Tax the Rich: An animated fairy tale

[presence]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6ZsXrzF8Cc



California teachers create an animated video depicting the rich peeing all over the "not rich"!
http://politicsandfinance.blogspot.com/2012/12/california-teachers-create-animated.html



Taking a page out of Barack Obama's playbook, the video created by the CFT paints a picture of the rich as a class of people who got to where they are through tax cuts, tax loopholes, buying politicians, skirting the law and in fact at times actually breaking the law.

True... but I'm not sure taxing them more is the solution. No more QE∞ I could get behind. Reveresal of corporate personhood. Drastic redo of patent law; I'm game. Elimination of subsidies, licensing schemes, no bid government contracts... I could go on.


http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/article_large/public/2012/12/05/ed-asner.jpg

Ed Asner ‘Tax The Rich’ Cartoon Has Conservative Media Seeing Red
http://www.ibtimes.com/ed-asner-tax-rich-cartoon-has-conservative-media-seeing-red-video-921815


The former “Mary Tyler Moore Show” star and longtime liberal activist is ruffling feathers among conservative commentators over an eight-minute cartoon he narrated for the California Federation of Teachers.

The cartoon, called “Tax the Rich: An Animated Fairy Tale,” borrows from the Occupy Wall Street school of snarky activism, calling out the richest 1 percent of Americans for their role in the nation’s increasing wealth disparity. In the video, Asner playfully points to a time in our not so distant past when the labor movement fostered a strong middle class and steady economic growth.

Fast-forward to today, Asner says in the video, and the “towers of money” built by avaricious rich folk have collapsed, leaving lower- and middle-income Americans scrambling to pick up the pieces while the rich get a government bailout and keep getting richer.

“In 20 years, rich people doubled their share of the land’s income,” Asner says in the cartoon. “Schools, public safety, roads, parks libraries, pubic transportation all went into decline. The rich people didn’t care. They bought their own teachers, police, garbage collectors and transportation.”





Ed Asner Narrates ‘Tax the Rich: An Animated Fairy Tale’
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/12/05/ed-asner-narrates-tax-rich-animated-fairy-tale


Somewhat disgracefully, midway through the video, there’s an image of the rich actually urinating on the 99 percent.

No, I’m not kidding.

http://newsbusters.org/sites/default/files/2012/Urinating.png

[Antischism]

They should be showing this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YS88F7Bw2AQ) in schools instead.

[FrankRep]

Here's an update:



California teachers have pulled a controversial class warfare "educational" video for children from YouTube after stiff criticism from Fox News.


California Teachers Pull Propaganda Video (http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/13858-california-teachers-pull-propaganda-video)


The New American (http://www.thenewamerican.com/)
07 December 2012



The California Federation of Teachers has pulled a controversial class warfare “educational” video for children from YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cwg4DB-EeEA) and its own website (http://www.cta.org/) after encountering stiff criticism from Fox News and the conservative blogosphere. (The video can still be viewed here or at bottom of article.)

The wildly inaccurate video — narrated by the openly socialistic Hollywood actor Ed Asner — purported to show children in an animated fairy tale how the current recession happened, blaming it on the top one percent for their piles of money falling on the poor people's houses. (There's a great rebuttal by Lee Doren over at the Daily Caller here (http://dailycaller.com/2012/12/06/ed-asner-patiently-explains-why-california-is-a-disaster/).) Ed Asner is a member (http://www.dsausa.org/about/history.html) of the Democratic Socialists of America. The video also shows the rich urinating on poor people, a scene that drew the most ire from critics of the video.

The video's explanation of the economic crash is as comical as it is false:



Meanwhile, the rich people's money piled higher and higher. But after a while, it was piled too high. One day the money fell down with a big crash, down right on the houses of millions of ordinary people. It broke their houses.


The video then claims that the “one percent” caused the economic crisis and have recently paid virtually no taxes, even though the Heritage Foundation has proven (http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/top10-percent-income-earners) that “the top 10 percent of income earners paid 71 percent of all federal income taxes in 2009 though they earned 43 percent of all income.” The California Federation of Teachers video nevertheless claims:



The people looked around, and saw too many students in their classrooms. They saw the roads filling with holes. They saw that when they needed help, it took longer to arrive. People began to say that rich people have too much money now. And maybe our problems have something to do with the one percent not paying their fair share of taxes.... It was rich people who crashed the money onto their houses and jobs. It was the one percent who got politicians to cut their taxes, until there wasn't enough for schools, safe streets, libraries, health care and parks.


The video claims that the rich did not care that public schools have been defunded, since the “one percent” sent their children to expensive private schools. But the video is inaccurate: Public school expenditures have skyrocketed, and have outpaced average per-pupil private school spending. While there has long been some very expensive private schools, Catholic Schools and private Christian schools regularly spend less per student than public schools, have higher average class sizes, and nevertheless better academic results than government schools.

The video also falsely charges that the “one percent” hypnotized the working classes with lies that they could one day be rich:



When ordinary people wondered why rich people needed so much money, the one percent said “Don't worry. This is good for you too, because it will trickle down from us to you. Someday, you'll be rich, and the rules we made for us will be your rules too.”


The implication in this part of the video is false as well, since studies (http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/286874/president-s-suspect-statistics-scott-winship) have demonstrated that Americans tend to be poorer earlier in their lives and richer as they age. And in an inversion to the theme of the video, it's the social welfare spending in programs such as Social Security that has prevented the majority of Americans from retiring as millionaires. The average Social Security recipient would retire with several million dollars in the bank (http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Weighing+benefits%3a+would+a+private+retirement+fu nd+yield+far+more...-a0129169467) had he been allowed to invest his payroll tax into a private account (even taking account for Medicare, disability, and survivors' insurance).

Combined Social Security and Medicare taxes now account for 13.3 percent of the working class families' incomes (and 15.3 percent again if the nation goes off the fiscal cliff), far more than it did 30 or 40 years ago (http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/supplement/2010/2a1-2a7.html#table2.a3). The self-employed pay the full cost directly, while those working for others have their employers pay half of the tax.

The California Federation of Teachers video — inaccurate as it was — did provide a genuine public insight. It demonstrated that much of America's government schools are in the grip of socialist propagandists who care less for accuracy than for an ideological agenda that coincides with a bigger paycheck from the people they allegedly serve. But the fact that they pulled the video from the web demonstrates that they can still be pressured to do the right thing occasionally.

==

Update: The California Federation of Teachers has reposted the video on YouTube.

[presence]

Here's an update:


California teachers have pulled a controversial class warfare "educational" video for children from YouTube after stiff criticism from Fox News.

[]

Update: The California Federation of Teachers has reposted the video on YouTube.

So which one is it? They've pulled it? Or they're now posting it again? I didn't see it on their site, but its a pretty big site so I might have missed it.

[FrankRep]

So which one is it? They've pulled it? Or they're now posting it again? I didn't see it on their site, but its a pretty big site so I might have missed it.

They pulled it off the Youtube channel, but they re-posted it.


The original is now private:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cwg4DB-EeEA

[ronpaulfollower999]

LOL. That's a fairy tale alright.