Census finds record gap between Rich and Poor

[Trajan]

Still waiting for the explanation why having a gap between rich and poor is bad.

pack a lunch fitz.

 

[Intense]

For thousands of years before anyone coined the word "socialism" the prime function of ALL governments was to socialize cost and privatize profit.

GE and the Pentagon continue this proud tradition.

Yeah, GE is one of my favorite too.

GE is a good example of today's corporate citizen's sense of entitlement:

"Take GE, for example. GE has $36Bn in sales and paid $431M in taxes (15% of net profits) in 2009.

"They also paid out $9Bn in dividends and over $24Bn in 2008 and 2007 and in 2007 they bought back their own stock but, in those three years, they paid -(NEGATIVE) $900M in taxes!

"Are you feeling victimized yet? 'Does GE use our infrastructure? Do they use our public airwaves?

"'Are they protected by our police? Is our army out there fighting and dying to protect them? Do they take money from our government? Do we educate their employees? This is the INSANITY of the US tax system.'"

When Warren Buffett revealed in 2007 that he paid taxes at about half the rate of his employees (17.7%), I certainly didn't connect the dots between individual and corporate tax rates and our national deficit:

" US corporations, who are (according to to the Supreme Court) also citizens of this country, paid just $300Bn in taxes last year on $6 TRILLION in income (5%).

"That’s right, if US corporations simply paid the same amount of tax as Mr. Buffett - that would, by itself, be enough to wipe out our deficit. But, things have gone decidedly the other way in the past 30 years:

http://www.philstockworld.com/wp-content/uploads/Coorporate Taxes.jpg

I've been repairing appliances for a good part of my life. I am too familiar with the crap GE has gotten away with. There was a time the Company did do the right thing because it was the right thing to do. The Government has their back at every mishap, they insulate, divert, and protect GE, and many others, especially when it is something that can effect the economy. We get what we vote for, we get what we pay for.I wish We would all "Just Say no", more often, rather than "Thank You, May I have Another". If only Government and Business were as good at doing, as they are at selling, scamming, and packaging Bullshit.

 

[Big Fitz]

Still waiting for the explanation why having a gap between rich and poor is bad.

pack a lunch fitz.

More like buy "Food Insurance".

 

[georgephillip]

"There’s a great WSJ blog called "The Wealth Report" by Robert Frank, who wrote an excellent book called "Richistan" in which he makes a case that the world’s wealthy have essentially formed a shadow (let’s call it virtual as it sounds nicer) nation 'where the top 1% control $17T in wealth, have their own health care system (concierge doctors), travel system (private jets, destination clubs) and language. (”Who’s your household manager?')."

"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."

This has more to do with Republicans AND Democrats dependence on the richest 1% of Americans to fund their campaigns than it does with "merit."

FLUSH the DC TOILET in 2010.

The Dooh Nibor Economy

thats so cock- eyed I can barely contain my derision.

Then maybe you should cock that other eye in the direction of Donald Trump (and please feel free to cut loose all that derision)

"Donald Trump (and no disrespect to The Donald as I love the guy, but he’s a good example), one of our 1,000 Billionaires, spends $1.2B to put up 1,000 new condos in Manhattan. He sells those condos for $2.2M each to 1,000 of our nation’s 1.8M people who have $10M or more, pocketing an extra $1Bn for all his hard work.

* Since nice condos 'only' cost $1M just 7 years ago, the poor multimillionaires must figure out how to come up with an extra 10% of their net worth in order to maintain the 'Trump Lifestyle.' "Let’s say they earn $500K per year and need an extra 50K - doesn’t seem like much does it?

o "They in turn raise the prices they charge to 1,000 of their clients (the 150M strong "middle class") by 10%. These people are the doctors, lawyers, store owners, white collars, etc. that you do business with every day.

+ That forces the middle class, who can barely afford their lifestyle to pass that 10% on to each other, as well as the 120M Americans who have household incomes of less than $48,000 a year, many FAR less than that in the form of vital services they can’t live without."

"That’s how your housekeeper, who spent $3.20 per gallon to fill up her tank in order to clean your house for $10 per hour, ends up paying for the Trump condo she’s cleaning.

"It’s a nickel here and a dime there but when you pick the pockets of 270M people for "just" a quarter a dozen times a day that’s $3 x 270M x 365 days = $295Bn a year.

" Multiply this petty theft over a 10-year period and that’s how you move $3T of our missing $4T from the poorhouse to the penthouse - Dooh Nibor!

 

[georgephillip]

Yeah, GE is one of my favorite too.

GE is a good example of today's corporate citizen's sense of entitlement:

"Take GE, for example. GE has $36Bn in sales and paid $431M in taxes (15% of net profits) in 2009.

"They also paid out $9Bn in dividends and over $24Bn in 2008 and 2007 and in 2007 they bought back their own stock but, in those three years, they paid -(NEGATIVE) $900M in taxes!

"Are you feeling victimized yet? 'Does GE use our infrastructure? Do they use our public airwaves?

"'Are they protected by our police? Is our army out there fighting and dying to protect them? Do they take money from our government? Do we educate their employees? This is the INSANITY of the US tax system.'"

When Warren Buffett revealed in 2007 that he paid taxes at about half the rate of his employees (17.7%), I certainly didn't connect the dots between individual and corporate tax rates and our national deficit:

" US corporations, who are (according to to the Supreme Court) also citizens of this country, paid just $300Bn in taxes last year on $6 TRILLION in income (5%).

"That’s right, if US corporations simply paid the same amount of tax as Mr. Buffett - that would, by itself, be enough to wipe out our deficit. But, things have gone decidedly the other way in the past 30 years:

http://www.philstockworld.com/wp-content/uploads/Coorporate Taxes.jpg

I've been repairing appliances for a good part of my life. I am too familiar with the crap GE has gotten away with. There was a time the Company did do the right thing because it was the right thing to do. The Government has their back at every mishap, they insulate, divert, and protect GE, and many others, especially when it is something that can effect the economy. We get what we vote for, we get what we pay for.I wish We would all "Just Say no", more often, rather than "Thank You, May I have Another". If only Government and Business were as good at doing, as they are at selling, scamming, and packaging Bullshit.

I started working in the orange groves around my hometown in the mid-60s. Thirty years before that Huey Long compared DC to a restaurant that served only one dish.

There were Republican waiters along one wall.
And Democrat waiters along the other.

But no matter which party delivered your order..."all the grub came from Wall Street's kitchen."

This tool we're communicating with right this instant gives us the power to "Just Say No" in a way someone like Huey would recognize instantly.

Since Republicans AND Democrats need Wall Street far more often than they need voters, why not FLUSH as many incumbents from the US Congress as possible on November 2nd?

Many ballots around the country already have viable third party candidates. If Republicans want to be driving this train when it jumps its economic tracks, Democrats could FLUSH 100 (200?) Democratic incumbents from the House and Senate and replace them will Greens and Libertarians.

It is a political leap of faith (at least) BUT continuing to "choose" between Republicans OR Democrats only ensures Wall Street's bullshit will continue.

Until the American Republic disappears from the page of time.

 

[Bern80]

"There’s a great WSJ blog called "The Wealth Report" by Robert Frank, who wrote an excellent book called "Richistan" in which he makes a case that the world’s wealthy have essentially formed a shadow (let’s call it virtual as it sounds nicer) nation 'where the top 1% control $17T in wealth, have their own health care system (concierge doctors), travel system (private jets, destination clubs) and language. (”Who’s your household manager?')."

"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."

This has more to do with Republicans AND Democrats dependence on the richest 1% of Americans to fund their campaigns than it does with "merit."

FLUSH the DC TOILET in 2010.

The Dooh Nibor Economy

thats so cock- eyed I can barely contain my derision.

Then maybe you should cock that other eye in the direction of Donald Trump (and please feel free to cut loose all that derision)

"Donald Trump (and no disrespect to The Donald as I love the guy, but he’s a good example), one of our 1,000 Billionaires, spends $1.2B to put up 1,000 new condos in Manhattan. He sells those condos for $2.2M each to 1,000 of our nation’s 1.8M people who have $10M or more, pocketing an extra $1Bn for all his hard work.

* Since nice condos 'only' cost $1M just 7 years ago, the poor multimillionaires must figure out how to come up with an extra 10% of their net worth in order to maintain the 'Trump Lifestyle.' "Let’s say they earn $500K per year and need an extra 50K - doesn’t seem like much does it?

o "They in turn raise the prices they charge to 1,000 of their clients (the 150M strong "middle class") by 10%. These people are the doctors, lawyers, store owners, white collars, etc. that you do business with every day.

+ That forces the middle class, who can barely afford their lifestyle to pass that 10% on to each other, as well as the 120M Americans who have household incomes of less than $48,000 a year, many FAR less than that in the form of vital services they can’t live without."

"That’s how your housekeeper, who spent $3.20 per gallon to fill up her tank in order to clean your house for $10 per hour, ends up paying for the Trump condo she’s cleaning.

"It’s a nickel here and a dime there but when you pick the pockets of 270M people for "just" a quarter a dozen times a day that’s $3 x 270M x 365 days = $295Bn a year.

" Multiply this petty theft over a 10-year period and that’s how you move $3T of our missing $4T from the poorhouse to the penthouse - Dooh Nibor!

You have a few pretty major unprovable and probably all together false presumptions there to make this particular line of BS work. I'm not really sure where to start.

First I'm not sure you know what net worth actually is.

Second you presume that most of your people with mid six figure incomes actually care about maintaining an image. The fact is most people with a net worth of a million dollars don't.


You presume that consumers have no choice but to by Trump's condo's and the customers of those consumer's who buy Trump's condos have no choice but to do business with those people that just raised their prices to afford them.

You presume to know what it costs to afford those 'vital things you can't live without'. For one person to get by with very little in the way of luxuries doesn't cost all that much. Believe me I know because I'm living it.

What is so funny is that all of you whiners are essentially complaining about how you and other people don't have enough money, but when someone like Trump figures out how to get EXACTLY what you want you throw them under the bus and make up outrageous crap about how they exploited and stealing from housekeepers. GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK YOU WHINY SNIVELING PIECE OF SHIT.

