Than Most Americans Do In A Lifetime And Pays A Lower Tax Rate
As ThinkProgress has previously noted, necessary services and public investments in Main Street America are being gutted as some of the wealthiest Americans are getting away with paying less in taxes than they have in a generation.
Progressive activist and former Texas agricultural commissioner Jim Hightower notes one particularly egregious exammple of this unfair economic arrangement: the case of hedge fund billionaire John Paulson. Hightower writes that an American who earned $50,000 a year for 47 years would earn $2.4 million, which would be a healthy sum. Yet Paulson earns that much in an hour:
If your job paid $50,000 a year and you stayed at it for 47 years, your tally for a lifetime of work would be $2.4 million. Not bad — but hedge fund hustler John Paulson pulled down that much last year.
Most of us would consider an annual income of $2.4 million to be a windfall, but it didn’t take Paulson a full 12 months of work to pocket his windfall — or one month, a week, or even a day. That’s how much he made an hour. Yes, Paulson could’ve worked one single hour in 2010 and hauled off a paycheck equal to what a typical household gets for a lifetime of work.
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/05/13/hedge-funder-john-paulson/