Decades of Redistributed Wealth

Over the last 50 years, the richest Americans have shifted the burden of the federal individual income tax off themselves and onto everybody else. From WWII to the 60s, highest income earners paid a tax rate over 90% for many years. Today, the top earners pay a rate of only 35%. Take into account the many loopholes the rich can use far more than the poor, the gap narrows even more.

Buffett is alone among the billionaires in stating the present tax structure is unfair and harmful.

Lower taxes the rich got for themselves are one reason why they have become so much richer over the last half century.
Reduced taxes on the wealthy leave them with more money to influence politicians and politics. Their influence wins them further tax reductions, which gives them still more money to put to political use. When the loss of tax revenue from the rich worsens already strained government budgets, the rich press politicians to cut public services and government jobs and not even debate a return to the higher taxes that they used to pay.

Cutting the taxes on the rich no way guarantees social benefits from what they may choose to do with their money. Indeed, their choices can worsen economic conditions for the mass of people.

These days, that is exactly what they are doing.

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War Against the Middle Class

America is governed by an owning class that considers government intervention to maintain an equitable distribution of wealth, anti-American, socialist, and a threat to individual liberty and national prosperity.

In the 1970s, an alliance of elite interests began preparing to roll back the measures that created the American middle class and launched a full-scale class war during the 1980s under the banner of the Reagan revolution.Corporate interests provided the money and controlled the real agenda.
The Reagan administration rolled back taxes on the wealthiest Americans, ended robust antitrust enforcement, and launched a stunningly successful campaign to make finance the U.S. economy’s dominant and most profitable sector. This process continued seamlessly through subsequent Republican and Democratic administrations.

This effort to achieve an upward redistribution of wealth was so successful that from 1980 to 2005, the highest-earning 1 percent of the U.S. population increased its share of taxable income from 9 percent to 19 percent. 

In 2007, the top 400 U.S. tax returns reported an average annual income of $345 million—compared to an average of $12.7 million for the top 427 returns in 1955.

The richest 2 percent of world’s people now own 51 percent of all the world’s assets.... the poorest 50 percent own only 1 percent.

We are deeply embroiled in a class war that poses a mortal threat to the middle class and to democracy.

How the rich soaked the rest of us | Richard Wolff |guardian.co.uk