The Win America Campaign, which included Cisco Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc., ended its relationship with two of its three lobbying firms in March, according to forms filed with the U.S. Senate last week. The group spent more than a year and $760,000 on the effort, according to public filings.

The group wanted Congress to repeat a 2004 tax holiday that let companies bring home offshore profits at a discount. Critics, including the Obama administration, said the proposal would cost the government money, encourage companies to move profits offshore and undermine efforts to overhaul the U.S. tax code.

The lobbyist said prospects for the legislation weren’t promising, which contributed to the decision to disband the group.

Doug Thornell, who had been a spokesman for the campaign, declined to comment.

The bill is H.R. 1834.

Repatriation Tax Lobbying Campaign Said to Disband is an article on Wealth For Common Good.

As the tax filing deadline approaches, you should keep people like me in mind when you hear politicians denounce higher taxes on the wealthy as “class warfare” or an attack on “job creators.” I don’t create jobs. Does it make sense for me to pay lower taxes than someone who works hard all day and makes a lot less than I do?

The richest Americans have hired lobbyists to influence the political process and hide an unpleasant reality: wealthy people have become freeloaders. I’m a freeloader, and I don’t like it.

Conservative ideology doesn’t support free markets. Instead, it protects the wealthy. Conservatives have waged this war for 30 years, obtaining tax cuts for the rich while cutting spending on the public institutions that made this country great.

bright strangely / Flickr

Ronald Reagan reduced the top marginal tax rate from 69 percent in 1981 to just 28 percent in 1989. Then, a decade later, the wealthy got the government to cut tax rates on capital gains and dividends. These rates are now a mere 15 percent.

Why is this a big deal? Dividends and capital gains are two of the top sources of income generated by wealth. Over and over these past 30 years, the wealthy have persuaded presidents and Congress to tax this income at lower rates. Sure, many working-class and middle-class Americans also make some investment income. But it’s typically an insignificant part of their household budget.

Simply put, the vast majority of this tax giveaway benefits the very richest people in our country.

Most of us are now aware of how this works, thanks to some high-profile examples. Low tax rates on unearned income allow Warren Buffett to pay a lower rate than his assistant. It also knocks multi-millionaire Mitt Romney’s rate down to 14 percent. The hypocrisy is now out in the open.

The same lobbyists who tirelessly protect these tax breaks for the wealthy often bemoan the debt we’re passing on to our children. Yet you never hear them bemoan the deteriorating public infrastructure, such as our public schools, roads, and bridges. That’s a tragic deficit we’re also passing along to future generations. Where’s their outrage about that irresponsible legacy?

I want to be a patriotic citizen, yet when I file my taxes accurately, the tax codes are structured to give me preferential treatment over those who work — teachers, firefighters, managers, soldiers, nurses, and doctors. As a patriot, let me say loud and clear: the system needs to change!

I’m grateful for all I’ve been given. Yet I want to leave my children more than money. I want to leave them a better world. Our nation needs resources to invest in a better future for all of our children. It’s time for wealthy people like me to become more responsible and pay our fair share of taxes.

I imagine a future in which each American child gets a good public education and can compete for the world’s best jobs, our transportation system is the finest in the world, and government invests in basic research to keep our economy vibrant and jumpstart new industries. I’m willing to play my part in that future. Isn’t that only fair?

Betsy Malcolm serves on the organizing committee of Act Now and is a member of Wealth for the Common Good. wealthforthecommongood.org

Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)

Rich American Freeloaders is an article on Wealth For Common Good.

(Photo: Liz Borda)

Armed with pies and pie charts on Sunday afternoon in Prospect Park, a group of self-identified 1%ers  set out to educate neighborhood residents about the role of the tax system in increasing wealth inequality in the United States. Purposefully staged ahead of this year’s Tax Day and an attempt by the U.S. Senate to vote on the Buffett Rule, the action aimed to raise awareness among affluent young people in the Park Slope and Prospect Heights neighborhoods of how the current tax structure favors and protects people with wealth.

A joint project of a pair of non-profits – Resource Generation and Wealth for the Common Good - the group campaigns for reforms of the current tax system to include higher taxes on the rich and an equal taxation on wealth and work. Under present law, the top tax rate is 35% but the tax rate on income earned from investments is only 15%.

“We want to be taxed, and we want our families to be taxed,” said Sophie Hagen, one of the participants. “We believe that the security of our families does not depend on how much wealth we have, and we want to re-imagine what safety, security, and community means.”

Concretely, this means leveraging their financial resources and positions of privilege to support social justice movements and affect institutional change, and Resource Generation supports them in doing so.

