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The U.S. Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner – April 2011: Q: “Is there a risk that the United States could lose its AAA credit rating? Yes or no?” – Tim Geithner: “No risk of that.”

The U.S. Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner – April 2012: Q: “If we don’t deal with these debt problems we are going to be Greece in two years” – Tim Geithner: “No risk of that.”

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From Daily Capitalist and Jeff Harding. Latest data as of 2009:

• The top 10% pay 70% of all income taxes.
• The top 1% pay 37% of all income taxes.
• The bottom 50% pay almost nothing (2.25%).
• 233,435 taxpayers reported at least $1 million of Adjusted Gross Income.
• Those filers represent only 0.2% of all tax payers.
• Those 0.2% pay 20% of all income taxes.
• Their effective tax rate in 2009 was 25% ($176.4 billion paid on $702.2 billion of income).
• If you increase that rate to 30%, then, all things being equal, they would pay an additional $34 billion (210.7 billion vs. $176.4 billion). Other estimates range up to $50 billion in additional revenue.
• In a world of $3.7 trillion budgets, that means the additional revenue from the Buffett tax would amount to only 0.9% of total federal expenditures. (Ric: This is less than one month’s budget DEFICIT at the current rate of our borrowing money)

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On the day the 2001 deal was struck, the government owed the bank about 600 million euros ($793 million) more than the 2.8 billion euros it borrowed, said Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over the country’s debt-management agency in 2005. By then, the price of the transaction, a derivative that disguised the loan and that Goldman Sachs persuaded Greece not to test with competitors, had almost doubled to 5.1 billion euros, he said. (From Bloomberg – click here to read the whole ugly story)

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The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases. — Thomas Jefferson

Government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery. — Jonathan Swift

A civil servant is sometimes like a broken cannon– it won’t work and you can’t fire it. — General George Patton

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