Who are the 1 percent?

I myself hope to become a member of the 1%. At one time I was in the bottom 10% and with no help from the Government or a Union worked my way up to the 80%. Even though I am now in the top 80% after paying a total tax burden of well over 50% (includes federal, state, local and hidden taxes like sales tax and corperate taxes added to all my purchases, fuel, phone ect.) I am forced to live modestly.

The problem with the argument from the Leftists is that if you take some wealth away from those in the 1% and redistribute it to the poorest among us that it would make the bottom 10% better. The cold hard fact is that forms of this have been repeatedly tried and all end up with the same result. At best as you remove wealth from the 1% with much of it is wasted by the Government, some does actually get to who it was intended. The wealth is soon squandered requiring even more. The wealth of the 1% becomes less and less to a point when enough is not left to sustain the insatiable appetite of the Marxist redistributive system and it collapses upon itself.

The Rights view of letting a hardworking citizen keep a fair share of the efforts through fair taxation induces more of the same hard work and entrepreneurial spirit thus growing the economy. This proven Capitalist formula has provided more wealth for the poor then any variation of the same old tired Marxist Redistribution based ponzi scheme.

Who are the 1 percent?

Below is an Article by Tami Luhby published in CNN Money on October 29, 2011

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Think it takes a million bucks to make it into the Top 1% of American taxpayers?
Think again. In 2009, it took just $343,927 to join that elite group, according to newly released statistics from the Internal Revenue Service.
Occupy Wall Street protesters have been railing against the Top 1%, trying to raise anger and awareness of the growing economic gap between the rich and everybody else in America.
But just who are these fortunate folks at the top of the income ladder?
Well, there were just under 1.4 million households that qualified for entry. They earned nearly 17% of the nation's income and paid roughly 37% of its income tax.
Collectively, their adjusted gross income was $1.3 trillion. And while $343,927 was the minimum AGI to be included, on average, Top 1-percenters made $960,000.
But the income threshold for this exclusive group changes every year, largely with the performance of the stock market, experts said.
In 2007, when times were good on Wall Street, one needed to have an adjusted gross income of more than $424,000 to get into the highest rank. But the stock market decline in recent years has helped lower that bar back to a level not seen since 2002.
"The further up you go, the wider swings you see," said Pete Sepp, spokesman for the National Taxpayers Union. "They have a great deal of wealth sunk into the markets, which can vary quite widely."
While much of the wealthy's income comes from capital gains on investments, bonuses on the job can also give people the needed boost.
Just what jobs are those?
Many workers in the securities industry in New York likely qualify for the Top 1%.
These folks, many of whom work only blocks from where protesters are gathering in Zuccotti Park, made an average salary of just over $311,000 in 2009, according to the state Comptroller's Office. (This figure does not take into account certain income, losses and deductions that make up adjusted gross income.)
A separate study found that financial professionals made up about 14% of the top rank in 2005.
Executives, managers and supervisors working outside of finance accounted for 31%, the largest share, according to an analysis by Jon Bakija of Williams College, Adam Cole of the Treasury Department and Bradley Heim of Indiana University. Medical professionals came in at 15.7%, while lawyers made up 8.4%.
Over time, the Top 1% has claimed a bigger share of the income pie. In 2007, they earned 22.8% of the nation's income, more than double the amount in 1986, according to IRS data. The recession has since brought that slice down to just under 17% for 2009.
While those at the top have seen their incomes soar over time, middle-class incomes have stagnated.
"The higher up the income distribution you go, the more your income rose and the larger the share of total income gains went to your group," said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
But as corporate profits and productivity have increased, workers aren't reaping the benefits, said Edward Wolff, a New York University economics professor who specializes in income inequality. That's helping spark the movement, which has spread across the country.
"There is a lot of anger and it's for a very good reason," Wolff said. "If all of the income gain goes to the top, there's not much left to go to the rest of the people."

The Hypocrisy of Occupy Wall Street

I have a question to anyone supporting the occupy movement?
Why Don’t #Occupy Protesters Go After Insider-Trading Congressmen?

What a bunch of phonies see the three links below .
Un-occupy the City: Nine out of ten tents remain empty overnight at St Paul's protest camp

Ezra Levant: Occupy secrets revealed!

Occupy Wall Street protesters stay at $700-a-night hotel

Zee AC Tech's response to a tweet!

Ruth Hinckley http://twitter.com/#!/Lironah @Lironah Sleeping in a tree

Jack of all trades but master of none.

http://www.ironwolfgames.com

Ruth tweeted the following to me this was to much to reply to in a simple tweet so I combined her tweets into a statement that I could then respond to.
Here are the tweets combined into a single statement.

