i have tried over and over to explain to clintonite apologists, that bill raised taxes on the poor, and cut them for the rich, there was no clinton high tax boom: When unrealized capital gains are included in the wealth-building of the richest 1%, th

[nickname unavailable]

i have tried over and over to explain to clintonite apologists, that bill raised taxes on the poor, and cut them for the rich, there was no clinton high tax boom: When unrealized capital gains are included in the wealth-building of the richest 1%, the OVERALL tax rates plunge for the super-rich, causing the poorest Americans to pay the highest rates.


income inequality exploded under bill clinton, and its the gift that just keeps on giving. oh, and by the way, billy cut the safety net, and even tried to privatize social security. billys cut in the safety net was the largest cut in american history.

then billy gave the super wealthy a gigantic capital gains tax cut. what is capital gains, why its money made off of paper transactions, yep, you heard it right, its what the idle wealthy do with their money, it does not go into the productive part of the american economy, it goes into get rich quick paper schemes like asset bubbles like the stock market or real estate.

this left poor americans with the highest share of their income going to taxes.


The Clinton era epitomized the vast difference between appearance and reality, spin and actuality. As the decade drew to a close, Clinton basked in the glow of a lofty stock market, a budget surplus and the passage of this key banking “modernization.” It would be revealed in the 2000s that many corporate profits of the 1990s were based on inflated evaluations, manipulation and fraud. When Clinton left office, the gap between rich and poor was greater than it had been in 1992, and yet the Democrats heralded him as some sort of prosperity hero.



http://www.nationofchange.org/2017/03/20/new-evidence-poor-americans-pay-highest-taxes-get-little-
safety-net/


New evidence that poor Americans pay the highest taxes and get little of the safety net
Today the taking of our national wealth can be tax-deferred indefinitely.
By
Paul Buchheit

March 20, 2017

Before taxes on the rich are cut and social programs decimated, uninformed conservatives should consider who really benefits from U.S. tax laws and assistance programs.

The Wealthiest Americans Pay Very Little Tax On Their Full Income
When ALL forms of taxes and income are considered, poor Americans pay higher tax rates than the richest 1%.

The analysis starts with state and local taxes, which are often ignored by apologists for big-income tax cuts. According to The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the state and local tax rate for the poorest 20 percent of individuals is DOUBLE that of the top 1 percent (10.9 percent vs. 5.4 percent). New data from Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman allows us to go further: When unrealized capital gains are included in the wealth-building of the richest 1%, the OVERALL tax rates plunge for the super-rich, causing the poorest Americans to pay the highest rates.

What is the justification for adding unrealized capital gains to one’s income? The 16th Amendment gives Congress the power “to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.” Thus, under an original definition of income developed by the American economists Robert M. Haig and Henry C. Simons in the 1920s and still utilized by financial economists, an increase in the value of a stock or other asset would be subject to taxation even if it’s not sold.

With this more accurate guide to income measurement, the real tax rates paid by the 1% can be calculated. Details can be found here. The bottom line is that poor Americans pay about 25 percent in total taxes, while the 1% pays anywhere from 18 to 23 percent.

Rich Americans Benefit as Much as the Poor from the Safety Net
Piketty and Saez and Zucman calculate government transfers to three groups: the richest 10%, the middle 40%, and the poorest 50%. Each group is evaluated for total transfers, including Social Security, as a percent of average national income.

Surprisingly, the middle 40% receives more government assistance than the bottom 50%, with a benefit equivalent to 23 percent of national income (see Figure S.13).

More surprisingly, the richest 10% as a group receives almost as much government assistance as the poorest 50%.

The critics of poor Americans should be informed that even after transfers, income for the working-age bottom 50% has not improved since 1979. And they should be reminded that the cost of the entire Safety Net is only about ONE-SIXTH of the $2.2 trillion in tax breaks and tax avoidance that primarily benefit the rich.

The Super-Rich Don’t Pay Much for All Their Benefits from Society
Most of society’s benefits go to THE SUPER-RICH and their businesses:
Financial Assistance: The stock markets, the legal system, patent and copyright systems, intellectual property, contract law.

