I want to get into some of the issues that we understand and misunderstand about taxes, money, wealth, and how the very, very morbidly rich in the United States have seized not only virtually complete economic power in this country but also virtually complete political power. They're damn close and they're doing absolutely everything they can to nail it down so that they never lose it.

And all over the country you've got individual Democrats running for office to pry those nailed-down boards back up. But anyhow, some concepts:

The first is a concept of money and this is actually a brilliant piece. Conrad Shaw is a writer, actor, filmmaker, lapsed engineer is how he describes himself, and he wrote this piece for medium.com titled "Money Isn't Money". And he makes two important points that I just want to stick in your head, here. The first is, he says:

"If you give a starving man $5, you've given him his next sandwich."

"If you give a wealthy man $5, you've given him five dollars."

You haven't given him a sandwich. He doesn't need a sandwich. What you've given him is $5. So sometimes money actually represents our core needs and sometimes it represents money. It's just money. It's just a medium of exchange.

And then building on that he takes the example of Mark and Mary. Mark and Mary live in the same neighborhood in the same town, so all the economic and socio-economic and whatnot factors, cost of living and everything, it's all the same. And Mark makes $40,000 a year and Mary makes $20,000 a year. And in this particular neighborhood, when you add up the cost of rent and food and transportation, electricity, septic, water, all the basic stuff that you have to have to live, it costs $19,000 a year to live in this neighborhood.

Mary's making twenty so Mary has $1,000 in disposable income at the end of the year or throughout the year. Mark, on the other hand, who's making $40,000 - Mary's making $20,000 - now most people would say Mark makes twice as much as Mary because he makes $40,000 whereas she makes $20,000, right?

He's actually making 21 times as much as Mary because both of them have to spend $19,000 to live in the neighborhood. After that, "money" is spent. And that's not really money, that is cost of living, right, after the basic core costs are covered. Mary has $1,000 left over, Mark has $21,000 left over, so there's a huge difference between the two.

And as Conrad Shaw writes:

"This is why increasing wealth and income inequality are so insidious. It is why the wealthy should pay a larger share in taxes."

So you've got that. Put that your head.

Secondly, Yves Smith wrote a brilliant piece over the last week over at Naked Capitalism...

-Thom

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