While you struggle...
It's been a good year for some on Wall Street. The New York Times reports today that John Paulson, a hedge fund manager, earned $3.7 billion--that's billion, not million--by shorting mortgage-based securities.
While I don't mind people making money--and the Times article cites several other hedge fund managers who did almost as well--I do object when they have to pay only 15 percent of their loot in federal income taxes. That's a rate reserved for the working poor, and, it seems, hedge fund managers, thanks to a loophole in the tax laws. They make a percentage of what the hedge fund earns, and because those earnings are capital gains, they are taxed at 15 percent instead of the 35 percent rate someone with that much income would normally have to pay.
Nice work if you can get it. Because George W. Bush has greatly reduced the taxes on millionaires (and John McCain wants to cut them even further), there isn't money for national health care, better schools, and everything else a progressive, modern society ought to have.
I'm not saying we should necessarily return to the 90 percent marginal tax rate in effect between 1950 and 1963, when it was cut by the Kennedy Administration to 77 percent and by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 to 70 percent, where it stayed until the early 1980s. That 70 percent figure seems about right for the wealthy. And remember, the late 1960s were a boom time for U.S. workers. Higher taxes aren't always a bad thing.