Five Ugly Extremes of Inequality in America

From AlterNet:

2. A single top income could buy housing for every homeless person in the U.S.

On a winter day in 2012 over 633,000 people were homeless in the United States. Based on an annual single room occupancy (SRO) cost of $558 per month, any ONE of the ten richest Americans would have enough with his 2012 income to pay for a room for every homeless person in the U.S. for the entire year. These ten rich men together made more than our entire housing budget.

For anyone still believing "they earned it," it should be noted that most of the Forbes 400 earnings came from minimally-taxed, non-job-creating capital gains.
 
And

4. The U.S. is nearly the most wealth-unequal country in the entire world

Out of 141 countries, the U.S. has the 4th-highest degree of wealth inequality in the world, trailing only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon.

Yet the financial industry keeps creating new wealth for its millionaires. According to the authors of the Global Wealth Report, the world's wealth has doubled in ten years, from $113 trillion to $223 trillion, and is expected to reach $330 trillion by 2017.
 
More here.

Years ago, when I was liberal but not nearly as liberal as I am now, I was having a friendly argument with some people at a party.  I was advocating taxing the rich at a much higher rate, to pay for that ever-ominous deficit, to pay for social programs, and other various reasons.  The party was in Austin, a liberal city, but it was still Texas: one of my opponents retorted, "Why should we punish success?"

I tried to respond that taxes aren't punishment, that they're what people owe, dues essentially, for being able to live, function, and operate in the United States.  Of course, people were drunk, and the conversation quickly broke up, with the "punish success" woman feeling like she had made an unassailable argument.  But really.  Taxes are "punishment"?  If that's the case, then living in a modern civilized nation must necessarily be punishment, too, because you can't have a modern civilized nation without taxes.

But that's where popular thinking was in the mid 1990s, and the sentiment continues, albeit not as strongly, to this very day--taxation is "punishment."  And that's a drag because such a notion does nothing more than confuse what the actual questions are: what should the government do, and where should we get the money to do it?  When you bitch and moan about taxation in itself, you're sidestepping your civic responsibility, and worse, taking others with you down into your rabbit hole of selfish ignorance.

The reality today is that the wealthy have been so extraordinarily successful over the last three decades with this insidious rhetorical device, taxes as "punishment," that there is now no doubt as to where we should get the money to fund the government.  We should get it from the rich.  That's where the money is, and that's where we need to go to get it.  Since the Regan era, America has been profoundly and amazingly generous to the filthy rich, while at the same time sticking it to people who work for a living.  And this crazy imbalance is starting to tear at the fabric of the nation.

It's time for the rich to pay up.  It's not punishment.  It's what they OWE.

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