Big Gulp.

In a true capitalist system there would have been no taxpayer funded bailouts, poorly run businesses would be allowed to fail.
Singapore would be the best example, what I do not like about that country is that it is a police state where chewing gum is illegal.

Say what you like about Singapore, but it is the world's happiest dictatorship..

How come it's ok to bail out businesses? Why don't they - bastions of capitalism- refuse our money?? Why ok for corporations to take
huge bailouts when they vehemently don't believe in them? ??

Because if we didn't bail them out, they would have taken us all down and it would have been worse than the Great Depression. Things were that close 4-5 years ago to really going into the toilet. We would all be trying to sell pencils from a plastic dixie cup on the street corner. Too poor to afford a tin cup.

The question is, why do we acknowledge that the businesses are now too big to fail, and we have set the precedent that we will bail them out when they get into trouble, and yet we aren't doing ANYTHING to slice them up into smaller businesses that can fail without hurting us?

We broke up Ma Bell. Why can't we break up these horrible banks? When it comes to businesses, big is bad. It's self defense. Break them up already.

Yeah. Its just that these dickheads - these "capitalists" - eschew
any type of private hand-out but they certainly do feed st the trough of corporate welfare.

Agreed. It is long past time and those with the power to do so have failed us - all of them.

I can't help but wonder how much more good some of these companies could do by taking the millions they give these super PACs and putting it directly into the company. $400 million will cover quite a few "working class" salaries with decent benefits, can upgrade fleets, improve machinery and IT assets, buy land/shop space, etc...

It's like they can scrape up all this money from somewhere to purchase politics, but can't seem to find money in the budget to lower health insurance premiums, make better products or hire people who want to work.

Seriously, what's the ROI on $400 million paid to a super PAC?

If it means your corporate tax rate drops instead of rises, if it means your subsidies keep coming, if it means you own that many more politicians? Probably REALLY big.

neat site. I hadn't seen anything from them before. At first I thought they were a partisan group trying to use a name close to the CBO. One interesting article had this piece.

According to wikipedia, they're often called a left-of-center group, so take it or leave it as you will, but..

From the articles I scanned that was my impression too.
I had to go through a bunch on Romney before I found one on something else.

cropped from, apparently, a photo taken of a TV screen on Tumblr, so low-quality, but i couldn't find a better version of the chart. Rachel Maddow featured it on her show a few days ago, and had been saving it for a long time to use, cause it's so informative.
I think it says a lot.

What we would 'like' wealth distribution to be is rather silly. I like the contrast between what it 'is' and what we 'think' but what we 'want'?

Hell, I'd like to be a unicorn but it ain't going to happen.