Here's a question: how do some people sleep at night after writing drivel like this?
Billionaire owners can afford to run their leagues however they wish. But in the real world it makes little sense to punish success or reward failure. Yet that's exactly what the federal government's tax policy does.
According to a recent report by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, in 2007 (the most recent year for which figures are available) the top 20 percent of earners paid 70 percent of all federal taxes. The bottom 40 percent of earners paid no income tax.
The only way you can make this argument is if you conveniently narrow its scope to federal income taxes. That's right, you have to leave out the payroll tax, property taxes, various sales taxes, and local, state, and federal fees - all of which hit the working- and middle-classes the hardest. And you have to ignore that taxes on capital gains - income earned from investments - has been steadily whittled down, which directly benefits the richest among us. And that's also ignoring the byzantine tax credits and loopholes created for people with capital to slip out of paying any taxes. In 2008, the GAO reported that "72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005."
In short, to make this argument, you have to deliberately ignore actual tax policies. In reality, we do not have a progressive tax system. Instead, we have a system that's been deliberately engineered to redistribute income from the poorest to the richest.
And the premise of the article, that income rewards good work is laughable on its face. It's like the author has lived in a box his whole life. Money rewards money, not success. The unregulated financial system created the current recession - which collapsed on defaulted mortgages...for the rich - yet hits working- and middle-class families the hardest. Wealth isn't a measure of an individual's ability, it's too often the result of having all the doors of society - education and economic opportunity - opened by money. Our nation's fiscal policy is aimed at propping up the wealthy, creating economic safety nets that allow the rich to take ill-conceived risks without having to suffer any consequences.
Ordinary taxpayers end up shouldering the bulk of costs of oil spills in Alaska and the Gulf or the medical bills of workers and their families suffering from asbestosis and other health conditions related to industrial pollution. Ordinary taxpayers bail out huge, multi-billion dollar investment banks when they lose their shirts at the blackjack table.
But Feulner's article should serve notice that, once again, the conservative lackeys of big business are sharpening their pencils in preparation to turn the facts upside-down: the rich are poor, the poor are rich, and the problem is that you have too much money. |
