How The Rich Fund America

I'd like to address this to all you bleeding-heart leftists out there who are all in a fuss about how the evil rich are exploiting the poor.

Excuse me? Perhaps you aren't aware but it is in fact the rich who are funding all those wonderful government expenditures, so many of which you claim exist to help the poor (the veracity of that claim is for another discussion). How you ask? Well, your budget deficit is as large as the bond market allows - you have to have enough bondholders to buy up your debt or you can't spend any more. The large number of these bondholders in the US but also internationally are the reason you have such a large debt yet are not in financial trouble - there's a lot of bondholders out there.

Now, who do you suppose holds these bonds? I don't know about you but most normal, middle class people don't go around buying up government bonds, they have other more important things they need their money for. No, it is much more likely these bonds will be bought up with the large amount of disposable income available to the rich Wall St. types. And since it is your tax money that pays off these bonds, this in effect means that your tax money, which is largely drawn from the blue collar and middle classes, is being paid to rich bondholders so the government can spend vast amounts of money.

So in effect, the rich Wall St. types (and foreign rich people as well) you all hate so much are the reason you can have the government spending programs you do. Without them, you'd have to sell them to the Federal Reserve who would then have to get rid of them by turning them into money, monetizing your debt and causing inflation.

Now I'd argue you're getting a bad bargain out of this because most government spending is very inefficient and wasteful so the amount of benefits you get from the government is less than the amount you pay to the rich people on Wall St. So I would argue that if you want the rich to stop "exploiting" the poor, stop electing politicians who spend so much (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*) money, and stop demanding of your politicians that they spend so much (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*) money.

Even if we ignore that, the fact remains that you NEED those rich Wall St. fat cats to have what you have, so you can either keep being hypocrites and I will laugh at you, you can change your stance, or you can just shut up about the 'evil rich people'.

 

Yeah, well... They're not paying enough of their fair share!!!! They don't NEED all of their extra money while paying their own employees low wages, they need to pay their fair share and spread it around for everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!


**Childish temper tantrum lib voice off**

 

Or, elect politicians who will tax the rich rather than borrowing money from them.

 

After "too big to fail" happened multiple times, the Wall Street argument is rather weak.

At this point, the government borrows a lot of money from banks while at the same time bailing said banks out when market collapses occur. You're correct that the rich fund America, but the banking system itself is designed to prop them up at everyone else's expense.

When you have the power to create money out of thin air while at the same time have the power to get taxpayers to bail out your failures, well, you really can't lose.

Granted, they have to keep Americans distracted enough and complacent enough to keep them from revolting. If they don't throw the poor some bones, then you end up with something like the French Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution.

In effect, we're just in a mode of damage control, while market bubbles continue to develop (and will continue to involve bailouts afterwards at taxpayer expense).

 

You're talking about banks, I'm not talking about banks, I'm talking about rich bondholders.

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As long as you're willing to except monetization of the debt so you can keep spending the way you do.

 

"rich bondholders" hold a very small portion of the national debt.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how...5501143j0j0&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

Fail.

 

Oh goody another kiss the rich's ass thread.

 

Oh goody. Another hate rich people (except the liberal wealthy) reply. Nice to know that some things never change.

 

Those big red and brown sections of that NPR graphic are small to you?

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Where did I ever say I worship rich people? Did I not specify I thought this whole thing was a (*)(*)(*)(*)ty deal?

 

And yet, even after all they do, they still have so much MORE than the vast majority of this country's people do, in terms of both wealth and what that wealth can do for quality of living.

Not that I hate them or anything, they certainly earned most of it. But I'm not going to fight for them either.

Meanwhile, the vast majority is becoming worse and worse off, and not all of that is THEIR specific fault. What do you think will happen when the vast majority cannot afford to feed or shelter themselves?

 

I haven't seen the NPR graphic, but I am able to deal with numbers and percentages. Do NPR readers need cartoons? The PORTION of national debt held by individuals is small.

Montoya has a knee-jerk reaction when he/she sees the word rich. Removes his/her ability to discuss rationally.

 

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013...the-u-s-government-owes-money-to-in-one-graph

The government owes about a 3rd to itself. The other two thirds are to the American people and foreigners.

Are you willing to bet most of the Americans and foreigners holding that debt are, say, poor? Cuz I wouldn't make that bet.

 

The so-called rich and everyone else who pays personal income taxes
need to have them cut. The government has enough to waste.

 

The graph indicates 6% of the debt is held by individuals, brokers, corporations and others. So your contention that rich individuals fund the government is in error.

 

The proportion is irrelevant because they don't pay off the entire debt at once, they just pay off portions. Much of the Domestic and Foreign portions of the debt is individuals, businesses or various other parties buying up government bonds. Those bonds must be paid back so that is owed to them, thus it is "debt". The government uses the revenue from selling those bonds to pay back some of the other debts it has incurred (government spending programs), namely to itself. Those bonds end up paid back with your tax money.

The overall debt represents both the debt from government expenditures as well as the money owed US bondholders. The increasing number of bonds the US must sell to fund its other expenditures are why the debt is so large. Basically, one part of the debt is funding another part of the debt.

 

Not so,
Quite a substantial amount comes from the people's taxes and corporate taxes with manpower of the people.
I could say that the people also contributed so much to make them rich and thus their ability to fund could be credited to the people as well.
The People of America.

 

Actually, about 47% of Americans pay no income tax, so about half of the middle class pays nothing for these bonds. Just as the Federal taxes are paid for prinarily by the wealthy, so to are the bonds paid off with tax revenue collected from the wealthy.

 

They will have to watch Rachel Maddow on the iPhone instead of on their big screen TV and text their congressman about how downtrodden they are. People are not worse and worse off except by their own decision making based on their own inflated sense of what they think their labor is worth. Every day I drive past neighborhoods of old mill houses--largely 4 squares, some with attic conversions, and know that it wasn't that long ago that people raised big families in those little houses with 1 bathroom and no AC. Many still have their old coal fireplaces in them that they heated with but most have shed their big old antennae on top that some people were still using for TV when I was a kid.

Worse off. Give me a break.

 

How true. Another point is that they are a part of Federally funded poverty,
aka, the Democrat Vote Program.

I never thought for a moment, while growing up, that these people were
worse off. They may have learned how to be better people by sharing and
not being as self centered.

 

Actually, taxing the wealthy to cover spending instead of borrowing from the wealthy to cover spending precludes the need for debt monetization.

 

We wouldn't need all those wonderful government expenditures if the rich weren't bleeding the country white.

 

It's not like the rich aren't contributing anything. They just do the strict necessary to ensure the market keeps ongoing. If they did less, then the market would shrink and so the income...

 

Please explain.

 

The wealthy don't have as much money on-hand as you're probably looking for. There's a reason they use bonds - they don't have to pay them back for a while, so they can spend much more than you'd think they could afford given their tax revenue. They they pay all of it back in little bits.

 

And an increase in tax revenue would lead to more debt monetization how?