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As one poster points out above, it's not really top 400, it's more like a pool of the top 4,000 earning households out of whom 400 appear to occupy the top spots in a given year. Increasingly, it's more like a pool of top 40,000 around the world who are involved in more or less one loose network or global community of the superrich.
Most of these entities get to show whatever US income they like. They have a leeway unimaginable to most of us in the ability to defer income, reinvest it, show revenue as loss, show revenue in other countries, shift it around different institutions to the point where one part of the empire appears to lend money to a separate unit that is also part of the empire, and just plain hide it. The assessed values of assets like multiple large real estate holdings can vary by hundreds of millions from year to year. The main flows of cash can be kept offshore and in foundations, where many of the true levers of power lie, largely unaccounted. Control of a variety of corporate entities translates into a control of a far larger multiple in assets than those that appear as individual wealth. Ultimately this class (top half percent at most) also owns the largest voting shares in the big banks and corporations (in US and increasingly worldwide as a single global class). Thus they own and can control the majority of the economy.
The absolute largest fortunes are unlikely to appear on this list. They are older money that has diversified into many holdings and is administered by foundations or obscure holding-company structures that maintain whole tribes descended from robber barons, but generally with one monarch actually running the family empire at any given time (for the Rockefellers over the last half-century that would have been David). They can reach more easily into politics in the guise of charitable institutions (from the Koch complex on the "screw everyone" right financing the Teabaggers, to the Rockefellers on the "noblesse-oblige" right financing ostensible social initiatives, which is bizarrely called "liberal").
Some on the top 400 list of income earners are relatively trivial fortunes of the moment garnered from single-source successes (sports, pop/movie stars, overnight Internet fortunes) and which have not yet diversified and institutionalized themselves via foundations and such. They may be household names, but they don't have the power yet of the more established arrangements.
Recently we saw how the Gates fortune diversified and institutionalized itself for the next century and was able to present this as "being given away." This is the classic move by which robber barons appear to turn into "philanthropists." (If it's a give-away, how is it that a century later some of the supposedly given-up fortunes are still around?)
And all that still doesn't account for the shadow world of spook and criminal fortunes, or the religious enterprises ("churches") who also get to evade taxation and accounting while having an enormous impact on politics and society.
Finally, even for the large portion of the total income tax collected that they do pay, you can be certain that the superrich get more back in the way of corporate welfare and other government services. Laws are generally enforced in the service of their interests. Wars are fought in their presumed economic interests, generally after being lobbied for by groups within their class. Members of this class own the contractors who directly profit from these wars and the "defense" complex, and after each set of wars they hire and enrich the generals who did the planning and ran the campaigns. I focus on war and the spook complex since that's half of the discretionary budget, but of course all other parts of it contain taxpayer-financed corporate welfare for major multinational corporate contractors.
The main part of the federal government that pays back to the people, meanwhile, is the part financed directly by the people in the form of regressive taxes like FICA, Medicare and unemployment. Until now this has always been run at a surplus, and that surplus has financed the awesome deficits of the discretionary budget, the main part of which is devoted to war, "defense" and the spook complex. The US government is unlikely to ever pay back what it now owes to Social Security, which is why the holy grail of the corporate policy wonks has always been privatizing it and ending that obligation.
A more progressive tax system may help make things better for the majority, but it isn't going to change that system at all. The power imbalance will remain, the inhumane distortions it causes from the servants' quarters at the Rockefeller mansion down to the hellish pits of the maquiladoras will remain.
If you want to change this system, you have to acknowledge the need for something that has been cursed as "socialism":
- Nationalize and communalize the banks. There should be state banks devoted to particular functions (California Agricultural Bank, Michigan Tech Bank) and credit unions. Their boards should be voted on by depositors and they would meet from year to year to plan finance for a rational economy. Obviously there would no longer be a Federal Reserve.
- Negotiate with all powers to reduce militaries to emergency response and border patrol.
- Public campaign finance and free TV time for everyone who can make the ballot as a condition of broadcast (by cable too, or it's pointless).
- Obviously, end corporate personhood.
- Throw open the books of the foundations, churches, offshore entities, etc., and above all the black budget and spook world. No longer can a company get special privileges because it's intel. (Obviously CIA must be shut down and the full extent of its activities since 1947 revealed.) All money flows must be made identifiable. Hire 10 times as many people as currently work at the SEC, FTC, FBI financial section to handle this. It's a jobs program all its own!
- Obviously, end war on drugs to drain the swamp of hidden money.
- Punish state and corporate crime. This needn't be a long march to the guillotine. Exposure and expropriation will be sufficient for more than 90 percent of those discovered. Those who go to prison will find very spacious accommodations there, after most of the current prisoners are released in the drug amnesty.
- Senate? Presidents? Please. These are means to delegate power to the upper class. The House should be sovereign, preferably with a proportional representation system, a Senate should have veto power at most, a President's sole job should be to should smile and wave at parades, look solemn at funerals, and have a good looking spouse. (It sort of is that way already - although the executive has the power, that's in the permanent bureaucracy and deep state, and above all in private capital. Electing one guy (or even gal, one day) to the top spot every four years means you get to watch him grow old fast as he makes every possible accommodation to the corporate will until he's spat back out into a minor fortune).
Make the House sovereign, and watch people take up an intense interest in learning about the issues.
YES! I see this involves constitutional changes, and I know how unlikely these are.
NO! I don't think ANY OF THIS is likely to happen. I'm just laying out the structure of power, and what it would look like if it is to change from within. Progressive taxation alone won't do it.
Much more likely is a sooner-or-later collapse of the death system, which is why our culture is so obsessed with apocalypse as religion and visions of planetary disaster as entertainment (which we're helping to speed along, no doubt).
Ooops. I didn't think I'd be spending this half hour quite in this way. Think I'll make a new post of this and watch it drop down the board (or get slagged by unclever one-liners insulting me for things I didn't say).
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