| because without the poor the rich won't exist Could you explain this statement? If you mean to imply that the rich somehow exploit the poor, the reality is exactly the other way around - the poor and middle class exploit the rich. http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2012/07/progressivity-of-taxe... To quote Paul Krugman on the topic (he was discussing the 1980's, but none of the facts he relies on have changed significantly since then). "...growth in inequality is not a simple picture. Old-line leftists, if there are any left, would like to make it a single story--the rich becoming richer by exploiting the poor. But that's just not a reasonable picture of America in the 1980s. For one thing, most of our very poor don't work, which makes it hard to exploit them. For another, the poor had so little to start with that the dollar value of the gains of the rich dwarfs that of the losses of the poor..." The Age of Diminished Expectations, 1990, p. 22. Also, the US has more progressive taxation than the rest of the OECD. http://taxfoundation.org/blog/no-country-leans-upper-income-... |