The Military: National defense, local police forces, the National Guard, the Coast Guard.

Infrastructure: In the physical form of highways, railroads, airports; the energy grid; and in the form of communications though the airwaves, especially the Internet.

Federal Agencies: The Federal Reserve, SEC, FTC, SBA, FAA, NASA. Research at the Department of Defense, the Air Force, NASA, and public universities.
National Wealth Does Not Belong To The 1%

Today the taking of our national wealth can be tax-deferred indefinitely. A just society should have some form of wealth tax, as recommended by Piketty, perhaps as a modified version of the Haig-Simons call for taxing annual stock gains. Then millions of non-stockholders would rightfully get a piece of our 70 years of national prosperity.

[Ringer]

Typical conservative liar. The article you refer to mentions nothing about
what Bill Clinton said or did. It was about what is happening right now
based on years of cutting taxes for the rich and cutting programs for the
poor. Do you think the poor have large stock portfolios? Do you have proof
that Clinton tried to privatize social security? Nope. Look at this:
http://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_fixsocsec/. You took what
government is doing to people and tried to put it on the Democrats and Bill
Clinton. That's why we don't listen to you.

[nickname unavailable]

first off i am not a conservative, have been posting on alt.politics.economics since the second half of the 1990's, you have responded to me over the years, and i have never backed conservative polices, unless by chance, every once in a while they might get it sorta right, its rare, but if they get it right, i am not a partisan.

The article you refer to mentions nothing about
> what Bill Clinton said or did.

he should have given credit where credit is due. even then you would attack this well known progressive writer as a conservative.
if he had given credit to where it belonged, it would help people like you who have been so duped by the clinton years. you ignorance of the clinton years, has left the democratic party in shambles, locked out of the federal government, and all but six state government.
if you really understood those years, it would have helped people like you to change the democratic party whilst you can.

It was about what is happening right now
> based on years of cutting taxes for the rich and cutting programs for the
> poor.

it was based on what has happened over the years. if you understood that it was the clinton bait and switch on taxes, that has left the poor paying a higher share of their income on taxes.
bill clinton raised taxes in the 1990's for all of us, then cut the capital gains tax, the corporate tax, and exempted the wealthiest from paying his higher tax rate. and obama reinstated that tax rate during his terms. most wealthy people then put their money in paper assets.
that left the rest of us to pay a higher tax.

now before you attack rasmus, you must understand he is very progressive, and writes for counter punch. he is a fine economist. and has always done bullet proof work.



https://jackrasmus.com/2016/03/01/bill-clintons-dubious-economic-legacies/

During Bill Clinton’s two terms in office, 1992-2000, 45 percent of all the income growth during the period went to the wealthiest 1 percent of families in the US, according to IRS data gathered by economist, Emmanuel Saez, of the University of California, Berkeley.

The S&P 500 stock index rose 234 percent, providing the wealthiest 1 percent households most of that 45 percent gain. Bill’s big tax cut handout to the 1 percent enabled that income growth by reducing capital gains taxation in 1997 from 28 percent to 20 percent. Executives’ direct pay also rose — on average from US$4.5 million in 1992 to US$11.1 million by 2000, for a 342 percent increase. CEO pay was equal to about 90 times the pay of the averaged paid worker; by the end of his second term, CEO pay had risen to more than 300 times the average worker’s pay.

How did the average worker do over the same period? Adjusted for inflation, in 1982 real dollars, average hourly pay rose by a paltry 5.8 percent over eight years. At the bottom of the work force, the minimum wage, measured in real terms, rose by a mere 4 cents an hour to US$5.50. The 5.8 percent and 4 cents an hour were more than offset by workers’ rising contributions to continue their pensions and healthcare insurance coverages.
Tax Rip-Offs

Apart from reducing capital gains taxes for wealthy stock and bond owners, Clinton exempted the top 10 percent households from tax hikes in 1993. Thereafter, in his big tax cut act of 1997, he raised the threshold for paying any estate tax, cut gift taxes (so the rich could give more to relatives), repealed the alternative minimum tax for small businesses and reduced it for larger corporations. Meanwhile, the effective corporate tax rate — i.e. the rate at which they actually paid a percent of their profits — fell from 18 percent in 1995 to 12 percent. In his second term, 1996-2000, no fewer than 63 percent of all corporations in the U.S. paid no corporate income tax whatsoever, amounting to a US$2.5 trillion tax windfall.

