The American Spectator

thought the Soviet government was good. br> — Reid Bogie br> Waterbury, Connecticut /p>

I can’t help but wonder if, and how much, George Soros is involved in the current financial crisis. After all, he was the man who “broke the Bank of England” in 1992, forcing the Conservative government of the day to withdraw the pound from the European Exchange Rates Mechanism, which ended up costing the UK some £3.4 billion, and dealt the British economy a severe blow. Soros made $1 billion on the deal.

p>Soros has made no secret of the fact he wants Obama to be elected, and he would do just about anything to see that happens. To that end, he certainly has the wherewithal and the knowledge to have engineered the current financial crisis, knowing that a crash if the US economy would be to Obama’s advantage. (I’m not saying he did engineer the current mess, but, then again, such monkeyshines are not totally out of the realm of possibility.) br> — Gretchen L. Chellson br> Alexandria, Virginia /p>

As a former corporate CEO and die-hard capitalist it pains me to see one of ours, and a professor non-the-less, make a stupid statement: “the top 1 percent of taxpayers earned 22 percent of total adjusted gross income and paid 40 percent of all federal income taxes.” I know, I know, per the latest release of the IRS data etc., etc. etc.

No argument from me that the upper 1 percent and upper 25 percent of American wage earners pay more, much, much more, than their fair share of taxes. To say that the remaining American’s do not pay federal income tax is a lot like denying that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west (the earth rotates around the sun of course, not vice-versa.) In both cases you are technically correct but not in the sense of what either means to normal, human beings.

The bottom 75% of Americans do pay taxes and a very significant amount of the tax burden. For example, while the so called ‘social security tax’ goes into a ‘trust fund’ it really is just a federal income tax not much different from the taxes you are talking about. Furthermore, for all practical purposes, corporate taxes flow to the consumer through either prices, or changes in quality and/or quantity of a good or service. If it where otherwise the corporation would eventually go out of business and new corporations would not be formed.

p>Please for your own sake Prof. Reiland, readjust your numbers and rhetoric to reflect the real picture so you don’t come across as a foolish Rush Limbaugh by parsing the meaning of federal taxes.