(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
How to save $1.3 trillion a year, get healthcare reform, and lose weight doing it
Michael Lemke, Special Interests Examiner – Sept 3, 2009
Ending the Bush tax cut for the top 1% would save $132 billion next year alone.
While the rich have been getting richer at a staggering rate both under Clinton and under Bush, the lower 80% of US households have been stagnating or getting poorer. We have reach the highest level of income inequality in US history, surpassing even the obscene levels of the late 1920s.
http://www.examiner.com/x-1908…
Well, that’s one sure fire way to help pay for Health Care —
Repeal the Bush Give-Away to the Top 1%, or just let them sunset, as the legislation requires!
January 1, 2011, is one Sunset, that can’t come soon enough!
George W. Bush and the GOP did a lot for to America, in their 8 years of unquestioned Republican rule — and America is still dealing with the aftermath of that Circus.
Perhaps tops on the list of tricks, is the reckless Tax Cut rollback that strongly favored the Wealthiest among us — those the most Needy Deserving in their minds, apparently? W’s unfunded give-away turned a Multi-Trillion Dollar Surplus, into a Multi-Trillion Dollar Deficit … Talk about “fuzzy math”!
Mission Accomplished, GOP! (nice use of Congressional Reconciliation process, too!)
Income Inequality Is At An All-Time High: STUDY
Huffington Post – 09-14-09
Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez.
[…]
This trend, according to Saez, only accelerated during the George W. Bush’s tenure as President:“…while the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew at a solid pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993-2000, these incomes grew only 1.3 percent per year from 2002-2007. As a result, in the economic expansion of 2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…
If GOP had their way, No Workers would ever get ahead! In their world its only Corporations and their Interests that matter — Helping regular People is just NOT in their Political Playbook.
Tax Returns: A Comprehensive Assessment of the Bush Administration’s Record on Cutting Taxes
By Joel Friedman and Isaac Shapiro — April 23, 2004
This analysis offers a comprehensive review of the Bush Administration’s tax cuts. […] analyses by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center and fresh cost estimates by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The early returns on the effects of the tax cuts have not been good.
— The Bush tax cuts have contributed to revenues dropping in 2004 to the lowest level as a share of the economy since 1950, and have been a major contributor to the dramatic shift from large projected budget surpluses to projected deficits as far as the eye can see.
— The tax cuts have conferred the most benefits, by far, on the highest-income households — those least in need of additional resources — at a time when income already is exceptionally concentrated at the top of the income spectrum.
— The design of these tax cuts was ill-conceived, resulting in significantly less economic stimulus than could have been accomplished for the same budgetary cost.
[…]Over the next 10 years [from 2004], total tax-cut costs will equal $3.9 trillion
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index….
Good thing we had an election last year, to finally start to reel in the GOP’s “Midnite Madness”, Going-out-of-Business fire-sale, before they gave away the entire store! … at bargain basement prices, to their best friends and business buddies.
If we keep up the GOP’s “business as usual” policies, we may end up with the Top 10% of the Wealthy owning everything — instead of only HALF OF EVERYTHING, like they do now:
Striking it Richer:
The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States
(Update with 2007 estimates)
Emmanuel Saez, August 5, 2009
Figure 1 presents the income share of the top decile from 1917 to 2007 in the United States. In 2007, the top decile includes all families with market income above $109,600.
The overall pattern of the top decile share over the century is U-shaped. The share of the top decile is around 45 percent from the mid-1920s to 1940. It declines substantially to just above 32.5 percent in four years during World War II and stays fairly stable around 33 percent until the 1970s.
Such an abrupt decline, concentrated exactly during the war years, cannot easily be reconciled with slow technological changes and suggests instead that the shock of the war played a key and lasting role in shaping income concentration in the United States.
After decades of stability in the post-war period, the top decile share has increased dramatically over the last twenty-five years and has now regained its pre-war level. Indeed, the top decile share in 2007 is equal to 49.7 percent, a level higher than any other year since 1917 and even surpasses 1928, the peak of stock market bubble in the “roaring” 1920s.
Figure 2 decomposes the top decile into
the top percentile (families with income above $398,900 in 2007)
and the next 4 percent (families with income between $155,400 and $398,900 in 2006),
and the bottom half of the top decile (families with income between $109,600 and $155,400 in 2006).
Interestingly, most of the fluctuations of the top decile are due to fluctuations within the top percentile.
The drop in the next two groups during World War II is far less dramatic, and they recover from the WWII shock relatively quickly. Finally, their shares do not increase much during the recent decades.
In contrast, the top percentile has gone through enormous fluctuations along the course of the twentieth century, from about 18 percent before WWI, to a peak to almost 24 percent in the late 1920s, to only about 9 percent during the 1960s-1970s, and back to almost 23.5 percent by 2007.
Those at the very top of the income distribution therefore play a central role in the evolution of U.S. inequality over the course of the twentieth century.
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/99…
Notice: how those Trendlines for the Wealthiest 10%, fared in the last decade. No wonder the GOP is SO worried about protecting “their base”!
While the bottom 99% (ie the rest-of-us) saw “our wealth” go from a 2.7% annual growth rate in 90’s, to a miserly rate of 1.3% per year in the 00’s. That’ll keep up with the 20% annual increases in Insurance Premiums — NOT!
The GOP has never met a Tax Cut they didn’t like, afterall their “kick-the-can-Accounting” worked out so well in the last decade, for all the American Economy, hasn’t it? … There’s Economic Growth booming Everywhere — NOT!!
Good thing, in America:
‘We don’t tolerate NO Class Warfare’, and
‘We don’t tolerate NO Socialist programs’ — (except for the Wealthy, of course.)
Because it kind of looks like that Class Warfare battle is finally over with!
Three guesses who won?
The American People perhaps? — NOT!!!
Hmmmm … I wonder whatever happened to that “rising tide” Reagan promised?
It must of “went out” to sea, for the rest of us, never to return, eh?
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Tips for the “rest of us”
finally!