- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Yes, the rich pay the most in taxes. THEY SHOULD. They are benefiting from our current arrangements more than others. The same police protect their millions while protecting poor people's thousands or hundreds. Same with the fire department. Same with our military (if it actually protected us rather than egging on other nations).
What's more, the super rich hardly pay any taxes. I have such people in my family and they describe jokes within the circles they move about how no one pays taxes. Read David K. Johnston's "Perfectly Legal". (Note: I'm middle class and like other posters drive a used car I paid for in cash, don't have cable, bike to work, etc.)
The bottom line for people who defend the somewhat rich who pay most of the taxes is this: they don't deserve that money in the first place. It's harsh, but true. Simply because our inflated, house-of-cards market pays them a seven-figure salary doesn't mean they're worth that much. How can one claim that a CEO works harder than a single mother with two dead-end jobs? It's arbitrary. It is based on the CEO's ability to generate short term stock gains through schemes that often don't even help the company for which they work in the long run. Sure, there are people who earn six figures who work hard at honest jobs, but even there it's not entirely clear that they are being paid their value -- they are simply paid their market value in an inflated market. That's called hard work plus a lot of luck. And if the dollar collapses, these people too are fucked.
Finally, there is the moral question: even if the low-end rich (and that's the richest kind of people posting here) survive a major crisis -- which I question -- is it fair to let all of the people who will experience crushing poverty languish because "that's life?" I hope you remember that when your company turns to crap and you don't have any employable skills ("I know you have a tax law degree, but I need someone who can pick beans quickly, and you don't seem to know how to do that at all").
