Bistiza: "Third, you state these rates as though they are high, and yet in my opinion the extremely wealthy should be paying even MORE than either of the numbers you provide. Why? Because while poor people need just about every dime they can scrape just to survive, most of the income of the very wealthy is surplus and is not needed for them to survive. They should be footing far more of the tax bill than they are, and the very poor should be paying nothing or next to nothing."
I know that you're not paying that 35%, or you wouldn't feel that way.
Also, the poor don't pay. 47% of the country. you can live in this michael moore dream world where the rich are cheating the poor, and it's their fault that your life hasn't turned out according to plan. in fact: you're encouraged to live there by your compatriots, apparently.
as far as the rich paying more, they already support the country. at what point do some of YOU need to step up and say, "you know what guys? maybe we need to take responsibility for ourselves and quit leeching from the public coffers."
the rich are not villains. while you were drinking beer and scraping by to get your bachelor's, a lot of them were going to school for 8 or 12 more years than you. a lot of others were working 90 hour work weeks after risking every penny they had to build their companies.
you're not a victim. you get out what you put in with your education and work ethic (and if you're lower socio-economically, you get out hundreds of thousands of dollars more than you put in over the course of your lifetime). apparently, you didn't put in enough. the wealthy who i know did, and now they bear the extra burden of having to support you- not only for food, shelter, and medical care (the majority of medical care; some of this money is spent terribly. ever seen an emergency room in chicago?) which are certainly things that the world would like all people to have, but also for their right to have cell phones with UNLIMITED DATA PACKAGES, and XBOX'S, and CIGARETTES, and ALCOHOL, and LOTTERY TICKETS. if you think that is scraping by, look beyond your utopian backyard: you can't imagine what real suffering is, you myopic twit.
god bless america, because only divine intervention will save your country, as well as the rest of us on this continent who are stupid enough to latch onto your government that has become a ticking........time........bomb.
boom goes the dynamite. i hope china will be kind enough to let you keep your entitlement cigarettes. but, if you want my advice, smoke em while you got em.