It costs a lot to live in the greatest country on earth.
True. Does it automatically have to cost more each and every year? Is a person's income subject to the whims of the masses? Do you see a problem with the majority agreeing to fund their preferences by taxing people other than them?
The strength and security of this Nation depends in large measure on the stability of its economy, which depends in turn on the distribution of its wealth resources.
Within the past three decades the U.S. has fallen behind the rest of the developed world in its living standard, in its industrial productivity, in its upward mobility and in the education of its youth, each of which, and more, is a direct result of the incremental dismantling of the middle class, which has been achieved in part by the ability of corporations to export jobs to foreign countries and to import merchandise produced by slave labor without the imposition of protective tariffs. At the same time as these economically destructive practices have operated to systematically decimate the formerly affluent middle class other deviously conceived and cunningly enacted legislation has enabled the transfer of massive amounts of the Nation's financial resources from the middle class to a small number of politically advantaged individuals referred to by former President George W. Bush as his "base." The "haves and have-mores."
One of the ways this has been done is by gradually but significantly reducing the tax rates of the rich as shown:
The income tax rate of upper income levels:
1950 - 91%
1980 - 70%
1985 - 50%
1987 - 38%
2004 - 35%
http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/f...y-june2010.pdf
The right-wing claim that increased taxation causes reduced productivity and growth is shown to be false by the fact that our Nation's most prosperous years, those years between 1950 and 1980, occurred at the same time as the tax rates on the wealthiest Americans were highest. And it is clear that the state of our economy declined in direct proportion to the gradual reduction of those rates.