people who have made some pretty good money by taking certain chances and/or made good business decisions. But I think that there are many, many more who would not think twice about scamming people out of their money.

Bernie Madoff was just the tip of the iceberg. And he is exceptional because of the massive pyramid scheme he created and because he actually turned himself in and actually went to jail. There are many, many others like Madoff, or even bigger scammers who have not yet been caught, or if they have, they were not prosecuted.

And I was reading the Forbes Fortune 500 the other day where they had photos and short bios, along with the net worth, of richest people in the US. They all seem to be decent people and have even given to various charities. There are only a few who have given away much of their wealth to worth causes. But even Savings and Loans scandal swindler Charles Keating gave $1.25 million of stolen money to Mother Theresa. He donated $100,000 to the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul and more that $1 million to Covenant House and lots of other donations. What a sweet heart, eh? But, at one time his Lincoln Savings and Loan assets climbed to $5.5 billion. What is a puny one or million dollars compared to his net worth? That would be almost comparable to someone of the working class giving one dollar to charity and expecting to be revered as a great, magnanimous person. And so many of these very wealthy people, while cheating many people out of their money, one way or another, and paying way less than most working people, expect to be praised as generous beings. When you steal a lot of money..you can afford to give a little in return...and that's all they are giving...just a little. It buys them kudos in their society pages.

Kend -- If you used facts, reasoning or even read what Thom said this blog would be boring.

If you take the BLS Consumer Expenditure table including incomes, and extract the necessities (sums) for life, Food, Clothing, Shelter, Transportation (workers have to get to their work location), Medical and Education and subtract the sum of each of these for the median incomes of the tabled income classes, you find that those earning less than $20,000 per year, have a negative flow of incomes. This does not include any extra,m beyond Social Security for Pension or to carry them when not working. The proportion of incomes for the upper income classes for the necessities drops from almost 200% for those under $5,000 per year to about 9% or less for those having incomes over $150,000 per year. Unfortunately the BLS Consumer Expenditure tables do not give larger incomes but classify the largest income group as "Greater than $150,000. To get the information for incomesover $50,000 you have to extract from the BLS table for higher incomes.

Yes history I would but that is the first time I think I have ever seen the word grammatical. I guess I should of stayed in school. Which one of my facts is not true?

chuck. I just think if when it comes to taxing capital gains The guy with $20,000 invested should not be taxed the same as a guy with $20,000,000,000.

Kend -- When you say taxed, do you mean tax rate or the amount of taxes? Do you think the guy with 20e9 invested should have a higher tax rate than the guy with 20e3 invested?

Competitive society works thus. The richest people are the most unethical because being unethical gives them an advantage. It doesn't take long for most people in business to figure that out so pretty soon there are no ethics in business or even society in general.

The rich got rich by stealing the product of someone else's labor. Ever since the domestication of plants and animals that's been the case, or rather, ever since the principle of domestication got applied to other people.

It's not possible to have a legitimate discussion about the economy and our prospects of economic recovery/survival as long as we ignore poverty. Not everyone can work, due to health or circumstances, and there aren't jobs for all who need one right now. We know from our own history that refusing to spend $.01 of the people's money on the people's survival today will inevitably cost $1.00 or more in the future. Those who live more comfortable lives can't grasp that it's not possible for millions of workers, on today's low wages, to save enough money to tide them over following a layoff. They are a single job loss from losing everything, with no way back up. Families are torn apart, futures are wiped out -- a high price to pay for a damaged economy. Those who are left destitute don't disappear. From the costs of foster care placement to health care costs to the costs of routinely cycling the homeless through jails, our socioeconomic policies take a heavy toll on the budget. It's great to talk about job creation -- been doing just that for decades. But until then, one way or another, we are going to have to face the high cost of ignoring American poverty.

Moving toward taxing capital gains the same as income from work would help to level the economic playing field. As pointed out by Warren Buffet, why should his tax rate be less than his secretary's. Many people say they want freer markets and want less government interference, but at the same time they want the government to give specialized tax breaks to capital gains. Taxing capital gains the same as income from work would allow workers to share in more of the productivity gains. With a lot of the wealth going toward the top, we don't need the government to give specialized tax breaks to the top. Tax changes could be done gradually, since sudden, big changes could be disruptive to the economy.

