Class Warfare

Welcome back to Dicken’s “Victorian Age”, Twain’s “Gilded Age”, and to the return of Social Darwinism.

Consider:

• The top 1% of Americans now earn 24% of all income.
• The top 1% now own 40% of America's wealth.
• The top 1% now have a greater collective net worth than the entire bottom 90%.
• 80% of the nation’s income growth has gone to the top 1% over the last quarter century.
• Income for the top 1% has risen 18% in the last decade.

• Median family income has declined by more than $2,500 in the last decade.
• CEO salaries of America’s largest corporations were 531 times greater than the average employee in 2001. They were 42 times greater in 1980.
• The median income of S&P 500 CFO’s increased by $2.9 million last year alone.
• Hedge fund manager John Paulson made $4.9 billion last year, as much as 184,000 average Americans. Most of his income is considered “carried interest” and therefore taxed (after considerable deductions) at 15% instead of 35%.
• Corporations’ share of federal tax revenue has fallen from 30% in the mid-1950’s to 6.5% today.

The proposed repeal of the Bush tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans has been repeatedly called “class warfare”.

Huh??

Four years ago, Warrren Buffet compared how much he pays in taxes in terms of a percentage of his salary to what his employees pay. The results? Buffett said he pays 18 percent of his salary to the IRS while the rest of his staff pays nearly twice that — 33 percent... "Frankly, an economy where my receptionist pays a lot higher tax rate than I do does not strike me as a just economy," he told lawmakers.

This is from 2007. Still…

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3869458&page=1