The top 1 percent of Americans now have greater collective net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.

http://www.classwarfareexists.com/the-top-1-percent-of-americans-now-have-greater-collective-net-worth-than-the-entire-bottom-90-percent/

It’s very hard for people to understand the shear magnitude of inequality of opportunity in this country. We talk about income inequality but that ultimately leads to wealth inequality, and I think that’s the whole enchilada … the whole problem. One of the benefits of having a wealthy plutocrat like Mitt Romney running for President is that it shined a very bright light on the various loopholes and tax preferences that the rich ultimately have.

Like other wealthy billionaires – Romney could easily have paid less than 10% in taxes in his most recent income tax return and the only reason he didn’t was to save face with the American people. He made a conscious decision not to take all of the deductions available to him in order to pay a higher tax rate, but rest assured – he has almost assuredly refiled an amended return and will recoup those tax advantages. But this isn’t about Romney – this is about the multitude of tax loopholes that have been inserted into the tax code over the past several years that specifically benefit the rich.

There are a whole host of complicated tax avoidance schemes that allow many of the wealthy to pay a lower tax rate than you or I and that ultimately leads to an unfair advantage in wealth creation. Indeed – we are living in two different worlds now more than at any other time in the past century … a world for the 1% and a world for the rest of us.

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Nicholas Kristof at the NY Times writes HERE:

A wealthy friend of mine notes that we all pay for poverty in the end. The upfront way is to finance early childhood education for at-risk kids. The back-end way is to pay for prisons and private security guards. In cities with high economic inequality, such as New York and Los Angeles, more than 1 percent of all employees work as private security guards, according to census data.

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