"Do you really think that 1 in 6 Americans don't have jobs because they choose not to work? Your news is out of date, there. There is certainly a Marxist minority among the protestors, claiming that capitalism itself is the source of the problem But there are plenty of good ideas and valid points being brought up. I'll share some. First there's the unemployment about 16% according to several sources, which is like, 1 in 6 American workers. That's the lowest it's been since the Depression era, though we don't have it that bad, yet. Many of the corporations and politicians being maligned are ones who are making profits by sending jobs overseas, because they can pay less for labor done there. So there are plenty of jobs there, but they aren't being made available to Americans. That causes the whole student loan thing: Jobless Americans assumed that they were jobless because their degree wasn't competitive. So they went back to school, and of course being unemployed they had to take out loans. Well, we all start graduating, only to find that that wasn't the real problem, because we still can't find jobs. So we start defaulting on loans, mortgages, etc., people who would normally be starting up businesses and supplying more jobs can't, because they can't get start-up money. This all came to a point at the burst of that bubble So people started paying attention to where the money was really going, since supposedly we were recovering from the recession, but unemployment kept rising and rising. Then they noticed the extreme income inequality, and started protesting and the protesting made people think about what caused the inequality - which is also approaching pre-Depression levels So, now that #OWS has started to say something about it, people have begun digging, and found that some of the Depression Era legislation has been dismantled and undermined. Glass-Steagal is one example. Finally, people investigated the source of this dismantling and noticed that a lot of politicians are also former CEOs of corporations which donate heavily to election funds. People who do this are called lobbyists, and what they do is put pressure on the politicians they 'bought' into office to vote a certain way. These politicians no longer feel responsible to the Americans who elected them, only to the money that got them there, and are afraid that if they don't play ball, they won't get the money next time they're up for election. So that's where the terms 'lobbyist' and 'crony capitalism' come in. The 'crony' part is important, because it distinguishes between true capitalism and elitism or oligarchy, where only the rich have power. So it isn't so much that #OWS is protesting about those people having more money, as that the 1% has so much MORE money that ours might as well not exist when it comes to legislation. Finally, #OWS sees and points out the exorbitant bonuses the CEOs of these bailed-out banks are giving themselves, and it's almost like their flipping the bird at the taxpayers who are still unemployed, still being foreclosed on by these exact same banks. So there's #OWS in a nutshell; not exactly simple, but you can kind of see where each of the individual complaints kind of follows the same chain of causality. I hope that helped I meant 'highest' in this tweet, not lowest. Twitter - not exactly the best medium for exposition." Ruth Hinckley quote

I must say that was quite a tweet but some interesting points were brought up that deserves a response from me.

1. I certainly do not believe that the majority of  unemployed Americans choose not to work. That being said I have an issue with the attacks on American businessmen forced to go overseas in order to stay in business. Why does the Labor advocates address the countries that allow there own workers to be exploited and endangered. The problem is those who allow the abuse to go on. Many cite the race to the bottom. This will always be a concern unless the bottom is raised. You can not blame a business for going with the most efficient legal means of product sourcing.
2. Student loans are being subsidized at the taxpayers expense and this must be done responsibly, fairly and sustainably. Another problem is not everybody should be have a bachelors degree only those willing to work for it. I have no issue with giving aid and a slight lowering of standards for the poorest among us as long as it is for those willing to work hard at it and succeed as the financial resources are indeed limited. All qualified individuals deserve a chance to succeed. If 100% of the population has a bachelors degree then the degree will have little value.
3. The Glass-Steagle Act was not the cause of the current financial crisis although it arguably was a contributing factor. The real cause is to much bad debt versus sustainable income. The following 11 underlying public-policies are the true causes of the current financial crisis #1-The Internal Revenue Code, #2-Prescriptive and Proscriptive Safety-and-Soundness Regulation, #3-Discouraging Maturity Matching in Funding Assets, #4-Fair-Value Accounting, #5-Enforcement of Credit-Default Swaps Where There Is No Insurable Interest, #6-Mispriced Government Deposit Insurance, #7-First Amendment Protection for the Credit-Rating Agencies #8 Government-Sponsored Enterprises, #9-The Overpromotion of Home Ownership, #10-The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 and #11-Monetary Policy. Underlying Public-Policy Causes of the U.S. Financial Crisis
4. Corrupt Crony Capitalism 'Been Bery, Bery Good' To Members of Congress! My fellow bloggers at American thinker cover this subject quit well and I happen to agree with them. You can also add to the lobbyist problem that needs to be corrected the unholy alliance of big labors chosen politicians undue influence in elections that continue to negotiate unsustainable unrealistic contracts at the taxpayers expense eventually bankrupting us!
5. I feel that the TEA activists libertarian based model of limited government coupled with fair taxes is the only viable long term solution.