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The Gap Just Keeps On Growing... LONG rant alert
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Nofsdad


Joined: 06 Jul 2003
Posts: 8379
Location: Central CA
Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2009 5:55 pm    Post subject: The Gap Just Keeps On Growing... LONG rant alert  
US Income Inequality Continues to Grow

This is stuff you will NOT find in the mainstream media, no matter how biased for the "libruls" the right claims it is. Not one single major national news outlet, including the cable networks, has ever presented this information in its entirety.

But it's always been out there. The data is based on government figures that are published regularly by the GAO, the Census Bureau (perhaps the REAL reason Michelle "Crazy Lady" Bachmann wants it shut down?), the CBO and various IGs for government agencies. You just have to dig for it and I usually find it on the internet, just like I find everything else I really need to know. Based on a column by Don Monkerud in The Capital Times, Madison Wisconsin:

Quote:
In June 2009, the U.S. economy saw its second steepest decline in 27 years. New jobless claims increased, business inventories fell and exports plunged as bad economic news persisted.

Will the once high-flying American wealth machine continue to produce the vast inequalities of the past?

Sure it will... it never stops producing wealth and all things being equal... meaning that we keep voting the same malevolent mental gnomes into office... as long as it produces wealth it can't help but produce inequities. The difference lies in how the wealth gets distributed.

Those who try to blame Obama for all the economic woes of the lower and middle classes really need to do some damned studying instead of just regurgitating the Rush Limbaugh's talking points on a daily basis.

None of this crap started on his watch. It may or may not be continuing on his watch. As impatient as I am, I'm willing to withhold judgment on that until he's actually had time to DO something... but in any event, he didn't start the stuff.
Quote:
Only two years ago (before Obama), Steve Forbes, CEO of Forbes magazine, declared 2007 "the richest year ever in human history.".

Yeah... I remember Bush and several others saying the same damned thing, high fiving each other and crowing like banty roosters in a herd of hens and my answer was, and is now, "Oh yeah? For who?". Here's who:

Quote:
During eight years of the Bush administration, the 400 richest Americans, who now own more than the bottom 150 million Americans, increased their net worth by $700 billion.

In 2005, the top 1 percent claimed 22 percent of the national income, while the top 10 percent took half of the total income, the largest share since 1928.

Wow... 10 percent of the population in total control of 50+% of the total wealth. And references to 1928... the last full year before the 20th century's biggest financial meltdown. Isn't that damned eerie? All those similarities between the run up to 1929 and the run up to the current mess... you'd think someone was actually planning this shit, eh?
Quote:
In June 2009, the Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Report estimated the number of the world's wealthiest people declined by 15 percent, the steepest decline in the report's 13-year history. The number of millionaires in the U.S. fell by 19 percent to 2.5 million people.

Analysts tell us the economy is being restructured, but how will the disparities in wealth between the rich and the poor play out?


First off don't even try to point to this as some indication that the system is reforming itself in any way that will benefit the other 90% of us. Those people didn't lose out because the poor gained anything, that's for damned sure. They lost out for the same reason the rest of us lost during those eight years.

There's only so much room at the top of the food chain and the Great White Sharks at the top are turning cannibal and eating the smaller sharks. The weaker and less adept sharks are simply learning the hard way that the bigger sharks don't give a rodent's rectum whether lunch is Charlie the Tuna or other sharks, just so they're getting fed.

Quote:
"The source of wealth has changed over the past 30 years; corporations have become the engine of inequality in the U.S.," says Sam Pizzigati, associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C. "In the past, wealth came from ownership: Today it comes increasingly from income."


Quote:
Over 40 percent of GNP comes from Fortune 500 companies. According to the World Institute for Development Economics Research, the 500 largest conglomerates in the U.S. "control over two-thirds of the business resources, employ two-thirds of the industrial workers, account for 60 percent of the sales, and collect over 70 percent of the profits."

This is how they've always been able to coerce American workers to support their drive to be allowed to operated unhampered by any government oversight and regulation... by claiming that lack of open access to the federal chicken house was going to cost Americans jobs.

And they were claiming this at the same time they were shutting down American factories, laying off American workers, importing cheap and even hazardous facsimiles of the materials we used to produce ourselves, shifting investments to emerging countries and investing in THEIR economies and infrastructures instead of our own.