 

[georgephillip]

Still waiting for the explanation why having a gap between rich and poor is bad.

The gap between the rich and the rest becomes a problem as it widens. Currently it stands about as wide as it was in 1929.

If it's true the richest 0.01% of Americans (10,000 people) have a median annual income of $50,000,000 and they have $350,000,000 in assets AND that is an increase or 550% since 1978, the first question becomes how have you fared in the past 30 years?

Do you see our elected government as more democratic or less democratic than it was in 1978?

When money is speech, government will pay more attention to those with the most money.

And now corporations will also be freer to spend on political campaigns.

American is 234

 

[Bfgrn]

Failed reply. It worked for 30 years. Even with all the hand out for votes from the democrats.

The last 30 years have seen the decline of the middle class. It has FAILED you moron. The Reagan revolution failed just like it's brethren, the Bolshevik revolution. Ronbo Reagan was the biggest 'socialist' this country has ever had as president.

Wrong faggot
Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 261:Supply-Side Tax Cuts and the Truth about the ReaganEconomic Record
On 8 of the 10 key economic variables examined, the American economy performed better during the Reagan years than during the pre- and post-Reagan years.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa261.pdf

The Standard of Living
The Reagan Information Page:The Standard of Living

The CATO Institute? That same CATO Institute, founded by the Koch brothers?

Funded BY:
* Altria (the report identifies Altria Corporate Services as the contributor)
* American Petroleum Institute
* Amerisure Companies
* Amgen
* Chicago Mercantile Exchange
* Comcast Corporation
* Consumer Electronic Association
* Ebay Inc
* ExxonMobil
* FedEx Corporation
* Freedom Communications
* General Motors
* Honda North America
* Korea International Trade Association
* Microsoft
* National Association of Software and Service Companies
* Pepco Holdings Inc.
* R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company
* TimeWarner
* Toyota Motor Corporation
* UST Inc
* Verisign
* Verizon Communications
* Visa USA Inc
* Volkswagen of America
* Wal-Mart Stores

Supported by:

* Castle Rock Foundation (Formerly Coors Foundation)
* Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation
* Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation
* Earhart Foundation
* JM Foundation
* John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
* Koch Family Foundations
* Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
* Scaife Foundations (Sarah Mellon Scaife, Carthage)

 

[Bfgrn]

Yeah, GE is one of my favorite too.

GE is a good example of today's corporate citizen's sense of entitlement:

"Take GE, for example. GE has $36Bn in sales and paid $431M in taxes (15% of net profits) in 2009.

"They also paid out $9Bn in dividends and over $24Bn in 2008 and 2007 and in 2007 they bought back their own stock but, in those three years, they paid -(NEGATIVE) $900M in taxes!

"Are you feeling victimized yet? 'Does GE use our infrastructure? Do they use our public airwaves?

"'Are they protected by our police? Is our army out there fighting and dying to protect them? Do they take money from our government? Do we educate their employees? This is the INSANITY of the US tax system.'"

When Warren Buffett revealed in 2007 that he paid taxes at about half the rate of his employees (17.7%), I certainly didn't connect the dots between individual and corporate tax rates and our national deficit:

" US corporations, who are (according to to the Supreme Court) also citizens of this country, paid just $300Bn in taxes last year on $6 TRILLION in income (5%).

"That’s right, if US corporations simply paid the same amount of tax as Mr. Buffett - that would, by itself, be enough to wipe out our deficit. But, things have gone decidedly the other way in the past 30 years:

http://www.philstockworld.com/wp-content/uploads/Coorporate Taxes.jpg

I've been repairing appliances for a good part of my life. I am too familiar with the crap GE has gotten away with. There was a time the Company did do the right thing because it was the right thing to do. The Government has their back at every mishap, they insulate, divert, and protect GE, and many others, especially when it is something that can effect the economy. We get what we vote for, we get what we pay for.I wish We would all "Just Say no", more often, rather than "Thank You, May I have Another". If only Government and Business were as good at doing, as they are at selling, scamming, and packaging Bullshit.

The reason the 'Company' no longer does the right thing and the government has their back is because GE and other corporations BOUGHT that protection. Human nature hasn't changed, and middle class expectations haven't shifted. GE and other corporations have BOUGHT the ability to write laws and make their unethical practices LAWFUL

 

[bigrebnc1775]

The last 30 years have seen the decline of the middle class. It has FAILED you moron. The Reagan revolution failed just like it's brethren, the Bolshevik revolution. Ronbo Reagan was the biggest 'socialist' this country has ever had as president.

Wrong faggot
Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 261:Supply-Side Tax Cuts and the Truth about the ReaganEconomic Record
On 8 of the 10 key economic variables examined, the American economy performed better during the Reagan years than during the pre- and post-Reagan years.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa261.pdf

The Standard of Living
The Reagan Information Page:The Standard of Living

The CATO Institute? That same CATO Institute, founded by the Koch brothers?

Funded BY:
* Altria (the report identifies Altria Corporate Services as the contributor)
* American Petroleum Institute
* Amerisure Companies
* Amgen
* Chicago Mercantile Exchange
* Comcast Corporation
* Consumer Electronic Association
* Ebay Inc
* ExxonMobil
* FedEx Corporation
* Freedom Communications
* General Motors
* Honda North America
* Korea International Trade Association
* Microsoft
* National Association of Software and Service Companies
* Pepco Holdings Inc.
* R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company
* TimeWarner
* Toyota Motor Corporation
* UST Inc
* Verisign
* Verizon Communications
* Visa USA Inc
* Volkswagen of America
* Wal-Mart Stores

Supported by:

* Castle Rock Foundation (Formerly Coors Foundation)
* Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation
* Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation
* Earhart Foundation
* JM Foundation
* John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
* Koch Family Foundations
* Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
* Scaife Foundations (Sarah Mellon Scaife, Carthage)

What is your point?
In the Reagan years, family incomes (again in 2000 dollars) rose nearly 15 percent from about $47,000 annually to over $54,000.
DLC: America by the Numbers: Comparing the Presidents' Economic Records by Al From

 

[Bfgrn]

Wrong faggot
Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 261:Supply-Side Tax Cuts and the Truth about the ReaganEconomic Record
On 8 of the 10 key economic variables examined, the American economy performed better during the Reagan years than during the pre- and post-Reagan years.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa261.pdf

The Standard of Living
The Reagan Information Page:The Standard of Living

The CATO Institute? That same CATO Institute, founded by the Koch brothers?

Funded BY:
* Altria (the report identifies Altria Corporate Services as the contributor)
* American Petroleum Institute
* Amerisure Companies
* Amgen
* Chicago Mercantile Exchange
* Comcast Corporation
* Consumer Electronic Association
* Ebay Inc
* ExxonMobil
* FedEx Corporation
* Freedom Communications
* General Motors
* Honda North America
* Korea International Trade Association
* Microsoft
* National Association of Software and Service Companies
* Pepco Holdings Inc.
* R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company
* TimeWarner
* Toyota Motor Corporation
* UST Inc
* Verisign
* Verizon Communications
* Visa USA Inc
* Volkswagen of America
* Wal-Mart Stores

Supported by:

* Castle Rock Foundation (Formerly Coors Foundation)
* Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation
* Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation
* Earhart Foundation
* JM Foundation
* John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
* Koch Family Foundations
* Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
* Scaife Foundations (Sarah Mellon Scaife, Carthage)

What is your point?
In the Reagan years, family incomes (again in 2000 dollars) rose nearly 15 percent from about $47,000 annually to over $54,000.
DLC: America by the Numbers: Comparing the Presidents' Economic Records by Al From

Stubborn Facts

Germany's Der Spiegel has a short informative, if disturbing, article that looks at the widening gap between rich and poor in the United States that threatens to erode the 70 years of gains made by the American middle classes that will leave the country looking more a second tier developing country in terms of wealth distribution than an advanced economy. Here are some of the alarming statistics from the article:

Four out of 10 Americans who consider themselves part of this [middle] class believe that they will be unable to maintain their social status.

In its current annual report, the US Department of Agriculture notes that "food insecurity" is on the rise, and that 50 million Americans couldn't afford to buy enough food to stay healthy at some point last year. One in eight American adults and one in four children now survive on government food stamps. These are unbelievable numbers for the world's richest nation.

The boom in stocks and real estate, the country's wild borrowing spree and its excessive consumer spending have long masked the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans derived almost no benefit from 30 years of economic growth. In 1978, the average per capita income for men in the United States was $45,879 (about €35,570). The same figure for 2007, adjusted for inflation, was $45,113 (€35,051).

Statistically, less affluent Americans stand a 4 percent chance of becoming part of the upper middle class -- a number that is lower than in almost every other industrialized nation. (among OECD countries, only in México and Turkey does someone born poor stand less of chance of escaping poverty than in the United States)

While 90 percent of Americans have seen only modest gains in their incomes since 1973, incomes have almost tripled for people at the upper end of the scale. In 1979, one third of the profits the country produced went to the richest 1 percent of American society. Today it's almost 60 percent. In 1950, the average corporate CEO earned 30 times as much as an ordinary worker. Today it's 300 times as much. And today 1 percent of Americans own 37 percent of the total national wealth.

Because they lacked savings, Americans began borrowing money to cover all of their other expenses, including education, healthcare and consumption. American consumer debt now totals about $13.5 trillion.

Many people threaten to suffocate under the burden of their debt. Some 61 percent of Americans have no financial reserves and are living from paycheck to paycheck.

All rather grim. The Der Spiegel article doesn't go into the causes of this decline but it should be clear that this massive redistribution wealth, a trickle up and then some, is a result of policies enacted by successive Republican Administrations beginning with the Reagan tax cuts. The Reagan Administration drastically altered the wealth distribution patterns by introducing tax legislation that favored the top one percent.

If the redistribution upwards since 1981 had not taken place, if the average American family in the bottom 90 percent were today getting the same share of the nation's income as the average bottom 90 percent family received in 1973 when income distribution was much more egalitarian, this average family would now be taking home in income over $10,000 more per year. Now how many of you can use an extra ten grand?