Income inequality trends, topical in the U.S. and the current 2016 presidential campaign today, actually accelerated under Clinton, and even more than under Reagan.

here is a fine graph built on the work of piketty and saez. it clearly shows that wealth inequality exploded under bill clinton. and we know why, nafta, gatt, the w.t.o., china, well bill created globalism, and its only working for a few.


http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/02/extreme-inequality-causes-economic-collapse.html

piketty and saez also say its the unearned income(capital gains, or paper gains) and globalism, which was fashioned by bill clinton.

Do you think the poor have large stock portfolios?

no, so why did bill do so much for the idle wealthy, and their stock portfolios?

Do you have proof
> that Clinton tried to privatize social security? Nope.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/10/30/how-monica-lewinsky-saved-social-security/
October 30, 2004
How Monica Lewinsky Saved Social Security
by Robin Blackburn

[This essay is excerpted from CounterPunch’s hot new book, Dime’s Worth of Difference.]

Had it not been for Monica’s captivating smile and first inviting snap of that famous thong, President Bill Clinton would have consummated the politics of triangulation, heeding the counsel of a secret White House team and deputy treasury secretary Larry Summers. Late in 1998 or in the State of the Union message of 1999 a solemn Clinton would have told Congress and the nation that, just like welfare, Social Security was near-broke, had to be “reformed” and its immense pool of capital tendered in part to the mutual funds industry. The itinerary mapped out for Clinton by the Democratic Leadership Committee would have been complete.

It was a desperately close run thing. On the account of members of Clinton’s secret White House team, mandated to map out the privatization path for Social Security, they had got as far down the road as fine-tuning the account numbers for Social Security accounts now released to the captious mercies of Wall Street. But in 1998 the Lewinsky scandal burst upon the President, and as the months sped by and impeachment swelled from a remote specter to a looming reality, Clinton’s polls told him that his only hope was to nourish the widespread popular dislike for the hoity-toity elites intoning Clinton’s death warrant.

In an instant Clinton spun on the dime and became Social Security’s mighty champion, coining the slogan “Save Social Security First”.
Let us now reconstruct the plot in greater detail.

In the mid-1990s pessimism about the future of Social Security was rife in seminars, conferences, op-eds and learned papers by which elite consensus is fashioned. The media lent an eager ear to charlatanry from outfits like the Third Millennium, which ventriloquized a supposed consensus amongst youth that the program would not be there for them when they came to retire ­ and that consequently their best bet was to take their FICA payments and put them in a private share account in soar-away Wall Street. Third Millennium released artfully contrived polls claiming to show that, for example, more young Americans believed in UFOs than in the future of Social Security. In fact the poll had no question linking the two propositions but this didn’t stop lazy columnists and editorialists from picking it up and kindred ‘findings’ such as that General Hospital would outlast the program or that a bet on the Super Bowl was a more rational use of money.

Third Millennium was, of course, a front for the privatization lobby. But it did tap into a vein of public anxiety and skepticism concerning Social Security finances and, with the stock market soaring upward, its Wall Street connections were an asset not a liability. Whatever the exaggerations of the privatizers, the claim that an aging society would have to meet rising costs was not in itself wrong. The idea that “something must be done” was widespread and many expected that Clinton would follow up his capitulation to Republicans on welfare with a deal on Social Security. But he didn’t, thanks to the zaftig young woman in a blue dress who caught his eye in 1995.

We have this on the authority of high-ranking members of the Clinton Treasury who gathered in Harvard in the summer of 2001 to mull over the lessons of the 1990s. At that conclave it was revealed that on Clinton’s orders a top secret White House working party had been established to study in detail the basis for a bipartisan policy on Social Security that would splice individual accounts into the program. Such was the delicacy of this exercise that meetings of the group were flagged under the innocent rubric “Special Issues” on the White House agenda.

