Downlo

Blacks are not likely to number themselves among the forty-six million Americans today who can trace the origins of their family wealth to the Homestead Act of 1863, because almost all of that land was allocated to whites through restrictions expressly designed to deny access to blacks.’ They cannot include themselves among the major beneficiaries of the trillions of dollars of wealth accumulated through the appreciation of housing assets secured by federally insured loans between 1932 and 1962 because 98 percent of FHA loans made during that era went to whites via the openly racist categories utilized in the agency’s official manuals for appraisers.’ Most blacks know that past discrimination continues to influence contemporary struggles to accumulate assets because wealth is inherited and passed down across generations.

In recent years, moreover, changes in the tax code have further skewed opportunities and life chances along racial lines by giving favored treatment to those forms of income most likely to represent the fruits of past and present discrimination like inheritance income and capital gains, while lessening the value of income gained through work. The living legacy of past discrimination combines with the impact of contemporary discriminatory practices in mortgage lending, real estate sales, automobile credit financing, and employment to impose artificial impediments against asset accumulation among African Americans.

The U.S. system of government has produced what is known as a dual-welfare system. Programs for the poor are termed relief, welfare, assistance, or charity. Programs for the rich, however, are called tax expenditures, subsidies, price supports, parity and the like.

The dual-welfare system is an integral part of the higher immorality, allowing the rich to become richer at the expense of the middle class and the poor. Mark Zepezauer and Arthur Naiman have recently put the costs of the corporate welfare at $448 billion, “about 3.5 times as much as the $130 billion we spend yearly for the poor.” Such “wealthfare” includes subsidies, tax deductions, tax exemptions, tax-free investments, excessive government pensions, and $172 billion worth of fraud and waste in the Defense Department.

….[B]lessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income…

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher […] According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. [….] And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue…Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.

To put it in perspective, if Congress were to do nothing, the Bush tax cuts would expire next year… That by itself would yield $3.9 trillion to the federal government over the next 10 years. We would go to the bottom of the pack in terms of deficit as a percentage of GDP among the rich countries in the world — we would basically solve our fiscal problems for the short term.

How can I get by on one house? I need five houses, ten houses! I need three jet planes to take me all over the world! Sorry, American people. We’ve got the money, we’ve got the power, we’ve got the lobbyists here and on Wall Street. Tough luck. That’s the world, get used to it. Rich get richer. Middle-class shrinks…

So these crybabies, the multimillionaires and billionaires, these people who are making out like bandits, they are crying and crying and crying, but their effective tax rates for the top 400 income earners in America was cut almost in half from 1992 to 2007. The point that needs to be made is when is enough enough? That really is the essence of what we are talking about. When does greed—and greed is, in my view, it’s like a sickness, it’s like an addiction. We know people on heroin, they can’t stop, they need more and more.

I would hope that for these people who are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, they will look around them and say, “There is something more important in life than the richest people becoming richer when we have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world.” Maybe they will understand that they are Americans, part of a great nation which is in trouble today. Maybe they’ve got to go back to the Bible or whatever they believe in understanding that there is virtue in sharing, in reaching out, that you can’t get it all.

How can anybody be proud to say that I am a multimillionaire and I’ve been getting a huge tax break and one-quarter of the kids in this country is on food stamps?