Well…if you didn’t think that there was something wrong with America and how the rewards of the economy are shared across all of it’s citizens…all you have to do is look at the recent study done by the University of California that revealed that in 2010 93% of all income growth went to the top 1% of earners…yep, you read it…the top 1% took away virtually all of the income growth while the other 99% of us were left to feed on the scraps that these folks have not figured out how to steal yet….I’ll come back for more later..but right now I need to read something else so I don’t fall into the pit of despair that these kind of numbers normally induce…geez…
Tag Archives: income disparity
Everyone’s doing fine but the workers…
Well…this one just popped into my head about an article that I saw a few days ago that said that the current congress is the richest one in the history of the country with the current crop’s net worth being 10 times the average Americans, and this points to one of the problems that I see with the country right now: that everyone but the workers are doing well. Corporations have the highest highest retained earnings of any time in history and CEO pay is at it’s highest in relation to worker’s pay since statistics have been kept…why doesn’t anyone connect the dots here? We have the rich in congress making laws for the rich bought and paid for by corporations that have done nothing but stagnate the income of the middle class (or, in real dollars have shrunk the income of the middle) and we wonder why no one is spending, we wonder why the economy can’t stop sputtering and start to move again? Until the middle gets a true share of their contribution to the economy and the rich stop taking more and more, we are doomed to just idle, to look at tiny slivers of hope and blow them out of proportion just because we want to believe that the American dream still exists…I’ve got news for you….it’s already gone…geez….
The direction I think “Occupy” should take….
Well…this little thought popped into my head the other day when I was thinking about the next phase of the “Occupy” protests and what they should look like. First, though, I think the best tactic that should be immediately employed is to declare victory and go home…the tent cities and other encampments have served the purpose of changing the national debate to include the huge disparity in income and opportunity that exists in this country, but I think the continuation of this tactic may alienate parts of the public that “Occupy” is trying to help, and in the world of faster and faster change, I think the movement has to change and grow to eliminate the avenues of attack that have been used against it. The establishment has made it clear that it will use their private armies to suppress any dissent that does not come from the right, so let’s put together some organization that directly deals with this suppression…constantly changing tactics will keep them off stride and directly address criticisms that come from friendly quarters. Tent cities have served their purpose, but let’s move on to the part that is keeping the right up at night…converting this energy into political change that will break the grip of the tiny minority of the right that run our lives…let’s get going…
Gonna keep pounding this one home…
Well…read an interesting article in “The Guardian” this afternoon about all of the crowing the 1%’ers do that they create jobs and earn the ridiculous money they make and the politicians that still believe that nonsense…and I am going to keep pointing this stuff out until I can’t write anymore or things change. But, the first point on productivity that I touched on briefly last week is that from the late 40′s until the late 70′s, productivity and real wages of the middle class were basically a 1:1 ratio; that is that as productivity rose 118% in that time, real wages rose about 122%. Since then, though, from 1979 through 2009, productivity has risen almost 80% but the real wages of the middle class has fallen by 4% and the rich have taken all of that additional production for themselves in the form of bonuses and higher pay to the tune of a 279% increase. Can anyone see that from a pure economic standpoint, this concentration has stripped huge amounts of demand out of the economy since the the middle class has less and less of the pie to spend? It is something I have been saying for quite some time now…as the rich and corporations have been squeezing every last penny out of you and me, who is going to be able to buy the goods and services that make any economic growth sustainable? We are seeing these effects now in sluggish growth and stagnation that have become the hallmarks of this type of wealth concentration…and I finally hope someone cares….other than me, that is.
Here’s the indisputable proof…
Well…this one is pointed at all of you right wing idiots out there that say the OWS protesters are just a bunch of whiny losers that don’t know what they are protesting…according to a report out today done by the Congressional Budget Office…the non-partisan arm of congress that is charged with coming up with the cost of new legislation among other things…the income of the top 1% of people in this country has tripled….yep, tripled since 1979…with most of that growth coming after the Bush tax cuts in 2000 while the rest of the country’s workers income increased a paltry 80%….so, 300% to 80%…pretty easy numbers to understand even for the troglodytes on the right. How are you guys going to wave away this one? When you take into account the productivity gains over that same time period, real wages for the bottom 80% of us actually went down over the same time period….and the right wonders why the rest of us are so pissed off. It is just this kind of inequality where the top 1% takes no risks and has no risks…where they just sit back and rake in the cash through connections and rigging the system that is finally triggering a broad based revolt of the working people in this country….it’s about time…geez…