Wage Suppression Revisited

On March 23, 2011 I posted an article on the results of wage suppression. In it I reviewed academic studies demonstrating the growing gap between productivity growth, which has been substantial, and wage growth, which has been nil. This gap is recent, the direct result of conservative policies favoring corporations. I followed up on April 20, 2011 with another article on why the rich vote Republican. Again, we see clear evidence of a middle class becoming undone by conservative policies.

Below is another depressing snippet of data. It may be hard to see, but it shows an index of labor's share of income (2005=100). There is a fairly steady drift downward starting around 1980, a short-lived upward trend in Clinton's second term, and a significant deterioration throughout Bush the Lesser's eight years. The trend continues in the Obama years. Some discussion and a bigger example of the chart can be found here.

To put this data in very stark terms, go have a look at Overworked America, 12 charts that will make your blood boil.There is a lot there, but one fact underscores what I have been trying to say about wage suppression in the US: wages generally followed productivity increases for most of the 20th century, at least after the New Deal. As productivity increased, so did wages. That is no longer the case, as I show above. If labor had received commensurate wages, average income would not be around $50,000, but $92,000.

Think about that for a moment. Our recession began and continues because our economy heavily depends on consumer spending. If you ever wonder why spending is flat, it is because wages are too.  Where have the productivity gains gone? The 42 grand per worker? To corporate America and the investor class.

Despite this, Republicans never miss a chance to make you think unions are to blame for America's economic illness. It takes a lot of gall to make such demonstrably false statements.

Yet millions of Americans believe them.  And that takes a lot of ignorance.

They Hate Him and Want to Silence Him

Eat the rich.  And the torturers, warmongers, theocrats, those who oppress and those who enable the oppressors.



Don't recognize him? You may be part of the problem.

The Embrace of Selfishness

On June 7th I commented on the quesy unease some Christians were feeling about the Republican party's embrace of Ayn Rand's cult of selfishness. Dave Johnson has more on this at Concern Over Republican Embrace of The Ayn Rand Poison.

As Johnson writes:

Disciples of Ayn Rand's philosophy of selfishness now dominate the thinking of the leadership of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. There is no way around it. Republican budget leader Rep. Paul Ryan says Rand is his guide. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) says Rand's Atlas Shrugged is his "foundation book." Senator Rand Paul is named after her (or not). Clarence Thomas requires his law clerks to watch The Fountainhead. Fox News promotes Rand. Conservative blogs promote Rand. Glenn Beck has been promoting Rand for years. So has Rush. This isn't recent, Alan Greenspan lived with the Rand cult and promoted and implemented her ideas.

Johnson goes on to quote Rand, suggesting, with good reason, that she sounds like a psychopath. If you are wondering, check this out. And here too.

American Justice

Texas Miracle, My Ass

So what is it with Republican voters and swaggering Texan Governors? The last one should have been a warning. Rick Perry is said to be considering a run for President. His supporters seem to think his record as TX Governor is something to run on.

Here's Rachel Maddow taking down Perry (starts at about the 8:30 mark). Among the highlights:
   --Wages have been nearly flat since 12/07, lagging behind NY, CA, and the national average.
  --TX has a higher percentage of workers earning minimum wages than any other state.
  --The median hourly wage in TX is $11.20. Yikes! Even if one assumes a year-long, full-time workweek, that is barely $23,000. And that is the median: many are earning significantly less.
  --TX has the highest percentage of citizens without healthcare in the country, currently over 25%.

Near the end of the clip, Maddow reviews Perry's amazing hypocrisy when he railed against Washington's irresponsible stimulus, but quietly took $billions that shored up 97% of the TX budget shortfall.

She might have added an item that Perry's cheerleaders, and most of us, ignore. Texas has a huge advantage over most states, it has nothing to do with Perry, and it can be stated in three words: oil and gas. That advantage is a fortuitous accident of nature.

Joshua Holland also provides a withering analysis of the so-called "Texas Miracle." Highly recommended.

The US Could Really Use a Third Party

Here is Cenk Uygur laying into a Representative Earl Blumenauer, who, as a member of the Progressive Caucus, is supposed to fight for the middle class against the Republican efforts to turn over even more of the economy to Wall Street.

But even Blumenauer acts like he gets his talking points from Paul Ryan. What the hell is wrong with Democrats when they say that raising the retirement age for social security is negotiable?

This is not specifically about the retirement age; that issue alone is not a cure-all, and it isn't the end of the world either. The huge problem in all of this is that Republicans have set the parameters and they have got at least some feckless Dems, including Blumenauer, to negotiate within those parameters. The result is that every piece of budget-related legislation that has come from the House has involved funding cuts for America's poor, its children, its elderly, the dispossesed, and the working class, or it involves tax cuts, and deregulation for the investor class.