Still to put our wealth gap into perspective, top one percent controls more assets than the bottom 90 percent. Who makes up that bottom 90 percent? Well, it is all of the poor, all of the middle class and half of the upper middle class.

In 1984 presidential campaign, the Reagan campaign ran an ad that ran "It's morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better."

It was really twilight then for the American working poor and now the cold dark of night is falling on the American middle class. Reagan also loved to say that facts are stubborn things. Well, here are some rather stubborn facts about Reagan's America:

* By 1984, Reagan's America had the greatest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation. Previously Italy, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, and Australia were all more unequal.

* Income inequality rose substantially over the business cycle of the 1980s whether measured by the 90/10 ratio (an increase of 23.67 percent) or by the Gini coefficient (an increase of 14.17 percent).

* The number of millionaires more than doubled between 1980 and 1988 going from 574,000 to 1.3 million.

* In 1981 there were no more than 10 billionaires in the US. By 1986, there were 26. By the end of Reagan's term in 1989, there were 52 billionaires.

* The top 10 percent of US households controlled over 68 percent of the wealth in the country by 1988.

* In 1987, real income levels for the average American family adjusted for inflation matched those in 1973. Only the top 20 percent of Americans saw an increase in family income between 1977 and 1988, with the top 10th gaining an increase of about $17,000, the top 5 percent seeing an extra $31,000, and the top 1 percent with a whopping $134,000 increase. Middle-class and working Americans, however, saw declines in real income from about $600 to $1,600 in the Reagan era.

* The level of tax paid by the top 1 percent decreased from 31 percent to 23 percent between 1981 and 1984, while their income share rose from 41 percent to 44 percent.

* Incomes of the top 5 percent rose more than 27 percent, to about $120,000, and the highest 20 percent went up about 25 percent, to around $70,000. The next 20 percent of income earners saw a nominal rise in wealth during the 1980s, while the rest, 60 percent of Americans, saw no rise at all or, in the case of the lowest two-fifths, actually saw a decline in income and savings. In fact, income inequality rose each year of the Reagan administration, while taxes were correspondingly lowered and the national debt grew. The last President to see income inequality rise each year during his term had been Herbert Hoover.

* Weekly per worker income dropped substantially during the Reagan years. The average American take home paycheque was $366 in 1972, by 1987 that paycheque was only $312, a 14.8 percent decline. Where the median pay for working men in 1973 was a little over $10 an hour in 1973, it fell to $8.85 by 1987. The average worker without an advanced degree might have made about $24,000 a year in the early 1970s, but by the end of the Reagan years, that was down to around $18,000.

* Americans leisure time declined 37 percent between 1973 and 1987 from 26.2 hours per week to 16.6 hours as Americans were forced to work longer hours to maintain their living standards.

* Another of Reagan’s enduring legacies is the steep increase in the number of homeless people, which by the late 1980s had swollen to 600,000 on any given night – and 1.2 million over the course of a year.

* The urban poor were the hardest hit by Reagan's fiscal policies. In 1980 Federal dollars accounted for 22 percent of big city budgets. By the end of Reagan’s second term, Federal aid was only 6 percent. In the 1980s the proportion of the eligible poor who received federal housing subsidies declined. In 1970 there were 300,000 more low-cost rental units (6.5 million) than low-income renter households (6.2 million). By 1985 the number of low-cost units had fallen to 5.6 million, and the number of low-income renter households had grown to 8.9 million, a disparity of 3.3 million units.

* Reagan and his supply-side advisers believed that big tax cuts would pay for themselves by generating higher tax revenues through greater economic growth. It never happened. Under Reagan, the national debt more than tripled from $900 billion dollars to $2.8 trillion.

This, course of, only points to the genesis of the assault on the American middle class. The full frontal assault came during the George W. Bush era which reversed the modest gains made under the Clinton Administration. Between 2002 and 2006, an astounding three-quarters of all the growth in the US economy was captured by the top 1 percent.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Final Report Card on the Reagan Years

Our current economic meltdown may finally have ended the era that began when Ronald Reagan became President. Now a new study — from the Congressional Budget Office — helps us understand the inequality that has us melting.

Americans in the overall top 1 percent, the 2007 CBO data showed, did quite well in the Reagan era's first quarter-century. Their average incomes, after taking inflation into account, essentially tripled, rising 201 percent.

But these top 1 percent stats, the new CBO data help us understand, hardly tell the full story. The truly stunning income increases over recent decades have gone to the tippy-top of the U.S. income distribution, not the top 1 percent, but the top tenth — and top hundredth — of that top 1 percent.

The higher up you go on the income ladder, in other words, the sweeter the Reagan era.

Between 1979 and 2005, the bottom half of the top 1 percent saw their average incomes only double, after inflation. These incomes increased 105 percent. The next highest four-tenths of the top 1 percent somewhat raised the income bar. Their average incomes, after inflation, rose 161 percent.

That brings us to the top 0.1 percent of Americans. Their incomes, from 1979 to 2005, rose a staggering 294 percent after taking inflation into account. Not bad at all. But the top 0.01 percent did even better. The 11,000 households in this rarified air took home an average $35.5 million in 2005, a 384 percent increase over average top 0.01 percent incomes in 1979.

Need some perspective here? Let's compare Americans at the top to Americans in the middle. Between 1979 and 2005, the average income of America’s statistical middle class — the 20 percent of Americans in the exact middle of the U.S. income distribution — rose, according to the CBO figures, a mere 15 percent. That's less than 1 percent a year.

But many average Americans never actually saw that less than 1 percent. That's because the CBO takes a kitchen-sink approach to defining income. CBO researchers include in their “comprehensive income” calculations all the standard household revenue streams — wages, dividends, interest, and the like — and lots more, too, from food stamps and Social Security to employer-paid health benefits.

All these add-ins tend to inflate average household “incomes.” If your employer’s health insurance company jacks up prices, for instance, the extra dollars in premiums that your employer has to pay count as income to you, at least in the CBO calculations.

The CBO actually has a good reason to take this "kitchen-sink" approach to defining income. Conservative cheerleaders for the Reagan era have been arguing for years that the United States isn't growing that much more unequal, not when you calculate in the various benefits that poor and average Americans get from government and their employers.

But the CBO figures, by adding in all those benefits, neatly expose the flim-flam behind this cheerleading. The United States definitely has become substantially more unequal. Overall, after taxes, the very rich — the top 0.01 percent — have nearly quadrupled their share of the nation's income since 1979.

These super-rich Americans in the top 0.01 percent, even more amazingly, now pay a lower share of their incomes in federal tax than the merely rich.

The overall top 1 percent paid federal income tax at an average 19.4 percent rate in 2005. The top 0.01 percent paid at just a 17 percent rate, mainly because the richest of the rich get nearly half their income from capital gains — and capital gains enjoy preferential tax treatment.

Under George W. Bush, the tax rate on capital gains income — income from the sale of stocks, bonds, and other assets — dropped to 15 percent, less than half the current top 35 percent tax rate on “ordinary” income from paychecks.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Income and Wealth Inequality

 

[bigrebnc1775]

The CATO Institute? That same CATO Institute, founded by the Koch brothers?

Funded BY:
* Altria (the report identifies Altria Corporate Services as the contributor)
* American Petroleum Institute
* Amerisure Companies
* Amgen
* Chicago Mercantile Exchange
* Comcast Corporation
* Consumer Electronic Association
* Ebay Inc
* ExxonMobil
* FedEx Corporation
* Freedom Communications
* General Motors
* Honda North America
* Korea International Trade Association
* Microsoft
* National Association of Software and Service Companies
* Pepco Holdings Inc.
* R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company
* TimeWarner
* Toyota Motor Corporation
* UST Inc
* Verisign
* Verizon Communications
* Visa USA Inc
* Volkswagen of America
* Wal-Mart Stores

Supported by:

* Castle Rock Foundation (Formerly Coors Foundation)
* Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation
* Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation
* Earhart Foundation
* JM Foundation
* John M. Olin Foundation, Inc.
* Koch Family Foundations
* Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
* Scaife Foundations (Sarah Mellon Scaife, Carthage)

What is your point?
In the Reagan years, family incomes (again in 2000 dollars) rose nearly 15 percent from about $47,000 annually to over $54,000.
DLC: America by the Numbers: Comparing the Presidents' Economic Records by Al From

Stubborn Facts

Germany's Der Spiegel has a short informative, if disturbing, article that looks at the widening gap between rich and poor in the United States that threatens to erode the 70 years of gains made by the American middle classes that will leave the country looking more a second tier developing country in terms of wealth distribution than an advanced economy. Here are some of the alarming statistics from the article:

Four out of 10 Americans who consider themselves part of this [middle] class believe that they will be unable to maintain their social status.

In its current annual report, the US Department of Agriculture notes that "food insecurity" is on the rise, and that 50 million Americans couldn't afford to buy enough food to stay healthy at some point last year. One in eight American adults and one in four children now survive on government food stamps. These are unbelievable numbers for the world's richest nation.

The boom in stocks and real estate, the country's wild borrowing spree and its excessive consumer spending have long masked the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans derived almost no benefit from 30 years of economic growth. In 1978, the average per capita income for men in the United States was $45,879 (about €35,570). The same figure for 2007, adjusted for inflation, was $45,113 (€35,051).

Statistically, less affluent Americans stand a 4 percent chance of becoming part of the upper middle class -- a number that is lower than in almost every other industrialized nation. (among OECD countries, only in México and Turkey does someone born poor stand less of chance of escaping poverty than in the United States)

While 90 percent of Americans have seen only modest gains in their incomes since 1973, incomes have almost tripled for people at the upper end of the scale. In 1979, one third of the profits the country produced went to the richest 1 percent of American society. Today it's almost 60 percent. In 1950, the average corporate CEO earned 30 times as much as an ordinary worker. Today it's 300 times as much. And today 1 percent of Americans own 37 percent of the total national wealth.

Because they lacked savings, Americans began borrowing money to cover all of their other expenses, including education, healthcare and consumption. American consumer debt now totals about $13.5 trillion.