What was in fact being prepared for the President was precisely that second dose of welfare reform, this time targeted on the very citadel of the New Deal, the Social Security program Roosevelt himself established.

The “Special Issues” secret team was set up by then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers (later elevated to Treasury Secretary and now President of Harvard) and Gene Sperling, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers. The Deputy Treasury Secretary’s fondness for schemes to privatize Social Security comes as no surprise. As Chief Economist of the World Bank in the early 1990s Summers had commissioned a notorious report, “Averting the Old Age Crisis”, that argued that Merrill Lynch and Fidelity would be better at pension provision than any government. In fact governments should offer only a safety net and farm out their power to tax payrolls to private financial concerns, which would run mandatory funded pensions on the Chilean model. The task of the Special Issues group was to find an installment of privatization that could reconcile realistic Republicans and Democrats, and be sold as still honoring most existing entitlements.

Participants at the Harvard conference conceded that severe technical problems beset efforts to introduce commercial practices. The existing program has low administration costs whereas running tens of millions of small investment accounts would be expensive. The secret White House team sought to finesse the problem by pooling individual funds and stripping down the element of choice or customer service. But Summers was unhappy: as one Team member now recalls it, “Deputy Secretary Summers was fond of saying that we had to guard against the risk of setting up the Post Office when people were used to dealing with Federal Express”. And pooled funds were also to be avoided because they would risk government control of business.

Some members of the team also worried that allowing employees the option of setting up their own accounts would soon turn into a “slippery slope”, since the defection of the richest five or ten per cent of employees would soon undermine the program’s ability to honor its commitments to existing retirees.
Nevertheless, under Summers’ guidance, the secret team pushed forward. There were high hopes that the President would embrace what had by now had become a detailed blueprint: “The working group’s estimates were at the level of detail that it was determined how many digits an ID number would have to be for each fund and how many key strokes would therefore be required to enter all of the ID numbers each year.”

Clinton was kept up to date with briefings every few weeks and in July 1998 attended one of the “Special Issues” meetings himself. But in that same month he was served with a grand jury subpoena. A month later he finally acknowledged a sexual relationship with Monica.

By the end of 1998 the secret team concluded with heavy hearts that the escalating Lewinsky affair might well doom all their efforts. The President was desirous to be seen doing something dramatic for Social Security, but not anything risky. It could be controversial, but controversial in the direction of doing more for the program, not endangering it. As one team member put it this summer in the Harvard conclave: “Toward the end of 1998, as the possibility that the President would be impeached came clearly into view, the policy dynamic of the Social Security debate changed dramatically and it became clear to the White House that this was not the time to take risks on the scale that would be necessary to achieve a deal on an issue as contentious as Social Security reform.”

Clinton was so desperate for an approach that would prove popular that he was even prepared to disappoint Wall Street. “The President decided to follow a strategy of trying to unite the Democrats around a plan that would strengthen Social Security by transferring budget surpluses to Social Security and investing a portion in equities.”

In his 1999 State of the Union address Clinton seized the initiative from the privatizers with a bold new plan that gave substance to the “Save Social Security First” slogan. He proposed that 62 per cent of the budget surplus should be used to build up the Social Security trust fund. He promised to veto any attempt to divert Social Security funds to other uses, and he urged that 15 per cent of the trust fund should be invested in the stock market, not by individuals but by the Social Security Administration.

Part of the cunning of this approach was that it stole a Republican theme. While rejecting individualization it insisted that Social Security funds should not be spent on other programs or on tax cuts. Republicans had urged that Social Security taxes be placed in a “lock box” and soon Clinton himself was using the term. Not content with this Clinton also offered public subsidies to Universal Savings Accounts that would be set up outside Social Security and not at its expense. This was a residue of the commercializing approach but it won few plaudits from the privatizers as it was a voluntary add-on to a strengthened public program.

Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was willing to see the budget surplus pledged to Social Security but he denounced the plan to invest the trust fund in equities on the grounds that it would lead to government interference in business. A writer in the New York Times, January 25, 1999, warned that if the trust fund was allowed to invest in stocks and shares it would be impossible to prevent the politicization of investment: “The danger is that Congress will meddle, for example, steering funds into environmentally-friendly companies rather than, say, tobacco companies.”