What Blumenauer needs to say is that it is ridiculous to even be discussing a raise in the retirement age for social security in the first place. Instead of shit about people living longer, he should be hammering home the fact that even in this slow economy, SS is once again running a surplus, a fact that completely undermines scare talk about "fixing" it.

Social security was able to run up a $2.6 trillion surplus thanks to tweaks made in the early 1980s (under Reagan!). The problem is not with social security, which has worked extremely well; the problem is that politcians "borrowed" that surplus and blew it on other programs, wars, and tax cuts for the wealthy. And now they do not want to pay it back. Republicans want you to think that SS is a huge drain on the federal budget. They are lying through their goddamn teeth.

So why can't guys like Blumenauer make these points? Dems are not fighting back on issues like social security, which should be easy to defend. It's a freakin slam dunk as far as the facts are concerned. 

Cenk hammered him for it, and Cenk was absolutely right.



hat tip to moxnews.com

Robert Reich: The Truth About the Economy

Robert Reich, telling it like it is.



He forgot one last point; none of this shit started with Obama.

US Corporate Model is Dysfunctional

Below is a video interview of political columnist Harold Meyerson. He addresses a topic that should be front page news everywhere, but isn't. He talks of America's dysfunctional corporate model and its negative impact on the economy.

In my view, and it is a subject I want to discuss more later, Meyerson correctly describes the US economic model as an obsession about the microeconomic needs and interests of corporations and shareholders, and not to the needs of communities, workers, or the broader interests of the nation.

Note Meyerson's references to Germany, which has a huge trade surplus, based on manufactures, and substantially higher wages and benefits than in America. Though he did not say it, Germany's per capita exports are about four times higher than America's. This in an a country where union membership is much higher and manufacturers are not given free rein to offshore production to cheap labor havens. This is a recipe for disaster, according to the Neo-Cons, Neo-Liberals, Wall Street, the right wing, virtually all Republicans, ideologues, and the endless stream of bloviating media shills.

I give them credit; they know how to protect their interests and get voters to care more about somebody's home makeover, scary brown people, or Wiener's wiener.  



It's a shame, really. Our politicians fight fiercely to protect US corporate interests, the corporate model, and the overclass that feeds off it. They talk to us of liberty, freedom to choose, and the horrors of industrial policy and government interference, even as they bail out Wall Street and subsidize Big Oil.

In return, their pockets are filled with cash to buy the next election.

Christians Getting Quesy Over Rand?

Christians may be starting to finally figure out what secular progressives have known all along: the Republican party is all about moneyed interests, on Wall Street and elsewhere. Many liberal Christians have known this, of course, but I am talking about the 'warriors for God', the 'onward Christian soldiers', and the 'Christian nation' crowd. If they were to give their brains a chance, they would see the party they vote for engages in blatant class warfare. Forget about feeding the poor. It's all about justifying greed and the worship of mammon, exactly what Jesus preached against. Their prophet is Ayn Rand and the bible the Money Party and their Wall Street benefactors promote is Atlas Shrugged.

This devotion to Ayn Rand is understandable if your name is Gordon Gecko, but should be tough to reconcile for all but the neo-fascist wing of the Christian church. I suspect, however, that most of the religious right are not very familiar with Ayn Rand. Perhaps they have heard some superficial characterizations about personal responsibility, the evils of high taxes and the welfare state. I suppose that is enough if you are hopelessly invested in the Republican party, have libertarian tendencies, and consider Sean Hannity's drivel to be deep analysis.

Most are surely not familiar with Rand's perverse sense of morality, her unbridled selfishness, and most importantly for the religious right, her disdain for religion and the teachings most closely associated with Jesus. And now we are seeing Republicans politicians come out and sing praises for that repulsive woman.

So how can voters who take their religion seriously tolerate not only her anti-religious views, but more importantly, the politicians who have publicly embraced her destructive doctrine?

Some are now beginning to speak out. Time's Amy Sullivan has a piece detailing how some traditional supporters of the Republican party are finally asking for some explanations from the politicians who got their vote. Much of their ire is directed at Congressman Paul Ryan, who led the right-wing effort to dismantle Medicare.

As Sullivan says:

These days, when people question a politician’s “morality,” they usually mean his or her personal behavior and choices. But an interesting thing is happening right now around the GOP budget proposal. A broad coalition of religious voices is criticizing the morality of the choices reflected in budget cuts and tax policy. And they’ve specifically targeted Ryan and his praise for Rand, the philosopher who once said she “promote[d] the ethic of selfishness.”

A religious group calling itself the American Values Network has put up a video detailing their dismay at the Randian obsession of Paul Ryan and others.

Amy Sullivan calls this religious pushback against Randian ruthlessness "wholly unanticipated."

I call it long overdue.

