Wednesday, September 26, 2007

78. PASS THE COW CHIPS

From the Archives

(2005) Today is April 15. One year has passed since Lynne's untimely death and I am in a pensive mood.

It's also tax day. Or, as Molly Ivins’s aptly says
April 15: You’re Getting Screwed.

She refers to NYT regular and Pulitzer prize–winner author David Cay Johnston’s Perfectly Legal—The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super-Rich—and Cheat Everyone Else.

Johnston reports:

Through explicit policies, as well as tax laws never reported in the news, Congress now literally takes money from those making $30,000 to $500,000 per year and funnels it in subtle ways to the super-rich—the top one-one hundredth of one percent of Americans.

People making $60,000 paid a larger share of their 2001 income in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes than a family making $25 million, the latest Internal Revenue Service data show. And in income taxes alone, people making $400,000 paid a larger share of their incomes than the 7,000 households who made $10 million or more.

The rest of us are subsidizing not only the super-rich, but also corporations. Fifty years ago, corporations paid 60 percent of all federal taxes. But by 2003, that was down to 16 percent. So individual taxpayers have to make up the difference, as corporate profits soar and wages fall.

It’s a Bush world after all.



Meanwhile, the stock market fell to the lowest it’s been in two years today and the World Cow Chip Throwing Contest was held in Beaver, Oklahoma.

(The ways in which some people can distract themselves never fail to amaze me.)

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