The billionaire founder of one of the world's largest investment firms has acknowledged that he has gotten incredibly wealthy "at the expense of labor" and is calling for higher taxes on the rich to help curb growing economic inequality.
In an 'Investment Outlook' newsletter titled "Scrooge McDucks," Bill Gross, founder and chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO) wrote:
Having benefited enormously via the leveraging of capital since the beginning of my career and having shared a decreasing percentage of my income thanks to Presidents Reagan and [George W.] Bush via lower government taxes, I now find my intellectual leanings shifting to the plight of labor."Having grown rich at the expense of labor, the guilt sets in and I begin to feel sorry for the less well-off," Gross writes.
He continues:
I would ask the Scrooge McDucks of the world who so vehemently criticize what they consider to be counterproductive, even crippling, taxation of the wealthy in the midst of historically high corporate profits and personal income to consider this: Instead of approaching the tax reform argument from the standpoint of what an enormous percentage of the overall income taxes the top 1 percent pay, consider how much of the national income you've been privileged to make.Indeed, the top 1 percent of US income earners made 19.3 percent of national household income in 2012, its largest slice of the proverbial pie since the IRS began keeping records a century ago. Since the Great Recession officially ended in 2009, 95 percent of all income gains went to the top 1 percent of earners.
Comment: Imagine the outcry if Syria had attacked Israel under the suspicion that it was training and providing weapons to the so-called 'Syrian rebels'.
In this twisted world, some countries have a license to kill and Israel is at the top of the list.