Less Wall Street, More Main Street

I want to share a post by airmechild who captures much of what is wrong with the American economic model. I quote at length:

There is a show on one of the major networks, ABC I think, called the Shark Tank. Basically the show is about entrepreneurs looking for investment capital to start or expand their business. They pitch their ideas to a group of likely investors hopping to get at least one of them to invest money in their business.

In one show a business woman asked for an investment to expand her line of shoes into the next lower class of stores. Her shoes sold well in very upscale boutiques and she wanted to sell in stores like Nordstrom’s and Macys. All of which would require expanding her manufacturing and distribution base.

One of the “sharks” asked where she had her shoes manufactured. She replied Florida and Mass. His response was that she should moved it (manufacturing) to China. The show includes several minutes of bantering between investors and the client until a deal is reached. After all “you have to respect the money.” One of the investors will say during the deal making processes.

Simply, it’s all about the money. Wall Street, the unofficial indicator of “profitability” of Americas companies, has dictated it to be so. Over and over since Reagan came along we have heard the mantra “Wall Street says…” or “the Street…” as the gospel of business or the economy.

Remember this, if you learn nothing more about economics, Wall Street does not represent the American worker, businessman or America. It only represents the greed of the investors. In recent years many a business decision, work force cuts or outsourcing was made simply at the behest of Wall Street. Not one of these decisions bettered America, the economy or a worker (blue or white color.)

It has had just the opposite effect. Wall Street made pitting a company and its tax structure against communities and states for “competitive” tax rates. Another moniker for improved wealth to the investors. The next step was to pit American workers against Foreign workers. After all according to the “Street” our wages are to high.

So the contestant should move production to China? That's our investor class talking; if it can juice up profit margins, they are all for it. Lost jobs? Not my problem.

This infatuation with giving what the investor class wants is seriously undermining this country. They have convinced themselves, and apparently many others, that individual greed is all we need and the less one cares about others, the better off we will be. It is all about me and my profits. Labor is just an abstract, a necessity. The lower management can lower labor costs, the better investors like it.  

No wonder other countries are doing better than the US. Germans, for example, are in utter disbelief and think we are insane. 

Hat tip to airmechild. There is more at the original.

Fox Hacked?

Ok, so this just went up on Youtube. I am not sure it is real, but the message is on target.



Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people.

How Republicans Suppress Voting

Ernest Canning, guest blogging at Brad Friedman's The Brad Blog, writes: 

Voter suppression has long been a staple of American politics, but the tsunami of new restrictions on the polling place now being rammed through by newly-elected Republican majorities in state after state is unprecedented, certainly since the era of Jim Crow was supposed to have been ended by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Canning goes on the explain the felt need for Republicans to suppress votes, not the least of which is the growing unpopularity of that party's policies, its efforts to deliver for its Wall Street benefactors are becoming more blatant, and national demographics are moving away from Republicans, even as they themselves are moving ever further to the right.

Voter suppression is becoming increasingly institutionalized. A good analysis of how it works can be seen at the video below. It is the full-length version of Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections.

Voter suppression does not need to be pervasive to be decisive.

Mazie is Running

Yeah, baby



Mazie's gonna win Dan Akaka's seat and land one right on McConnell's keester.

Check out her site at Mazie Hirono for Hawaii.

Social Security Records Surplus

No wonder Republicans want to end social security; they hate federal programs that work and get in the way of their ideology. I have to admit that, as a kid growing up, and even much later, I did not really appreciate the right wing animosity towards social security. Perhaps that is because they kept their sociopathy to themselves, or because they didn't have nearly enough votes. And to think, they want to turn SS over to Wall Street, the same folks who put the economy in the ditch in the 1980s, first with the S&L scandal, and then the crash of '87, and again in the 1990s with the dot.com bubble, and again in 2000's with the still festering housing/mortgage bust. Along the way they have eviscerated 401-k's, pensions, and many IRAs.

So once again, as designed, social security records a surplus.

Today the Social Security Trustees released their Annual Trustees Report for 2011.  The following provides comment and analysis from the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, a coalition of more than 300 organizations representing more than 50 million Americans:  (Click here for a complete pdf of the press release)

“The trustees’ report found that Social Security's surplus will be $69.3 billion in 2011.  Those who say that Social Security is in deficit this year are flat wrong,” said Nancy Altman, Co-Chair of the Strengthen Social Security Campaign. “By law, Social Security cannot deficit-spend and cannot borrow, so it is obvious that Social Security cannot add a penny to the federal deficit.”

 

“The trustees’ report states that Social Security will be able to pay all benefits for the next quarter century, even without congressional action. Bottom line, Social Security works,” said Eric Kingson, Co-Chair of the Strengthen Social Security Campaign. “Even in a bad economy, Americans continue to receive the full benefits they have earned for themselves and their families. The trustees report makes clear there is no reason to cut benefits—not for today's seniors; not for any generation.

