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: : Another factoid; over 50% of tax reciepts come from the top 5% of wage earners. We've already got redistribution of wealth. : SDF: The main form of redistribution of wealth in the world today is called wage labor, and it proceeds FROM the working class TO the owning class. Let's start with individual instances of these classes, me and my employer for instance. At the job, I make ten widgets with my labor per day, which my employer takes for his own. I am compensated with enough money to buy the labor cost it costs to pay someone else to make one widget. My employer has thus gained nine widgets' worth of labor off of me, that is to say, I as an employee have, with my day's worth of work, redistributed my wealth upward to my employer through work. This redistribution, from workers to owners of capital, is reflected in how the pie is sliced.
: And then of course there's the MAIN form of redistribution of wealth in global society, from the poor nations to the rich ones, that occurs at about the rate of six Marshall plans per decade. And as Susan George reported:
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Have these extraordinary outflows served to reduce the absolute size of the debt burden? Not a bit: in spite of paying out more than $1.3 trillion between 1982 and 1990, the debtor countries as a group began the l990s with a full 61 percent more in debt than in 1982. Sub-Saharan Africa's debt increased by 113 percent during this period.
: ...such situation having NOT having changed significantly since 1990.
: As for taxes, most of the beneficiaries of "your tax dollar at work" are rich people -- the government pays more in corporate welfare than it does in welfare for the needy, and half of every dollar you send the IRS goes to the military... this can hardly be called "redistribution" in any way that cuts across the class divide...
This is the intellectual equivilant of David Letterman's 'Stupid Pet Tricks' segment.
This is all very interesting as Marxist analysis, but the fact remains that the majority of taxes that the IRS recieves comes from a very small percentage of top wage earners. Forays into the miasmatic and fevered economic swamps of 'congealed labor' and 'surplus value' is fine for those faux intellectuals who have not and probably never will acheive the exalted state that they feel the world owes them. The model that you use is so craven that it doesn't deserve any serious consideration. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Fassbinder. How can a smart person be so thick?
