Tag Archives: income inequality

Average income increase for 90% of us over the past 40 years: a whopping $59.00

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Average income rose just $59 from 1966 to 2011 for the bottom 90 percent once those incomes were adjusted for inflation… the top 10 percent fared much better, according to a new study of tax data from David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize winner: In 2011 the average AGI of the vast majority fell to $30,437 per taxpayer, its lowest level since 1966 when measured in 2011 dollars. The vast majority averaged a mere $59 more in 2011 than in 1966. For the top 10 percent, by the same measures, average income rose by $116,071 to $254,864, an increase of 84 percent over 1966.

[...] The biggest driver in that disparity, Cay Johnston wrote, was not that the rich were working harder, “but the shift of income from labor to capital and changes in federal income, gift, and estate tax rules.” Indeed, the estate tax has been eased over recent decades and federal income taxes have become more favorable to the wealthy thanks to breaks for investment income. A recent study, in fact, found that the capital gains tax cut, which benefits the wealthy but does virtually nothing for everyone else, was “by far” the biggest driver in the growth of American income inequality.

Other important facts: 

(via ThinkProgress)

The rise in wealth inequality? It’s permanent: “the advantaged [are] becoming permanently better-off, while the disadvantaged becoming permanently worse-off.” [...] If we were seeing a lot of transient inequality, that would mean the households at the bottom in any given year still have a good shot at improving their lifetime earnings. The fact that the inequality is of the permanent sort shuts the window on that optimistic interpretation: The earners at the bottom are stuck at the bottom, and their lifetime earnings are about as low as one would think. (via Ezra Klein)

With this ever-increasing, permanent inequality, now decades in the making, what’s most important to Republicans? 95% of the GOP-led House voting in favor of Paul Ryan’s Class Warfare Budget:

  • Recent analyses have shown that [Ryan's] budget plan’s tax reforms, which lower top tax rates to 25 percent, would give millionaires at least $200,000 in tax cuts. At the same time, it would slash the social safety net, targeting poverty programs for two-thirds of its cuts. (via Travis Waldron)
  • Ryan’s budget would end Medicare, cut taxes by over $5 trillion, take health care benefits away from millions of Americans, make “massive” cuts to in programs for low-income and vulnerable Americans, and relies on smoke and mirrors to balance the budget within a decade… It’s designed to satisfy folks who believe the wealthy are over-burdened by taxes and struggling families have too much access to affordable health care. (via Steve Benen)

Unfortunately the non-wealthy, low-info Republican base voters — who have been personally harmed by income inequality just like everyone else — have been successfully programmed to chase the regularly-scheduled and completely manufactured social outrages dangled before them (usually involving guns, God, and gays), instead of paying attention to what their party is actually doing with tax laws and budgets.

Bush’s tax cuts on capital gains are the biggest contributor to rising income inequality

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While we consider how we are just days away from devastating sequestration cuts (which the Republican Party has decided is superior to closing tax loopholes for the super rich), take a look at why there’s such a huge gap in income inequality in America today:

Changes in tax law that reduced the federal tax rate on capital gains income is “by far the largest contributor” to rising income inequality in the United States, according to a new paper from Thomas Hungerford, an economist at the Congressional Research Service: By far, the largest contributor to this increase was changes in income from capital gains and dividends. Changes in wages had an equalizing effect over this period as did changes in taxes. Most of the equalizing effect of taxes took place after the 1993 tax hike; most of the equalizing effect, however, was reversed after the 2001 and 2003 Bush-era tax cuts. [...] The large increase in the contribution of capital gains and dividends to the Gini coefficient, however, is due to the large increase in the share of after-tax income from capital gains and dividends, and to the increase in the correlation of this income source with after-tax income. 

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We’ll stop talking about George W. Bush when the things he did while he was president for eight years stop affecting us today.

Fix the Debt: plutocrats are turning up the volume on the class war

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“Listening to these people talk about the national economy is like listening to a burglar tell you that you should really polish the silver more often.” – Charles P. Pierce

“The important thing to understand now is that while the election is over, the class war isn’t.