Many people threaten to suffocate under the burden of their debt. Some 61 percent of Americans have no financial reserves and are living from paycheck to paycheck.

All rather grim. The Der Spiegel article doesn't go into the causes of this decline but it should be clear that this massive redistribution wealth, a trickle up and then some, is a result of policies enacted by successive Republican Administrations beginning with the Reagan tax cuts. The Reagan Administration drastically altered the wealth distribution patterns by introducing tax legislation that favored the top one percent.

If the redistribution upwards since 1981 had not taken place, if the average American family in the bottom 90 percent were today getting the same share of the nation's income as the average bottom 90 percent family received in 1973 when income distribution was much more egalitarian, this average family would now be taking home in income over $10,000 more per year. Now how many of you can use an extra ten grand?

Still to put our wealth gap into perspective, top one percent controls more assets than the bottom 90 percent. Who makes up that bottom 90 percent? Well, it is all of the poor, all of the middle class and half of the upper middle class.

In 1984 presidential campaign, the Reagan campaign ran an ad that ran "It's morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better."

It was really twilight then for the American working poor and now the cold dark of night is falling on the American middle class. Reagan also loved to say that facts are stubborn things. Well, here are some rather stubborn facts about Reagan's America:

* By 1984, Reagan's America had the greatest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation. Previously Italy, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, and Australia were all more unequal.

* Income inequality rose substantially over the business cycle of the 1980s whether measured by the 90/10 ratio (an increase of 23.67 percent) or by the Gini coefficient (an increase of 14.17 percent).

* The number of millionaires more than doubled between 1980 and 1988 going from 574,000 to 1.3 million.

* In 1981 there were no more than 10 billionaires in the US. By 1986, there were 26. By the end of Reagan's term in 1989, there were 52 billionaires.

* The top 10 percent of US households controlled over 68 percent of the wealth in the country by 1988.

* In 1987, real income levels for the average American family adjusted for inflation matched those in 1973. Only the top 20 percent of Americans saw an increase in family income between 1977 and 1988, with the top 10th gaining an increase of about $17,000, the top 5 percent seeing an extra $31,000, and the top 1 percent with a whopping $134,000 increase. Middle-class and working Americans, however, saw declines in real income from about $600 to $1,600 in the Reagan era.

* The level of tax paid by the top 1 percent decreased from 31 percent to 23 percent between 1981 and 1984, while their income share rose from 41 percent to 44 percent.

* Incomes of the top 5 percent rose more than 27 percent, to about $120,000, and the highest 20 percent went up about 25 percent, to around $70,000. The next 20 percent of income earners saw a nominal rise in wealth during the 1980s, while the rest, 60 percent of Americans, saw no rise at all or, in the case of the lowest two-fifths, actually saw a decline in income and savings. In fact, income inequality rose each year of the Reagan administration, while taxes were correspondingly lowered and the national debt grew. The last President to see income inequality rise each year during his term had been Herbert Hoover.

* Weekly per worker income dropped substantially during the Reagan years. The average American take home paycheque was $366 in 1972, by 1987 that paycheque was only $312, a 14.8 percent decline. Where the median pay for working men in 1973 was a little over $10 an hour in 1973, it fell to $8.85 by 1987. The average worker without an advanced degree might have made about $24,000 a year in the early 1970s, but by the end of the Reagan years, that was down to around $18,000.

* Americans leisure time declined 37 percent between 1973 and 1987 from 26.2 hours per week to 16.6 hours as Americans were forced to work longer hours to maintain their living standards.

* Another of Reagan’s enduring legacies is the steep increase in the number of homeless people, which by the late 1980s had swollen to 600,000 on any given night – and 1.2 million over the course of a year.

* The urban poor were the hardest hit by Reagan's fiscal policies. In 1980 Federal dollars accounted for 22 percent of big city budgets. By the end of Reagan’s second term, Federal aid was only 6 percent. In the 1980s the proportion of the eligible poor who received federal housing subsidies declined. In 1970 there were 300,000 more low-cost rental units (6.5 million) than low-income renter households (6.2 million). By 1985 the number of low-cost units had fallen to 5.6 million, and the number of low-income renter households had grown to 8.9 million, a disparity of 3.3 million units.

* Reagan and his supply-side advisers believed that big tax cuts would pay for themselves by generating higher tax revenues through greater economic growth. It never happened. Under Reagan, the national debt more than tripled from $900 billion dollars to $2.8 trillion.

This, course of, only points to the genesis of the assault on the American middle class. The full frontal assault came during the George W. Bush era which reversed the modest gains made under the Clinton Administration. Between 2002 and 2006, an astounding three-quarters of all the growth in the US economy was captured by the top 1 percent.


I have got to laugh at your attemp to make a great president look bad. Those who live through the Reagan years knows a hell of lot more about those years then some snot nosed little bitch kid who read a liberal book getting false information.

There are several things I noticed
1.

* In 1981 there were no more than 10 billionaires in the US. By 1986, there were 26. By the end of Reagan's term in 1989, there were 52 billionaires.

DUDE are you for real? That's not the rich are getting richer that people are getting richer.

And 2. now this really makes me laugh my ass off


FOLLOW THE LINKS TO YOUR SOURCE
Powered by WebStrong Group.
WebStrong | Public Affairs, New Media Strategy and Technology
WSG has created successful campaigns for a a variety of clients, including the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, Senator Robert C. Byrd, Senator Tom Harkin, Senator Tom Daschle, Senator Mark Warner, SEIU, Women’s Voices-Women Vote, The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and other political and sports clients.
WebStrong | Advocacy

So very failed source

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Final Report Card on the Reagan Years

Our current economic meltdown may finally have ended the era that began when Ronald Reagan became President. Now a new study — from the Congressional Budget Office — helps us understand the inequality that has us melting.

Americans in the overall top 1 percent, the 2007 CBO data showed, did quite well in the Reagan era's first quarter-century. Their average incomes, after taking inflation into account, essentially tripled, rising 201 percent.

But these top 1 percent stats, the new CBO data help us understand, hardly tell the full story. The truly stunning income increases over recent decades have gone to the tippy-top of the U.S. income distribution, not the top 1 percent, but the top tenth — and top hundredth — of that top 1 percent.

The higher up you go on the income ladder, in other words, the sweeter the Reagan era.

Between 1979 and 2005, the bottom half of the top 1 percent saw their average incomes only double, after inflation. These incomes increased 105 percent. The next highest four-tenths of the top 1 percent somewhat raised the income bar. Their average incomes, after inflation, rose 161 percent.

That brings us to the top 0.1 percent of Americans. Their incomes, from 1979 to 2005, rose a staggering 294 percent after taking inflation into account. Not bad at all. But the top 0.01 percent did even better. The 11,000 households in this rarified air took home an average $35.5 million in 2005, a 384 percent increase over average top 0.01 percent incomes in 1979.

Need some perspective here? Let's compare Americans at the top to Americans in the middle. Between 1979 and 2005, the average income of America’s statistical middle class — the 20 percent of Americans in the exact middle of the U.S. income distribution — rose, according to the CBO figures, a mere 15 percent. That's less than 1 percent a year.

But many average Americans never actually saw that less than 1 percent. That's because the CBO takes a kitchen-sink approach to defining income. CBO researchers include in their “comprehensive income” calculations all the standard household revenue streams — wages, dividends, interest, and the like — and lots more, too, from food stamps and Social Security to employer-paid health benefits.

All these add-ins tend to inflate average household “incomes.” If your employer’s health insurance company jacks up prices, for instance, the extra dollars in premiums that your employer has to pay count as income to you, at least in the CBO calculations.

The CBO actually has a good reason to take this "kitchen-sink" approach to defining income. Conservative cheerleaders for the Reagan era have been arguing for years that the United States isn't growing that much more unequal, not when you calculate in the various benefits that poor and average Americans get from government and their employers.

But the CBO figures, by adding in all those benefits, neatly expose the flim-flam behind this cheerleading. The United States definitely has become substantially more unequal. Overall, after taxes, the very rich — the top 0.01 percent — have nearly quadrupled their share of the nation's income since 1979.

These super-rich Americans in the top 0.01 percent, even more amazingly, now pay a lower share of their incomes in federal tax than the merely rich.

The overall top 1 percent paid federal income tax at an average 19.4 percent rate in 2005. The top 0.01 percent paid at just a 17 percent rate, mainly because the richest of the rich get nearly half their income from capital gains — and capital gains enjoy preferential tax treatment.

Under George W. Bush, the tax rate on capital gains income — income from the sale of stocks, bonds, and other assets — dropped to 15 percent, less than half the current top 35 percent tax rate on “ordinary” income from paychecks.



Sam Pizzigati HOLY FUCKING SHIT? Are you kidding are you sure you want to use this guy as a source?

A veteran labor movement journalist, Pizzigati spent 20 years directing the publishing operations of America's largest union, the 3.2 million-member National Education Association. Over the course of his union career, he has also edited publications for three other national unions and co-edited the primary text on trade union journalism, The New Labor Press (Cornell University ILR Press). His latest book, Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our Lives (Apex Press), won an "outstanding title" of the year rating from the American Library Association (Choice, January 2006). Greed and Good examines just how concentrated wealth is poisoning every aspect of our contemporary lives, from our economy and politics to our health and our happiness.
Institute for Policy Studies: Sam Pizzigati

UNIONS did not like Reagan So get this faggot bullshit the fuck out of here.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Income and Wealth Inequality

THE REAGAN YEARS:
A Statistical Overview of the 1980s

For the love of God do some research before you post something.

Your comments concerning this website are welcome. I am committed to improving and correcting any arguments or statistics brought to my attention. You can reach me at [email protected]. Read also Help Fight the Right! -- support Liberalism Resurgent.