Note that social security does NOT contribute to the deficit and the funds are NOT borrowed.

Put Some Sugar in His Gas Tank While You are at it
Ok, this is not breaking news. But it is an indication of how are leaders are spending their time.  As reported by Yahoo News back in February:

Republicans weren't joking when they said they would go after funding for President Obama's pet programs.

Per Wonkette, GOP Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas filed an amendment to a House spending bill this week that would have cut funding for the president's Teleprompter. Womack later pulled the amendment because he couldn't find out how much the measure would actually save, but told Fox News he believes he made his point. 

"We're asking people to do more with less, and I think the president ought to lead by example," the GOP lawmaker said. "He is already a very gifted speaker. And I think that's one platform he could do without."

 And what is the point you believe you made, Womack? That you are a petty asshole?
No wonder this government cannot get anything done.

I'm with this guy
Scott McLarty has a post up at OpEd News where he says to "stop calling them conservative." The behavior and policies of today's Republicans would be unrecognizable to most conservatives of the past, including Goldwater.

Theology as Personality

In the video below Cenk Uygur hits on an essential truth; the shameless habit of christians, especially the religious right, to cherry pick their theology to suit their personality, their ideology, and their pocketbook. Did not your christian god repeatedly talk of caring for the poor and needy? Did he not repeatedly denounce those who sought earthly possessions?

Apparently not if you're a Republican. America's right wing must be using a different Bible, the one called Atlas Shrugged.

Only a Republican Could Catch Osama, Right?

Jed Lewison's post at Daily Kos helps explain what is so contemptible about the Teabagger mindset; facts don't matter --not when they interfere with ideology.

When George W. Bush took office in Jan 2001 there were 111,634,000 private sector jobs. When he left office in Jan 2009 there were 110,981,000 private sector jobs.

When Bush took office in Jan 2001 there were 20,835,000 government sector jobs. When he left office in Jan 2009 there were 22,582,000 government sector jobs.

That means during Bush's eight years in office, we lost 653,000 private sector jobs and gained 1,747,000 government sector jobs.

Moral of the story: Barack Obama is a Kenyan socialist fuckstick.

And George W. Bush saved capitalism. Plus, he got bin Laden too.

They just can't stand that the guy they hate keeps messin' with their identity, their worldview, and their authoritarian personalities. Isn't Obama supposed to be a weak, feckless, immoral Democrat who wants to destroy America?

No, assholes. You're wrong again.

In your face, bitches

What Bush Hath Wrought

On April 26, I wrote that the US has a tax problem, not a spending problem. Lori Montgomery, writing in the Washington Post, has more to say on this.

Polls show that a large majority of Americans blame wasteful or unnecessary federal programs for the nation’s budget problems. But routine increases in defense and domestic spending account for only about 15 percent of the financial deterioration, according to a new analysis of CBO data.

The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts. Together, the economy and the tax bills enacted under former president George W. Bush, and to a lesser extent by President Obama, wiped out $6.3 trillion in anticipated revenue. That’s nearly half of the $12.7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to real debt. Federal tax collections now stand at their lowest level as a percentage of the economy in 60 years.

Read that last sentence again: Federal tax collections now stand at their lowest level as a percentage of the economy in 60 years. Montgomery has it right; because of the endless tax cuts and exemptions, for individuals and corporations alike (I'm looking at you, GE), the federal government is slowly being strangled.

Montgomery continues:

Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus, a favorite target of Republicans who blame Democrats for the mounting debt, has added $719 billion — 6 percent of the total shift, according to the new analysis of CBO data by the nonprofit Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative. All told, Obama-era choices account for about $1.7 trillion in new debt, according to a separate Washington Post analysis of CBO data over the past decade. Bush-era policies, meanwhile, account for more than $7 trillion and are a major contributor to the trillion-dollar annual budget deficits that are dominating the political debate.

Montgomery's article is excellent and should be read aloud to Republicans and other intellectual prostitutes. But I have to agree with Legal Schnauzer, who says Montgomery needs to acknowledge how different the economy was for Obama than it was for Bush. As LS puts it:

Montgomery should be applauded for a tough, hard hitting article. But she is being much too kind to Bush here. She lays $1.7 trillion in new debt at Obama's feet, while putting $7 trillion of new debt under Bush. But almost all of the Obama-era choices were an attempt to jump-start an economy drowning in the Great Bush Recession. That means the blame for almost all of the $8.7 trillion in new debt should fall on Bush.

Bingo. Most Americans seem to not realize how deep of a mess we are in, how long it will take to get out, and how big the steaming turd was that our worst President handed to Obama.

Teachers and Soldiers

Nicely put:

WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources...

Read the rest at The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries.

