The United States Of America: "We're #1" (Ah! The Shame...)
Earlier today, friend Elodie Bentley posted the following meme.
As often happens, one of her Facebook friends Allen Sales responded with a hackneyed right-wing view.
I enjoy replyint to Allen Sales and have done so below.
Truth be told, I am grateful to Allen for giving me repeated reasons to "set the record straight."
Notice that Monbiot does not say "the rich and the ultra-rich pay no taxes."
He says that they pay lawyers and politicians - with the presuppositional "given" that they also pay taxes. Duh.
Another platitude the sounds really catchy, and very divisive. But it is nowhere near the truth.
According to the tax foundation ...
Bottom 50% of all tax payers, 76,900,699 of them, paid 3.0% of all federal income taxes paid.
The top 50% of all tax payers, 76,900,699 of them paid 97% of personal income taxes.
The top 25% paid 87.2%
The top 10% paid paid 72.0%
The top 5% paid 61.0%
The top 1%, 1,538,014 of them, paid 40.4% of all federal income taxes paid.
“The rich do not pay their share of taxes” is the greatest lie in politics. The richer you get, the more complicated your taxes get. That is why the richer you get, the more expensive the person is that you get to do them.
There also needs to be a differentiation between “being wealthy” and earning a lot of money. We tax income, not wealth. Wealth is what you accumulate for retirement.
Allen Sale Here is the Cornerstone of your Falsehood:
For the wealthy, income tax is a trivial business expense.
Vanishingly inconsequential.
The truth is that "national finances" play out primarily in the domain of Net Worth, not income tax.
Emphatically NOT income tax.
The American Right has been propagating this substantive lie, this national "decoy" about "the wealthy paying their fair share..." forever.
It all comes down to contextualization.
Y'all assume that American citizens will be suckers forever, that "Jane and Joe Blow" will never awaken from the soporific stupefaction that The Ungodly Wealthy's propaganda machine has fobbed off on The Common Folk like political narcolepsy.
Below you will find two links that explain the substantive truth of how we have become a rogue nation, a failed state and could quickly become what Trump himself describes as a "shithole country."
And we could become a "shithole country" the moment we look at American politics from the vantage of "The General Welfare" whose meaning is exactly what the constituent words say, not what the Supreme Court has decided they mean by the mangling "The General Welfare" and its Siamese twin, "The Common Good"
Of the 50 words that comprise the Preamble (which is pretty much The Mission Statement of the Constitution), nearly 10 percent of those words (which begin with "We the People") are straightforwardly dedicated to "promoting the General Welfare."
The Preamble: "We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,[note 1] promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Just as "We the People" is a phrase that has tremendous traction with the American Right, "promotion of the General Welfare" is of equal importance. "Promoting the General Welfare" is a Truth that a huge number of Americans (whether they think about it or not) "hold to be self-evident."
No wonder y'all are so opposed to wokeness.
The whole goddamn System would come crashing down if everybody woke up; indeed if only the percentage of Americans who still approve of His Malignancy woke up. (A week ago, The Economist reported that 36% of Americans approve of The Grotesquerie.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker)
For more Carlin, check out:
George Carlin: Everything You Need To Know About American Society And Politics: "Just Promise The Doofuses New Gizmos"
