Frank Rich-Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?

Op-Ed Columnist
Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?

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...The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.

The Americans I’m talking about are not just those shadowy anonymous corporate campaign contributors who flooded this campaign. No less triumphant were those individuals at the apex of the economic pyramid — the superrich who have gotten spectacularly richer over the last four decades while their fellow citizens either treaded water or lost ground. The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 — up from less than 9 percent in 1976. During the boom years of 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent’s pretax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. But the boom proved an exclusive affair: in that same period, the median income for non-elderly American households went down and the poverty rate rose.

It’s the very top earners, not your garden variety, entrepreneurial multimillionaires, who will be by far the biggest beneficiaries if there’s an extension of the expiring Bush-era tax cuts for income over $200,000 a year (for individuals) and $250,000 (for couples). The resurgent G.O.P. has vowed to fight to the end to award this bonanza, but that may hardly be necessary given the timid opposition of President Obama and the lame-duck Democratic Congress.

more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/opinion/14rich.html?_r=1&src=twrhp

K&R

:rofl:

Probably makes them all want to grow up and be either Donna Reed or a Playboy Bunny! Sickening.

foregone conclusion.

own ears. Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I have to hold on to some small sliver of hope that my young hero will rise to the occasion. :shrug:

yup, BIG TIME

you know what happened to the last Czar? or Marie Antoinette? I would tell them YOU failed because you don't share, you just TAKE..like a gang of sociopaths...You parasites had a good life by diminishing everyone else's lives,Now it's our turn to make a society WE can live in..Which will be more difficult because you pigs have poisoned this world.So since you just HAVE to have control; that means WE cannot trust you or live around your taint.Head meet basket...chop.

Marginalizing psychopaths remains an area of active research for me. Psychopaths simply lack empathy. The humane thing is to build a imperceivable construct to contain their pathogen.

rec'd

:kick:

"The president’s argument against extending the cuts for the wealthiest has now been reduced to the dry accounting of what the cost would add to the federal deficit. As he put it to CBS’s Steve Kroft, “the question is — can we afford to borrow $700 billion?”

"That’s a good question, all right, but it’s not the question. The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich."

Yep, THE question is why don't we institute a confiscatory tax on these bandits and even things up somewhat?