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Hey Tex, hey buddy!

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Whitewing

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I thought of you when I read this comment in the linked article. Haven't checked out the details to verify them, but suspect they're correct.

Since I believe I've seen you post that the rich aren't paying their fair share, I was wondering what your thoughts are on the following statement from the article:

He has misled people and incited envy by repeatedly suggesting that wealthier Americans don't pay their fair share of taxes. Yet Congressional Budget Office (CBO) figures show that if the citizenry is divided into quintiles by income, the top two quintiles pay 99 percent of all federal income taxes, and the top 1 percent pays 40 percent. Nor is this merely reflective of disparities in income: The top two quintiles make three times as much money as the bottom three quintiles but pay 75 times as much in income taxes.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/dissembler-chief_576913.html
 
While 44% of all Americans don't pay any taxes. Something is wrong and the whole thing needs changed.
 
BRG said:
While 44% of all Americans don't pay any taxes. Something is wrong and the whole thing needs changed.

I suspect the coming depression will force some adjustments in how things are done. That's usually how these things work out.
 
Whitewing said:
BRG said:
While 44% of all Americans don't pay any taxes. Something is wrong and the whole thing needs changed.

I suspect the coming depression will force some adjustments in how things are done. That's usually how these things work out.

Whitewing, there are two sides to that equation.

On another post I explained that Saddam Hussein was the only one who funded his government. Of course he was the only one getting all the revenue from sales of oil too.

The other side of the equation is that one that hounds Mexico too. It is the fact that the society and rule of law is such that there is a very top that has concentrated the wealth in the land.

I want EVERYONE to pay taxes. To do that, you must have an economy where more people are actually making the money, not just a relative few at the top.

I could care less about some people's wealth. I am not envious of that wealth. I don't need another vacation nor another couple houses in this country and that country.

It does bother me when the very very rich can buy tax loopholes so that my state and local taxes cost more and they get out of paying them because of the way the federal government sends dictates to the states without the money.

It does bother me when the super rich are able to buy the spin they do and the rules and laws of the land.

Money shouldn't make you above the law but in this country it does, especially when it comes to economic crimes, which very few people seen to have the capacity to understand when the spinster spin and blow smoke.

The SS system has loaned the U.S. something over 2 trillion dollars. Now politicians who have screwed up the economy so much that we have high unemployment and lower wages means the SS surplus isn't there for them to spend. So what do some of the politicians do? They have to "reform" social security.

We have the highest concentration of wealth since the Great Depression when the "competition" between the Robber Barons concentrated the wealth and then wrecked the economy.

I don't see the super rich's surplus being used. They just changed the accounting terms so that regular people pay the SS taxes and they don't up to their highest income.

You tell me what is wrong with that picture.

I am tired of comparing only income tax when we don't compare percent of SS tax paid nor do we count the aggregation of wealth that they have been able to buy for themselves.

Tex
 
Let is get specific, Whitewing. Here is a dated article on the demise of the Glass Steagal Act and the fix we got ourselves into. This was done by very rich and powerful men who claimed that consolidating the banks (into what we call too big to fail) was an "efficient" thing for the economy to help it.

Mid-50s BHC battle helped shape today's banking landscape, literally. E-mail

Mid-50s battle shaped today's banking


By Steve Cocheo, executive editor
[email protected]

After more than two decades of often-bitter wrangling, in mid-1956, Congress passed the Bank Holding Company Act, including the "Douglas Amendment." At the time, the act and that amendment, especially, represented a major restriction on the activities of a portion of the banking industry. However, it also helped bring about today's geographic landscape in banking.

One of the authors of the act was Sen. A. Willis Robertson (D.-Va.), successor to Sen. Carter Glass, of Glass-Steagall Act fame, and father of Pat Robertson, today's tv evangelist. Robertson chaired what was then the banking subcommittee of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee. In the June 1956 Banking, Robertson wrote that the new law was "… the most significant banking statute that has been enacted since the Banking Act of 1935 [Glass-Steagall]. It is important to bankers of every state of the Union, but is of particular concern to bankers in the 33 states where bank holding companies are carrying on active operations."

Today, there are holding companies, large, medium, and small, all over the business. But at the time of passage they were a relatively new, and increasingly powerful, factor. The 1956 act's two main purposes were to rein in future expansion of bank holding companies, and to require them to divest themselves of nonbanking investments.

Regarding the latter point, one of the best examples of what was going on was Transamerica Corp. Founded by A.P. Giannini, founder also of Bank of America, Transamerica owned banks in multiple states as well as nonbanking businesses in insurance and other. In a January 1956 Banking commentary, F.N. Belgrano, Jr., Transamerica's chairman and president, argued against the pending holding company act. He noted that the industry was fighting itself, with smaller, hometown banks and their allies on one side, and larger, holding-company-centered banking firms on the other.