“Wealthy people actually have a key role to play in organizing for social change,” said Jessie Spector, program director at Resource Generation. “To have wealthy people saying that they don’t want wealth disparity either is such an important thing, especially because their voices have a lot of power in that space.”

Many Resource Generation members now publicly self-identify as the 1% standing in solidarity with the 99%, although it wasn’t always that way. Resource Generation was founded in 1995 and for most of its history worked discreetly – focusing its work either internally, on the education of its members in social change philanthropy, or on collaboration with like-minded grassroots organizations.

The Occupy movement has provided both an opportunity for Resource Generation to create a public face and a language with which to speak out. “I think many activists who are 1%ers feel that talking about the wealth that they come from is actually going to act counter to their activism,” said Hagen.

“We’re showing that that’s actually not true, that it is important to be honest and open about the privilege that we come from, because then we can really move the dialogue forward.”

For these 1%ers, or in some cases, actually 5%ers or 20%ers, coming to be involved with Resource Generation was a process of coming to terms with their class identity. “All of these feelings come up, about what is my worth and what is my role,” Spector explained. “Resource Generation really provides a community where I can work through some of that, and also not be quiet about my money but actually give it to organizations that I care about and say, ‘Yes, I’m a donor and I’m an activist and I care about these issues.’”

In describing the issue of tax justice, the Tax Team used pies – in lemon, chocolate, and deliciously melting “messy chocolate” varieties – to illustrate the current distribution of U.S. wealth and stock market wealth. The numbers: the top 1% owns 35% of wealth and 38%  of stock market wealth, while the top 19% owns 52 and 53%, respectively.

At the end of the demonstration, the pies were cut up evenly and shared out between presenters and onlookers.

“It’s interesting, there’s definitely a growing inequality involved, but it’s hard to gauge how you feel about that,” said Charles Roberts, a neighborhood resident who sampled some pie. “The idea is to aspire to be on that other half or that 1%, so it’s hard to balance the idea of equality and the incentive to work really hard in order to make, hopefully, millions of dollars.”

In conjunction with the New York City event, local chapters of Resource Generation held similar pie actions April 15 and April 17 in cities around the country, including Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Denver, Los Angeles, Chicago, Durham, and Portland, Maine.

1% for the 99%: Young NYC Philanthropists Demand Rich Pay Fair Share of Taxes is an article on Wealth For Common Good.

It is a national disgrace that millionaires pay effective income tax rates substantially lower than middle class taxpayers do.

As super-investor Warren Buffett has pointed out, his effective tax rate has been declining for years. In 2010, Buffett disclosed he paid 17.4 percent of his income in federal taxes, while most of his office colleagues paid 33 to 41 percent of their incomes.

This is largely the result of the way our tax code privileges income from wealth and investments over income from work and wages. In 1986, income from wages and capital gains were both taxed at the same rate of 28 percent. Today, we tax higher incomes from wage earnings at 35 percent and income from capital gains and dividends at 15 percent, creating huge distortions.

The wider public widely supports increasing taxes on millionaires because they recognize the U.S. has developed a “two-tier” tax system. We have one set of rules for the vast majority of people and another set of advantaged rules for the super-wealthy. They understand how tax rules have been tilted in favor of the 1 percent at the expense of everyone else.

Instituting the Buffett rule will be a step in the right direction but inadequate to reverse several decades of regressive tax policies and meet our revenue needs.

Since 2001, we have borrowed over $1 trillion to pay for the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. We should reverse the Bush tax cuts and institute several additional revenue provisions. A financial speculation tax—a modest penny tax on every four dollars of financial transactions—would generate over $100 billion a year and dampen the kind of speculative trading activity that crashed the economy in 2008. Closing offshore tax havens that enable transnational corporations to game their taxes down to zero would also generate over $100 billion.

The Buffett rule moves us to greater fairness and trust in the tax system and ensures the rest of our nation’s taxpayer that we are not chumps for paying our fair share on April 17.

Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and cofounder of Wealth for the Common Good.

The ‘Buffett Rule’ Moves Us in the Right Direction is an article on Wealth For Common Good.

Watch ‘Patriotic Millionaires’ Lobby Congress for Higher Taxes on Rich on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Patriotic Millionaires Lobby Congress for Higher Taxes on Rich (Video) is an article on Wealth For Common Good.

Chuck Collins Talks About His New Book, 99 to 1 (Video) is an article on Wealth For Common Good.

Bridging the income gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is not something that only benefits the 99 percent while penalizing the 1 percent in some way. In fact, here are five ways in which the 1 percent also stands to gain from such a bridge:

1. The 1 Percent Can’t Build A Wall Around Global Problems. There are real limits to how big a wall or fortress the 1 percent can erect in the face of global climate change, nuclear proliferation and economic instability. Global instability and the climate crisis will not bypass the 1 percent, even though they will be buffered from the worst conditions. Our present economic and ecological challenges require 100 percent of us to be engaged.