As I'm not a rich Senior but an Independent Senior I find your statement so rediculous and factless it is just outright wrong. The super rich that Thom is referring too aren't the seniors that have modest savings in their accounts. You Teabaggers just can't seem to get a handle on reality of today in America. When the super rich and that excludes nearly all seniors pay 20% on unearned money that they didn't sneak off into some foreign tax shelter country. A hard working American that works between 40 and 50 hours a week and makes $55,000.00 per year pays 39% on the income and the super rich that have $55 million in a money making account that doesn't require any work pays only 20% on say he only gets 5% unearned money which is $2.75 million where is the balance in that system of taxaction You creatures that support the super rich that don't care about you in the least.

Tax rate. %

"jproctor", you need only scan the blog archives to see that 99% of Kend's assertions are ridiculous and factless. Like most conservatives, he makes up his own "facts" to support his opinions. It's a conservative trademark! - AIW

Kend -- I thought the tax policy that can be derived from what Thom said is that the progressive tax that applies to income should also apply to capital gains. Our current tax structure does allow a deduction for being over 65. The amount of income tax on 20K to 50K is minimal.

Friends, we keep arguing over how to reform the income tax system, but what we really need to be working for is a leveling tax on individual wealth/net worth - we should tax people based on what they own (both here and overseas) with the goal of achieving a leveling of wealth inequality through direct redistribution. It doesn't need to be a total leveling, but it should be enough to close the wealth gap to the point that no one is left living in poverty anymore. A debt jubilee to wipe the books clean on all student debt would also be a constructive step.

If we want to achieve anything at all we need to be thinking big (bigger then just income tax), because anything we demand will inevitably be whittled down. Demand the stars, but settle for the moon. With that in mind we might consider demanding class-war crimes trials as well. It was the rich after all who broke the social peace of the Fordist economic compact by declaring an open class-war of aggression upon the American working people under Reagan. I'm a peaceful guy, but I confess that the idea of a long queue of shackled Wall Street banksters and CEO class-war criminals running up Broadway to a guillotine in the middle of Central Park does have its appeal from time to time in those darker hours of the night.

Quote DancingBear: ...we might consider demanding class-war crimes trials as well. It was the rich after all who broke the social peace of the Fordist economic compact by declaring an open class-war of aggression upon the American working people under Reagan. I'm a peaceful guy, but I confess that the idea of a long queue of shackled Wall Street banksters and CEO class-war criminals running up Broadway to a guillotine in the middle of Central Park does have it's appeal from time to time in those darker hours of the night.

By the way, I just saw the Disney movie "Bears". Did you know that full grown bears eat 90 pounds of salmon a day to store up enough fat for hibernation during the winter? I thought up a new bumper sticker: "Kill the bears, more salmon for us!" Just kidding of course! ;-} Those little bear cubs are so cute. But those big bears...well, I wouldn't want to meet one in the woods one day! Especially if he knew that I thought up that bumper sticker.

Why would it take a dictator to pass a wealth tax or declare a student loan jubilee? Just elect enough progressive thinking politicians to pass these policies into law.

As for class-war crimes trials and a guillotine in Central Park you are correct, that would take a dictator. But to be absolutely clear here I was not being serious about that. As I said "demand the stars, but settle for the moon." That long line of Banksters and CEO class-war criminals leading to the "national razor" is nothing but a dark fantasy, not a part of any political program of change that I am advocating. I was being hyperbolic, and if some were confused, my bad.

chuckle8 - I wasn't thinking of a world wide wealth tax involving everyone on the planet, but rather a wealth tax here in the USA that took into account people's overseas holdings as well as their domestic ones. And yes it is not an easy get, but neither was universal health care: TR, FDR, LBJ, and Bill Clinton all failed to get some kind of universal health coverage, but eventually Obama did get it done. The ACA is still far from perfect, but at least everyone is at long last covered in the places where the law is not being sandbagged by state officials. So the fact that FDR and LBJ couldn't get a wealth tax dosn't tell me it is impossible for our democracy to do, it just tells me that we need to keep pushing until the day comes when we can get it done.

DnBr -- The main concern I have is that people in 2008 kept pushing the agenda of taxing wealth. I think they should have applied most of their efforts to eliminate the bush tax cuts. The result was that most of the bush tax cuts became permanent. The few taxes on the rich that we won was worth 600 billion (10 yrs) vs the 6000 billion that the elimination of the bush tax cuts would have provided

Another facet of the tax structure of FDR was that Look magazine in the 60's said America would never have any billionaires. This was accomplished without any wealth tax.