Wrote Belgrano: "… the real bone of contention is whether bank holding companies have an advantage over their competitors and, if so, whether this advantage is 'unfair' so as to justify congressional intervention."

An opponent, and a former ABA president, banker A.L.M. "Lee" Wiggins, president, Bank of Hartsville, S.C., stated in the December 1955 Banking:

"… On the whole, holding companies have a splendid record in their operation of banks. They performed a valuable service in taking over and saving a number of banks during the depression period of the thirties. Simple fairness would dictate that holding companies owning banks across state lines should not be required to divest themselves of such ownership. However, future acquisitions across state lines should be prohibited by federal law. Such a policy would be consistent with that now applicable to branch banking across state lines …"

The holding companies lost the battle, and along the way, the Douglas Amendment became part of the new law. Paul Howard Douglas (D.-Ill.), economist and professor, and a strong backer of what became Truth in Lending, added a rule that extended the restrictions on bank branching contained in the McFadden Act ("Then and Now," April) to holding companies. Holding companies had been seen as evading McFadden by acquiring banks in other states, in lieu of the McFadden-barred branching. As Robertson wrote in 1956:

"Interstate expansion is controlled by the Douglas amendment, which prohibits a bank holding company from acquiring a bank outside of the home state of the holding company unless the laws of the state to be entered specifically authorize such acquisitions by out-of-state holding companies. No state now has such an authorizing law, so at present no holding company can acquire additional banks across state lines."

After passage of the 1956 act, divestitures were made. Transamerica, today part of a larger financial firm, kept its nonbanking activities and spun off its nearly two dozen banks in 11 western states into a separate firm. In time, that firm became First Interstate Bancorp, acquired in the mid-1990s by Wells Fargo, itself acquired by Norwest Corp., which adopted the name, in 1998. Today's Wells has banking offices in 23 states.

In 1970 some amendments to the holding company act further tightened its strictures, but in the mid-1980s, exploitation of loopholes, and a Supreme Court case saw the barriers to bank holding company interstate expansion begin to erode. The High Court upheld the concept of regional compacts, in which participating states within a region would permit interstate activity within the region. This fostered regional powerhouses—by design—that in time became some of today's giants. As successive banking laws further eroded interstate restrictions, these giants grew, and grew. The Douglas Amendment was officially repealed in 1994 by the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act.

In the May 1998 ABA Banking Journal, "Of maps and men" marked the takeover by NationsBank, Charlotte, N.C., of BankAmerica. The acquiror adopted the target's name, and, in the end, a Bank of America—albeit headquartered in the East, not California—came to be, at $1.7 trillion, the nation's second-largest bank holding company, with banking offices in 32 states and Washington, D.C.



When I talk about the "rich" fixing the system for themselves, it is not ALL of the rich, but some of them who use their money to influence the outcome. I have known a lot of land and cattle rich ranchers and I am NOT talking about them. They are not using their influence to corrupt the dialog like the current meat packers.

Current meat packers are using their spin machines to misrepresent the GIPSA rules and sell the demise of the economic rules embodied in the Packers and Stockyards Act because they have gained much of their value by cheating family farmers out of the value they brought to the market. Federal Judges have trumped juries to give the meat packers the "efficiency" argument.

It is the same thing that happened with our banking laws and our current financial meltdown. I think some people are not smart enough to realize it yet. Perhaps we need a little more pain in the equation to get the empathy needed to change the greed train. Some of those who drove the greed train need to be in jail and paying for our financial meltdown----every last dollar. I haven't seen much of anything on that front except the "compromise" that money can buy.


Tex
 
I guess if your solution to the problems as you see them is to redistribute the wealth, I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.
 
I like your thinking Tex, it amazes me of some of the Tom Foolery that goes on. Seems that money buys votes and the Monarchy in the States,as same Families are always there.

CA
 
canadian angus said:
I like your thinking Tex, it amazes me of some of the Tom Foolery that goes on. Seems that money buys votes and the Monarchy in the States,as same Families are always there.

CA

So what family is claiming Obama?
 
Whitewing said:
I guess if your solution to the problems as you see them is to redistribute the wealth, I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.


Then you would have a problem with the system today because it is all about redistribution of wealth and it has been working pretty well.

You know, Whitewing, I do agree with you. Redistribution without real reasons is not the answer. I wonder why the NCBA is so bent on making sure the meat packers get away with it.

Tex
 
okfarmer said:
canadian angus said:
I like your thinking Tex, it amazes me of some of the Tom Foolery that goes on. Seems that money buys votes and the Monarchy in the States,as same Families are always there.

CA

So what family is claiming Obama?

I don't think anyone claims him, they just want to use him. It doesn't matter what color you are if you get the work done, you are still hired for the job. It doesn't matter what political party either. That is a game for the second level and first level.

Tex
 

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