The Dangerous Game the Rich and Powerful are Playing.

After reading the accounts on CNN.com and listening to blowtorch radio talk-show hosts like Glenn Beck and local hosts like Darrel Ankarlo (Phoenix) or Mac & Gatos (Phoenix), it is becoming apparent that something very ugly and dangerous is beginning to fester in the national consciousness.

This is the bitter feeling by the majority of U.S. citizens that the rich and/or powerful do not pay taxes.

Now, if you look at the data contained in the IRS's own spreadsheet (http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04in06tr.xls), you will see that the rich pay MOST of the taxes in the United States. In fact, the top 5% of wage earners pay 54.36%; the top 10% pay 65.84% and the top 50% pay 96.54%. So the disgruntled middle-class probably needs to consider this when they are sharpening their pitchforks and lighting their torches.

But these statistics notwithstanding three of President Obama's cabinet picks (Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary; Tom Daschle, Health & Human Services Secretary appointee; and Michelle Killefer, "Chief Performance Officer" appointee) were revealed to have had significant tax payment violations in the relatively recent past. The American people get the distinct impression that what our elected and appointed officials are telling us is to "to do as we say, not as we do". I'm distinctly reminded of the uber-witch real-estate magnate Leona Helmsley who famously declared that "... only little people pay taxes".

Since all of President Obama's appointees have been relatively high on the earnings scale, there is an opinion festering that there is no such thing as an "honest politician", which is especially bad when President Obama campaigned on honesty and transparency. The influential don't pay all their taxes and the American taxpayer (who believe that they DO pay all their taxes) are being asked for nearly one trillion dollars (that's one thousand billion dollars, ladies and gentlemen) for stimulus. All the while, they are paying themselves huge bonuses.

The rapidly shrinking middle-class is the primary buffer between the rich and the destitute that keeps the lower classes from simply deciding that they have nothing to lose and begin to take what they want by force. We are, in my opinion, very close to the boiling point right now. Senate and House telephone lines that typically receive very little inbound traffic from the typical American are burning down right now with the call volumes about the stimulus bill. The typical American does not understand why their tax-moneys are being used to prop up fantastically large and wealthy corporations, investment banks and financial institutions that continue to pay their executives large performance bonuses even though many of them have no growth or negative growth in 2007, 2008 and probably going into 2009.

The American aristocracy which includes the intellectual elite, the super-wealthy and the professional political class is very much in danger of finding themselves facing a revolution not entirely dissimilar from the French Revolution in both terms of it's causitive factors as well as the potential outcome. People who have nothing left to lose also have absolutely everything to gain in a violent upheaval of the status-quo. As the IRS own stats show, the bottom 50% of wage earners in the U.S. paid only 3.26% of the taxes. This means that the median wage earner is just barely above the acknowledged poverty level.

While I do not condone socialism, facism or any other -ism that gives the state broad power to either nationalize private industry or to transfer vast amounts of wealth for "social programs", I think that the extremely wealthy segments of our society needs to do some soul-searching with regards to their obligation to our government, to the laborers whom without they would not be able to achieve the fantastic financial heights that they have reached and to those who are unable to help themselves. A continued attitude of "me, me, me" by these captains of finance, industry and government are going to find themselves looking at the business end of a lot of pointy pitchforks held by very angry common citizens.