Worthy of Contempt

There is a fair number of ideas, attitudes, or policies that I truly despise and consider worthy of contempt. Three prime examples that come to mind are wage theft, tax avoidance, and voter suppression. Obviously they are not on the same immoral level as, say, genocide, but they are all too common, tolerated, and even defended by our politicians, parties, and corporate leaders. And they are mostly ignored by a feckless media.

I have posted on wage theft before, and will do so again. I will address tax avoidance as well, in part because it is becoming increasingly prevalent. 

Voter suppression; where to start? How about the fact that over time and throughout the world it has been overwhelmingly a political weapon of conservatives, the overclass, the wealthy, monarchists, and other authoritarian-types. In the United States, voter suppression has been consistently utilized, sometimes with decisive results, by the same groups who bleat endlessly about the constitution, their love of democracy, and the sanctity of the rule of law.

Voter suppression isn't voter fraud. The latter is extremely rare though claims of voter fraud have become an increasingly common charge or scare tactic promoted by those who want to make the voting process more difficult, onerous, and discouraging than it already is.

And as it turns out, that means Republicans. This conclusion is unavoidable for one reason distilled into two words: massive evidence. Think about the various state efforts to tighten voting requirements, to require more personal identification, or limit voting hours and precincts.  How about "voter caging"? Republicans are behind them all.

Now I am not saying only Republicans will resort to dirty tricks, or use questionable methods to discredit an opponent. I am reminded of LBJ's rise to the US Senate where his operatives, under his direction, most likely did some creative ballot stuffing. And that was not just a hard-ball tactic; it was clearly illegal.

Voter suppression isn't even always illegal. And what is contemptible to one may be realistic tactics to another. So there is a gray area as to what is smart and tough, and what is unethical or crosses the legal line.

My real point is that regardless of how one feels about election season ethics, it has been conservatives, including Southern Dixiecrats of the past, and now almost always Republicans, who most consistently work to prevent high voter turnout and to restrict eligibility. This reflects sentiments entirely consistent with American conservatism. It was conservatives who opposed the right of women to vote, who implemented unconstitutional poll taxes, and for whom giving voting rights to former slaves was anathema. 

There has been much academic ink written on this phenomenon. The reasons why Republicans are more likely to indulge in voter suppression are well-documented and based on sound theoretical foundations. For those who would like to see how voter suppression relates to personality, especially an authoritarian personality, see the work of Professor Bob Altemeyer, especially his classic, The Authoritarians.

ThinkProgress recently posted From Poll Taxes to Voter ID Laws: A Short History of Conservative Voter Suppression. 

 Conservatives have said voter id laws are necessary to combat mass voter fraud. Yet according to the Brennan Center for Justice, Americans are more likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than commit voter fraud. And the Bush administration’s five-year national “war on voter fraud” resulted in only 86 convictions of illegal voting out of more than 196 million votes cast. Instead conservatives are employing an old tactic: using the specter of false voting to restrict the voting rights of minorities and the poor...

There is more at the link above. And while you are at, see the excellent investigative reporting by Greg Palast from last fall, where he explores the motives of Arizona's show-me-your-papers legislation espoused by Republicans; you know, the ones that bray endlessly on personal freedom and how they will get government off your back.

The backdrop, as Palast explains, is that Republicans were insisting there was serious voter fraud:

In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters ... directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then Secretary of State, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer's command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you're not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: after all, they give their names and addresses.

  

So I asked Brewer's office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?

No, not one.

 Good job, Greg. That is how investigative reporting is done.

America's Problem is Low Taxes, Not Spending

It has quickly become a Republican talkling point that the US does not have a taxation problem; it has a spending problem. No need to raise taxes, they say. Just cut all that wasteful spending, and we will be all right. After all, teabaggers tell us we are Taxed Enough Already.

The reality is dramatically different. The chart below shows "general government expenditures as a percent of GDP". It is taken from the OECD "iLibrary" and can be found here. The bars represent each country's annual average for 2006-8. The blue bar is the average for all OECD countries combined.

The US is the seventh bar from the left, below the average and far below most of  Europe's most developed states. Note also that the gray diamonds hovering above each bar represent that govenment's average expenditure for 1995-97. They show that the spending percentage for the US was virtually unchanged for the subsequent decade.

The reality is that US government expenditures are a relatively modest percentage of GDP. Needless to say, US expenditures would be even lower were it not for our monstrously expensive industrial-military complex.

In other words, the US is not spending nearly as much on non-military items as some politicians would have you believe. Our overall spending levels are relatively low, and entitlement spending that directly benefits families is even lower. The US does not have a tax and spend issue. Our national debt is burgeoning because we keep reducing taxes on the wealthy and on corporations.

