The .1 Percent

"...uncertainty. As a small business owner..."

were the first words I heard when I flipped on NPR the other day. The caller was a guy named Steve and my ears waited for the inevitable rip on the president. Instead, this is is what I heard.

"The federal government, and I mean all of them but most specifically Congress, needs to let me know what they are going to do. See, I'm part of the 1 percent who they are calling the job creators and I have no problem if they raise my taxes. I can afford it. But where I am uncertain is if I hire more people, will I get a tax break? If they came to me and said, "Hire more people and we will give you a tax break," then I would at least be able to adjust and calculate what I'm going to need if they do raise taxes."

We then found out that Steve had three small businesses and made millions a year. So, the uncertainty for him was simply a matter of figuring out his balance sheet which, quite honestly, is all the rest of us do. It made me wonder how many of the 1 percent who were uncertain would also be willing to pay more in taxes.

Then Steve said something that the 99 percenters and occupiers should understand.

"It's not the 1 percent that are the problem. It's the .1 percent. People that are with me in the other 9/10ths of 1 percent are doctors, lawyers, and wealthy small business owners. We have the same issues that most Americans have with money. We just have more of it. What we do adds to our society in the way of jobs and economic growth. But the .1 percent? That's the people on Wall Street with whom I invest my money. All they do is move money around. They add no value to society whatsoever. "

And there it is. It's not the one percent. It's the .1 percent. They are the ones that are really the problem right now and they always have been. These are the folks that nearly ruined our economy 3 years ago and that have, more or less, created a Wall Street government. People like Steve got fucked over by them just like we did.

In a recent column, Paul Krugman echoed this sentiment with some interesting numbers.

The recent Congressional Budget Office report on inequality didn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, did. According to that report, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent.

For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite’s share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 — and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains.

Clearly, there's gross inequality within the 1 percent as well. So is Steve right about who makes up the .1 percent?

For who are the 0.1 percent? Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone’s income and his economic contribution.

Not all in the financial sector but certainly not the "job creators" that we hear about all the time.

I took a lot away from Steve's call. I think it was important to hear from someone who is indeed a job creator and would happily pay more in taxes if the federal government would get its shit together. Based on the poll numbers and Steve's call, it appears as if most of the blame is being laid at the feet of Congress.

Will the American people let them know what they think next November?