Wealthy are More Dependent on Government

Wealthy are More Dependent on Government

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We came across an article by Paul Buchheit, a faculty member of DePaul University and Chicago City Colleges, where he introduces perspective to this national discussion. Let’s take a look at what he discovered on how the rich rely on the government, and how much it costs taxpayers:

Security

• The government will spend $55 billion on Homeland Security next year, in addition to $673 billion for the military.
  
• The police, emergency services, and National Guard are trained to focus on crimes against wealth.
  

Laws and Deregulation

• The wealthiest Americans benefit from tax laws, property rights, zoning rules, patent and copyright provisions, trade pacts, antitrust legislation, and contract regulations.
  
• Tax loopholes allow them to store over $1 trillion in assets overseas.
  
• Corporations benefit from the SBA and SEC guidelines favoring business.
  
• The FDA and USDA minimizes consumer complaints and product recalls.
  
• Financial industry executives have profited from 30 years of deregulation – most notably the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.
  
• Lobbying by the financial industry has prolonged the absurdity of a zero sales tax on financial transactions. Multinational corporations benefit from trade agreements like NAFTA, with international disputes resolved by the business-friendly World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization.
  
• Federal judicial law protects our biggest companies from foreign infringement.
  
• The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership would put governments around the world at the mercy of corporate decision-makers.
  
• The euphemistically named JOBS Act further empowers business, exempting startups from regulatory accounting requirements.
  
• There are even anti-antitrust measures, such as the licensing rules that allow the American Medical Association (AMA) to restrict the number of doctors in the U.S., thereby keeping doctor salaries artificially high.
  

Research and infrastructure

• A publicly supported infrastructure allows the richest 10% to manipulate their 80% of the stock market.
  
• CEO’s rely on roads, seaports and airports to ship their products.
  
• The FAA and TSA and Coast Guard and Department of Transportation to safeguard them.
  
• A nationwide energy grid to power their factories, communications towers and satellites to conduct online business.
  
• Private jets use 16 percent of air traffic control resources while paying only 3% of the bill.
  
• One of the most extensive advantages to the wealthy is basic research conducted with government money.
  
• Taxpayer-funded research at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the Internet) and the National Science Foundation (the Digital Library Initiative) has laid a half-century foundation for technological product development.
  
• Companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco have profited since the 80′s from the fastest-growing product revolution in American history while the U.S.
  
• Government was providing half the research funds.
  
• Even today 60% of university research is government-supported.
  
• Public schools have helped to train the chemists, physicists, chip-designers, programmers, engineers, production line workers, market analysts, and testers who create modern technological devices.
  
• Let’s not forget about the publicly funded fiber optic networks used to carry out derivative transactions.
  

Subsidies

• Annually, $1.3 trillion in “tax expenditures” (tax subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, and loopholes) goes to the top quintile of taxpayers.
  
• Mortgage interest and rental expense deductions alone returns almost $100 billion a year to millionaires.
  
• The Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in financial assistance to financial institutions and corporations.
  
• According to Citizens for Tax Justice, 280 profitable Fortune 500 companies, which together paid only half of the maximum 35 percent corporate tax rate, received $223 billion in tax subsidies.
  
• In agriculture, most of the funding for commodity programs goes to large agribusiness corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland.
  
• For the oil industry, estimates of subsidy payments range from $10 to $50 billion per year.
  
• According to the USDA, taxpayers cover about two-thirds of the premiums for crop insurance policies. The cost to taxpayers has grown from $1.5 billion a year in 2002 to $7.4 billion last year.
  
• And guess who gets to bail out the farmers when crops are ruined due to the lack of rain?
  

Disaster costs

• Oil spills, crop failures, automotive and financial bailouts to mention a few.
  
• The financial disaster, due to fraud and mismanagement by their grossly overpaid CEO’s, cost taxpayers $13-15 trillion, or enough to pay off the deficit and next years entitlement costs.
  

Case in point: Mike Pence wants to eliminate the personal property tax on businesses while floating the idea of raising the local county income tax to pay for it.