The chart below shows spending for families as a percent of GDP for the US and four other OECD members. This represents the socialistic spending and entitlements Republicans say is out of control and must be cut. Background and additional charts can be seen here.

Finally, have a look at the next chart. It comes from the same place as the first one. It also encompasses the same time frame. The one below measures taxes as a percent of GDP. The US is the fourth bar from the left, putting us even further down the OECD list.

To summarize, the US is not a tax and spend socialist nightmare. Government spending is comparatively low; spending on entitlements, welfare and the like is proportionately even lower. Teabaggers and others who buy into Congressman Paul Ryan's asinine spending bill, the one that guts Medicare and lowers taxes on the rich even more, are full of some serious shit.

Read Robert Reich, who details why we must raise taxes on the rich.

Why the Rich Vote Republican

On March 23, I posted an article on the results of wage suppression and the shift in wealth from Main Street to Wall Street. Here is another revealing graph. Not sure you can see it well, but the vertical green line indicates the beginning of the Reagan Presidency. The blue line represents the average income in real terms, of the bottom 99% of all Americans; the pink line indicates the top 1%.

The effects of FDR's New Deal, beginning in 1935, vividly show how the American middle class was created.  The graph also shows how that same middle class has been squeezed in recent decades as conservative policies, such as outsourcing, hostility to unions, financial deregulation, an indifference to deindustrialization and other feckless trade policies, have dramatically stunted average income for the bottom 99% (a trend that began before Reagan) and have boosted average incomes for the top 1%, primarily through tax cuts, just as dramatically.

If you are the least bit willing to give your brain a chance, you must surely realize that Republicans are pushing policies to further undermine the middle class and shift ever more wealth to the very top.

Blaming the Victim

Do you remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in TARP money, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes? 

Me Neither.

Pass it on...

Signs Our Health Care System is Broken

Here are a few signs we have a shitty health care system. Read them and consider why citizens in other industrialized countries have no desire to adopt our system.

1. Spam e-mail for Canadian drugs. We are all besieged with email offering low-cost pharmaceuticals from the land of Molson. Ever thought why? Many reasons, one of which is that our own government has guaranteed profits for the domestic drug industry. The Bush administration made it illegal for medicare to negotiate for discounts, or to obtain cheaper Canadian or other foreign-made drugs. (Just another Bush travesty Obama has embraced).

So now we get a steady stream of offers, of questionable legality, from abroad because they know we are getting ripped off.

2. Fundraisers to pay medical bills. This time it is grandpa's hip; next time it will be your co-worker'sw emphysema. Please give what you can. For millions of Americans getting sick without insurance puts a life at risk and a family ever closer to bankruptcy. This shit happens because our health care system lets it happen. Yeah, yeah, I know; much of this is supposed to end with health care reform. We'll see.

3. Medical tourism. Yet another growing industry, as Americans desperately seek medical care, even of questionable quality, because of prohibitive US prices. High quality care in industrialized nations is often cheaper, even after airfare and hotels, than the domestic stuff.

A hat tip to Southern Beale. See her post here for a more extensive purview. She is absolutely correct when she says: "Too many people are getting far too rich off of our current system. American healthcare no longer serves the majority of its customers. Which is precisely why nothing will change without a huge fight."

Yup, health care is a profit center in America. It does not serve citizens very well, but it enriches the health care industry, the investor class, and politicians willing to obstruct real reform.

And that is why we are unable to change it.

Does Ideological Purity Make You Stupid?

If you are Milton Friedman, it does.

This is too good, in a nauseating, face-palm, sort of way, to pass up.




Hat tip to the Frankfactor, which I heartily recommend.

Maher Calls For Class War

Maybe we are seeing a little momentum from the American majority? Here is Bill Maher again. He makes too much of Charlie Sheen, as so many do, but his essential point is worth repeating.  When will the middle class realize the overclass does not give a shit about others or this country, and will keep taking from us as long as we keep letting them. Sheen is nothing but bread and circus writ modern.

Push back, hard, to the point where they shit their pants because they realize they have gone too far. It's the only thing that will get their attention.

The Price of Tax Cuts

Just so we're clear on who and what are the prime contributors to our federal budget deficit. It sure as hell is not the welfare queens,unemployment benefits, or social security (which is paid in advance anyway). We had balanced budgets when marginal tax rates were substantially higher. We could have them again if we raised the marginal tax rate, not to uncharted territory, but only back to previous levels.

It would also help if we could reel in defense spending and the 2.5 wars we are waging. But higher taxes on those manifestly able to pay, and a scaled back military-industrial gravy train are anathema to the overclass.

They blame you for the problems they created, and now they want to punish you. It's called class warfare.

I Paid More Taxes Than Exxon, Boeing, B of A Combined

Lots of data has come out recently about how little America's top corporations are paying in taxes, both federal and state, and that's despite earning huge profits. So where is the outcry from teabaggers? Where are the demands about "paying your fair share"?

