The super-rich team tries to convince us that all is well with America’s economy. Because to them, it’s all a game and the middle-class keeps losing.
On January 26, 2015, Paul Buchheit writes on Nation Of Change:
Just 10 percent of Americans own 91 percent of the nation’s stocks and mutual funds, according to economist Edward Wolff (Table 7). Most of the remainder is held by a “middle class” that is steadily losing ground. The bottom 60 percent is almost entirely shut out (Table 2).
Stock owners, some of whom made billions of dollars last year, can defer their income taxes indefinitely, pay a reduced capital gains tax when they decide to cash in, or pass on the capital gains tax-free to their heirs.
Making money is all a game to the super-rich — redistribution toward the top, trickle-down delusions, tax avoidance, and even, for some of them, dabbling in criminal activities. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) once said, “It’s really American to avoid paying taxes, legally…It’s a game we play…I see nothing wrong with playing the game because we set it up to be a game.” Here’s part of their game plan:
Blitz
$2 of every $5 owned today was created in the last five years, most of it from the financial markets, and almost all of it going to the richest 10 percent.
Unfathomably, the richest 1 percent took anywhere from 95 percent to 116 percent of the new income gains after the recession. Yes, 116 percent, because almost everyone else went backwards. Median wealth dropped about 40 percent from 2007 to 2013.
Taunting
JP Morgan CEO Jaime Dimon said, “I am not embarrassed to be a banker.” On the contrary, he and his banking buddies can sit back and gloat, knowing that not a single Wall Street banker has been prosecuted for the financial collapse, and that the little fines they pay for their misconduct simply amount to the cost of doing business.
Their crimes include faulty mortgages, lying to the U.S. Senate, andconspiring to hide billions of dollars of trading losses from regulators. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission used variations of the word ‘fraud’ over 150 times in describing the buildup to the crisis.
Piling On
The superrich team tries to convince us that all is well. From the Wall Street Journal: The U.S. economy is on a tear. From a Moody’s analyst: Our economy is firing on most cylinders. And from President Obama himself:Tonight, we turn the page.
People with stocks are happy, but the news is a lot different for middle America, which has seen its pay drop a stunning 23 percent since 2009, and its median wealth plummet by about 40 percent.
Holding
Even though corporate profits are at their highest level in 85 years, corporations aren’t pumping it back into the economy. Instead they’reholding it. S&P companies last year spent an incredible 95% of their profits on stock buybacks to enrich executives and shareholders.
Meanwhile, as the rest of us dutifully pay our taxes, we get blind-sided by wealthy individuals and corporations who defer their taxes, stash income intax havens, enjoy a special capital gains tax rate, invest their money intax-free foundations, or simply don’t pay. Boeing, Ford, Chevron, Citigroup, Verizon, JP Morgan, and General Motors, with a combined income last year of $74 billion, paid no taxes, and instead received a combined refund of nearly $2 billion.
And the Middle Class Keeps Losing
This is the middle class of a nation in which over half of public school students are poor enough to qualify for lunch subsidies.
It is a middle class so poor that almost two-thirds of polled Americans said they didn’t have enough money to cover a $500 repair bill or a $1,000 emergency room visit.
The only hope of the middle class may be for someone like Elizabeth Warren to lead it against the team of Wall Street bankers who keep winning year after year.
http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/01/26/super-bowl-rich-upper-class-91-middle-class-9/
Daily you read assessments of the truth about the deteriorating state of the economy, including numerous problem-defining articles by Paul Buchheit and other economists. Yet, you virtually NEVER see these economists offering up any REAL solutions that would reverse income and wealth ownership inequality and put us on the path to inclusive prosperity, inclusive opportunity, and inclusive economic justice. It is always just the same old problem-defining writings. Unbelievably, they NEVER turn their brains on to realize that their own problem-defining writings suggest the inherently obvious solutions––that the reason the rich are rich is because they OWN wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets and the American majority to not to any significant degree, and because the system is rigged to empower the 1 percent to continually acquire more and more capital ownership, while the vast majority of Americans struggle daily, weekly, and monthly to earn wages to pay for basic necessities of living as individuals and as providers of families.
These economist-critics should KNOW the solutions that will REALLY reform the system and abate further concentration of capital ownership, but when they do speak of solutions, which is hardly ever, they ONLY resort to wealth redistributive policies, which are the essence of socialism and undermine our nation’s founding principles of individual strength through private property capital ownership whereby citizens would become empowered as owners to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens.
I have made it a practice to continuously comment on these conventional economists’ writings, always pointing to the obvious––if you want to solve income and wealth inequality then the system needs to be reformed to empower EVERY child, woman, and man to acquire wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets simultaneously with the growth of the economy, thereby creating new capital owners and “customers with money” to drive the growth of an economy that can support general affluence for EVERY citizen. It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption that is the problem in the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being.
The HOW to achieve this objective is to support and implement the following:
Support the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-basic-principles-of-economic-and-social-justice-by-norman-g-kurland/, http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/jtw-graphicoverview-2013.pdf and http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-a-new-vision-for-providing-hope-justice-and-economic-empowerment/.
Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/. See http://cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ and http://cesj.org/…/uploads/Free/capitalhomesteading-s.pdf.
Support the Unite America Party Platform, published by The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/platform-of-the-unite-ame_b_5474077.html as well as Nation Of Change at http://www.nationofchange.org/platform-unite-america-party-1402409962 and OpEd News at http://www.opednews.com/articles/Platform-of-the-Unite-Amer-by-Gary-Reber-Party-Leadership_Party-Platforms-DNC_Party-Platforms-GOP-RNC_Party-Politics-Democratic-140630-60.html.
