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To tax (from the Latin taxo; "I estimate", which in turn is from tangō; "I touch") is to impose a financial charge or other levy upon a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a state or the functional equivalent of a state such that failure to pay is punishable by law.

 

Well it's Groundhog Day and here we are in wonderful Punxsutawney Pennsylvania...

And sometimes I seem to wake up and experience the same morning, the same day over and over and over again. It is called THE RUT.

I mean, I have not attempted suicide twenty times, nor have I hit my old school mate fourteen times for attempting to sell me life insurance. But I swear, sometimes it just seems like I am reliving the same day over and over again and it will never, ever, stop.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKvT1laennU

Here is a tidbit from the New York Times that TPM sent me to this A.M. :

 

The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country's entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.

But the second number, buried deeper in the budget's projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama's own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 -- years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms -- they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/us/politics/02deficit.html

I have read this same paragraph every fucking year for fifty years. I am so goddamn sick of it I was about to throw up on my keyboard until I realized that the NYT soon will not make me read their tripe any longer due to some not so hidden web/pc tax that will require some number on a credit card that I do not have.

Every single year sources inform me that our national debt is going to fry us. Nobody will have any money and we will find ourselves in the midst of the great depression of all time and there will be no man in a wheel chair with some crippling disease to pull us out of it. Every single year.

There were a couple of balanced budgets with even small surpluses in the 50's.

Then Clinton came around with the Gingrich Revolution that brought a surplus of one fifth of a trillion dollars. Mathematicians of course went to work with the aide of software some idiots pulled out of their assholes and projected that OUR ENTIRE DEBT WOULD BE PAID OFF IN LESS THAN A DECADE.

So did we work with piety and with a real eye to our National Security? Did we remember the story in Genesis where Joseph of the multicolored robes prevailed upon the Pharoah to save the surpluses for the down times that inevitably arise?  http://www.scribd.com/doc/2089098/Genesis-Chapter-41

OF COURSE NOT. Gingrich and Scarborough and the other repubs started yelling:

IT'S OUR MONEY AND WE WANT IT NOW!!!

So w bush gets in and they write out checks that would buy the average middle class family a toaster oven and the upper echelons yachts with golden toilets and ....puff...no more surpluses.  In other words, the same bastards who had screamed about fiscal responsibility for decades and decades looked at the situation and began yelling:

TOGA TOGA TOGA

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9JYq-mXprw

 

And wbush looked at it and said:

It is all good. And we shall proceed to go to war and call it national security and we shall bury the cost of the wars in the hidden zone, away from the eyes of the sensitive.

AND IT'S ALL GOOD

Overall the number of wealthier households is on the rise with baby boomers hitting the highs of their careers.[1] In addition, wealth is unequally distributed with the wealthiest 25% of US households owning 87% ($43.6 trillion, in 2004) of the wealth in the United States[2][3]

  Here is some commie take on America and distribution of wealth:

Wolff: The most common measure used, and the most understandable is: what share of total wealth \ is owned by the richest households, typically the top 1 percent. In the United States, in the last survey year, 1998, the richest 1 percent of households owned 38 percent of all wealth.

This is the most easily understood measure.

There is also another measure called the Gini coefficient. It measures the concentration of wealth at different percentile levels, and does an overall computation. It is an index that goes from zero to one, one being the most unequal. Wealth inequality in the United States has a Gini coefficient of .82, which is pretty close to the maximum level of inequality you can have.

MM: What have been the trends of wealth inequality over the last 25 years?

Wolff: We have had a fairly sharp increase in wealth inequality dating back to 1975 or 1976.

Prior to that, there was a protracted period when wealth inequality fell in this country, going back almost to 1929. So you have this fairly continuous downward trend from 1929, which of course was the peak of the stock market before it crashed, until just about the mid-1970s. Since then, things have really turned around, and the level of wealth inequality today is almost double what it was in the mid-1970s.

Income inequality has also risen. Most people date this rise to the early 1970s, but it hasn't gone up nearly as dramatically as wealth inequality.

MM: What portion of the wealth is owned by the upper groups?

Wolff: The top 5 percent own more than half of all wealth.

In 1998, they owned 59 percent of all wealth. Or to put it another way, the top 5 percent had more wealth than the remaining 95 percent of the population, collectively.

The top 20 percent owns over 80 percent of all wealth. In 1998, it owned 83 percent of all wealth.

This is a very concentrated distribution.

MM: Where does that leave the bottom tiers?

Wolff: The bottom 20 percent basically have zero wealth. They either have no assets, or their debt equals or exceeds their assets. The bottom 20 percent has typically accumulated no savings.

.http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/America/Wealth_Divide.html

 

So the top twenty percent own 43 trillion dollars in assets and the bottom 20% OWNS NOTHING.

Now we are anticipating a 1.5 trillion dollar deficit over the coming fiscal year.  And the repubs are irrelevant because they cannot filibuster the budget--which is for their own good since they wish to have as much of that money go to family, friends and at least some to end up with their constituents--and so it will pass. 

The logic of a financial transactions tax is simple. It would impose a modest fee on trades of stocks, futures, credit default swaps and other financial instruments. For example, the UK puts a 0.25% tax on the sale or purchase of shares of stock. This has very little impact on people who buy stock with the intent of holding it for a long period of time.

For example, if someone buys $10,000 of stock, they will pay $25 in tax at the time of purchase. If they sell the stock 10 years later for $20,000, they will have to pay $50 in tax. The total tax would be equivalent to an increase of 0.8 percentage points in the capital gains tax.

By contrast, if someone is interested in buying stock at 1.00pm to sell at 2.00pm, this tax is likely to take a bit hit out of their expected profits. The same applies people who are speculating in futures, credit default swaps and other financial instruments.

We can raise more than $140bn a year taxing financial transactions, an amount equal to 1% of GDP. Before we look to impose a national sales tax, or value-added tax, as the deficit hawk crew would like, we should insist that we first put in place a set of financial transactions taxes. http://tpmcafe.

 

Well, how many stock trades are made in one year anyway?

An average of 9.1 billion shares has traded each day on U.S. exchanges since the beginning of the year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-29/stock-tax-may-reduce-volume-90-interactive-brokers-ceo-says.html

But screw 50 bucks per ten thousand shares. Make it one percent. 

IT IS WALL STREET AND THE MORTGAGE PRICKS WHO GOT US INTO THIS MESS AND WHO PAY THEMSELVES BILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR FOR DOING SO.

Oh...our best and brightest will go elsewhere, the pricks say.

Where exactly will they go? Canada? Canada would rightfully tax the shite out of them.

Europe? Europe would do likewise.You know I have had it with this best and the brightest crap. For every one suckling pig at the give a way trough etched out for the rich, there are ten thousand waiting to have their turn at the same trough.

Look the bastards who own this country did not get there just through hard work. A coal miner knows what hard work is.

He got there because of hard work, drive, and a lucky run. And the system fixed it so that they do not even need a lucky run anymore.

Now Businessweek folks tell us that if we attempt to do something like this, we are all going to hell in a hand basket.

BUT WE ARE ANYWAY. At least that is the case according to the RNC, the NYT, the WSJ and the Punxsutawney  Mirror.

Join me and Bill Murray in our attempt to stop the cycle; that is the same goddamnable day from appearing with the Rosy Fingered Dawn. 

LET US TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT.

We have debts, but we have A LOT OF WEALTH TO PAY THOSE FUCKING DEBTS IN THIS COUNTRY.

So lets pay those debts and get on to the business of being a society that has as its leaders a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

 

Or we shall be condemned to sixty more years of winter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrFxQ5w7FmM&

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