How much have the richest 1% stolen since 1980?
"If you make less than $114,000 a year (90% of us), you've been financially damaged by the flow of income to the richest 1% of Americans over the past 30 years.
"Based on Internal Revenue Service figures, if middle- and upper-middle class families had maintained the same share of American productivity that they held in 1980, they would be making an average of $12,500 more per year."
Since US GDP has increased five-fold since 1980 is it not reasonable to say upper-middle class families should have maintained their same share of the economic pie?
"But if earnings since 1980 were based on this measure of productiveness, the richest 1% of Americans would be making $1 trillion less per year.
"A trillion dollars a year. That's more than we spend on the entire military.
"A trillion dollars a year. That's seven times more than the budget deficits of all 50 states combined...
"Who are the people making up the richest 1%? Bankers, CEOs, upper management, university presidents, Congressmen...
"Taxing them is not 'soaking the rich.'
"The greatest redistribution of income in history has taken place over the last 30 years, and the victims are beginning to make a fuss about it."
MAKE a FUSS!Jealous are we??
Try focusing on my arguments and not on your perceptions of my economic class which is correct,
Do you agree with the following unemployment figures from October 2010?
Bill Quigley: The Class War at Home
"One of every six workers, 26.8 million people, is unemployed or underemployed. This 'real' unemployment rate is over 17 per cent.
"There are 14.8 million people designated as 'officially' unemployed by the government, a rate of 9.6 per cent. Unemployment is worse for African American workers of whom 16.1 per cent are unemployed.
"Another 9.5 million people who are working only part-time while they are seeking full-time work but have had their hours cut back or are so far only able to find work part-time are not counted in the official unemployment numbers.
"Also, an additional 2.5 million are reported unemployed but not counted because they are classified as discouraged workers in part because they have been out of work for more than 12 months. Source: US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics October 2010 report."
Do you think unemployment is affected by the one trillion dollars per year currently going to our richest 1% of the population that would have been shared by middle and upper middle class families had their share of American productivity remained at 1980 levels?
The Big Obscenity: A Trillion Dollars a Year to the Richest 1% | Common Dreams
"There are 49 million people in the US who live in households which eat only because they receive food stamps, visit food pantries or soup kitchens for help.
"Sixteen million are so poor they have skipped meals or foregone food at some point in the last year.
Wealth, Income, and Power
The Wealth Distribution
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.7%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2010).
Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power
Here's Michael Hudson's take on Obama's 1-2-3 tax punch:
Michael Hudson: Obama's Sellout on Taxes
"First, many former Democratic and independent voters will 'vote with their backsides' and simply stay home (or perhaps be tempted by a third-party candidate), enabling the Republicans to come in legislate the cuts in perpetuity in 2012 – an estimated $4 trillion to the rich over time.
"Second, Obama’s Republican act (I hate to call it a compromise) 'frees' income for the wealthiest classes to send abroad, to economies not yet wrecked by neoliberals.
"This paves the way for a foreign-exchange crisis.
"Such crises traditionally fall in the autumn – and as the 2012 election draws near, it will be attributed to 'uncertainty' if voters do not throw the Democrats out.
"So to 'save the dollar' the Republicans will propose to replace progressive income taxation with a uniform flat tax (the old Steve Forbes plan) falling on wage earners, not on wealth or on finance, insurance or real estate (FIRE sector) income.
"A VAT will be added as an excise tax to push up consumer prices.
"Third, the tax giveaway includes a $120 billion reduction in Social Security contributions by labor – reducing the FICA wage withholding from 6.2 per cent to 4.2 per cent.
"Obama has ingeniously designed the plan to dovetail neatly into his Bowles-Simpson commission pressing to reduce Social Security as a step toward its ultimate privatization and subsequent wipeout grab by Wall Street."
Do you think it's likely Americans in the middle and upper-middle economic classes are working at least as hard today as they were in 1980?
"If you make less than $114,000 a year (90% of us), you've been financially damaged by the flow of income to the richest 1% of Americans over the past 30 years.
"Based on Internal Revenue Service figures, if middle- and upper-middle class families had maintained the same share of American productivity that they held in 1980, they would be making an average of $12,500 more per year.
I don't believe the "flow of income" towards the richest 1% of Americans since 1980 has as much to do with hard work as it has with campaign donations to Republicans AND Democrats.
A tax bias of debt over equity investment seems to me a more likely explanation for most of that income flowing to the richest 1%.
The Big Obscenity: A Trillion Dollars a Year to the Richest 1% | Common Dreams
It's hard to miss how deliberate deceptions in the US media repeatedly prejudice Americans against their own best interests.
"In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 1988) Noam Chomsky and I put forward a 'propaganda model' as a framework for analyzing and understanding how the mainstream U.S. media work and why they perform as they do.
The Propaganda Model Revisited, by Edward S. Herman
"We had long been impressed with the regularity with which the media operate within restricted assumptions, depend heavily and uncritically on elite information sources, and participate in propaganda campaigns helpful to elite interests.
" In trying to explain why they do this we looked for structural factors as the only possible root of systematic behavior and performance patterns."
Does the propaganda work without profit?
"What is the propaganda model and how does it work?
"The crucial structural factors derive from the fact that the dominant media are firmly imbedded in the market system.
"They are profit-seeking businesses, owned by very wealthy people (or other companies); they are funded largely by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and who want their ads to appear in a supportive selling environment.
"The media are also dependent on government and major business firms as information sources, and both efficiency and political considerations, and frequently overlapping interests, cause a certain degree of solidarity to prevail among the government, major media, and other corporate businesses.
"Government and large non-media business firms are also best positioned (and sufficiently wealthy) to be able to pressure the media with threats of withdrawal of advertising or TV licenses, libel suits, and other direct and indirect modes of attack.
"The media are also constrained by the dominant ideology, which heavily featured anticommunism before and during the Cold War era, and was mobilized often to prevent the media from criticizing attacks on small states labeled communist."
Does the propaganda work without profit?
"What is the propaganda model and how does it work?
"The crucial structural factors derive from the fact that the dominant media are firmly imbedded in the market system.
"They are profit-seeking businesses, owned by very wealthy people (or other companies); they are funded largely by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and who want their ads to appear in a supportive selling environment.
"The media are also dependent on government and major business firms as information sources, and both efficiency and political considerations, and frequently overlapping interests, cause a certain degree of solidarity to prevail among the government, major media, and other corporate businesses.
"Government and large non-media business firms are also best positioned (and sufficiently wealthy) to be able to pressure the media with threats of withdrawal of advertising or TV licenses, libel suits, and other direct and indirect modes of attack.
"The media are also constrained by the dominant ideology, which heavily featured anticommunism before and during the Cold War era, and was mobilized often to prevent the media from criticizing attacks on small states labeled communist."
"As this chart shows, the US is cranking out multimillionaires at a record pace with super-rich (more than $10M) households doubling in the past decade.
"What’s scary is that doubling the amount of people who have more than $10M per household (from 300K to 600K) means there’s $3,000,000,000,000 less available for the other 98% of the of the households as MONEY IS A COMMODITY and can only be possessed by one person OR another."
The Dooh Nibor Economy (that’s “Robin Hood” backwards!) | Phil
Do you think voting for a Republican or a Democrat will Change anything?