What follows is a guest blog from a long-time friend who's just getting into this blogging thing. Her pen name is OCBananaGirl and you can see another post of hers on
BoSox Tavern. Below she offers what I think is a very unique and accurate perspective regarding what the 1% value about America versus what the rest of us value about America.
"All day I have been wondering, what if 99% of us only paid a 13% tax rate, would the 1% still want to live in this country? If half of the taxes that pay for roads, bridges, prisons, security, judges, police officers, fire departments, zoos, parks, snow plows, beach replenishment, catastrophe help, flood insurance, social security, medicare, insurance backing our banks, FDA, EPA, medical research, space programs, education, medical research, and wars -- I am sure I have missed so much as I am accustomed to my regular life -- but what if we as US citizens had to live without nearly 1/2 the funding and many of the programs that make us love our country were not available, would we still be so in love with our country?
My thought is, yes, 99% of us would still love our county and the 99% would somehow come together to make the country better, the 99% would find the ingenuity and the get-down-dirty effort to bring this country back. But the real question lies with the 1%. Would they be able to live with decrepit roads, pot holes, no snow plows, no trash pickup, long lines at hospitals, no flood insurance for the beach front homes, no beaches, no parks to visit on family vacations, no police to protect their property? And when I wondered about this, I realized that the 1% need the 99% more than the 99% need the 1%. Maybe it is time to realize that the 1% should act on their threats and move their assets to the Cayman Islands because they already have and 99% of us still continue to struggle and yet are proud to call ourselves Americans."
2 comments:
Yeah, it feels like we take all the risk and pay for all the bennies, so that they can spend their money lobbying to make things even more inequitable.
The biggest reason we have a huge deficit and crumbling infrastructure, etc, is because they are not paying their share; and since they are not creating jobs, especially well-paying ones, the rest of us are running out of money to do these things.
At a time when most of the other Repuglicans are using the term "job creator," I found it illuminating that Gov McDonnell used the term, "wealth creator." I haven't heard him use it since. I wonder if he was called by the big Repuglican kahuna and told to stop saying it, just like Newt was told to stop calling the Paul Ryan budget proposal, "right wing social engineering."
Elizabeth Warren has the right of it, "No one in this country got rich by themselves..... They got rich taking their products to market on roads everyone else paid for, protected by police and fire personnel that everyone else paid for. They employed a workforce that was educated by everyone else... and they owe it to next guy with the good idea to have the same things available to him."
Do the 1% need the 99% more than the 99 need the 1? Absolutely!
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