b) I’m tired of our forced hatred of numbers. As artists, numbers are the enemy, right? They make emotion seem irrelevant, right? They make people seem like quantities, right? Wrong, they allow us to see the world in a way in which analysis becomes possible. Analysis without numbers is not analysis – it’s speculation.

Here’s some numbers:

There are 11,000 people who are considered to be a part of the wealthiest 0.01% of Americans.

The poorest of that group of people makes $8,579,000 a year.

The average person in that group makes $35,473,200 a year.

Now, let’s let emotion creep in. Specifically the emotion of empathy.

44,000,000 Americans make less than $36,000 a year

Does anyone really need to make more than 8.5 million a year, when almost half of our country lives on $3000 a month? What’s the point in that? What good is their 9th or 10th million doing? Is it actually incentivizing anybody to let millionaires keep their 12th million dollar?

If we took all of the money that people make past 8.5 million dollars per year and gave it to the government that would give us $295,836,200,000. That’s without raising any current taxes, just taking away any money that anybody makes past 8.5 mill in a year. At 8.5 you get cut off. We only implement a new tax – I call it “The Max Tax.”

If we brought that cut off down to the top 0.1% income earners – in other words the top 110,000 people in America in terms of money made – the cut off would be at $1,532,400. It would also bring in $686,891,700,000 (aka: the bank bailout – aka: the money we gave to the people in this income bracket).

If we split that money evenly between the bottom half of America’s income earners, we would be giving them each $12,488.94.

I’m not suggesting we do that, but we should do that.

Source.