A huge Wall Street payday is raising questions as to whether the nation's top earners should benefit from tax breaks while so many unemployed Americans continue to struggle. Hedge fund manager John Paulson made more than $5 billion in personal profits last year, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The jaw-dropping figure works out to roughly $159 rolling in every single second.Most of his profit is considered long-term capital gains, so he'll pay 15 percent in taxes. That's because of a tax loophole that billionaires have fought tooth and nail to keep (and Congress has let them). Most American workers pay income taxes at a rate of about 26 percent (not to mention a slew of state taxes).
What's disturbing is that Paulson apparently didn't make his money by investing in businesses that create jobs. Instead, he made bets on Wall Street, this year on gold.
TeamsterNation did a little google search and learned that $5 billion is about the gross domestic product of an entire nation -- Malawi. In fact it's MORE than the gross domestic product of Grenada, Gambia, Fiji, Barbados or Belize.
Gross.
