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What A Difference A Decade Makes On Income Inequality (Demo)

http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/28/10529015-what-a-difference-a-decade-makes-on-income-inequality

Republicans used to care about income equality. You can tell from this long-lost article by then Senator Rick Santorum:

“Despite a strong economy through the 1990s, the gap between the rich and the poor expanded. Among Americans who reach age seventy, the top ten percent own more wealth than the bottom ninety percent. How do we address this inequity? […]

Initiatives that encourage individual wealth creation are imperative to closing the gap between the rich and the poor. I believe the government can play a role in helping many Americans who struggle to enter the economic mainstream.”

maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com

For much of the Obama era, issues such as income inequality have been deemed largely off limits by the right.
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  • 107 people like this.
    • Charles BeanSimply put, he is playing his campaign to a certain few, in no way can he represent the majority!

      7 minutes ago ·
    • Todd Morris‎”Dumbo Ears” … this coming from the real life inspiration for Napoleon Dynamites older brother ‘Kip’.

      7 minutes ago ·
    • Gary Reber This is certainly a “big picture” statement, which is absolutely true. I hope that Rick Santorum and other presidential candidates, as well as President Obama are up for a revolutionary national discussion. What we really need in this 2012 presidential election year is a national discussion on the topic of the importance of capital ownership and how we can expand the base of private capital ownership simultaneously with the creation of new capital formation, with the aim of building long-term financial security for all Americans through accumulating a viable capital estate.We need a recognition in America that we should deliberately begin to broaden the capital ownership base in a way that is consistent with the laws of property and the Constitutional safeguards of the rights of men and women to own property and be productive.
      What needs to be adjusted is the opportunity to produce, not the redistribution of income after it is produced.We need to arrive at a new market economy structure in which on one level the employees of a corporation could walk into management and demand, in collective bargaining, the use of an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP)—not just to trade a single block of stock for wage concessions, but to redesign the future of the company and its employees. We need, as a society, the assurance that as a corporate employer grows, it builds ownership into its employees. All of them! When people are in a position to earn the wages of their capital as well as the wages of their labor, their company is in a position to be more competitive through lower labor costs and increased technological innovation, while achieving higher employee incomes through the employee’ capital.Once this goal becomes the national political focus we will see an unbelievable discussion of workable plans to realize the goal. Remember that planning begins with a vision and a goal. This is not rocket science but it does require national leadership. Implementation requires amending a few laws that basically authorize the transactions that will broaden capital ownership paid for with the future earnings of capital investment. Allowing such transactions will provide incentives for profitable opportunities to employ unused capacity and promote stable economic growth.

      Still, after a half-century, we have no leaders with a growth strategy that could restore the economic productiveness of the American economy. The growth strategy I have presented is not new, but it has not yet registered in the minds of leaderless politicians and their advisers from the left to the right of the political spectrum and a population of people who have been mis-educated and mis-led by conventional economists from all the conventional schools of economics.

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