The same people who bet big on Mr. Romney, and lost, are now trying to win by stealth — in the name of fiscal responsibility — the ground they failed to gain in an open election. […]

Consider, as a prime example, the push to raise the retirement age, the age of eligibility for Medicare, or both. This is only reasonable, we’re told — after all, life expectancy has risen, so shouldn’t we all retire later? In reality, however, it would be a hugely regressive policy change, imposing severe burdens on lower- and middle-income Americans while barely affecting the wealthy. Why? First of all, the increase in life expectancy is concentrated among the affluent; why should janitors have to retire later because lawyers are living longer? Second, both Social Security and Medicare are much more important, relative to income, to less-affluent Americans, so delaying their availability would be a far more severe hit to ordinary families than to the top 1 percent.

Or take a subtler example, the insistence that any revenue increases should come from limiting deductions rather than from higher tax rates. The key thing to realize here is that the math just doesn’t work; there is, in fact, no way limits on deductions can raise as much revenue from the wealthy as you can get simply by letting the relevant parts of the Bush-era tax cuts expire. So any proposal to avoid a rate increase is, whatever its proponents may say, a proposal that we let the 1 percent off the hook and shift the burden, one way or another, to the middle class or the poor. […]

So keep your eyes open as the fiscal game of chicken continues. It’s an uncomfortable but real truth that we are not all in this together; America’s top-down class warriors lost big in the election, but now they’re trying to use the pretense of concern about the deficit to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Let’s not let them pull it off.”

— Paul Krugman: Class Wars of 2012

While finance executives urge Congress and the President to rein in spending, finance companies are raking in profits. [...] Meanwhile, workers are struggling. Average hourly pay, when adjusted for inflation, has fallen 0.7 percent over the past year, according to the Labor Department. And the unemployment rate in October was 7.9 percent — it was at a low of 4.4 percent in May 2007 before the recession. It’s a “zero-sum game,” Moody’s Analytics economist Aaron Smith told The Huffington Post in February. Companies are earning record profits largely because they are squeezing more productivity out of their workers without paying them more. — Corporate Profits Reach Record High, While Workers Struggle

Several CEOs — under the guise of a campaign known as “Fix the Debt” — have recently called for cuts to Social Security and other entitlements. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, for instance, said that “there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised.” “The solutions [to the fiscal cliff] are – it’s the retirement age; means testing Social Security and Medicare,” said Aetna CEO Mark Berolino. [...] Blankfein has nearly $12 million in retirement assets, while Bertolini has $1.5 million. Adding insult to injury, many of the CEOs calling for cuts to the social safety net are underfunding their workers’ retirement accounts — CEOs Looking To ‘Fix The Debt’ By Cutting Social Security Sit On Huge Retirement Accounts

The CEO Campaign to ‘Fix’ the Debt: A Trojan Horse for Massive Corporate Tax Breaks – IPS: The Fix the Debt campaign has raised $60 million and recruited more than 80 CEOs of America’s most powerful corporations to lobby for a debt deal that would reduce corporate taxes and shift costs onto the poor and elderly.

Key findings:

  • The 63 Fix the Debt companies that are publicly held stand to gain as much as $134 billion in windfalls if Congress approves one of their main proposals — a “territorial tax system.” Under this system, companies would not have to pay U.S. federal income taxes on foreign earnings when they bring the profits back to the United States.
  • The CEOs backing Fix the Debt personally received a combined total of $41 million in savings last year thanks to the Bush-era tax cuts. The top CEO beneficiary of the Bush tax cuts in 2011, Leon Black of Apollo Global Management, saved $9.9 million on the Bush tax cuts. The private equity fund leader reaped $215 million in taxable income last year just from vested stock.
  • Of the 63 Fix the Debt CEOs at publicly held firms, 24 received more in compensation last year than their corporations paid in federal corporate income taxes. All but six of these firms reported U.S. profits last year.

Sign this petition to tell Congress that it’s time to let the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2% expire and that they must reject any Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefit cuts.

Costco and Walmart: a good American employer vs. a shitty American employer

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Costco charges charges low prices, makes a ton of money & still treats its employees well.

