Wealth, and the Media's Portrayal that Austerity is the ONLY Choice

[liberalmike27]

http://www.alternet.org/story/149918/9_pictures_that_expose_this_country%27s_obscene_division_of_wealth?akid=6540.225373.qz8PJt&rd=1&t=2

Isn't it disgusting how they are portraying all of this on most of the media, MSNBC perhaps being the only exception. They keep acting like there is no other option to cover the shortfall. How about repealing the tax cuts to Wal*Mart for one. Do you really think they aren't going to locate there?

I post this article just to show people how rich, the rich are. Seriously, 20-30,000 dollar a night hotel rooms, huge mansions, not just one but multiple super-expensive cares. There is money, bou-coup bucks just welling up into pockets out there, while others are demanded they pay thousands more, directly out of their checks. "We must take cuts," "It's our only choice," they say.

Everyone should leaf through these easily read pages about income and wealth. During the 1929 depression, the people became so upset with the wealth that they weren't safe on the streets. Many who owned the great mansions were in such fear that they rightly donated their mansions to be used more properly as shelter for orphans and such. We need not admiration for this kind of wealth, but disdain and hatred.

Wealth pooling in society is like Gout, it needs to be drained, healed, redistributed to the masses by jobs. It's obvious, it's not what they want to do, just like they don't want to pay back the 2.6 Trillion dollars they've borrowed from SS. But when wealth and income is so vastly maldistributed in society, then not only is redistribution not a bad thing, it is entirely necessary.

[hedgehog]

1. kick

[vonarrow]

2. They Constantly and Shamelessly Promote the Evil Lie That Soc. Sec. Must Be Cut!

Budget Baloney (1): Why Social Security Isn’t a Problem for 26 Years, and the Best Way to Fix It Permanently
http://robertreich.org/post/3331762717
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican presidential hopeful, says in order to “save” Social Security the retirement age should be raised. The media are congratulating him for his putative “courage.” Deficit hawks are proclaiming Social Security one of the big entitlements that has to be cut in order to reduce the budget deficit.

This is all baloney.

In a former life I was a trustee of the Social Security trust fund. So let me set the record straight.

Social Security isn’t responsible for the federal deficit. Just the opposite. Until last year Social Security took in more payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits. It lent the surpluses to the rest of the government.

Now that Social Security has started to pay out more than it takes in, Social Security can simply collect what the rest of the government owes it. This will keep it fully solvent for the next 26 years.

But why should there even be a problem 26 years from now? Back in 1983, Alan Greenspan’s Social Security commission was supposed to have fixed the system for good – by gradually increasing payroll taxes and raising the retirement age. (Early boomers like me can start collecting full benefits at age 66; late boomers born after 1960 will have to wait until they’re 67.)

Greenspan’s commission must have failed to predict something. But what? It fairly accurately predicted how quickly the boomers would age. It had a pretty good idea of how fast the US economy would grow. While it underestimated how many immigrants would be coming into the United States, that’s no problem. To the contrary, most new immigrants are young and their payroll-tax contributions will far exceed what they draw from Social Security for decades.

So what did Greenspan’s commission fail to see coming?

Inequality.

Remember, the Social Security payroll tax applies only to earnings up to a certain ceiling. (That ceiling is now $106,800.) The ceiling rises every year according to a formula roughly matching inflation.

Back in 1983, the ceiling was set so the Social Security payroll tax would hit 90 percent of all wages covered by Social Security. That 90 percent figure was built into the Greenspan Commission’s fixes. The Commission assumed that, as the ceiling rose with inflation, the Social Security payroll tax would continue to hit 90 percent of total income.

Today, though, the Social Security payroll tax hits only about 84 percent of total income.

It went from 90 percent to 84 percent because a larger and larger portion of total income has gone to the top. In 1983, the richest 1 percent of Americans got 11.6 percent of total income. Today the top 1 percent takes in more than 20 percent.

If we want to go back to 90 percent, the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security tax would need to be raised to $180,000.

Presto. Social Security’s long-term (beyond 26 years from now) problem would be solved.

So there’s no reason even to consider reducing Social Security benefits or raising the age of eligibility. The logical response to the increasing concentration of income at the top is simply to raise the ceiling.

Not incidentally, several months ago the White House considered proposing that the ceiling be lifted to $180,000. Somehow, though, that proposal didn’t make it into the President’s budget.

[liberalmike27]

5. That was a great article

The Republicans had a great long-term plan. I've never been quite sure when it was kicked off--most would probably say during the Reagan years, and surely it has been set into overdrive in the last 32 years. But you could go back to the Kennedy tax cuts in 1963-64, or even further back in time to the McCarthy hearings. In those, they pretty much began to look at anyone who looked to find better benefits for working people as communists.

But their little sinewy tactics have invaded every crevace of our being, of our congress. Education is so bad, people can't see what they are really up to, the promotion of prejudices and hatreds work to their advantage. They destroyed the last chance of media equality when they got rid of the fairness doctrine in our media in the mid-late eighties. Globalization is pretty much a union busting strategy, it starved the government of much needed taxes, thus accepting it without question (which is insane on the face of it, but no media even questioned it much) has created all of these government crises at all levels.

I did a rough calculation of 25 million jobs federal, social security, and sales taxes lost the other day, and based on an average salary of about 42,000 dollars a year, I came up with about a half-trillion a year. And that was with no multiplier effect, of other jobs created, had we still kept said jobs, with a tariff structure to aim for closer to a full-employment society.

Of course unions contribute mostly to democrats, so they were destroyed. Unions never had the power of corporations, but now it's almost laughable when con-servatives throw out unions as a countervailing force to corporate donations. It's just silly, and now with the public sector under attack, they are trying to destroy those tactics.

Then there are the 20 or so think-tanks, brought into power to strategize, some even having their own little studios to put their pundits out there. They give conservative writers comfy little sinecures, huge bonuses to write books trying to dissect and demonize FDRs policies.

It's complete and thought-out. Democrats now need corporate money so badly they are afraid to even make the case. Now there are 3 Senators, Democrats, who are retiring, as they see fighting against the tsunami of money nearly futile, fighting against a media that is almost collectively completely overtaken by corporate power.

But at least a glimmer of hope still exists in these protests in Wisconsin, Michigan, and other places. At least it seems Republicans might have finally reached the edge of that envelope they've been pushing for decades, even over half a century. But it's so weak now, so trampled, so shot full of holes I just don't know if David is powerful enough to go against the many Giants now in place to stop him.

[xchrom]

3. Our leadership is part of the echo chamber as well.

As much as I dislike Clinton at least he said his class needed a tax hike.

[liberalmike27]

4. Yep

You can name the good, democratic things Clinton did on one hand, pretty much.

Obama has turned into a disappointment, modeling himself after the Clintons. I'd have voted for Hillary if I'd wanted that.