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Rich
getting much richer
So, of course, they need tax relief
If you asked Americans how much of
the nation's pretax income goes to the top 10 percent of households,
it is unlikely they would come anywhere close to 50 percent, which is
where it was just before the bubble
burst in 2007… Even within that top "decile," the distribution is
remarkably skewed. By 2007, the top 1 percent
of households took home 23 percent of the national income after a
15-year run in which they captured more
than half – yes, you read that right, more than half – of the country’s
economic growth. As Tim Noah noted
recently in a wonderful series of articles in Slate, that’s the kind of
income distribution you’d associate with a
banana republic or a sub-Saharan kleptocracy, not the world’s oldest
democracy and wealthiest market economy...
There are moral and political reasons for caring about this dramatic
skewing of income, which in the real world
leads to a similar skewing of opportunity, social standing and
political power. But there is also an important
economic reason: Too much inequality, just like too little, appears to
reduce global competitiveness and
long-term growth, at least in developed countries like ours...
People don’t work hard, take risks and make sacrifices if they think
the rewards will all flow to others.
Conservative Republicans use this argument all the time in trying to
justify lower tax rates for wealthy
earners and investors, but they chose to ignore it when it comes to the
incomes of everyone else.
It’s no coincidence that polarization of income distribution in the
United States coincides with a polarization
of the political process. Just as income inequality has eroded any
sense that we are all in this together, it has
also eroded the political consensus necessary for effective government.
There can be no better proof of that
proposition than the current election cycle, in which the last of the
moderates are being driven from the political
process and the most likely prospect is for years of ideological
warfare and political gridlock.
I remember reading about Henry Ford.
Someone asked him why he paid his employees so much and
he replied,
"I want
them to be able to afford to buy a new Ford."
They're doing away with the middle class - stealing them blind - with no regard
for the fact that people with no money aren't going to do a lot of shopping.
Today's Rethugs are as greedy as oil men.
They aren't happy being billionaires because they know some other
billionaire has more
than they have and that totally pisses
them off so they ramp up their energy so they can
steal every last nickel from every last former middle-class American.