Elisa Ransom
FCS 4840
Book Blog/Pages
1-97
February 14,
2016
On page 51,
Abramsky wrote “There is, after all, a reason Swedes…tolerate far higher taxes
than Americans do.” What does Abramsky
mean by this?
Abramsky
is referring to an anti-tax, anti-government movement, where the 2010 Citizens
United Supreme Court ruling allowed outside interest groups to spend freely on
attack ads and “independent expenditure” campaigns. Abramsky stated that the
method was simple: If you defund public
services, ensure that government only delivers second-rate goods, convince the
electorate that long-term societal investment such as Social Security and
Medicare are Ponzi schemes unlikely to survive down the generations, and it
becomes easier to convince ordinary people that taxes are a mugging rather than
an investment. So basically in the end,
they will get their money’s worth from their taxes. The pay good money and get good quality services
while American’s public receives duds.
My take on what Abramsky is saying is simple, we hear how the government
says at the rate we are going there may not be any Social Security for us in
the future. Social Security may be
obsolete by the time it is my time to draw from it. My solution to that is, what happen to all
the money that people didn’t us because they died before they could us it?
Where is the money at for those individuals who just simple didn’t use the
money because they are not here to partake in there hard earned money, then
will it seem as a Ponzi scheme then if the money comes from dead people. Just a critical thinking question for one to
ponder on.
Have any
specific passages from the book struck you so far? If so, which one?
As I quote from the book: Between 1950 and 1975, Johnston calculated,
for each additional dollar in income most Americans received $4. From 1960 to 1985, it was $17. “And for 1981 through 2005, it is almost
$5000. For the top 0.01 percent of the
economy, that number was a staggering $140,000.
In other words, if an average earner took home $100 more one year, it
was reasonable to assume that the billionaire living across town had increased
his income by roughly $14 million during that same period. That just struck a chord with me, simply because
the top 5% of income earners run this country.
They own their businesses and employ people and merely give them
pennies, making it to where employees can’t even make ends meet to pay their
everyday bills. As much money as the top
5% of the earners make who really run this county such as the Walmart clan,
they can pay their employees enough money to make ends meet and then some. At least they could pay enough for families
to be able to enough a feasible vacation every once in a while. One person with
billions of dollars should put some back into the economy to help build it
up. It doesn’t make sense to me that one
person has all that money and does not share.
It just makes me feel some type of way that people with that much money
have a one track mind, let me make this money make money and I’m getting richer
while the economy falls but I’ll be safe because I have the money. Abramsky stated in the book that if a few
hundred billionaires got together and controlled several trillion dollars in
assets that it would be enough to pay median income salaries for years on end
to tens of millions of workers. The
questions is why are Americans starving?
It’s not because most don’t have an education because you have folks
with master degrees and can’t find a job let alone pay their bills and feed their
families. This just makes me so mad.
What evidence
does Abramsky use to support his ideas?
Abramsky brings the effects of
economic inequality out of the shadows, and ultimately, suggests ways for
moving toward a fairer and more equitable social contract. Exploring everything from housing policy
to wage protections and affordable higher education, Abramsky lays out a
panoramic blueprint for a reinvigorated political process that, in turn, will
pave the way for a renewed War on Poverty.
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