What makes this especially contemptible is that corporate America has managed to get Republicans to yelp about our high corporate tax rate, as if any corporation actually paid anything close to the nominal rate. How many times have we seen Republicans and other intellectual prostitutes stand before a camera and say we can create jobs and get the economy going if we would just lower corporate taxes? This does not even include the numerous corporations that not only do not pay taxes, but get $ millions or even $ billions back from the feds.

Senator Bernie Sanders has released a list of corporate giants that pay dramatically lower taxes than their profits would suggest. The list, shown below, is available from various websites. I got it from here. 

1)      Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009.  Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings.
2)      Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, although it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion.
3)      Over the past five years, while General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States, it received a $4.1 billion refund from the IRS.
4)      Chevron received a $19 million refund from the IRS last year after it made $10 billion in profits in 2009.
5)      Boeing, which received a $30 billion contract from the Pentagon to build 179 airborne tankers, got a $124 million refund from the IRS last year.
6)      Valero Energy, the 25th largest company in America with $68 billion in sales last year received a $157 million tax refund check from the IRS and, over the past three years, it received a $134 million tax break from the oil and gas manufacturing tax deduction.
7)      Goldman Sachs in 2008 only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department.
8)      Citigroup last year made more than $4 billion in profits but paid no federal income taxes. It received a $2.5 trillion bailout from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury.
9)      ConocoPhillips, the fifth largest oil company in the United States, made $16 billion in profits from 2007 through 2009, but received $451 million in tax breaks through the oil and gas manufacturing deduction.
10)  Over the past five years, Carnival Cruise Lines made more than $11 billion in profits, but its federal income tax rate during those years was just 1.1 percent.

The video below is a compilation of taxpayers wanting to know why they pay their share, and many corporations don't. Some nice suggestions about how we can share the video and make people more aware of what this country has become. If enough people can make these points, maybe we will hear less of this obscene shit about how teachers need to take a pay cut to balance the budget.

Because, sweetheart, if we don't push back, it will only get worse. 

Remembering Triangle Shirtwaist

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire was 100 years ago. Dozens of young women and girls died because of managers who didn't give a shit about workers' personal well-being. Seems that not so much has really changed.

The video below offers a heart-wrenching summary of what happened that day in New York, why unions were soon after able to push through some basic improvements for workers, and why the same and simliar tragedies have repeated themselves in outsourced factories overseas.

Too many people are willing to let the gains made in the last two or three generations slip away. Or more accurately, be taken from us by a coalition of an overclass, a large and breathtakingly misinformed swath of the electorate, and the Republican Party they support. An ineffective and ambivalent Democratic Party completes the picture

Watch this video and remember that unions created the middle class. Some Republicans, especially these new shits elected by teabaggers, are determined to strip away what made the middle class possible; minimum wages, pensions, child labor laws, social security, and more.

They want to take us back to the days and the working conditions of Triangle Shirtwaist.

The Results of Wage Suppression

Negligible wage growth for most Americans has been an underreported feature of our political economy for an entire generation. This is as corporate America has wanted it, not because they don't want Americans in general to have higher incomes, but because they care first and foremost about their bottom line. That may seem normal to Americans who grew up in a post-Reagan society, but the result is that corporations have come to dominate policy, and economic ideology, as never before. What is best for citizens, families, and communities need not concern the corporation or the investor class.

We are now seeing the results of 30+ years of wage suppression and the gigantic growth in inequality that was inevitable. In a very recent study by The Economic Policy Institute, Lawrence Mishel reveals just how little workers have benefited from decades of substantial productivity growth:

Over the last 30 years there has been very modest wage growth for the typical worker. This is not because the economy was weak and employers were strapped for cash or profits. The economy enjoyed soaring productivity between 1980 and 2009. The Figure compares median wage growth over that period to average gross domestic product growth per worker, a measure of what each individual worker, on average, contributed to the overall economy. This is equivalent to the growth of income per worker as well. While average income per worker grew 59.0%, median wages grew by just 11.2%. Over this same period the amount of wealth (household assets less liabilities) per worker grew by 63.7%. 

What we usually hear and read is the ignorant and asinine contention that unions and public sector workers are to blame for deficits, poor productivity, and slow growth.  This is a nauseatingly stupid position, and it figures that teabaggers would get behind it. In reality, wage growth has never been a policy goal for most politicians. As Mishel writes, "The focus instead has been on policies that claimed to make consumers better off through lower prices: deregulation of industries, privatization of public services, the weakening of labor standards such as the minimum wage, erosion of the social safety net, expanding globalization, and the move toward fewer and weaker unions."