For Costco, treating workers well has led to increased motivation, higher quality service, greater productivity and lower turnover. After the first year of employment, turnover was less than 6 percent, one of the lowest rates in the industry. The combination of good wages and the knowledge that there were opportunities for advancement was an important incentive for employees to work hard and build a career with the firm. The high quality of service provided by motivated, engaged employees at Costco, combined with the low prices, meant that customers returned and were willing to pay the membership fees. Costco’s high-quality service also attracted a clientele that shopped not only for basic goods but also luxury items, which were still more profitable, even with the low markup. As a result, Costco had higher annual sales per square foot than its most direct competitor, Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club, ($795 versus $516), and higher annual profits per employee ($13,647 versus $11,039) even though Costco’s average wage was 42 percent higher. Over 16 years, Costco grew from 206 warehouses and $16 billion in sales to 554 warehouses and $69.9 billion in sales.

via: ericmortensen

The Walton family and trickle-down

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Consider where you want your hard-earned money going on Black Friday. Maybe you don’t want it going straight into the already heavy-lined pockets of the Walton children and their over-paid CEO?

[Walmart's] role as [the] marginal employer [in many US counties] often serves to drive down workers’ wages county-wide. …Concretely, between 2007 and 2010, while median family wealth fell by 38.8 percent, the wealth of the Walton family members rose from $73.3 billion to $89.5 billion …In 2007, it was reported that the Walton family wealth was as large as the bottom 35 million families in the wealth distribution combined, or 30.5 percent of all American families. And in 2010, as the Walton’s wealth has risen and most other Americans’ wealth declined, it is now the case that the Walton family wealth is as large as the bottom 48.8 million families in the wealth distribution (constituting 41.5 percent of all American families) combined.

— Inequality, exhibit A: Walmart and the wealth of American families | Economic Policy Institute

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current: Before you hit the streets on Black Friday to shop till you drop here are some key figures about Wal-Mart’s powerful position compared to its employees that might make you think twice about what retailers to support.

1.3 million – Wal-Mart employees in the United States. Wal-Mart is the largest private employer in the world.

$15.7 billion – Wal-Mart’s 2011 profits. The company is currently number 2 on the Fortune 500.

$8.75 per hour – average starting salary for a new Wal-Mart employee. That’s turns out to be an annual salary of $15,500, which is about even with the federal poverty level for a 2-person household.

$8,653 per hour – Wal-Mart CEO Michael Duke’s $18 million annual salary converted to a 40 hour-a-week hourly wage.

$13 per hour – Hourly wage the OUR Walmart group is demanding from Wal-Mart.

$4.83 million – The fine Wal-Mart agreed to pay the U.S. Department of Labor in 2012 for failing to pay overtime wages to more than 4,500 employees nationwide, .

$56,068.58 – Online donations received to sponsor striking employees on Black Friday.

12 – number of cities where Wal-Mart is currently facing strikes since October 4, 2012.

0 – number of strikes Wal-Mart has faced since 1962.

$312 billion — Wal-Mart’s revenue in 2005.

4,700 – number of children of Wal-Mart’s Alabama employees receiving Medicare assistance in 2005.

16 million – the number of US children – that’s 1 in 6 – that struggle with hunger. As Current has previously reported, roughly 20 percent of American children live in a home with parents who are unable to regularly put food on the table.

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“Often the best route to wealth isn’t competing… but lobbying Congress for a tax break”

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Why Let the Rich Hoard All the Toys? Nicholas Kristof: 

Americans seem by intuition to be flaming lefties. A study published last year by scholars from Harvard Business School and Duke University asked Americans which country they would rather live in — one with America’s wealth distribution or one with Sweden’s. But they weren’t labeled Sweden and America. It turned out that more than 90 percent of Americans preferred to live in a country with the Swedish distribution.

Perhaps nothing gets done because, in polls, Americans hugely underestimate the level of inequality here. Not only do we aspire to live in Sweden, but we think we already do.

[...] Likewise, the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington estimates that four major tax breaks that encourage excessive corporate pay cost taxpayers $14.4 billion last year. And 26 chief executives received more in pay last year than their companies paid in total federal corporate income taxes.

