Thursday, February 17, 2011

What's wrong with this picture?

In an interview on the PBS News Hour, 2/16/11, Sen Bernie Sanders of Vermont [independent] pointed out the following:

• The top 1 percent Americans today earn more income than do the bottom 50 percent. They earn about 22 percent of every dollar earned in America. And the gap is growing wider.
• The current budget includes massive tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires.
• The tax rates for the rich have gone down for many years while poverty in America is increasing.
• The United States has the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world ... and Congress is cutting programs for those people.
• Sixteen percent of Americans are unemployed or underemployed.
• The deficit primarily has been caused by two unfunded wars, “huge tax breaks to people who don't need it, an insurance-company-written Medicare Part D prescription drug program, and the bailout of Wall Street.”
• This year the United States is losing a hundred billion dollars in revenue because corporations, the wealthy, are stashing their money in tax havens in the Cayman Islands.
• This year, ExxonMobil, the most profitable corporation in the history of the world, is not paying a nickel in federal income taxes, despite having made $19 billion last year.
• In 2005, one-quarter of corporations -- large corporations in America making a trillion in revenue – paid no taxes.

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