The Raven Foundation

Things for the 99% to think about while Occupying Wall Street (or wherever):

The top 1% should pay their fair share.

When politicians try to divide the rich against the poor, rich and poor alike should refuse to take the bait. Here are some basic facts to consider: The wealthiest 1% pay an average tax rate of 30% and they account for 38% of all income taxes. The top 50% of tax payers pay practically all of the nation’s taxes (97.30%) and 40-45% of American income earners pay zero taxes. Now, I won’t deny the tax code we have in place is a bit of a convoluted mess or that it could use some serious reform, but overall it seems fair to me and we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be deluded into thinking that 1% of the people in this country are the cause and cure of 100% of our problems. And let’s face it, isn’t all this talk about fairness a little transparent? I mean, really, the truth is we are only annoyed with the 1% because we aren’t one of them! If we were rich and powerful, too, we wouldn’t be mad at ourselves, would we? So let’s be smarter than the politicians give us credit for and stop denying the love part of our love/hate relationship with the 1%. That would be fair.

We can balance the budget by cutting spending.

According to the Congressional Research Service, which prepared a report for members of congress on the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global war on terror, we have spent a total of $1.283 trillion since 9/11. While we are all arguing about who should pay more taxes, what spending to cut or which investments are worth making, we might just check in with the Pentagon and ask to see their balance sheets. The Congressional Budget Office consistently complains that they cannot get a clear reckoning of where all that trillion plus has been spent. Seriously?! I think all this 1% talk is a smoke screen to keep us from looking at the budget that really needs to be reformed.

Wall Street got us in this mess and they need to be held accountable.

We love to blame Wall Street for the mortgage crisis and housing downturn, but a closer look reveals our shared responsibility. We all participated in the boon years when housing prices soared and home equity loans allowed us to pay for our consumer lifestyles. As a nation we spent to excess, ran up credit card bills, and never wondered if we were going a bit overboard. Wealthy Wall Street traders and the average American homeowner became a lot alike as we all borrowed against the value of our portfolios only to see values dive, leaving us with nothing but debt. The Wall Street derivative traders believed in the value of their securities as surely as we believed in the value of our houses. Both turned out to be illusions.

My point is…

Look, I’m not denying that lots of people are in deep financial doodoo or that there are things that need fixing on Wall Street and on Main Street. Sure some guilty people made out scot free and innocent people are suffering, but is it really productive to waste all that energy being angry about it? I’m afraid that the Occupying Wall Street movement, by playing the cynical game that politicians like to play of dividing us against ourselves, is going to get us nowhere. The 99% need to stop blaming the 1% for all their problems and begin to realize that we need each other, all 100% of us, to weather the storm we are in. We even need the politicians – I know, we want to jettison the whole lot, but if we stopped falling for their simplistic, self-serving cr@#, they’d have to stop dishing it out. David Brooks said it: “It’s not about declaring war on some nefarious elite. It’s about changing behavior from top to bottom. Let’s occupy ourselves.”