The Forbes 400 Shows Why Our Nation Is Falling Apart

http://broadcastunionnews.blogspot.com/2009/10/forbes-400-shows-why-our-nation-is_02.html

Friday, October 2, 2009
The Forbes 400 Shows Why Our Nation Is Falling Apart
By Les Leopold
Author of The Looting of America
http://www.huffingtonpost.com

It's great to know that during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans, according to Forbes, actually increased by $30 billion.

Well golly, that's only a 2 percent increase, much less than the double digit returns the wealthy had grown accustomed to. But a 2 percent increase is a whole lot more than losing 40 percent of your 401k. And $30 billion is enough to provide 500,000 school teacher jobs at $60k per year.

Collectively, those 400 have $1.57 trillion in wealth. It's hard to get your mind around a number like that. The way I do it is to imagine that we were still living during the great radical Eisenhower era of the 1950s when marginal income tax rates hit 91 percent. Taxes were high back in the 1950s because people understood that constraining wild extremes of wealth would make our country stronger and prevent another depression. (Well, what did those old fogies know?)

Had we kept those high progressive taxes in place, instead of removing them, especially during the Reagan era, the Forbes 400 might each be worth "only" $100 million instead of $3.9 billion each. So let's imagine that the rest of their wealth, about $1.53 trillion, were available for the public good.

What does $1.53 trillion buy?

It's more than enough to insure the uninsured for the next twenty years or more.

It's more than enough to create a Manhattan Project to solve global warming by developing renewable energy and a green, sustainable manufacturing sector.

And here's my favorite: It's more than enough to endow every public college and university in the country so that all of our children could gain access to higher education for free, forever!

FULL story at link.

If Jonathan Swift were still around, I'll bet he could cook up a use for these 400. :beer:

at some point.

FREE?
FREE?
What are you a communist or something?
Don't you know that the Modern Conservative Christian Republican philosophy is that NOBODY gets ANYTHING for free?
FREE?

:rofl:

Oh, and by the way... Unions suck too.

:sarcasm:

If only we could make our country understand the simplicity of your post, Steve.
If only...

Great post, as always.

build 'em up and knock 'em down.

A trillion seconds ago, Neanderthals roamed the Earth.


That is just another attempt to put the awesomeness of a trillion in perspective.

A million seconds is 12 days.
A billion seconds is 31 years.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years

Your math is wrong!

We need to start making them care.

and those who took out student loans and got their jobs shipped overseas as being the real problem with the economy.

Not the parasitic sucking machines that have drained everything from everybody else and bought and used lawmakers to do it.:sarcasm: