Terrence McNally of Alternet.org has this great interview, "How You Can Have a Billion-Dollar Income in America and Pay No Taxes" that highlights the problem and solutions to our "debt crisis".
An excerpt:
Today one of our two major political parties -- nationally and in state capitals -- is unwilling to consider raising taxes no matter the circumstances. Though most of Washington's officials and media are hysterical about the deficit, and willing to hurt anyone in an effort to reduce it, both parties voted in December to extend tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans for two more years.
Despite profits of $14.2 billion -- $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States -- General Electric, the nation's largest corporation, did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year. Its CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, recently replaced Paul Volcker as leader of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board as its name was changed to the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
TM: We now take in less taxes and grumble about it more while we face huge deficits for which most people's only solution is to make cuts.
DCJ: You will hear that the top 1 percent pay 40 percent of the taxes. It's not true. The federal individual income tax is only about one out of every five dollars of all taxes raised in America. We have federal taxes, state taxes, local taxes, payroll taxes, and I'm ignoring all the things that used to be covered by taxes that are now paid by fees -- three different fees for using the airport, surcharges when you rent a car, etc.
The top 400 taxpayers now make about a million dollars a day. We have redistributed income, through a variety of means -- suppressed unions; reduced taxes and tax deferrals to people at the top; encouraging owners to withdraw capital from their businesses, destroying jobs. In the bottom half, people are making less now than they did 30 and 50 years ago, when you adjust for inflation.
The Republican answer to this is the same answer that George Washington's doctors applied to him when he got sick: they bled him. When he didn't get better, they bled him more, and they ultimately bled him to death. Let's cut taxes for the rich and cut them for the rich and cut them for the rich, and the economy keeps getting worse. It's not true that high taxes destroy jobs. Low taxes destroy jobs by encouraging owners of businesses to withdraw money from the business.
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