Should the Wealthy Pay More

“Asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes” was echoed many times during President Obama’s 2012 campaign. It doesn’t seem fair. It sounds more like a punishment to the wealthy for being successful. Sure, another 4% from someone making $10 million doesn’t seem terribly damaging, but when you consider the wealthy already pay a third of their income to federal taxes, 4% adds insult to injury. Asking the wealthy to pay a little more, seems wrong, but make no mistake about it, the wealthy should pay more and here are two reasons why.
Reason one is simple, ask yourself a couple of questions. First question: would you like to represent your district, and second: do you believe that you could make a difference. It's quite noble of you, if you answered yes, but you can forget about it. Mother Jones did a nice layout of what it would take to run for congress. The article indicated that it would take about $1.4 million to run for office, 88% of which typically goes to the incumbent. So unless you are wealthy or you are willing to parse your soul to special interest, you probably don’t stand a chance of winning. You need to have money to run for office, so that knocks out about 98% of us. This means that the wealthy are the ones who run the country
The second reason is even simpler; rich people caused all the problems! The wealthy facilitated the recession in 2008 through selling high risk mortgages and poor quality debt securities. Leading to bailouts, mass job loss and excessively high foreclosure rates. All of which adversely affected the bottom 98%. The Enron debacle, the Savings and Loan Scandal and likely a bunch of other stuff we don't know about yet, do more damage to the economy than welfare ever could. The wealthy run this country, they get the lion's share of the resources, and they do it all off the backs of the bottom 98% of Americans.