Robot Pirate Ninja

So I constantly hear about how my President is a socialist and transforming the country into a socialist hellhole.

There is pretty constant stream of incontrovertible evidence for this.   See, for example, the record corporate profits posted this quarter.

U.S. companies hauled in profits at a record annual rate of $1.66 trillion dollars in the third quarter, according to a report by the Department of Commerce Tuesday containing a number of economic indicators.

Corporate America is making a strong comeback this year. The rate of growth is set to be one-third faster than the last two years, which hovered around $1.2 trillion.

But if record corporate profits aren’t enough evidence of our slide into socialism, how about the fact that billionaires now pay lower tax rates than their secretaries?

In an interview with NBC’s Tom Brokaw that aired last week, Buffett took his “I’m not paying enough in taxes, and neither are my fellow billionaires” campaign to a new level, highlighting his contention that he pays a lower tax rate than all of his office employees.

He told Brokaw: “I’ll bet a million dollars against any member of the Forbes 400 who challenges me that the average (federal tax rate including income and payroll taxes) for the Forbes 400 will be less than the average of their receptionists.” 

And so far not a single billionaire has come forward to get their free money, ’cause, of course, they are TAXED ENOUGH ALREADY (and lower than their underlings).

They are, however, totally full of shit in their defense of their ludicrously low tax rates.

Several argued that Buffett isn’t taking estate taxes into account.  Casino owner Phillip Ruffin (Tied at #220 with $2.1 billion) told Forbes, “He is forgetting about the 55% estate tax at death that goes along with making the money.  Maybe he is getting senile?”  While not interested in the million-dollar challenge, Ruffin did say he’d play Buffett in poker.

Actually Phillip, he’s not.  Not only is the estate tax currently at 0% (yes, Bush lowered it all the way to 0%) but no one ever pays estate taxes every year, only that one year when you inherit a few hundred billion from dead old dad (like the self-made Tea Party founders, the Koch Brothers).   So even that caveat is gone.

So we have a socialist country where the richest pay the lowest rate, a person with a million dollar sitting in the bank doing nothing makes more and pays less taxes per year than your average blue collar worker, and this money rolls over and over forever, creating a long-term monied class that doesn’t have to work and pays lower tax rates than the working class.  

Now I know that this is being called “socialism” (largely by the minions of the aforementioned Koch Brothers) when in fact it is nothing less than a simple return to the U.S. economy of the late 19th Century, where the Robber Barons ruled all, bought elections with huge amounts of anonymous corporate money, and then had their newly elected employees turn around and lower their tax rates even further (and cutting services to pay for it).

It’s not socialism folks, heck, it’s not even capitalism. 

This is just bullshit.

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NOTE: The funny part about this whole thing?  You know what it was that took the U.S from the Gilded Age to the part in history where we are the pre-eminment economy and super-power?   Hint:  It wasn’t tax cuts for the robber barons.