GOP voters: suckers for tax cuts.
Fri Jul 28, 2006 at 06:29:12 PM PDT
Man, you guys are suckers. You hear 'tax cut' and drool all the way to the voting booth. Meanwhile the GOP uses your tax-cut blinders to screw you and just about every other working stiff. You dream of some day having enough of an estate to have to worry about the estate tax. The super rich thank you, knowing that your dreams are their ticket to
an American aristocracy:
Meanwhile, government policy is explicitly aimed at accelerating the income distortions. "In 2006, the average tax cut for households with incomes of more than $1 million -- the top two-tenths of 1 percent -- is $112,000 which works out to a boost of 5.7 percent in after tax income. That's considerably higher than the 5 percent boost garnered by the top 1 percent. It's far greater than the 2.5 percent increase of the middle fifth of households, and fully 19 times greater than the 0.3 percent gain of the poorest fifth of households." You'd think, given the the trends, the government would be using the tax code to smooth out the inequality. Instead, they're giving it a helping hand.
(cross posted at
Lutton Square)
Next up, of course, is the effort to cut the estate tax. But don't object, o' Democrats, lest you be accused of class warfare which, as we know, only happens when the middle class wants their wages to keep up with productivity, as they did in the last generation. Had those trends continued, the median income would now be in the $60,000s, not the $40,000s. Instead, the top 1 percent accounted for 33.4 percent of total net worth in 2004, while the bottom 50 percent commanded 2.5 percent. Yes, you read that right.
Meanwhile, if you work for a living, there's a strong likelyhood that--in real dollars--you're earning less now than three years ago, thanks to that booming economy that's earning corporations billions, and CEOs millions:
the new Employment Cost Index from the Bureau of Labor shows compensation falling behind inflation, which means that, in real terms, workers are making less money this year than they did last year. Indeed, according to new revisions from the GDP report, the average workers has lost 1.2 percent of his real income a year between 2003 and 2005. So here's your awesome economy: Most Americans are getting poorer.
So please, for the sake of fiscal sanity, take a look at the real numbers--yours, mine, your coworkers, your blog mates, your parents, your kids, etc--and stop ignoring the facts. Stop being suckers for tax cuts that foster the wealth concentration of the super rich. Stop dreaming of the day you'll worry about the estate tax and start worrying about the day the bill for GOPs fiscal madness comes due.
From 2003 to 2004, real average income for the top 1 percent of households shot up by 17 percent. For the remaining 99 percent, the average gain was under three percent. Indeed, the top one percent accumulated 36 percent of all income increases in 2004, a six percent increase from 2003.
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the media trumpets the growth, the politicians backslap over the roaring economy, and everyone wonders why the average American seems so unhappy. Meanwhile, the media rarely mentions data showing that incomes for the bottom 60 percent have grown by merely 20 percent in the last 30 years -- with nearly all those gains coming during the mid-90's. Indeed, this sort of economic concentration hasn't existed since 1929 -- hardly a golden period in American life.
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