If the citizens of the US were anything other than sheeple, they'd ALL flatly refuse to remit any income tax at all until the tax rates were equitable. I'll bet the government wouldn't hold out for a month before the laws changed!

Until "the people" get their act together and learn to stand shoulder to shoulder, every smuck in the country is going to run rough-shod over them.
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Sky:
We need tax reform. There are so many deductions, exemptions, credits and just plain craziness, like calling a bonus "carried interest" and taxing it as capital gains, that the actual tax rate bears little resemblance to what people, particularly the rich, actually pay.

Another nice thing to note, Romney donated 4M$ to the Mormon church. At 14%, that's half a million bucks of foregone tax. At 35%, it's about 1.5M. Do you think the Gov't could have done something better with the tax money they didn't get?

Mal,
Church or state...... it's still pissing money up against the wall.

Actually I think you do yourself no great good by these picayune attacks on individuals with money. If they are stealing that money, then yes, put your evidence on the table and go with it. Otherwise it just looks like, and probably is, sheer envy. Making money is the whole philosophy of America. The entire population judges itself on that one thing. Even their churhes!!

If they all inherited a similar amount and then, starting from the same starting line, competed for money, the competition might be fair and the results have some value. As it is, most people with a lot of money inherited a large enough chunk of it that their inheritance alone earns huge amounts. They like to take credit for "earning" that money. They don't. The wealth they inherit, which represents the labour of those who created that wealth, earns that money. It ought to go back to the society it came from.
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Sky,
Mitt Romney did practically steal a lot of his money. At least, he didn't earn it in the traditional sense most people think of: producing something of value and receiving fair payment in exchange for that work or it's products.

He was handed the position of CEO of Bain Capital by his employers, Bain & Company. He wasn't an entrepreneur that started the company. But what is really offensive is to consider how the company operated. It engaged in leveraged buyouts of companies that it perceived had more potential value than the present stock market valuation.

The buyouts were made with other people's money, loans that were then transfered to the target company. Then more debt was used to pay huge dividends to Bain Capital. They did make an effort to restructure the company and in some cases the companies survived as private companies after Bain had extracted its pound of flesh. In many cases the companies went bankrupt under the debt load, but that didn't concern Bain, who had already pocketed their payoff.

So this truly is vulture capitalism: enriching one's self by preying on weakened companies. Is this constructive? It's hard to say. It often results in dead-ending investment and employment that might have recovered viability without Bain's "help".

What it certainly is not is creativity and productivity and constructive economic growth. It may be a clever way to get rich using other people's money, but then any kind of con-artist's scam requires one to be clever. Is it admirable? I hardly think so. The role of Bain in the economy is kind of like the role of fungus, worms, and other decomposers who dismantle rotten flesh. Perhaps it's a dirty job that someone must do, but I can't see any reason why it should qualify him to call himself a job creator, or to receive a preferred advantage on his taxation that other hard working citizens do not receive.