The next day Milton Friedman contributed an excited piece to the Wall Street Journal warning that Clinton was embarked on a different type of slippery slope to that pondered by his secret team: “I have often speculated that an ingenious way for a socialist to achieve his objective would be to persuade Congress, in the name of fiscal responsibility, to (1) fully fund obligations under Social Security and (2) invest the accumulated reserves in the capital market by purchasing equity interests in domestic corporations.” Clinton had promised that the trust fund would be insulated from political pressure and that only 15 per cent of the trust fund would be invested, but Friedman was not at all convinced.

Clinton was also attacked for “double counting” when he pledged the budget surplus for Social Security. But accounts at the Harvard conference make clear that this concerned the pledge about the surplus aimed at separating the trust fund from the rest of the Federal budget. The proposal to allow the trust to hold a range of assets, not simply Treasury IOUs, would not only give Social Security real assets but would also create a powerful new lever on economic policy, something that Greenspan was jealously aware of.

Despite such attacks the Clinton plan as a whole went down very well with the American people. Republicans were swiftly moved to insist that they too would give priority to Social Security. Pessimism about the future of the program was replaced by a growing consensus that the program must be ­ and could be ­ saved. All that was needed was the will and a determination not to squander the trust fund.

Under the lash of the Lewinsky crisis, a President had issued a full-throated endorsement of the Social Security system. It was a terrible blow to a spectrum of opinion that stretched from the Cato Institute and Third Millennium to many New Democrats, including Senator Joseph Lieberman, who has proclaimed the need for individual accounts in the name of “choice”. In his presidential campaign Al Gore, we should note, publicly opposed the idea of the Social Security trust find holding a range of assets.

Even the Republic leadership sheepishly rallied to the notion that the surplus on the Social Security fund should be spent on nothing else. Just four days before the election Governor Bush told a crowd in Saginaw, Michigan, that protecting the Social Security trust fund was going to be one of his top priorities. The employee’s Social Security taxes, he promised, were “only going to be spent on one thing ­ what they’re meant for ­ Social Security. We’re not going to let Congress touch them for any other reason.” Less than a year later the Congressional Budget Office forecast that the administration would need $9 billion from the Social Security Trust Fund to balance its budget and much more next, even as Bush reassured Democratic Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle that he wouldn’t raid the famous Social Security lock-box.

Bush’s predicament over the trust fund was the more edgy because he wanted to introduce individual accounts into Social Security and has set up his own Commission to work out the best way to deliver this taste of privatization. The Bush White House web site featured an explanation of the promised “reform” which fulsomely insisted that all Social Security must be respected and that the private accounts would not be allowed to jeopardize them in any way.

The Democrats can blame the President for creating the budget problem by an unwise tax cut. If they had the guts the Democrats could have found a strategy for economic recovery by revisiting the Social Security debate of the late nineties, when Clinton not only coined the slogan now giving grief to his successor ­ ‘Save Social Security First’ ­ but also boldly proposed separating the trust fund from the Federal budget, allowing the trustees to pursue an investment strategy of its own.

