Rob from the poor to give to the rich.
My math isn't all that good. Two hundred seventy-two billion British pounds amounts to what, five hundred billion US dollars? That's about right.
Five hundred billion. That sounds familiar--is that the amount of money that the Iraqi war has cost us? (Actually, yes, but that's not what I'm posting about today.) No, five hundred billion dollars is the amount of tax that rich multi-national corporations are stealing from the third world. Each year.
In comparison, the first world gave about 576 billion dollars of Foreign Direct Aid in 2003. Too bad that most of it was eaten by corporations, eh?
Update: speaking of ripping off the poor, Katrina has delayed the budget cuts, but it hasn't stopped them. Republicans still plan on cutting funding to programs like Medicaid, foodstamps, and student loans (yeah, that last one is going to suck for yours truly). This effort will save our government $35bil over five years. Meanwhile, Republican-led efforts to extend the tax cuts will cost $70 bil. That's $70bil to extend the tax cuts on capital gains and dividends taxes. I don't know what those are either. It's something that only rich people have to worry about, the poor dears.
It's considered common knowledge that Republicans are better with money than Democrats. It's also common knowledge that $35bil is less than $70bil.
posted by Marie Antoinette at 9:20 PM
1 Comments:
Capital gains are the increase in value of your stock when you sell it. I'm not rich, but anyone who has any hope of having a decent standard of living in the US needs to understand investing. If you buy a stock at $5 and sell it for $10, the extra $5 is a capital gain, i.e., a gain on the capital that you invested. The government then taxes that gain.
A dividend is something you get when a company in which you hold stock decides to distribute some of the profits to its stockholders. Say you have stock in a company and it makes a lot of profits. The board of directors may vote to distribute a dividend of $0.25 a share to the stockholders. If you had 1000 shares, you woud get a check for $250. That's your dividend. Some companies pay a regular dividend, i.e., they pay a dividend every six months to stockholders. Wal-Mart pays a regular dividend. That dividend you receive is taxable.
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