Im not going to be able to keep up with a flood of replies from the bee hive that will grow. If you want to debate PM me. Right now Ill leave you this which is a paper published by Pew Research. It is 74 pages (not short read) summarizing the middle class shrinking.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2015/12/2015-12-09_middle-class_FINAL-report.pdf
I read it at a slow day at work (lol).
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I cant give you a specific number for fairly, but I can tell you I think capital gains tax should match your income and not an arbitrary 20%. Mitt Romney, for example, pays low taxes because most of his income come from stocks. I pay about 30 percent, but with health insurance and social security about 40% of my income is taxed. 50 years ago the tax for the ultra wealthy was much higher. And of course we have issues like the panama papers. The rich simply have the means to utilize loopholes. I also believe the tax code grew by a factor of 10. It should be burnt, rewritten, made concise, with no arbitrary deductions.
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The 2008 meltdown was caused by mortgage fraud. The lenders were responsible, but stupid borrowers also share responsibility. Further, the god damn Obama bailout made things 10x worse. They basically got money for speculating. If I go to a casino and put it on all 7, do I get a bailout if I lose everything?
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See, the panama papers for an example. Wells-Fargo funneling money for drug lords in Mexico. Credit card companies with interest rates in the double digits. How is that even legal? They might as well be the mafia. Student loans being held in the same category as child support payments so you cant discharge them if you become disabled or die (there have been cases of lenders going after family members after death). The list goes on. I don’t want to get my blood pressure up further.
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Fraud, I don’t have names of specific people. The lack of regulation is an issue in and of itself.
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Our government does not spend its money wisely… I work for a government contractor and we charge about $150 for a service guy to get a desk phone out of the supply closet and connect the cord on some ones desk. The entire process takes 20 minutes. The person doing the phone rigging gets like $15 an hour.
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I think the lenders you are talking about is Goldman-Sachs