Below is a graph taken from Mishel's paper. It shows as much as any single graph could as to why so Americans are hurting, despite working longer hours even as they fall into debt. The benefits of all that toil, investment, education, and innovation are not accruing to the middle class, but to upper management and the investor class. (Interestingly enough, the graph shows a distinct, recent uptick in both private and public sectors, even as productivity continues to climb. When was that? After Obama took office. No wonder Republicans hate facts).

In a nutshell, the gap in recent decades means that working- and middle-class incomes have not kept up with corporate America's ability to pay them. Workers' incomes would be significantly higher, but our overclass is pocketing the difference. 

Those outsized bonuses gotta come from somewhere. 

The Party of Distraction

Bill Maher nails 'em again.

When you go down the list of useless distractions that make up the Republican party agenda -- public unions, Sharia law, anchor babies, the mosque at Ground Zero, ACORN, National Public Radio, the war on Christmas, the new Black Panthers, Planned Parenthood, Michelle Obama's war on dessert...you realize that the reason nothing gets done in America is that one of the political parties puts so much [energy] into fantasy problems than real ones...

Distractions indeed; Republicans have nothing to say about Wall Street recklessness, income inequalitiy, homelessness, jobs, our crumbling infrastructure, or any substantive improvement in our deeply dysfunctional health care system.

There's more, so watch the whole segment.






And if you think Repubicans want to get government off your back, have a look at what they want the IRS to do.

Deficits, Health Care, and Willful Ignorance

Paul Krugman recently published an article in the New York Times in which he bemoans the inane level of discourse on the budget deficit as well as our out of control health care system.

Krugman writes,

According to a column in Kaiser Health News, Republican staffers jeered at any and all proposals to use Medicare and Medicaid funds better. Spending money on prevention was no more than a 'slush fund.' Research on innovation was 'an oxymoron.' And there was no reason to pay for "so-called effectiveness research."

Damn; Republicans are no longer even trying. They say nothing, offer nothing, that even pretends to be serious.

But today’s Republicans just aren’t into rationality. They claim to care deeply about deficits — but they’ve spent the past two years putting cynical, demagogic attacks on any attempt to actually deal with long-run deficits at the heart of their campaign strategy.

Here’s a recent example. In his new book, Mike Huckabee — the current leader in polls asking Republicans whom they want to nominate in 2012 — attacks the Obama stimulus because it included funds for, yes, comparative effectiveness research: “The stimulus didn’t just waste your money; it planted the seeds from which the poisonous tree of death panels will grow.” Will others in the G.O.P. stand up and say that Mr. Huckabee is wrong, that Medicare needs to know which medical procedures actually work? Don’t hold your breath.

Note the reference to comparative effectiveness research. That means we spend a little to look closer at what other countries are doing, the ones that offer care that is better, universal, and less expensive. But this is what Mike Huckabee ridicules.

Really, Mike? Do your really want Americans to remain uninformed and not know just how dysfunctional our health care really is? Most analyses of health care that make it to our mainstream media are incredibly vapid. In particular, they almost never explore in any depth why universal health care in other countries works well, contains costs, and is so popular. Ask yourself why the public in Europe, Canada, or Japan does not demand their governments adopt the US system. 

I have embedded a PDF below that offers a comparative analysis of the US health care system and those of several other industrialized nations. This is just one of several. The others I will post in due time.



1400_Davis_Mirror_Mirror_on_the_wall_2010


I hope this link and embedded PDF stuff works OK. I am using docstoc.com for this. Seems to be working, hope it stays working. Readers can let me know if the above PDF does not work. Note the text is a bit small, but you can click to open to full screen.

Alternatively, you can click here to view via Google docs.

Public Pension Idiocy

There is lots of huff and puff about how unfunded public pension obligations will bankrupt us all. Funny how we always have the money for banks, war, and tax cuts for the wealthy, but funding retirement for civil servants? Well, they don't deserve it anyway.

It's all horseshit. Paul Krugman has addressed the "truth about pensions." He references an excellent pdf from Dean Baker:

Dean Baker has a deeply enlightening analysis of state pension shortfalls (pdf), containing a lot of stuff I didn’t know. The basic moral is that the official story these days — of years and years of huge giveaways to unions, resulting in gigantic, unpayable debts — is just wrong: to a very large extent, the pension shortfall has emerged just since 2007, thanks to the financial crisis, and even then it’s not nearly as big relative to future state incomes as widely imagined. Here’s a key figure:

It puts an entirely different light on the situation. Whaddya know, we’re being sold a bill of goods.

Dean Baker's work has also caught the attention of Mike Elk, who also cites the work of Keith Brainard, research director of the National Association of State Retirement Administrators (NASRA). Specifically, Brainard has debunked the meme, shamelessly promoted by teabaggers and other assorted Republicans, that we gotta gut those public unions 'cause America just can't afford a middle class.