We're not sure if facts will matter in this cacophony, but someone should at least try to introduce a little reality into the debate, especially since Mr. Romney seems so unprepared to make the case.

Start with the fact that, like Warren Buffett, Mr. Romney said he makes most of his money from investments, not wages or salary. Thus his income is really taxed twice: once at the corporate tax rate of 35%, then again at a 15% tax rate when it is passed through to him as dividends or via capital gains from the sale of stock.

All income from businesses is eventually passed through to the owners, so to ignore business taxes creates a statistical illusion that makes it appear that the rich pay less than they really do. By this logic, if the corporate tax rate were raised to, say, 60% from today's 35% and the dividend and capital gains tax were cut to zero, it would appear that business owners were getting away with paying no federal tax at all. - WSJ

Then close the loophole. I am, however, opposed to raising the tax on dividends and capital gains beyond the current 15%, for the reasons I expressed earlier.
1)Raising the tax affects not just the 1%, but the millions of Americans who depend on investment income(mostly retired)to meet their monthly nut. Many of these people are just now recovering from the severe losses sustained in the 2008 crash. Now is not the time to penalize them in response to a national fever to punish anything Wall Street related.

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Canadian tar sands oil would be exported

Keystone XL would have diverted Canadian oil from refineries in the Midwest to the Gulf Coast where it could be refined and exported. Many of these refineries are in Foreign Trade Zones where oil may be exported to international buyers without paying U.S. taxes.

In an interview with Fox News in January, TransCanada CEO Russ Girling noted that demand for Canadian oil will all but guarantee that the pipeline is built -- if not south into the United States, then likely west towards the Pacific Ocean with access to Asia.

Top doctor's chilling claim: The NHS kills off 130,000 elderly patients every year

Around 29 per cent of patients that die in hospital are on controversial 'care pathway' or 'death pathway' to euthanasia. (Liverpool Care Pathway)

It works like this. The death panel in England decides Rudi Hargreaves, a 22-year-old teaching assistant living in Hull, East Yorks, England, doesn't deserve the ~$30,000 procedure to save his life so he must starve to death.

There are multiple contributors to this situation, which include the massive increase in the off-shoring of American production, the decline of labor unions, and changes in compensation practices by corporations.

As for the off-shoring, the income gains realized by executives from the off-shoring of American production were essentially one-time gains. These were effectively windfall profits made by the sale of American production to foreign countries, i.e. they got rich from selling America out. Notice that I'm not using the word jobs here, I'm using the word production, because we aren't just talking about jobs. Even if these executives laid-off the same number of workers and replaced them with robots and automated systems here in America that would still be better than off-shoring. Yes, given the current economic system it would still have led to growing income inequality, but by off-shoring American production to foreign countries these executives have not only eliminated certain jobs (arguably others are also created) but they have also reduced American control over production of the goods and services used by Americans, and not only have we lost some degree of control, but we have also lost capital and not only have we lost capital, but we have also lost the engine for further capital development.

Growth in executive compensation due to off-shoring is essentially the product of the elimination of domestic workers and replicating them with foreign workers at a lower cost, with a portion of the difference being awarded to executives. With American unions in decline, the ability of workers to fight such moves or to bargain for better terms of release has been diminished. Even if one argues that off-shoring creates new economic opportunities in America, this still doesn't justify the compensation going to executives for the practice, because those executives aren't the ones creating the new jobs, their compensation bonuses come from the elimination of existing ones, not from the creation of new ones.

But off-shoring and the decline of unions don't account for everything, there are other major factors. Over the past 30 years executive compensation has changed dramatically, not just in the amounts of the compensation, but also the forms of it. During the 1980s and 1990s executive salaries increased dramatically relative to average workers, but other forms of compensation increased even more, such as awards of stock, severance packages, cash bonuses, interest free loans, use of corporate property, and short-term incentive bonuses.

Unlike compensation for other employees, executive compensation is often governed by a board of directors, and that board of directors is typically elected or appointed by share holders. But who are the shareholders?

Well, since the end of World War II the portion of US stocks held by individual investors has been in decline, crossing the 50% mark in the 1980s. While the majority of stock was held by individuals from the end of World War II until the 1980s, today individuals directly hold only about 30% of US stock, the rest is held by institutional investors.

So what does this have to do with anything? Institutional investors have different interests than individual investors and different perspectives. Over the past three decades boards of directors have become more homogenous as well, with more of the same people sitting on boards of different companies. Institutional investors are now the primary electors and appointers of boards of directors, and these investors are themselves wealthy. They are more likely to support high compensation packages for executives and less likely to take an interest in compensation for the average worker.

But there is even more to it than just that as well.

Executive compensation is also a form of protection against takeovers. In effect, executives are paid in part simply not to destroy the company, i.e. they are paid not to undermine the interests of the shareholders by engineering undervalued corporate takeovers and things of that nature. In addition, executives have significant control over share price by the manner in which they report information. So executives are paid highly in part in order to provide a disincentive to underreport information leading to lower stock prices, which makes takeovers easier and less costly.

Now, in the 1980s and 1990s continuing deregulation of industries as well as other factors made the environment ripe for takeovers. As a result the institutional shareholders appointed executive compensation boards who worked in their interest to highly compensate executives as a means of defense against hostile and undervalued takeovers. As institutional shareholders became more powerful, it led to an arms race, in which the threat of takeovers grew and the defense against them grew as well.

Giving executives extremely high pay and golden parachutes (extremely rich termination packages) was seen as form of insurance against hostile and undervalued takeovers. The decline of unions also paved the way in this regard as well, because union contracts also form as a protection against hostile takeovers, but as unions declined this opened the door for more takeovers, leading to the further pumping up of executive compensation.

So in this sense, executive compensation has very little to do with reward for performance, it is simply a form of insurance, the price of which got ever higher with deregulation and deunionization. But again that still isn't the whole story, there was another aspect to this as well , which was the ever decreasing interest rate.

With the Federal Reserve continuously lowering the interest rates this also contributed to the building of leverage needed to engage in corporate buyouts and consolidation. So what happened over the past three decades was a snowball effect, in which concentration of capital led to the further concentration of capital, and as an insurance against being undermined by the executives in charge of all of this capital, the institutional shareholders grossly overpaid them as a means of buying their loyalty.

There were side effects of this executive compensation as well though, most of which the institutional investors were happy with. High executive compensation and short-term bonuses, which have grown tremendously over the past three decades, are engineered as a means to prevent executives from undermining the company by causing the share price to be undervalued, making the company ripe for a takeover. The converse is true as well, however, that this type of compensation leads to inflation of stock prices due to overly optimistic reporting, as we should have all learned by the events of the past 10 years since the initial dot.com bust of 2000 and the several busts and scandals that have emerged since. But the investors didn't mind inflated stock prices, especially since investment institutions typically work on a commission basis and thus get paid more the higher the prices go.