The White House spent close to ten years of my salary to take a picture of Air Force One.

I’m speechless.

Who signed that check? I’m sure it was someone who sits at a desk all day, making barely more than I do, stamping their boss’s signature on checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What does that person do when they go home at night? How do they swallow their dinner knowing that they spent 8 hours shoveling taxpayer money into a furnace in quantities best measured in tens of salaries?

If you tally up all the various taxes we pay (income, social security, sales, etc.) our effective tax rate is close to 50%. The French pay 50%, but it in return they get medical care, retirement, housing subsidies, welfare, and free college. Here, we get pretty pictures of the president’s jet. I think it’s time for a taxpayer revolution.

This is a third-hand quote, but it is amazing:

“I think there is a prudential reason for maintaining a progressive tax system (and we certainly can argue about “how” progressive it should be): namely, that if you believe, as I do, that the U.S. is best served by maintaining a capitalist system and a free market, we have to accept that one of the natural consequences of such a system is the accumulation of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

Regardless of whether these fewer and fewer deserve the money they accumulate or are unfairly being punished by progressive taxation, the political consequence of such an accumulation of wealth is radicalism - a majority that uses its political power to destroy the system rather than simply to modify it.

In other words, progressive taxation is required to maintain the political viability of a free market.”

Original post and commentary here.

Here are some graphs I created (sources of data at the bottom):

Here you can see an overlay of both graphs, and you can compare the wealth held by the top 1% (green line) with the amount of taxes they paid. Notice the times when ‘life was good’ — the teens, and the 50’s and 60’s, the taxes on the rich were sky high, and they held the least wealth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
(an awesome source, check it out)