Compare $14.4 billion to the $445 million which the federal government gave to PBS this year. Is firing Big Bird, as the King of Bain suggested, really going to solve anything? It’s appalling — or it should be — that the wealthiest people no longer necessarily build or produce anything (especially jobs with a living wage). They just lobby for more tax breaks, loopholes, and benefits to increase their wealth — which costs the government needed revenue and will cause austerity spending cuts for the rest of us, for balance. Big Bird is only the start of trickle down in action.

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Politics aside, people know in their hearts what’s right and what’s wrong. But too many are blinded by conservative spin. From Building a Better America−−One Wealth Quintile at a Time (warning: PDF):

“For the first task, we created three unlabeled pie charts of wealth distributions, one of which depicted a perfectly equal distribution of wealth. Unbeknownst to respondents, a second distribution reflected the wealth distribution in the United States; in order to create a distribution with a level of inequality that clearly fell in between these two charts, we constructed a third pie chart from the income distribution of Sweden (Fig. 1).”

“Figure 2 shows the actual wealth distribution in the United States at the time of the survey, respondents’ overall estimate of that distribution, and respondents’ ideal distribution. These results demonstrate two clear messages. First, respondents vastly underestimated the actual level of wealth inequality in the United States, believing that the wealthiest quintile held about 59% of the wealth when the actual number is closer to 84%. More interesting, respondents constructed ideal wealth distributions that were far more equitable than even their erroneously low estimates of the actual distribution, reporting a desire for the top quintile to own just 32% of the wealth. These desires for more equal distributions of wealth took the form of moving money from the top quintile to the bottom three quintiles, while leaving the second quintile unchanged, evincing a greater concern for the less fortunate than the more fortunate (Charness & Rabin, 2002).”

It’ll trickle down. Go back to Dancing with the Stars.

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theamericanbear: It’ll trickle down. Go back to Dancing with the Stars.

from Mother Jones

Last Sunday, 9/24/2012:

Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes: Now you made, on your investments, personally, about $20 million last year. And you paid 14 percent in federal taxes. That’s the capital gains rate. Is that fair to the guy who makes $50,000 and paid a higher rate than you did?
Romney: It is a low rate. And one of the reasons why the capital gains tax rate is lower is because capital has already been taxed once at the corporate level, as high as 35 percent.
Pelley: So you think it is fair?
Romney: Yeah, I think it’s the right way to encourage economic growth, to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work.

It’s not for nothing that George W. is the headliner at the upcoming Cayman Alternative Investment Summit. He’s probably the reason there’s a Summit there to begin with:

The correlation between the U.S. deficit and money hidden in offshore accounts

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Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore: A far-reaching new study suggests a staggering $21tn in assets has been lost to global tax havens. If taxed, that could have been enough to put parts of Africa back on its feet – and even solve the euro crisis

…Despite the professed determination of the G20 group of leading economies to tackle tax secrecy, investors in scores of countries – including the US and the UK – are still able to hide some or all of their assets from the taxman.

“This offshore economy is large enough to have a major impact on estimates of inequality of wealth and income; on estimates of national income and debt ratios; and – most importantly – to have very significant negative impacts on the domestic tax bases of ‘source’ countries,” Henry says.

[...] The sheer scale of the hidden assets held by the super-rich also suggests that standard measures of inequality, which tend to rely on surveys of household income or wealth in individual countries, radically underestimate the true gap between rich and poor.

[...] Inequality is widely seen as having increased sharply in many developed countries over the past decade or more – as described in a recent paper from the IMF, which showed marked increases in the so-called Gini coefficient, which economists use to measure how evenly income is shared across societies.

Globalisation has exposed low-skilled workers to competition from cheap economies such as China, while the surging profitability of the financial services industry – and the spread of the big bonus culture before the credit crunch – led to what economists have called a “racing away” at the top of the income scale.

However, Henry’s research suggests that this acknowledged jump in inequality is a dramatic underestimate. [...] In fact, some experts believe the amount of assets being held offshore is so large that accounting for it fully would radically alter the balance of financial power between countries. The French economist Thomas Piketty, an expert on inequality who helps compile the World Top Incomes Database, says research by his colleagues has shown that “the wealth held in tax havens is probably sufficiently substantial to turn Europe into a very large net creditor with respect to the rest of the world.”

