Tax the Rich, Nurture the Middle Class

Obviously, cutting taxes on the rich has not worked. There is no trickle-down effect. When the rich get richer, they don't start risky new businesses, instead they fire excess workers, lower salaries, accumulate big chunks of cash, and ship it to offshore and Swiss accounts. Sure, they hire servants and buy more diamonds; that doesn't help machinists, fabricators, assemblers and other productive workers to find jobs.

We need HIGHER TAXES ON THE RICH, a progressive income tax with top rate at 95%, confiscatory estate taxes to stop the inter-generational accumulation of great wealth, and HIGH TARIFFS to protect American manufacturing jobs from importing misery from sweat-shop slave-labor competitors.

Anyone making $10 million per year has some sort of financial scam going, is stealing from the government, or is part of the striped-pants BANKSTER crowd that should be taxed until they disgorge their ill-gotten gains.

The solution to coal-burning is in front of us: Chinese have taken and improved our solar panel manufacturing, which we could recapture -- we just fail to do so. Solar panels on the 10,000 square miles of sunny rooftops will produce MORE energy than we currently get from ALL sources, nuke, natural gas, hydro, coal, etc. So why do we give away our technology? Why not become the kingpin of solar panel manufacturers, exporting to the world?

Now oil: if you think a bit, we import $700 million dollars a day of oil from OPEC countries alone, money we don't have and must borrow from China and other richer countries. Yet proven 20-year-old plug-in car technology can easily replace the 120 billion gallons of oil per year we get from OPEC oil dictators; the batteries recycle, they charge up from rooftop solar panels, and we would have more energy than we could store (we do store electric via pumper-generators stations such as Lake Castaic, the pumps work at night, "storing" cheap energy and the next day turn into generators to meet peak power needs).

Our War Budget is about $600 billion per year -- about $5 for each gallon of OPEC oil. This doesn't count the cost of replenishing military supplies, the misery of the wounded and mentally troubled, not to mention the misery imposed on the countries we bomb, blast and dominate to protect oil pipelines. So even if you're a granola-crunching bike rider who never buys a gallon of gas, you are funding a "war tax" to protect Chevron oil supplies, whether you want to or not, via taxes, borrowing, and interest on past borrowing that benefits Chevron.

Most of our debt has been accumulated borrowing from China and other productive countries who finance our oil addiction and ship us the manufactured goods that put our workers out of work, leaving only worthless jobs like retail, movies, nails and beauty shops, and "overhead" police, army and health care. None of which produce any foreign exchange to pay for our oil addiction.

We need high tariffs to bring jobs back, and stop countries like China from getting rich at our expense. We need to recapture our own technologies, such as solar panels and plug-in cars, and resume production of all-electric trains. All these things are simple, but Big Coal paralyzes the Republicans, while Coal unions and pols in states like West Virginia paralyze the Democrats.

Similarly, Big Oil stops Republicans from doing anything to stop imported oil, while Oil, Chemical and Atomic workers unions, not to mention oil workers, paralyze the Democrats.

So nothing gets done, even though the solutions are obvious.