2. Inequality is Bad For Everyone’s Health. Too much inequality undermines everyone’s health, including the 1 percent. As the British health researcher, Richard Wilkinson, has documented in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, extreme inequality undermines public health for everyone in the society. For example, when you eat out at a nice restaurant, remember most employees serving you are likely to lack any sick days and often any health care. So they come to work sick — and then you get sick, too.

3. Entrenched Inequality Undermines Excellence. Extreme inequalities undermine opportunity, social mobility, and meritocracy. As wealth concentrates, so does power. A segment of the 1 percent –the “rule riggers” – use their power to corrupt the economic policy and outcomes. The U.S. is drifting into plutocracy, a society where the wealthy rule. As Warren Buffett said, it’s like picking the 2020 Olympic team by choosing the children of the 2000 Olympians. Already, research shows how social mobility is declining in the U.S. and increasing in more equal industrialized countries.

4. Inequality Hurts the Economy for Everyone. Polarized income and wealth lead to economic instability, distorted markets and hurt economic growth. The 2008 economic meltdown was inevitable as consumption by the bottom 80 percent was based on borrowing, not real wage growth. Meanwhile, the 1 percent moved a huge percent of their wealth out of the “real economy” of goods and services – and into the speculative marketplace. These two trends contributed greatly to the economic meltdown.

5. Extreme Inequality Breeds Fear and Destroys Communities. What kind of society do we want to become? The wealth gap keeps people apart – creating multi-tiered societies that are fear-based. Do we want to become like Brazil, where the vast majority live in poverty and the wealthy live behind walled enclaves, drive bullet-proof cars, and hire body guards to accompany their children to school? The current drift of unequal wealth and power is moving us in that direction.

Author Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and one of the founders of United for a Fair Economy.

Five Ways That Bridging the Wealth Gap Helps Both the 99% and the 1% is an article on Wealth For Common Good.

As a capitalist, I disagree with the politicians and policymakers who invoke the dynamism of small business owners to justify cutting taxes on the wealthy and otherwise making our economic system more unfair.

My business success didn’t come from tax breaks. During the past 20 years, we’ve gone from five employees to 40 in part because of public-sector spending. I depend on a wide range of goods and services that only governments can provide. Food inspectors ensure that the food we serve is safe. Highways, railways, and air traffic enable our guests to travel here. And government research funding supports the top universities that anchor the community where we are located.

I don’t hire people because of tax breaks. I hire people to expand my business — and make more money. I measure the success of my business by monitoring our market share and the revenues we see month by month. I’m competitive. I love thinking of new marketing plans and tracking their success. I seek ways to cut costs so that we can build the bottom line. My goal is long-termsuccess.

(Martha Soukup / Flickr)

That’s how you build a business. Not through tax breaks.

Cutting taxes on people who are already wealthy does absolutely nothing for the real Main Street economy. We just increase our investment portfolios. But worse than wasting money, these tax breaks mean that there’s less funding for the vital government services and infrastructure that all businesses — and our workers — rely on. So, while the wealthy get even wealthier, everyone else is worse off.

If the government is going to give anyone tax breaks, they should give them to people like me before I became an entrepreneur. I earned about $8 per hour back then as a single mother with two kids in middle school. I had to borrow nearly all the money I invested in my business. It was a scary time. I worked many long hours in every part of the operation.

But it paid off. My inns are thriving. My partners and I have developed and expanded our business. I now pay in taxes many multiples of what I lived on for years. I now give more to charity than I ever imagined earning annually.

I want other aspiring entrepreneurs to have the same opportunities. Instead of shrinking the government, let’s boost spending. If we ramp up public investment, we’ll attain an economy that works for all of us.

That’s why I support tax measures such as the Buffett rule, which would make sure that millionaire investors pay at least the same tax rate as Americans who work for a living. For the same reason, I also support restoring upper-income taxes to the pre-Bush era rates. Even though my taxes would go up, I’m in favor of ending once and for all those tax breaks for people who make more than $250,000.

You can say it’s enlightened self-interest, but I think it’s just good business. As a capitalist, I understand that the health of our economic system is maintained not just by all of us working hard on our own, but on the investments we all make together.

For 40 years, the wealthy have been disinvesting in our public institutions and services because of a steady stream of tax cuts. Real capitalists should know that this is a mistake. Our nation needs us to re-invest. Paying a bit more in taxes is a good start.

Job-Killing Tax Breaks is an article on Wealth For Common Good.