The logic of Social Security was once memorably explained and defended by Larry Summers’ brilliant uncle, the Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson. Compulsory social arrangements of this sort were, he explained, a necessary defense against greedy and short-sighted “free riders”; “if all but one obey, the one may gain selfish advantage by disobeying – which is where the sheriff comes in: we politically invoke force on ourselves. Once social coercion or contracting is admitted into the picture the problem (of free riders) disappears.” Samuelson was impelled to show that individualism needs collectivism: “That the Protestant ethic should have been instrumental in creating individualistic capitalism one may accept: but that it should stop there is not necessarily plausible. What made Jeremy Bentham a Benthamite in 1800, one suspects, might in 1900 have made him a Fabian (and do we not see a lot in common in the personalities of James Mill and Friedrich Engels?) Let mankind enter into a Hobbes-Rousseau social contract in which the young are assured of their retirement subsistence if they will today support the aged, such assurance to be guaranteed by a draft on the yet unborn.” (This passage is to be found in Samuelson’s paper, “An Exact Consumption-Loan Model of Interest with or without the Social Contrivance of Money”, Journal of Political Economy, December 1958.)
But by 1998 Samuelson’s nephew, Larry Summers, was busy undermining the social contract between the generations and, as we have seen, it took young Lewinsky to give it extra breathing space. In the process the Clinton White House, mired in scandal as it was, found itself exploring ideas of collective funding that went beyond the pay-as-you-go principles that Samuelson enunciated. If generations are of unequal size, and if the aging of the population gives rise to increased retirement or medical costs, then it becomes wise to introduce an element of pre-funding. Clinton and Gore eventually settled on a strategy of using such a fund to pay down the public debt and invoking the “lock box”. But the papers at that Harvard conference showed that sooner or later pre-funding could not be confined to paying down the public debt, partly because surpluses might swallow it up in a few years and partly because it might not be feasible or advisable to do so.

The Harvard papers were not the only evidence of new thinking on Social Security in the wake of the impeachment crisis. In another part of the Clinton White House an aide called Peter Orszag was working with Joseph Stiglitz, then Chief Economist at the World Bank, on a paper entitled “Rethinking Pension Reform: Ten Myths about Social Security Systems”. This constituted a powerful critique of the earlier World Bank report commissioned by Summers. The paper, originally delivered in September 1999, was later published in a book edited by Robert Holzman and Stiglitz, entitled New Ideas About Old Age Security. Its whole thrust is to defend public provision and to explore forms of pre-funding that would assist this. Indeed the paper, several of whose points are born out by the difficulties encountered by Clinton’s secret team, now give the opponents of privatization a potent weapon.

The collapse of the markets at the end of the Nineties bubble also meant that Bush and his Commission had a much harder task ahead of them, before the focus of terrorism changed the whole focus of Bush’s agenda. Flawed as it is, the case for privatization was superficially appealing during the heady days of the late-1990s bull market. Indeed its defeat at that time could turn out to have been decisive. On the other hand the economic downturn makes more relevant than ever the other prong of the original Clinton strategy, namely the idea that the Trust Fund should acquire its own assets. In a recession-hit economy these could include public bonds linked to investment in education or urban renewal, or they could involve injecting funds into sectors downcast by post-bubble blues. This would, it is true, be to go further than Clinton ever suggested ­ but it would be fully in the spirit of many left proponents of the original trust fund when it was added to the program in 1939 and it would be very well received by many sections of organized labor, such as the folks at the Heartland Alliance.

In his famous tract “What is History?” E.H. Carr debated the influence on history exercised by Cleopatra’s nose. Future historians of Social Security will be able to intersperse their explanation of the intricacies of COLAS, bend points and IPEs with at least a paragraph on the political and intellectual consequences of Monica’s beguiling smile. She saved the day.

ROBIN BLACKBURN, a frequent contributor to CounterPunch, is the former editor of The New Left Review and author of the excellent history of the slave trade, The Making of New World Slavery and the new book from Verso Banking on Death: the Future of Pensions.

Look at this:
> http://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_fixsocsec/.

look at the date,

April 1999


the timeline in the article clearly shows bill tried to privatize s.s., then when he found himself in trouble, backtracked and created his plan. its why billy has gotten away with so much, he is a fine con artist, and a media darling.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/4/25/1519937/-That-time-Bill-Clinton-tried-to-privatize-Social-Security-and-sabotage-Medicare

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027724810

You took what
> government is doing to people and tried to put it on the Democrats and Bill
> Clinton.

because they deserve the credit. to ignore the damage that bill and obama and their clintonite allies have done to america and the world, means you will be in the minority for a long long time. because the majority of the voters now know who did what to whom, and why. its why you lost, and will keep on losing till the democrats come clean on bill and obama regimes.
most bernie supporters, independents, and even many democrats, either stayed home, or voted for someone else out of pure desperation. so you either come clean, and clean up your house, or be out in the cold for a very long time.

That's why we don't listen to you.

you clicked on my post didn't you:)