Steve Kangas
Return to Liberalism Resurgent
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/1THE_REAGAN_YEARs.htm#reaganpage

 

[Bfgrn]

What is your point?
In the Reagan years, family incomes (again in 2000 dollars) rose nearly 15 percent from about $47,000 annually to over $54,000.
DLC: America by the Numbers: Comparing the Presidents' Economic Records by Al From

Stubborn Facts

Germany's Der Spiegel has a short informative, if disturbing, article that looks at the widening gap between rich and poor in the United States that threatens to erode the 70 years of gains made by the American middle classes that will leave the country looking more a second tier developing country in terms of wealth distribution than an advanced economy. Here are some of the alarming statistics from the article:

Four out of 10 Americans who consider themselves part of this [middle] class believe that they will be unable to maintain their social status.

In its current annual report, the US Department of Agriculture notes that "food insecurity" is on the rise, and that 50 million Americans couldn't afford to buy enough food to stay healthy at some point last year. One in eight American adults and one in four children now survive on government food stamps. These are unbelievable numbers for the world's richest nation.

The boom in stocks and real estate, the country's wild borrowing spree and its excessive consumer spending have long masked the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans derived almost no benefit from 30 years of economic growth. In 1978, the average per capita income for men in the United States was $45,879 (about €35,570). The same figure for 2007, adjusted for inflation, was $45,113 (€35,051).

Statistically, less affluent Americans stand a 4 percent chance of becoming part of the upper middle class -- a number that is lower than in almost every other industrialized nation. (among OECD countries, only in México and Turkey does someone born poor stand less of chance of escaping poverty than in the United States)

While 90 percent of Americans have seen only modest gains in their incomes since 1973, incomes have almost tripled for people at the upper end of the scale. In 1979, one third of the profits the country produced went to the richest 1 percent of American society. Today it's almost 60 percent. In 1950, the average corporate CEO earned 30 times as much as an ordinary worker. Today it's 300 times as much. And today 1 percent of Americans own 37 percent of the total national wealth.

Because they lacked savings, Americans began borrowing money to cover all of their other expenses, including education, healthcare and consumption. American consumer debt now totals about $13.5 trillion.

Many people threaten to suffocate under the burden of their debt. Some 61 percent of Americans have no financial reserves and are living from paycheck to paycheck.

All rather grim. The Der Spiegel article doesn't go into the causes of this decline but it should be clear that this massive redistribution wealth, a trickle up and then some, is a result of policies enacted by successive Republican Administrations beginning with the Reagan tax cuts. The Reagan Administration drastically altered the wealth distribution patterns by introducing tax legislation that favored the top one percent.

If the redistribution upwards since 1981 had not taken place, if the average American family in the bottom 90 percent were today getting the same share of the nation's income as the average bottom 90 percent family received in 1973 when income distribution was much more egalitarian, this average family would now be taking home in income over $10,000 more per year. Now how many of you can use an extra ten grand?

Still to put our wealth gap into perspective, top one percent controls more assets than the bottom 90 percent. Who makes up that bottom 90 percent? Well, it is all of the poor, all of the middle class and half of the upper middle class.

In 1984 presidential campaign, the Reagan campaign ran an ad that ran "It's morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better."

It was really twilight then for the American working poor and now the cold dark of night is falling on the American middle class. Reagan also loved to say that facts are stubborn things. Well, here are some rather stubborn facts about Reagan's America:

* By 1984, Reagan's America had the greatest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation. Previously Italy, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, and Australia were all more unequal.

* Income inequality rose substantially over the business cycle of the 1980s whether measured by the 90/10 ratio (an increase of 23.67 percent) or by the Gini coefficient (an increase of 14.17 percent).

* The number of millionaires more than doubled between 1980 and 1988 going from 574,000 to 1.3 million.

* In 1981 there were no more than 10 billionaires in the US. By 1986, there were 26. By the end of Reagan's term in 1989, there were 52 billionaires.

* The top 10 percent of US households controlled over 68 percent of the wealth in the country by 1988.

* In 1987, real income levels for the average American family adjusted for inflation matched those in 1973. Only the top 20 percent of Americans saw an increase in family income between 1977 and 1988, with the top 10th gaining an increase of about $17,000, the top 5 percent seeing an extra $31,000, and the top 1 percent with a whopping $134,000 increase. Middle-class and working Americans, however, saw declines in real income from about $600 to $1,600 in the Reagan era.

* The level of tax paid by the top 1 percent decreased from 31 percent to 23 percent between 1981 and 1984, while their income share rose from 41 percent to 44 percent.

* Incomes of the top 5 percent rose more than 27 percent, to about $120,000, and the highest 20 percent went up about 25 percent, to around $70,000. The next 20 percent of income earners saw a nominal rise in wealth during the 1980s, while the rest, 60 percent of Americans, saw no rise at all or, in the case of the lowest two-fifths, actually saw a decline in income and savings. In fact, income inequality rose each year of the Reagan administration, while taxes were correspondingly lowered and the national debt grew. The last President to see income inequality rise each year during his term had been Herbert Hoover.

* Weekly per worker income dropped substantially during the Reagan years. The average American take home paycheque was $366 in 1972, by 1987 that paycheque was only $312, a 14.8 percent decline. Where the median pay for working men in 1973 was a little over $10 an hour in 1973, it fell to $8.85 by 1987. The average worker without an advanced degree might have made about $24,000 a year in the early 1970s, but by the end of the Reagan years, that was down to around $18,000.

* Americans leisure time declined 37 percent between 1973 and 1987 from 26.2 hours per week to 16.6 hours as Americans were forced to work longer hours to maintain their living standards.

* Another of Reagan’s enduring legacies is the steep increase in the number of homeless people, which by the late 1980s had swollen to 600,000 on any given night – and 1.2 million over the course of a year.

* The urban poor were the hardest hit by Reagan's fiscal policies. In 1980 Federal dollars accounted for 22 percent of big city budgets. By the end of Reagan’s second term, Federal aid was only 6 percent. In the 1980s the proportion of the eligible poor who received federal housing subsidies declined. In 1970 there were 300,000 more low-cost rental units (6.5 million) than low-income renter households (6.2 million). By 1985 the number of low-cost units had fallen to 5.6 million, and the number of low-income renter households had grown to 8.9 million, a disparity of 3.3 million units.

* Reagan and his supply-side advisers believed that big tax cuts would pay for themselves by generating higher tax revenues through greater economic growth. It never happened. Under Reagan, the national debt more than tripled from $900 billion dollars to $2.8 trillion.

This, course of, only points to the genesis of the assault on the American middle class. The full frontal assault came during the George W. Bush era which reversed the modest gains made under the Clinton Administration. Between 2002 and 2006, an astounding three-quarters of all the growth in the US economy was captured by the top 1 percent.


I have got to laugh at your attemp to make a great president look bad. Those who live through the Reagan years knows a hell of lot more about those years then some snot nosed little bitch kid who read a liberal book getting false information.

There are several things I noticed
1.

* In 1981 there were no more than 10 billionaires in the US. By 1986, there were 26. By the end of Reagan's term in 1989, there were 52 billionaires.

DUDE are you for real? That's not the rich are getting richer that people are getting richer.

And 2. now this really makes me laugh my ass off


FOLLOW THE LINKS TO YOUR SOURCE
Powered by WebStrong Group.
WebStrong | Public Affairs, New Media Strategy and Technology
WSG has created successful campaigns for a a variety of clients, including the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, Senator Robert C. Byrd, Senator Tom Harkin, Senator Tom Daschle, Senator Mark Warner, SEIU, Women’s Voices-Women Vote, The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and other political and sports clients.
WebStrong | Advocacy

So very failed source

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Final Report Card on the Reagan Years

Our current economic meltdown may finally have ended the era that began when Ronald Reagan became President. Now a new study — from the Congressional Budget Office — helps us understand the inequality that has us melting.

Americans in the overall top 1 percent, the 2007 CBO data showed, did quite well in the Reagan era's first quarter-century. Their average incomes, after taking inflation into account, essentially tripled, rising 201 percent.

But these top 1 percent stats, the new CBO data help us understand, hardly tell the full story. The truly stunning income increases over recent decades have gone to the tippy-top of the U.S. income distribution, not the top 1 percent, but the top tenth — and top hundredth — of that top 1 percent.

The higher up you go on the income ladder, in other words, the sweeter the Reagan era.

Between 1979 and 2005, the bottom half of the top 1 percent saw their average incomes only double, after inflation. These incomes increased 105 percent. The next highest four-tenths of the top 1 percent somewhat raised the income bar. Their average incomes, after inflation, rose 161 percent.

That brings us to the top 0.1 percent of Americans. Their incomes, from 1979 to 2005, rose a staggering 294 percent after taking inflation into account. Not bad at all. But the top 0.01 percent did even better. The 11,000 households in this rarified air took home an average $35.5 million in 2005, a 384 percent increase over average top 0.01 percent incomes in 1979.

Need some perspective here? Let's compare Americans at the top to Americans in the middle. Between 1979 and 2005, the average income of America’s statistical middle class — the 20 percent of Americans in the exact middle of the U.S. income distribution — rose, according to the CBO figures, a mere 15 percent. That's less than 1 percent a year.

But many average Americans never actually saw that less than 1 percent. That's because the CBO takes a kitchen-sink approach to defining income. CBO researchers include in their “comprehensive income” calculations all the standard household revenue streams — wages, dividends, interest, and the like — and lots more, too, from food stamps and Social Security to employer-paid health benefits.

All these add-ins tend to inflate average household “incomes.” If your employer’s health insurance company jacks up prices, for instance, the extra dollars in premiums that your employer has to pay count as income to you, at least in the CBO calculations.

The CBO actually has a good reason to take this "kitchen-sink" approach to defining income. Conservative cheerleaders for the Reagan era have been arguing for years that the United States isn't growing that much more unequal, not when you calculate in the various benefits that poor and average Americans get from government and their employers.

But the CBO figures, by adding in all those benefits, neatly expose the flim-flam behind this cheerleading. The United States definitely has become substantially more unequal. Overall, after taxes, the very rich — the top 0.01 percent — have nearly quadrupled their share of the nation's income since 1979.

These super-rich Americans in the top 0.01 percent, even more amazingly, now pay a lower share of their incomes in federal tax than the merely rich.