Unbelievably, one of these super-rich individuals who hides his money in off-shore accounts wants to be the President of the United States — AND he wants to cut programs and services which average taxpayers rely on, to finance further tax cuts and loopholes for himself and his friends. Why would anyone in the working or middle class support this behavior?


image: questionall

It’s a shame American Christians don’t care about the economy or their own incomes

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If fundamentalists spent even one quarter of their time and attention on what the GOP was doing for the wealthiest Americans (at the expense of the poor, working and middle classes) as they do on social issues like gay marriage and abortion rights, we wouldn’t be living through a time of  income inequality that’s even greater than during the Great Depression.

Instead of worrying about the incomes and living conditions of their own families and friends and neighbors, these Christians are more worried about legislating what strangers should do with their privates lives. Meanwhile, they continue voting for the wolves who have been shoveling money up to their benefactors for the past three decades. Political Wire reports that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would reward the wealthy even more, while placing an even greater economic burden on the rest of us. And it will be the fundamentalists who vote for Romney:

A new Brookings Institution/Tax Policy Center study finds Mitt Romney’s plan to overhaul the tax code would produce cuts for the richest 5% of Americans — and larger bills for everybody else.

The Washington Post notes the researchers seemed “to bend over backward to be fair to the Republican presidential candidate” but “none of it helped Romney.”

“His rate-cutting plan for individuals would reduce tax collections by about $360 billion in 2015, the study says. To avoid increasing deficits — as Romney has pledged — the plan would have to generate an equivalent amount of revenue by slashing tax breaks for mortgage interest, employer-provided health care, education, medical expenses, state and local taxes, and child care — all breaks that benefit the middle class.”

A year ago, Think Progress reported that “crucial services and public investments for Main Street America are being gutted as taxes on the richest Americans are the lowest they’ve been in a generation. …ThinkProgress has assembled the following graph, which demonstrates that the United States is now about as economically unequal as Uganda and more unequal than countries like Pakistan or the Ivory Coast:”

Imagine the level of inequality if Romney and a Teapublican Congress get their way. What does it say about modern Christianity when all the fundamentalist rubes are capable of paying attention to are the social issues that the GOP distracts them with on an almost daily basis? Instead of helping those less fortunate, is trying to force your religious beliefs on others and being associated with what you hate really what Jesus intended?

Jon Stewart and Joseph Stiglitz on inequality in America

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source: sandandglass

Joseph Stiglitz

The GOP is holding tax cuts for 98% of us hostage until tax cuts for the wealthiest are extended

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America needs to regain some balance and the Republican Party needs to be reminded of that. For three decades the wealthy have unequally benefited from tax laws, taking home more money than the rest of us, paying less tax on their incomes than the rest of us.

The rich have stashed their extra money in offshore accounts while creating zero jobs. Actually, with less revenue coming into local, state, and federal treasuries, thousands of public sector jobs have actually been lost through layoffs and hiring freezes. Paul Krugman says the fall in public employment is “about 1.4 million jobs less than it would be if it had grown as fast as it did under President George W. Bush. And, if we had those extra jobs, the unemployment rate would be much lower than it is — something like 7.3 percent instead of 8.2 percent.”

That’s lost jobs, lost paychecks and benefits and pensions, lost buying power, lost business. Formerly middle class people now unemployed, homes foreclosed, some now living on unemployment and public assistance. And what for? So that the rest of us can continue to finance the one percent’s tax deductions / lifestyles – like the $77,000 deduction the Romneys took on their Olympic horse.

It’s time to let the Bush tax cuts expire for the super rich.

The Hill:

“In his weekly address, the President called for lawmakers to adopt a Democratic measure which would extend the expiring lower George W. Bush-era tax rates only for those couples making below $250,000, and forcing higher income earners to pay more.

“[...] Republicans charge that a tax increase on any Americans would further hurt the recovering economy, while Obama has threatened to veto an across-the-board extension, calling on the wealthy to pay more.

“In his address, Obama again called on the GOP to decouple the middle class rates from rates for higher income earners.

““If 218 Members of the House vote the right way, 98% of American families and 97% of small business owners will have the certainty of knowing that that their income taxes will not go up next year,” said the president.

