Sending our jobs and manufacturing sector overseas made a lot of short term gains for very few people and now we are paying the price.

Why the hell should anyone but Walmart stockholders listen to Robert Reich is beyond me.

How many chinese can openers can you buy in a year at Walmart?

Let's outsource our local government to China too. Hell, let them run the Federal Government too - let them deal with the Wall Street Gangsters as they well kow how to do.

actually, what I said above isn't quite that cut and dried.

Not all rich people are bent on using their wealth to make a killing on the frontier of the newly re-valued real estate market.

Even more interesting fact is that more than afew of them support having their taxes raised.

Consider the wealthy Democrats in the House and the Senate- a sizeable number, especially in the Senate- who are presently supporting the Obama tax plan.

The tax plan they want to pass is actually going to cost them money.

Yes, Soliel- they're supporting increasing their own taxes- not yours.

And, for that matter, there are other wealthy people- even within that one-tenth of 1% cohort, the 129,000 filers with annual incomes of $1.5 million and above- who support the Obama administration's tax increase proposals.

By no means all of them- but such people deserve to be mentioned, in the interest of fairness and balance.

How does taxing the rich hurt the poor? When the "Rich" are taxed more, they will spend less going out to eat, vacationing, spas, etc where often service workers work...thus jobs will be lost. That will definitely effect the poor, a probably a great deal.

Soliel, you're coming from the perspective of someone who has never been wealthy, and imagines it from the point of view of someone in a lower income bracket who thinks they have a grasp of what it's really like for rich people. The fact is, you're just imagining what it's like for someone in the "comfortable middle class."

I'm not by any means an expert on the perspective of the wealthy, myself. But I have learned a little bit.

One of the things I know is that the taxes on the truly wealthy that we're talking about could skyrocket, and they'd still have more than enough money to live lavishly.

It's difficult to explain. And the wealthy tend to be very tight-lipped about it, to the public.

Funny, paradoxical things happen in the realms of wealth. It gets cheaper to buy luxury goods, for one thing, since you don't to pay for them on time, with credit cards. Because of things like the option to travel, the rich have more opportunities to bargain hunt. They also find the best deals in travel and resorts, because of the circles in which they move. It's the middle classes who pay retail. Wealth gives people the latitude to do things like pick up residences in different states, and pick the ones they like best to file their state income taxes, or even get tax benefits.

The top 1% of income earners in this country makes $350,000 or more annually.

The top one-tenth of 1% of income earners- 129,000 people- makes $1.5 million or more annually.

The best private suites- or houses- at the best 5-star resorts in the world run about $2000-$5000 per night. And if you book for a season, imagine the discount.

How many people is someone staying at one of those resorts directly responsible for employing? Not very many. It isn't as if those resorts hire 15 times as much staff as some bourgeois place like the Hyatt Regency, with that money.

Anyway, people at that income level aren't the ones spending the vast proportion of the money on resorts of any kind. The wealthy already own their own resort properties (which just sit there vacant, doing nothing but earning a bit of property tax for the places where they're located- which typically hardly need the money.) The wealthy aren't the people supporting the vast majority of the restaurant business in this country. That's what the middle class and working class does.

What are the wealthy going to do with all that money? Among other things, they're waiting for the housing market to bottom out (and they have the time to do it) so they can buy the best bargain properties at the cheapest rates, and rent them or sell them to those at the income level below them, to make more money. With the income that people like you so thoughtfully support them keeping.

Keep in mind, we speak of those at an income level to have long ago earned enough money to own their own house(s) free and clear, and to provide a full-ride medical insurance plan for their entire family, and trust funds for all of their children's educations prepaid through grad school. And to hire a private chef to do the cooking for them.

Meanwhile, the country who provided the underpinning of affluence, public works, a and technological infrastructure to enable them to make those private fortunes has been increasingly starved of revenue and run into the red, while it's added 120 million people to it's population over the last 40 years.

Remember, Soleil- during the 1950s, the Republican Eisenhower era, the top income tax rate was 91%.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a few posts comparing both health care systems here and in Canada:

http://open.salon.com/blog/kanuk/2009/03/11/health_care_comparison_universal_versus_us-style_systems

http://open.salon.com/blog/kanuk/2009/03/14/health_care_comparison_us_vs_universal_-_update_on_part_i

In these posts, I put a few links that compared various tax rates across the US and around the world that may be of interest to some:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_around_the_world

http://www.taxadmin.org/fta/rate/ind_inc.html

As much as many of us do not like to pay (a lot of) taxes (i.e., income, sales, corporate, etc.), overall we have it better here than many other industrialized countries (see first post above). Nonetheless, this does not mean that the tax collection process at the local, state and federal levels is without flaws or fair. Unfortunately, I do not have enough time to address them here (perhaps within the next few days).

@djansing: it is important to point out that if the government significantly increases taxes on cigarettes and booze, you will create a black market that will eventually do us more harm economically than good. See the following for example:

Tobacco harm reduction policies: the debate in Quebec. International Journal of Drug Policy, Volume 9, Issue 4, Pages 247-253 by L.Beauchesne (1998)

Abstract

In the fall of 1995, Quebec’s Ministry of Health and Social Services (MSSS) introduced a Bill ‘against tobacco addiction’ which explicitly rejected the repression of smokers. The Government wanted to avoid reproducing the black market in tobacco products that had flourished from 1985 to 1994 as a result of increased tobacco taxes. The Bill had two purposes, first, the primary prevention of smoking and secondly, to introduce harm reduction measures for current tobacco product users....

http://www.globaltv.com/globaltv/quebec/story.html?id=1437821