The overall top 1 percent paid federal income tax at an average 19.4 percent rate in 2005. The top 0.01 percent paid at just a 17 percent rate, mainly because the richest of the rich get nearly half their income from capital gains — and capital gains enjoy preferential tax treatment.

Under George W. Bush, the tax rate on capital gains income — income from the sale of stocks, bonds, and other assets — dropped to 15 percent, less than half the current top 35 percent tax rate on “ordinary” income from paychecks.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Income and Wealth Inequality

Sam Pizzigati HOLY FUCKING SHIT? Are you kidding are you sure you want to use this guy as a source?

A veteran labor movement journalist, Pizzigati spent 20 years directing the publishing operations of America's largest union, the 3.2 million-member National Education Association. Over the course of his union career, he has also edited publications for three other national unions and co-edited the primary text on trade union journalism, The New Labor Press (Cornell University ILR Press). His latest book, Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our Lives (Apex Press), won an "outstanding title" of the year rating from the American Library Association (Choice, January 2006). Greed and Good examines just how concentrated wealth is poisoning every aspect of our contemporary lives, from our economy and politics to our health and our happiness.
Institute for Policy Studies: Sam Pizzigati

UNIONS did not like Reagan So get this faggot bullshit the fuck out of here.

WebStrong Group is a communications company. The article it features is THIS one: On the Way Down: The Erosion of America's Middle Class - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Sam Pizzigati is quoting FACTS from CBO reports.


Listen you little fucking moron. I've been around since Harry Truman was in the White House. I LIVED through all of the changes in this country. I KNOW what I've seen and how things have changed. The Reagan years were not good for middle class workers. Reagan and his henchmen began the dismantling of the middle class vehicles to pay increases and better working conditions like unions. Reagan was the biggest socialist in history. He re-distributed the wealth to the top and left the middle class to sink or swim in the river. And now stupid fucking right wing pea brains ideologues like you are throwing rocks to them and spewing the propaganda of the new robber barons, the multinational cartels that have NO allegiance to America or the American people. LOOK at the fucking FACTS. The middle class is disappearing. 6 in 10 families are in major debt. Children today have MORE parents that are going through bankruptcy than divorce!

The long history of mankind has been a dark and sad story of monarchies, aristocracies and plutocracies. Then along came America. From the New Deal through the Great Society America built the most robust middle class in history. It was a boom of prosperity and growth that ALL America shared in...

NOW, a short 40 years later America's poor have the lowest chance of reaching upper middle class status compared to every other industrialized nation. We rank with México and Turkey. Our health care outcomes are comparable with Costa Rica, Slovenia and Cuba. Our education system is at the bottom of first world countries.

The Reagan revolution was the biggest failure in history. It compares to the failure of the Bolshevik revolution.

The failed Reagan revolution and 30+ years of regressive conservative policies and authoritarian governance have taken the American dream and replaced it with the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having "nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope."

 

[bigrebnc1775]

Stubborn Facts

Germany's Der Spiegel has a short informative, if disturbing, article that looks at the widening gap between rich and poor in the United States that threatens to erode the 70 years of gains made by the American middle classes that will leave the country looking more a second tier developing country in terms of wealth distribution than an advanced economy. Here are some of the alarming statistics from the article:

Four out of 10 Americans who consider themselves part of this [middle] class believe that they will be unable to maintain their social status.

In its current annual report, the US Department of Agriculture notes that "food insecurity" is on the rise, and that 50 million Americans couldn't afford to buy enough food to stay healthy at some point last year. One in eight American adults and one in four children now survive on government food stamps. These are unbelievable numbers for the world's richest nation.

The boom in stocks and real estate, the country's wild borrowing spree and its excessive consumer spending have long masked the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans derived almost no benefit from 30 years of economic growth. In 1978, the average per capita income for men in the United States was $45,879 (about €35,570). The same figure for 2007, adjusted for inflation, was $45,113 (€35,051).

Statistically, less affluent Americans stand a 4 percent chance of becoming part of the upper middle class -- a number that is lower than in almost every other industrialized nation. (among OECD countries, only in México and Turkey does someone born poor stand less of chance of escaping poverty than in the United States)

While 90 percent of Americans have seen only modest gains in their incomes since 1973, incomes have almost tripled for people at the upper end of the scale. In 1979, one third of the profits the country produced went to the richest 1 percent of American society. Today it's almost 60 percent. In 1950, the average corporate CEO earned 30 times as much as an ordinary worker. Today it's 300 times as much. And today 1 percent of Americans own 37 percent of the total national wealth.

Because they lacked savings, Americans began borrowing money to cover all of their other expenses, including education, healthcare and consumption. American consumer debt now totals about $13.5 trillion.

Many people threaten to suffocate under the burden of their debt. Some 61 percent of Americans have no financial reserves and are living from paycheck to paycheck.

All rather grim. The Der Spiegel article doesn't go into the causes of this decline but it should be clear that this massive redistribution wealth, a trickle up and then some, is a result of policies enacted by successive Republican Administrations beginning with the Reagan tax cuts. The Reagan Administration drastically altered the wealth distribution patterns by introducing tax legislation that favored the top one percent.

If the redistribution upwards since 1981 had not taken place, if the average American family in the bottom 90 percent were today getting the same share of the nation's income as the average bottom 90 percent family received in 1973 when income distribution was much more egalitarian, this average family would now be taking home in income over $10,000 more per year. Now how many of you can use an extra ten grand?

Still to put our wealth gap into perspective, top one percent controls more assets than the bottom 90 percent. Who makes up that bottom 90 percent? Well, it is all of the poor, all of the middle class and half of the upper middle class.

In 1984 presidential campaign, the Reagan campaign ran an ad that ran "It's morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better."

It was really twilight then for the American working poor and now the cold dark of night is falling on the American middle class. Reagan also loved to say that facts are stubborn things. Well, here are some rather stubborn facts about Reagan's America:

* By 1984, Reagan's America had the greatest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation. Previously Italy, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, and Australia were all more unequal.

* Income inequality rose substantially over the business cycle of the 1980s whether measured by the 90/10 ratio (an increase of 23.67 percent) or by the Gini coefficient (an increase of 14.17 percent).

* The number of millionaires more than doubled between 1980 and 1988 going from 574,000 to 1.3 million.

* In 1981 there were no more than 10 billionaires in the US. By 1986, there were 26. By the end of Reagan's term in 1989, there were 52 billionaires.

* The top 10 percent of US households controlled over 68 percent of the wealth in the country by 1988.

* In 1987, real income levels for the average American family adjusted for inflation matched those in 1973. Only the top 20 percent of Americans saw an increase in family income between 1977 and 1988, with the top 10th gaining an increase of about $17,000, the top 5 percent seeing an extra $31,000, and the top 1 percent with a whopping $134,000 increase. Middle-class and working Americans, however, saw declines in real income from about $600 to $1,600 in the Reagan era.

* The level of tax paid by the top 1 percent decreased from 31 percent to 23 percent between 1981 and 1984, while their income share rose from 41 percent to 44 percent.

* Incomes of the top 5 percent rose more than 27 percent, to about $120,000, and the highest 20 percent went up about 25 percent, to around $70,000. The next 20 percent of income earners saw a nominal rise in wealth during the 1980s, while the rest, 60 percent of Americans, saw no rise at all or, in the case of the lowest two-fifths, actually saw a decline in income and savings. In fact, income inequality rose each year of the Reagan administration, while taxes were correspondingly lowered and the national debt grew. The last President to see income inequality rise each year during his term had been Herbert Hoover.

* Weekly per worker income dropped substantially during the Reagan years. The average American take home paycheque was $366 in 1972, by 1987 that paycheque was only $312, a 14.8 percent decline. Where the median pay for working men in 1973 was a little over $10 an hour in 1973, it fell to $8.85 by 1987. The average worker without an advanced degree might have made about $24,000 a year in the early 1970s, but by the end of the Reagan years, that was down to around $18,000.

* Americans leisure time declined 37 percent between 1973 and 1987 from 26.2 hours per week to 16.6 hours as Americans were forced to work longer hours to maintain their living standards.

* Another of Reagan’s enduring legacies is the steep increase in the number of homeless people, which by the late 1980s had swollen to 600,000 on any given night – and 1.2 million over the course of a year.

* The urban poor were the hardest hit by Reagan's fiscal policies. In 1980 Federal dollars accounted for 22 percent of big city budgets. By the end of Reagan’s second term, Federal aid was only 6 percent. In the 1980s the proportion of the eligible poor who received federal housing subsidies declined. In 1970 there were 300,000 more low-cost rental units (6.5 million) than low-income renter households (6.2 million). By 1985 the number of low-cost units had fallen to 5.6 million, and the number of low-income renter households had grown to 8.9 million, a disparity of 3.3 million units.

* Reagan and his supply-side advisers believed that big tax cuts would pay for themselves by generating higher tax revenues through greater economic growth. It never happened. Under Reagan, the national debt more than tripled from $900 billion dollars to $2.8 trillion.

This, course of, only points to the genesis of the assault on the American middle class. The full frontal assault came during the George W. Bush era which reversed the modest gains made under the Clinton Administration. Between 2002 and 2006, an astounding three-quarters of all the growth in the US economy was captured by the top 1 percent.


I have got to laugh at your attemp to make a great president look bad. Those who live through the Reagan years knows a hell of lot more about those years then some snot nosed little bitch kid who read a liberal book getting false information.

There are several things I noticed
1.


DUDE are you for real? That's not the rich are getting richer that people are getting richer.

And 2. now this really makes me laugh my ass off


FOLLOW THE LINKS TO YOUR SOURCE
Powered by WebStrong Group.
WebStrong | Public Affairs, New Media Strategy and Technology
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WebStrong | Advocacy

So very failed source

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Final Report Card on the Reagan Years

Our current economic meltdown may finally have ended the era that began when Ronald Reagan became President. Now a new study — from the Congressional Budget Office — helps us understand the inequality that has us melting.

Americans in the overall top 1 percent, the 2007 CBO data showed, did quite well in the Reagan era's first quarter-century. Their average incomes, after taking inflation into account, essentially tripled, rising 201 percent.

