...electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1 percent. Or, to be more precise, the .0000063 percent. Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80 percent of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.
"As we get women access to education and birth control, as there's a focus on human rights, the birth rate is leveling out. It's a great success story, actually. Sustainability is about consumption, not population. Indonesia has a high birth rate, but Indonesia is not going to push the world into runaway global warming. Not unless they all start consuming the way we do." — Ted Nace, author and environmental activist, during a Conference on World Affairs panel that asked, "Can Science Feed the Growing Global Population?"
For each 1 percent of the population voting in favor of the Republican presidential candidate, the state received an additional 1.7 cents in benefits for each dollar in taxes.
This chart should be ingrained in the mind of anybody who cares about fiscal policy. The main things to note:
- Federal taxes are the lowest in 60 years, which gives you a pretty good idea of why America’s long-term debt ratios are a big problem. If the taxes reverted to somewhere near their historical mean, the problem would be solved at a stroke.
- Income taxes, in particular, both personal and corporate, are low and falling. That trend is not sustainable.
- Employment taxes, by contrast—the regressive bit of the fiscal structure—are bearing a large and increasing share of the brunt. Any time that somebody starts complaining about how the poor don’t pay income tax, point them to this chart. Income taxes are just one part of the pie, and everybody with a job pays employment taxes.
- There aren’t any wealth taxes, but the closest thing we’ve got—estate and gift taxes—have shrunk to zero, after contributing a non-negligible amount to the public fisc in earlier decades.
If you were structuring a tax code from scratch, it would look nothing like this. But the problem is that tax hikes seem to be politically impossible no matter which party is in power. And since any revamp of the tax code would involve tax hikes somewhere, I fear we’re fiscally doomed.
From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
Use the slider at the bottom to zoom/explore the size of everything in the universe. We’ve seen some other takes on this, but this is the smoothest and most comprehensive of them so far. Thanks to Andrea Bedini for the link.