““Everyone says they agree that we should extend the tax cuts for the middle class,” said Obama. “Instead of doing what’s right for middle class families and small business owners, Republicans in Congress are holding these tax cuts hostage until we extend tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

“Obama said the country could not afford more “top-down economics” and vowed that as soon as they sent him a bill to block a tax raise on the middle class he would “sign it right away.””

Work harder, plebeians: wealthy Americans need more tax cuts

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image: waronidiocy 

Kevin Drum would like to remind everyone what the outrage from the top elite is all about:

“I just want everyone to be absolutely clear on what this “narrative of aggrievement” is all about. It’s about Obama’s proposal that the marginal tax rate on income over $400,000 should rise from 35% to 39.6%. That’s your aggrievement. That’s your entitlement. That’s your socialism. That’s your class warfare. An increase in the top marginal tax rate of 4.6 percentage points. Four. Point. Six. This is what America’s most prosperous citizens are up in arms about. This is why Barack Obama is an enemy of capitalism. These are the spiteful shackles he proposes to use to subjugate America’s engines of job creation. It’s the reason America’s wealthiest citizens are so frightened about the future of their country. 4.6 percentage points. Just let that sink in.”

It will be interesting to see what shiny object(s) the GOP will introduce into the news cycle this week, to distract their not-wealthy voting base from paying attention to the Tax Cuts For The Rich Bill they’re trying to fast track. Maybe Romney in Israel, drumming up a new war with Iran?

Krugman: this election really is about the rich versus the rest

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Paul Krugman approves of the Obama campaign’s decision to continue hammering Mitt Romney on his history with Bain Capital and his refusal to release any tax returns prior to 2010. He says,

“…this election is, in substantive terms, about the rich versus the rest, and it would be doing voters a disservice to pretend otherwise.

“[...] The print media do offer analysis pieces — but these pieces, out of a desire to seem “balanced,” all too often simply repeat the he-said-she-said of political speeches. Trust me: you will see very few news analyses saying that Mr. Romney proposes huge tax cuts for the rich, with no plausible offset other than big benefit cuts for everyone else — even though this is the simple truth. Instead, you will see pieces reporting that “Democrats say” that this is what Mr. Romney proposes, matched with dueling quotes from Republican sources.

“So how can the Obama campaign cut through this political and media fog? By talking about Mr. Romney’s personal history, and the way that history resonates with the realities of his pro-rich, anti-middle-class policy proposals.

“Thus the entirely true charge that Mr. Romney wants to slash historically low tax rates on the rich even further dovetails perfectly with his own record of extraordinary tax avoidance — so extraordinary that he’s evidently afraid to let voters see his tax returns from before 2010. The equally true charge that he’s pushing policies that would benefit the rich at the expense of ordinary working Americans meshes with Bain’s record of earning big profits even when workers suffered — a record so stark that Mr. Romney is attempting to distance himself from part of it by insisting that he had nothing to do with Bain’s operations after 1999, even though the company continued to list him as C.E.O. and sole owner until 2002. And so on.

“The point is that talking about Mr. Romney’s personal history isn’t a diversion from substantive policy discussion. On the contrary, in a political and media environment strongly biased against substance, talking about Bain and offshore accounts is the only way to bring the real policy issues into focus. And we should applaud, not condemn, the Obama campaign for standing up to the tut-tutters.”

We’re currently living “the cookie joke” — income inequality is all about political power

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Stan Sorscher argues that Americans are currently living “the cookie joke” — because income inequality is all about political power:

“A CEO, a Tea Party member and public employee sit at a table, with 12 cookies on a plate. The CEO grabs 11 cookies and tells the Tea Party member, “You better watch him. He wants your cookie.” The CEO took 11 out of 12 cookies. This isn’t a question of what’s fair. The CEO has the economic power to take 11 cookies, and he does.

“I found a conservative blog that explained this point of view. The CEO deserved 11 cookies. Without the CEO, the 12 cookies would never have been baked. No one would have anything without the CEO. Not only did the CEO deserve 11 of the 12 cookies, but if we somehow had 15 cookies, the CEO would deserve 14. If the CEO made 24 cookies in China, he should get 23. The Tea Party member and the public employee should thank the CEO for their one cookie. The conservative blogger acknowledged that his interpretation wasn’t funny.

