This may be the longest, but most important post Ive written all year. Last night I watched Moyers & Companys segment with Joseph Stiglitz, Noble Prize winning Economist on PBS (who dont have corporate sponsors) and it blew my mind. Hes singing my song about fair taxes for everyone and how the wealthy/wealthy corporations have lowered EVERYONEs standard of living by redistributing the wealth of the middle class to THEM! In two paragraphs, he said what needs to be said to get every tax payer in the USA in the middle and lower classes to PAY ATTENTION. Heres a sneak preview: A well-designed tax system can do more than just raise money—it can be used to improve economic efficiency and reduce inequality. Our current system does just the opposite. Piketty’s proposal for addressing inequality through taxation—a global wealth tax—is a political nonstarter, whatever one thinks of its merits. But there are steps the United States—home to the worst inequality among the advanced countries—can take on its own. With a sensible reform of our domestic tax code, we can simultaneously raise money, improve the performance of the economy, and address some of our biggest social problems—not just inequality, but joblessness and looming environmental catastrophe. We have this vicious cycle where economic inequality gets translated into political inequality. It gets translated into rules of the game that lead to more economic inequality, and which allow that economic inequality to get translated into evermore political inequality. The only way we’re going to break this viscous cycle is if people come to understand that there is an alternative system out here. That there is an alternative way of raising taxes, that we are not really faced with a budget crisis. It’s a manmade crisis. You know, when we had the government shutdown, we realized that that was a political crisis. That wasn’t an economic crisis. And the same thing about our budget crisis, you know. It’s not that we couldn’t raise the revenues in a way which actually could make our economy stronger. We can. If we just had a fair tax system, to tax capital at the same rate that we tax ordinary individuals, if we just made those people in that upper one percent pay their fair share of the taxes. That is all absolutely true and until the American people get behind him and force our politicians to represent US, YOU AND ME, instead of the 1%, we can blame ourselves for the downward spiral of our own standards of living. Blaming the poor, the elderly and the infirm is fairly naive. Its time to wake up my friends! billmoyers/2014/08/22/joseph-stiglitz-in-defense-of-capitalism/
Posted on: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 12:50:31 +0000