Planet Ponzi Quotes

“Memento mori is a Latin phrase meaning ‘remember you will die.”
― Mitch Feierstein, Planet Ponzi

“Willie Sutton was one of America’s best-known bank robbers. When asked by a journalist why he robbed banks, Sutton replied simply: ‘Because that’s where the money is.’ A good answer, but wrong. Yes, banks are where the money is, but you need to be an idiot to rob them. If you want to get rich, you need to work in one, ideally on Wall Street or in the City of London. If you head for one of the right banks and get the right sort of job (whatever you do, avoid the back office), you’ll make plenty of dough, no matter what niche you end up in.”
― Mitch Feierstein, Planet Ponzi

“the richest 1% have seen their annual after-tax income rise from a (prosperous) $337,000 to an astonishing $1,200,000.1 Bear in”
― Mitch Feierstein, Planet Ponzi

“There are countless other examples of huge, profitable companies paying far less in tax than they would do in almost any other jurisdiction in the world. Our tax system ought to be giving companies incentives to invest, to innovate, and to grow. Instead, we’re giving them incentives to hire tax lawyers‌—‌and generating compliance costs estimated at a staggering $163 billion a year.17 The inevitable result: we collect far less in tax than we ought to. In 1952‌—‌a year when, by the way, the United States led the world on every conceivable measure of industrial and commercial success‌—‌almost one-third of all federal tax receipts came from corporations. Today, that figure is under 10%.18 It’s bananas. And the answer is so obvious. We need a low rate of corporation tax‌—‌Ireland levies its rate at 12.5%, for example‌—‌and then we need to collect it. Like, actually knock on GE’s front door, and say, ‘Sorry, guys, but since you live here would you mind contributing?”
― Mitch Feierstein, Planet Ponzi

“We don’t simply have a problem when it comes to the amount of tax collected. We have a huge problem when it comes to the way we collect taxes. Take corporate taxes as an example. We impose taxes at the second highest rate in the rich world (35%), yet the corporate tax code is riddled with incentives, subsidies, exemptions, and loopholes.13 The result is crazy. We give firms a huge disincentive to earn money at home (because our basic tax rate is so high), while giving them huge incentives to play the system. And remember: the United States boasts some of the world’s most innovative and entrepreneurial companies. If we give those guys an incentive to find ways around our tax code, they’ll turn out to be world-beaters. World-beaters like General Electric, for example.14 GE earned $14.2 billion of profit in 2010, of which $5.1 billion was generated in the US. I’m guessing that you earned less than $5 billion that year, but I’m damn sure you had a more painful settlement with the taxman. In 2010, GE’s net corporation tax obligation to the US government was sub-zero. The firm actually derived a net benefit from the government. In the five years to 2010, GE accumulated $26 billion in American profits and booked a net benefit of $4.1 billion from the IRS. That’s completely insane. You don’t, however, need to be GE to outperform in this way. Big Oil can play the same game to almost equal effect. According to a Citizens for Tax Justice report out in 2011, ‘Over the past two years, Exxon Mobil reported $9,910 million in pretax US profits. But it enjoyed so many tax subsidies that its federal income tax bill was only $39 million‌—‌a tax rate of only 0.4%.’15”
― Mitch Feierstein, Planet Ponzi

“To be fair to President Bush, however, his approach to revenue was not a new one. In 1980, the year when Planet Ponzi started to turn, the average effective federal tax rate on the median American household was 11.4%. By 2010, that rate had plummeted to just 4.7%.10 That is not a reasonable amount for the average family to pay in exchange for defense, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, homeland security, the Department of Education, environmental protection, and various other services besides. The results are all too predictable. If you want to understand why we have a deficit in the US, look at figure 3.2. The graph is unusual in that it aggregates all sources of government revenues: not just taxation but other fees, charges, utility revenues, rents‌—‌any money that leaves your pocket and ends up in the government’s.11”
― Mitch Feierstein, Planet Ponzi

“To put it simply: within the space of a single generation, on current policies, as measured by a nonpartisan government statistical bureau, the government is going bankrupt.”
― Mitch Feierstein, Planet Ponzi

“It was as though all the passengers on the Titanic were roped together, and the fattest guy had just fallen overboard.”
― Mitch Feierstein, Planet Ponzi