But these top 1 percent stats, the new CBO data help us understand, hardly tell the full story. The truly stunning income increases over recent decades have gone to the tippy-top of the U.S. income distribution, not the top 1 percent, but the top tenth — and top hundredth — of that top 1 percent.

The higher up you go on the income ladder, in other words, the sweeter the Reagan era.

Between 1979 and 2005, the bottom half of the top 1 percent saw their average incomes only double, after inflation. These incomes increased 105 percent. The next highest four-tenths of the top 1 percent somewhat raised the income bar. Their average incomes, after inflation, rose 161 percent.

That brings us to the top 0.1 percent of Americans. Their incomes, from 1979 to 2005, rose a staggering 294 percent after taking inflation into account. Not bad at all. But the top 0.01 percent did even better. The 11,000 households in this rarified air took home an average $35.5 million in 2005, a 384 percent increase over average top 0.01 percent incomes in 1979.

Need some perspective here? Let's compare Americans at the top to Americans in the middle. Between 1979 and 2005, the average income of America’s statistical middle class — the 20 percent of Americans in the exact middle of the U.S. income distribution — rose, according to the CBO figures, a mere 15 percent. That's less than 1 percent a year.

But many average Americans never actually saw that less than 1 percent. That's because the CBO takes a kitchen-sink approach to defining income. CBO researchers include in their “comprehensive income” calculations all the standard household revenue streams — wages, dividends, interest, and the like — and lots more, too, from food stamps and Social Security to employer-paid health benefits.

All these add-ins tend to inflate average household “incomes.” If your employer’s health insurance company jacks up prices, for instance, the extra dollars in premiums that your employer has to pay count as income to you, at least in the CBO calculations.

The CBO actually has a good reason to take this "kitchen-sink" approach to defining income. Conservative cheerleaders for the Reagan era have been arguing for years that the United States isn't growing that much more unequal, not when you calculate in the various benefits that poor and average Americans get from government and their employers.

But the CBO figures, by adding in all those benefits, neatly expose the flim-flam behind this cheerleading. The United States definitely has become substantially more unequal. Overall, after taxes, the very rich — the top 0.01 percent — have nearly quadrupled their share of the nation's income since 1979.

These super-rich Americans in the top 0.01 percent, even more amazingly, now pay a lower share of their incomes in federal tax than the merely rich.

The overall top 1 percent paid federal income tax at an average 19.4 percent rate in 2005. The top 0.01 percent paid at just a 17 percent rate, mainly because the richest of the rich get nearly half their income from capital gains — and capital gains enjoy preferential tax treatment.

Under George W. Bush, the tax rate on capital gains income — income from the sale of stocks, bonds, and other assets — dropped to 15 percent, less than half the current top 35 percent tax rate on “ordinary” income from paychecks.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Income and Wealth Inequality

Sam Pizzigati HOLY FUCKING SHIT? Are you kidding are you sure you want to use this guy as a source?

A veteran labor movement journalist, Pizzigati spent 20 years directing the publishing operations of America's largest union, the 3.2 million-member National Education Association. Over the course of his union career, he has also edited publications for three other national unions and co-edited the primary text on trade union journalism, The New Labor Press (Cornell University ILR Press). His latest book, Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our Lives (Apex Press), won an "outstanding title" of the year rating from the American Library Association (Choice, January 2006). Greed and Good examines just how concentrated wealth is poisoning every aspect of our contemporary lives, from our economy and politics to our health and our happiness.
Institute for Policy Studies: Sam Pizzigati

UNIONS did not like Reagan So get this faggot bullshit the fuck out of here.

WebStrong Group is a communications company. The article it features is THIS one: On the Way Down: The Erosion of America's Middle Class - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Sam Pizzigati is quoting FACTS from CBO reports.


Listen you little fucking moron. I've been around since Harry Truman was in the White House. I LIVED through all of the changes in this country. I KNOW what I've seen and how things have changed. The Reagan years were not good for middle class workers. Reagan and his henchmen began the dismantling of the middle class vehicles to pay increases and better working conditions like unions. Reagan was the biggest socialist in history. He re-distributed the wealth to the top and left the middle class to sink or swim in the river. And now stupid fucking right wing pea brains ideologues like you are throwing rocks to them and spewing the propaganda of the new robber barons, the multinational cartels that have NO allegiance to America or the American people. LOOK at the fucking FACTS. The middle class is disappearing. 6 in 10 families are in major debt. Children today have MORE parents that are going through bankruptcy than divorce!

The long history of mankind has been a dark and sad story of monarchies, aristocracies and plutocracies. Then along came America. From the New Deal through the Great Society America built the most robust middle class in history. It was a boom of prosperity and growth that ALL America shared in...

NOW, a short 40 years later America's poor have the lowest chance of reaching upper middle class status compared to every other industrialized nation. We rank with México and Turkey. Our health care outcomes are comparable with Costa Rica, Slovenia and Cuba. Our education system is at the bottom of first world countries.

The Reagan revolution was the biggest failure in history. It compares to the failure of the Bolshevik revolution.

The failed Reagan revolution and 30+ years of regressive conservative policies and authoritarian governance have taken the American dream and replaced it with the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having "nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope."

WebStrong Group is a communications company. The article it features is THIS one


You are a fucking moron stupid bitch
WebStrong Group supports democratic only people. WebStrong Group supports SEIU, which is union. Sam Pizzigati spent 20 years directing the publishing operations of America's largest union. Every fucking link you use is a liberal source and liberals lie. I was 19 years old when Reagan was elected President. There is no way in hell you know what the fuck you are talking about.

Sam Pizzigati is quoting FACTS from CBO reports.

LIBERAL UNION ACTIVIST

Listen you little fucking moron. I've been around since Harry Truman was in the White House. I LIVED through all of the changes in this country. I KNOW what I've seen and how things have changed.

OMG you have been here since the second socialist president was in charge of this country and you want to call Reagan a socialist?

Socialist presidents
Wilson
Roosevelt
Truman continued with Roosevelt agenda
Carter
obama

 

[georgephillip]

thats so cock- eyed I can barely contain my derision.

Then maybe you should cock that other eye in the direction of Donald Trump (and please feel free to cut loose all that derision)

"Donald Trump (and no disrespect to The Donald as I love the guy, but he’s a good example), one of our 1,000 Billionaires, spends $1.2B to put up 1,000 new condos in Manhattan. He sells those condos for $2.2M each to 1,000 of our nation’s 1.8M people who have $10M or more, pocketing an extra $1Bn for all his hard work.

* Since nice condos 'only' cost $1M just 7 years ago, the poor multimillionaires must figure out how to come up with an extra 10% of their net worth in order to maintain the 'Trump Lifestyle.' "Let’s say they earn $500K per year and need an extra 50K - doesn’t seem like much does it?

o "They in turn raise the prices they charge to 1,000 of their clients (the 150M strong "middle class") by 10%. These people are the doctors, lawyers, store owners, white collars, etc. that you do business with every day.

+ That forces the middle class, who can barely afford their lifestyle to pass that 10% on to each other, as well as the 120M Americans who have household incomes of less than $48,000 a year, many FAR less than that in the form of vital services they can’t live without."

"That’s how your housekeeper, who spent $3.20 per gallon to fill up her tank in order to clean your house for $10 per hour, ends up paying for the Trump condo she’s cleaning.

"It’s a nickel here and a dime there but when you pick the pockets of 270M people for "just" a quarter a dozen times a day that’s $3 x 270M x 365 days = $295Bn a year.

" Multiply this petty theft over a 10-year period and that’s how you move $3T of our missing $4T from the poorhouse to the penthouse - Dooh Nibor!

You have a few pretty major unprovable and probably all together false presumptions there to make this particular line of BS work. I'm not really sure where to start.

First I'm not sure you know what net worth actually is.

Second you presume that most of your people with mid six figure incomes actually care about maintaining an image. The fact is most people with a net worth of a million dollars don't.


You presume that consumers have no choice but to by Trump's condo's and the customers of those consumer's who buy Trump's condos have no choice but to do business with those people that just raised their prices to afford them.

You presume to know what it costs to afford those 'vital things you can't live without'. For one person to get by with very little in the way of luxuries doesn't cost all that much. Believe me I know because I'm living it.

What is so funny is that all of you whiners are essentially complaining about how you and other people don't have enough money, but when someone like Trump figures out how to get EXACTLY what you want you throw them under the bus and make up outrageous crap about how they exploited and stealing from housekeepers. GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK YOU WHINY SNIVELING PIECE OF SHIT.

I'm not sure if you clicked on the link or not; however, I picked this stock and options trading site because it's run by people actively involved in the game as opposed to academics, for example, whose income doesn't stem primarily from market trades.

"About Phil:

"Philip R. Davis is the founder Phil’s Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders. Mr. Davis is a serial entrepreneur, having founded software company Accu-Title, a real estate title insurance software solution, and is also the President of the Delphi Consulting Corp., an M&A consulting firm that helps large and small companies obtain funding and close deals.

"He was also the founder of Accu-Search, a property data corporation that was sold to DataTrace in 2004 and Personality Plus, a precursor to eHarmony.com. Phil was a former editor of a UMass/Amherst humor magazine and it shows in his writing — which is filled with colorful commentary along with very specific ideas on stock and options trading."

Since Phil doesn't quite fit the mold of a "whiner" you might want to consider the possibility there are psychopaths among the "richest of the rich" whose only goal is to absorb as much of the world's wealth as possible.

That would include your wealth, too.

About Phil

 

[8537]

What failed? What was suppossed to happen exactley? What should society look like in your eyes? How many poor? How many middle class? How many wealthy? Who is responsible for creating these outcomes?

I'm not sure what it "should" look like, but it is certainly clear that something *did* happen. Before about 1978, there was a 30+ year trend towards income equality - a shrinking difference between the incomes of those at the top and the incomes of those in the middle. During that period, real incomes in the middle climbed so dramatically that the period created what we now call the "middle class".

