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Comment by jack-r-abbit | Hacker News Reader

>Pressed for examples of how the rich were being demonized...

Really, CNN? You haven't noticed that for the past few years? Tom may be an idiot and an extremist... but don't play stupid about the war on wealth.

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"Pressed for examples of how the rich were being demonized"

Maybe he could start with the one where rich people are depicted thinking that they should get more votes than everybody else. I mean, only a complete strawman would actually make that argument, right?

Oh wait...

where rich people are depicted

You mean one rich person. Demonizing all rich people for this would be like demonizing all Christians just because of the Westboro Baptist Church.

And for the record... we've been demonizing the rich before this. There was a whole freaking Occupy movement devoted to making the rich public enemy #1 for little more than having more money. We even gave them a cute little name, The 1%. Like they were all just a bunch of evil assholes just because they had accumulated more money than us.

It becomes a "war" when the poor start fighting back.

Uh... they are fighting back. By voting more money away from the minority. How kind of us to vote for someone else to pay the bill. Ain't democracy grand?

Those historically low tax rates really show the muscle of the poor.

Whose historically low tax rates? As long as I've been working it has been well known that when you make more, you eventually jump up to the next tax bracket which has a higher tax rate. [1]

A single person making $10K (taxable income) in 2013 paid $1,058 in taxes... or ~10%.

A single person making $100K (taxable income) in 2013 paid $21,293 in taxes... or ~21%.

If 10 people each made $10K, they collectively made $100K and paid $10,580 in taxes... which is still less than half of what the one person who made $100K on their own paid.

[1] http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040tt.pdf

Edit: I did just get my taxes done so I might be a little more bitter about the topic than I usually am. But the numbers suck.

Right, and when you make $10k per year a hamburger costs $1, and when you make $50k per year a hamburger costs $5, and when you make $100k per year a hamburger costs $10.

In the real world everyone pays the same $5 for a hamburger,

A single person making $10k has money left over to buy a little less than 5 hamburgers a day. A single person making $100k has enough money left over to buy a little more than 43 hamburgers a day. 10 people who make $10k can still only afford 50 hamburgers a day between them after tax, only a little bit more than the guy making $100k.

That's why we have a progressive tax system. We think the guys making $10k should be able to eat and the guy making $100k probably shouldn't eat 8 times as many hamburgers as the guy who makes $10k.

C'mon. I know you're aware that the rates for the tax brackets have changed over time. Surely you know that the top tax bracket was well over 50% for most of the 20th century, and is now lower than that.

Yes. I'm aware they've come down over time. I would argue they've only been correcting a previous wrong. A 50% tax rate is just ridiculous. So, even if they are lower now than 30 years ago, in the past few years (the time frame I was referring to) tax increases for only higher earners have been put in place. The war has started.

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