Robin Hood For President.

Dear America’s Future,

Please look at the above chart, taken from the Nation. It is 2010. The distribution of wealth in the United States of America is outrageous. The wealthiest 0.01 percent of American households earns more than 1000 times the average income of the bottom 90% of households. What is more outrageous is that the wealthiest of Americans are contributing to this country at nearly an all time low. Right now, in 2010, the income tax in the United States is capped at 35% of a very rich person’s money (very rich=annual income greater than $373,650). For a long period of time in the mid 20th century the tax rate on the top bracket was over 90%. What happened? Well here’s how I imagine it: The USA had huge expenses from WWII, was recovering from a Great Depression that they had to fix by implementing huge infrastructure programs. The majority of Americans being poor and many being descended from newly immigrated families could not be burdened with the cost so the government forced the rich to pay to make their country great. Here we are in 2010 with huge debt from foreign wars. Roughly 10% of the country is unemployed and the richest Americans are raking in 10^3 times the income of the average American. In the past America has fixed its problems by raising taxes on the outlandishly rich. Why not now? Since the beginning of the W Bush administration the tax rate on the wealthiest bracket of Americans has remained at 35%. The other wealthy countries of the world right now cap their taxes on their richest citizens between 45% and 60% (See Wikipedia).

I hope in the future that America is not a land controlled by a small elite group of wealthy families while the “free" and the "brave" have children that attend underfunded public schools and die of pneumonia because they can’t afford to heat their homes.

Love,

Joe

“If you don’t have an economic democracy, you don’t have a political democracy.” - Dennis Kucinich.