After about 1978, that gap began widening and it has widened almost every year for the past 32 years. During this period, real incomes of the wealthiest Americans has increased dramatically while the real incomes of the middle class have shrunk.

"What" happened is a valid question. Unless you believe that the middle class suddenly got lazier or less productive starting in the late 70's or early 80's while the wealthiest suddenly started working harder and got more productive, it's worth looking around to try to figure out why the great compression of the 1940's became the great widening 40 years later.

Laziness would not quite be it, but I think it's part of human nature. As I said before human nature tends toward finding simpler more efficient ways of doing things. As we find easier ways of doing things our expectations change about the level of effort that should be required to accomplish certain things. I believe that over the span of just a few decades we have been conditioned by greater convenience to expect things to be easy.

But the effort it takes to be middle class has not changed. In fact you could argue it take more effort (or at least more money) to acquire all of the status symbols that conotate 'middle class'. Middle class now is more than one tv, more than one car, a computer, cable, internet, cell phones, etc. Things you didn't have to pay for 20 years ago. The definition of middle class now is different than it was 20 years ago. To expect the effort needed to attain middle class not to change along with the definition of middle class is ridiculous. My contention is that the individuals that make up our society simply have not adapted. People think the same or less effort is supposed to yield the same outcome it once did. And it doesn't even need to be more effort. It means learning a different way of exerting effort. Not the hard way. The smart way.

I don't think the definition of middle class has changed. It's the middle quintile, or perhaps the middle three quintiles of income. Despite working more, those quintiles have seen their real income shrink. Their effort has not declined, but their income has.

There are a ton of reasons why we are where we are now. Almost none of them have to do with what government has done and people want things to change. But one fact of life is this; You can not change what you don't acknowledge. And my observation has been those that complain about the rich getting richer and engage in class warfare NEVER acknowledge their role in why they are where they are. Even though it is undeniable that your actions are predominantly what determines your outcome.

Your actions certainly play a role, but it defies logic to assume that the aggregated masses in the middle quintile quite suddenly began acting differently in the late 1970's. It seems far more plausible that real, fundamental changes in government policy and US finance / economy caused the trend to turn.

 

[georgephillip]

GE is a good example of today's corporate citizen's sense of entitlement:

"Take GE, for example. GE has $36Bn in sales and paid $431M in taxes (15% of net profits) in 2009.

"They also paid out $9Bn in dividends and over $24Bn in 2008 and 2007 and in 2007 they bought back their own stock but, in those three years, they paid -(NEGATIVE) $900M in taxes!

"Are you feeling victimized yet? 'Does GE use our infrastructure? Do they use our public airwaves?

"'Are they protected by our police? Is our army out there fighting and dying to protect them? Do they take money from our government? Do we educate their employees? This is the INSANITY of the US tax system.'"

When Warren Buffett revealed in 2007 that he paid taxes at about half the rate of his employees (17.7%), I certainly didn't connect the dots between individual and corporate tax rates and our national deficit:

" US corporations, who are (according to to the Supreme Court) also citizens of this country, paid just $300Bn in taxes last year on $6 TRILLION in income (5%).

"That’s right, if US corporations simply paid the same amount of tax as Mr. Buffett - that would, by itself, be enough to wipe out our deficit. But, things have gone decidedly the other way in the past 30 years:

http://www.philstockworld.com/wp-content/uploads/Coorporate Taxes.jpg

I've been repairing appliances for a good part of my life. I am too familiar with the crap GE has gotten away with. There was a time the Company did do the right thing because it was the right thing to do. The Government has their back at every mishap, they insulate, divert, and protect GE, and many others, especially when it is something that can effect the economy. We get what we vote for, we get what we pay for.I wish We would all "Just Say no", more often, rather than "Thank You, May I have Another". If only Government and Business were as good at doing, as they are at selling, scamming, and packaging Bullshit.

The reason the 'Company' no longer does the right thing and the government has their back is because GE and other corporations BOUGHT that protection. Human nature hasn't changed, and middle class expectations haven't shifted. GE and other corporations have BOUGHT the ability to write laws and make their unethical practices LAWFUL

The corporations really have grown like weeds around our central bank.

And more and more of us are waking homeless on the continent our forefather's conquered.

And it will NEVER change for the better by "choosing" between Republican OR Democrat.

It will, however, continue to improve for Wall Street.

FLUSH all the INCUMBENTS from the House and Senate on November 2nd.

Make Jefferson proud.

 

[Bfgrn]

Sam Pizzigati HOLY FUCKING SHIT? Are you kidding are you sure you want to use this guy as a source?

A veteran labor movement journalist, Pizzigati spent 20 years directing the publishing operations of America's largest union, the 3.2 million-member National Education Association. Over the course of his union career, he has also edited publications for three other national unions and co-edited the primary text on trade union journalism, The New Labor Press (Cornell University ILR Press). His latest book, Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our Lives (Apex Press), won an "outstanding title" of the year rating from the American Library Association (Choice, January 2006). Greed and Good examines just how concentrated wealth is poisoning every aspect of our contemporary lives, from our economy and politics to our health and our happiness.
Institute for Policy Studies: Sam Pizzigati

UNIONS did not like Reagan So get this faggot bullshit the fuck out of here.

WebStrong Group is a communications company. The article it features is THIS one: On the Way Down: The Erosion of America's Middle Class - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Sam Pizzigati is quoting FACTS from CBO reports.


Listen you little fucking moron. I've been around since Harry Truman was in the White House. I LIVED through all of the changes in this country. I KNOW what I've seen and how things have changed. The Reagan years were not good for middle class workers. Reagan and his henchmen began the dismantling of the middle class vehicles to pay increases and better working conditions like unions. Reagan was the biggest socialist in history. He re-distributed the wealth to the top and left the middle class to sink or swim in the river. And now stupid fucking right wing pea brains ideologues like you are throwing rocks to them and spewing the propaganda of the new robber barons, the multinational cartels that have NO allegiance to America or the American people. LOOK at the fucking FACTS. The middle class is disappearing. 6 in 10 families are in major debt. Children today have MORE parents that are going through bankruptcy than divorce!

The long history of mankind has been a dark and sad story of monarchies, aristocracies and plutocracies. Then along came America. From the New Deal through the Great Society America built the most robust middle class in history. It was a boom of prosperity and growth that ALL America shared in...

NOW, a short 40 years later America's poor have the lowest chance of reaching upper middle class status compared to every other industrialized nation. We rank with México and Turkey. Our health care outcomes are comparable with Costa Rica, Slovenia and Cuba. Our education system is at the bottom of first world countries.

The Reagan revolution was the biggest failure in history. It compares to the failure of the Bolshevik revolution.

The failed Reagan revolution and 30+ years of regressive conservative policies and authoritarian governance have taken the American dream and replaced it with the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having "nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope."

WebStrong Group is a communications company. The article it features is THIS one


You are a fucking moron stupid bitch
WebStrong Group supports democratic only people. WebStrong Group supports SEIU, which is union. Sam Pizzigati spent 20 years directing the publishing operations of America's largest union. Every fucking link you use is a liberal source and liberals lie. I was 19 years old when Reagan was elected President. There is no way in hell you know what the fuck you are talking about.

Sam Pizzigati is quoting FACTS from CBO reports.

LIBERAL UNION ACTIVIST

Listen you little fucking moron. I've been around since Harry Truman was in the White House. I LIVED through all of the changes in this country. I KNOW what I've seen and how things have changed.

OMG you have been here since the second socialist president was in charge of this country and you want to call Reagan a socialist?

Socialist presidents
Wilson
Roosevelt
Truman continued with Roosevelt agenda
Carter
obama

First off, you can hit the 'Quote' button, but stop cutting up my quotes asshole.

I learned about Pavlov's dogs, Reagan created Ronbo's dogs...human beings who drool anti-union propaganda as a reflex reaction, but are not even as smart as a pile of dogshit.

How can you right wing scum bags have such utter contempt for the common man and loathe fellow human beings so much and then turn around and worship ONE despot so much? It has to be the authoritarian follower illness your tiny little brain is afflicted with...

I clearly remember when Reagan became president...

Ronald Reagan…our TRAITOR President…

It was during the 1980 Iran hostage crisis that a traitor candidate undercut the President of the United States and made a backdoor deal with the DEVIL...



The same DEVIL you are poopin' your pants, under your bed, afraid to come out of the house, scared the sky is falling, crying and whining about!!!



It won a traitor an election, at a high cost still being paid today...NOW the DEVIL knows America has a PRICE!!!



The lives of 53 hostages were forfeited for 650,053 people!!!



Traitor: someone guilty of treason.

Treason: In law, treason is the crime of disloyalty to one's nation or state. A person who betrays the nation of their citizenship and/or reneges on an oath of loyalty and in some way willfully cooperates with an enemy, is considered to be a traitor. Wikipedia

 

[georgephillip]

I've never understood how someone like Reagan who didn't care enough about this country to fight for it in World War Two finished up as Commander-in-Chief?

Maybe the rich had something to do with that, too.

 

[DiamondDave]

The forcing comes from those on the left who think others should be forced to subsidize your want to go to college

You can work your way thru.. most just do not choose the hard road it takes to do so...

You could "work your way through" 100K to get an engineering degree? How many people can do that? Very few (you'd have to be already rich). C'mon, stop being so stupid.

You want it, you'll work your way through it... it is your CHOICE to go to a 25K a year school... if it's not a wise CHOICE, maybe community college for 2 years before the 4 year school.. maybe part time while you work in the mail room of a corporation that offers tuition reimbursement as an employment benefit... maybe you work harder and earn a scholarship.. maybe you work with organizations like the Lions club to obtain a charitable scholarship... maybe you work 60 hours as a stripper to take 2 classes a semester... maybe you hold off college for a couple of years while you save up 10K to start... maybe you join the military for the college fund and GI Bill... you CAN indeed work your way through it... but it is asshats like you who would rather whine and put the effort toward that, than put the effort toward doing what you have to do...

Un-fucking-believable

I noticed the crickets after options are actually shown.. typical...

Except by little tucked dick and his ignorant rep comment of "what a petty piece of trash you are"... laughable