“[...] By shoveling 93% of new income to the top 1%, we are currently living the cookie joke in full measure. This isn’t working. If trickle-down policies could ever work, then our figurative cookie-bakers would already have hired millions of new employees. They didn’t. It hasn’t worked for the last 35 years.

“It doesn’t work.

“Well… it doesn’t work for 99% of us. Stiglitz puts it this way, “We’ve been shaping our society to create people who are more selfish.” Increasingly, policies are created by the richest 1%, and for the richest 1%. Their interests are placed first, through globalization, privatization, deregulation and insanely expensive political campaigns.

“Meanwhile, 99% of us are put at risk. We risk losing our jobs, our economic security, our homes, health care, education for our children, and economic opportunities.

“As always [the rich] seem to be the winners from the policies that they advocated and that imposed such high costs on others.”

“This is bad for democracy, bad for our future as a nation, bad for our ability to solve serious problems on national and international levels, bad for the environment and the planet, and just plain bad.

“We could just as well shape society to restore balance to our social, political and economic life. We start with a rehabilitation of the Social Contract. We need each other to prosper. That is,our neighbors must prosper for us to prosper.

“We need to restore trust in institutions of civil society. That includes government.”

It’s no coincidence that the GOP / one percent want the good old reliable conservative voter base to keep buying into the Republican ‘ideal’ of less government, smaller government, government can’t be trusted, government is baaad, the only good government is currently drowning in a bathtub. And it’s funny because as the rabble expect less of government, and as they elect politicians who promise them less government (and who, when elected, actually give them government that truly doesn’t work, as promised), somehow the rich wind up with more for themselves – from government, in the form of policies, tax laws, and benefits. And the rich get even richer while the rest of us get poorer.

If conservative voters opened their eyes, they’d see the elite don’t use “boot straps” to get ahead. They’re using government.

via: christopherstreet

Worst. President. Ever. (Let’s do it again with Mitt Romney)

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Political Wire: “An excerpt of Where They Stand:The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians by Robert W. Merry in Salon suggests George W. Bush will be ranked near the bottom of all presidents: ”Based on the contemporaneous voter assessments, the objective record, and what we know of history, it’s difficult to see him even in middle-ground territory. History likely will view Bush largely as the voters did after eight years of his stewardship. And so it’s probably just as well that he doesn’t care much about the verdict of history.“

Consider that Mitt Romney, in actions if not in words, is creating a campaign that seems to be an exact duplicate of the Bush Years, from extending tax cuts for the one percent — who’ve already surpassed all other earners in the country with net income advantages, and who’ve hoarded their wealth gains to the detriment of our entire economy — to a neocon foreign policy platform that’s becoming more “Cheneyfied” by the day. What could go wrong?

Ari Berman: “Of Romney’s forty identified foreign policy advisers, more than 70 percent worked for Bush. Many hail from the neoconservative wing of the party, were enthusiastic backers of the Iraq War and are proponents of a US or Israeli attack on Iran. [...]  Romney’s malleability is an advantage for his neocon advisers, giving them an opportunity to shape his worldview, as they did with Bush after 9/11. Four years after Bush left office in disgrace, Romney is their best shot to get back in power. If that happens, they’re likely to pursue the same aggressive policies they advocated under Bush. “I don’t think there’s been a deep rethink,” says Clemons. “I don’t think the neoconservatives feel chastened at all. As a movement, the true neoconservatives never, ever give up. They will be back.””

Andrew Sullivan: “When you check reality, rather than the alternate universe constantly created by Fox News and an amnesiac press, you find that Bush had a chance to pay off all our national debt before we hit the financial crisis – giving the US enormous flexibility in intervening to ameliorate the recession. Instead, we had to find money for a stimulus in a cupboard stripped bare – its contents largely given away, by an act of choice. I’m tired of being told we cannot blame Bush for our current predicament. We can and should blame him for most of it – and remind people that Romney’s policies: more tax cuts, more defense spending are identical. With one difference: Bush pledged never “to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.””