From about 1980 onward, and especially during the period 2000 until 2008, they were pretty much granted everything they wanted in terms of deregulation, lack of oversight, and winky winky, look the other way, tacit approval of virtually anything and everything they did. And what did we get for allowing them unfettered access to the hen house? They pretty much sucked all the eggs and then ate the chickens that were laying them. What did anyone expect them to do?
Quote:
Corporations systematically created a wealth gap over the last 30 years. In 1955, IRS records indicated the 400 richest people in the country were worth an average $12.6 million, adjusted for inflation. In 2006, the 400 richest increased their average to $263 million, representing an epochal shift of wealth upward in the U.S.

Quote:
In 1955, the richest tier paid an average 51.2 percent of their income in taxes under a progressive federal income tax that included loopholes. By 2006, the richest paid only 17.2 percent of their income in taxes.

Somebody must a found a whole bunch of those loopholes for them, eh? Like the offshoring of profits that we've discussed here so many times? Wink

And yet they're still squealing like a stuck pig about the inequality of a tax system that places such an "unfair burden" on the rich. They're so damned offended by the idea that the rich should put back in proportion to what they take that they are... even as we speak... wreaking massive punishment on the citizens of California for daring to think so.
Quote:
In 1955, the proportion of federal income from corporate taxes was 33 percent; by 2003, it decreased to 7.4 percent. Today, the top taxpayers pay the same percentage[b] of their incomes in taxes as those making $50,000 to $75,000, [b]although they doubled their share of total U.S. income.

And yet we have old Boner standing in front of the house and the TV cameras, flashing through 10-12 shades of orange and shakin' like a chihuahua shittin' a peach pit... whining about the plight of the common citizens and trying to claim that only more of the same kind of bullshit is what's good for America.
Quote:
"Over the past 30 years, the income of the top 1 percent, adjusted for inflation, doubled: the top one-tenth of 1 percent tripled, and the top one-one-hundredth quadrupled," says Pizzigati. "Meanwhile, the average income of t[b]he bottom 90 percent has gone down slightly. This is a stunning transformation.[/b]"

I suggest you read that paragraph again... maybe several times... before you get in my face about how wonderful Reaganomics have been for the country or for whom 2007 was the "richest year ever in human history".

And while we're doing figures:
Quote:
Meanwhile, wages for most Americans didn't improve from 1979 to 1998, and the median male wage in 2000 was below the 1979 level, despite productivity increases of 44.5 percent. Between 2002 and 2004, inflation-adjusted median household income declined $1,669 a year. To make up for lost income, credit card debt soared 315 percent between 1989 and 2006, representing 138 percent of disposable income in 2007.

Which gives the Wall Street banksters yet another grip on the gonads of Americans everywhere, eh?
Quote:
"In the past corporations laid off workers because business was bad," Pizzigati says. "But over the past few decades, downsizing has been a corporate wealth generating strategy. Today, CEOs don't spend their time trying to make better products: they maneuver to take over other companies, steal their customers and fire their workers."

Eddie Lampert, anyone???
And for those who will claim that unions serve no purpose other than to take money from their members and do nothing in return...
Quote:
Progressive taxation used to prevent the rich from capturing a disproportionate share of national compensation, and the labor movement, which represented 35 percent of private sector employees and today represents 8 percent, once served as a political force to limit excessive executive pay.

NOW ask yourself why all those companies and their lackeys like Boner are so hell bent on destroying the labor movement that they would bankrupt half the damned country to do it. They don't give a pinch of monkey shit about how much it might cost you to belong to a union. They'd be spewing the same shit if unions were flipping free and now you know why.
Quote:
The Reagan backlash cut the top income tax rates, and saw the creation of right-wing think tanks that spent $30 billion over the past 30 years propagandizing for deregulation, privatization and wealth worship.

And they're reaping the rewards for that today. As for the rest of us... we get the honor of being the tools by which they reap. I don't know about you, but that ain't exactly a thrill for a cynical old bastard like myself.

As for the the turds all those learned corporatist and elite think tankers gave birth to while ensconced on those marble thrones in their ivory towers? You're more familiar with them than you might think. They were called "bubbles". Remember the bubbles?
Quote:
Bubble economies over the past 30 years helped CEOs pump up their income, and efforts to corral their pay are weak and ineffective. CEO pay may fall during these economic hard times, but disparity isn't going away. Without a strong movement for change, the wealth gap will only increase in this downturn.

Ain't that a happy fricking thought?
F**k 'em all.
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Calapso


Joined: 26 Aug 2008
Posts: 304
Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2009 8:25 pm    Post subject:  
There's your socialism, Americanized. Take from the poor, give to the rich. Re-distribution of wealth all right.
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