A Quote by Ralph Nader
When people ask, "Why should the rich pay a larger percent of their income than middle-income people?" - my answer is not an answer most people get: It's because their power developed from laws that enriched them.
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People at the very top of the income scale also benefited from globalization and automation. But the income of working- and middle-class people in the developed world has stagnated.
The collective income of all these people - the bottom half - is less than three percent of global household income, and so there is a grotesque maldistribution of income and wealth.
You know, the elites always want to shame the poor - right? - and everyone else. I mean, the fact is, this economy is based on 70 percent of the people driving consumer demand. If people do not purchase goods and services, this economy will grind to recession. And that is why, if you are going to do a tax cut, it ought to really be aimed at low-income and middle-income people.
I'm against an income tax because all the rich people hire lawyers and accountants to be sure that they don't pay income tax.
The people who are having the hard time right now are middle-income Americans. Under the president's policies, middle-income Americans have been buried. They're just being crushed. Middle-income Americans have seen their income come down by $4,300. This is a tax in and of itself. I'll call it the economy tax. It's been crushing.
The richer people, when they get another $100,000, or another million, or 10 million, don't tend to spend it as much as the poorer people would if they got another $100 or $1,000 or $5,000. All the empirical evidence suggests that the rich tend to consume a lower proportion of income than middle and lower-income people.
I agree that income disparity is the great issue of our time. It is even broader and more difficult than the civil rights issues of the 1960s. The '99 percent' is not just a slogan. The disparity in income has left the middle class with lowered, not rising, income, and the poor unable to reach the middle class.
Most poor families are living completely unassisted in a private rental market, devoting most of their income to housing. When you meet people who are spending 70, 80 percent of their income on rent, eviction becomes much more of an inevitability than the result of personal irresponsibility.
One basic myth is that rich people get wealthy by earning income. But that's not how most get rich. Most of the gains of the rich people since 1945 have been "capital gains".
For the three decades after WWII, incomes grew at about 3 percent a year for people up and down the income ladder, but since then most income growth has occurred among the top quintile. And among that group, most of the income growth has occurred among the top 5 percent. The pattern repeats itself all the way up. Most of the growth among the top 5 percent has been among the top 1 percent, and most of the growth among that group has been among the top one-tenth of one percent.
If you are ideologically opposed to income splitting for families, why wouldn't you scrap it for seniors? What is the distinguishing principle between income splitting for people with kids and income splitting for people who are retired?
As far as income goes, there are three currencies in the world; most people ignore two. The three currencies are time, income and mobility, in descending order of importance. Most people focus exclusively on income.
I just think that - when a country needs more income and we do, we're only taking in 15 percent of GDP, I mean, that - that - when a country needs more income, they should get it from the people that have it.
Politicians like to talk about the income tax when they talk about overtaxing the rich, but the income tax is just one part of the total tax system. There are sales taxes, Medicare taxes, social security taxes, unemployment taxes, gasoline taxes, excise taxes - and when you add up all of those taxes [many of which are quite regressive], and then you look at how they affect the rich and the poor, you essentially end up with a system in which the best off 20 percent of Americans pay one percentage point more of their income than the worst off 20 percent of Americans.
Many argue that graduates earn a 'premium' because of their education, and should have to pay their way. I agree, and that's why I've always advocated a progressive taxation system - so if people do receive large salaries, they pay more income tax.
Most of the productivity gains appear to go to the top 1 percent. Most people don't have enough income and as a result, they borrow additional money by using their credit card and they fall into high debt. The result of the growing income gap is a slower growing GDP (too few people with money to spend) and a rising tide of indebtedness.
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