Cross-posted from And The Horse You Rode In On
One reason politicians and corporations find it easy to screw the rest of us is that nobody has ever liked reading about numbers except Carl Sagan, and he’s dead.
Thus, in 2004, when the numbers clearly showed that the Bush tax cuts were diddling most of the people in the red states, the victims just took Karl Rove’s word for it that the tax cuts were helping everyone and stimulating the economy. They re-elected Bush to spend four more years giving their hard-earned money to the richest people in America and piling up debts that our grandchildren will be strugging to pay off.
If you tried, as I did, to explain that to people who were voting for Bush, they would just get angry.
Nobody likes to hear he’s been played for a patsy.
But the numbers keep rolling in. Circuit City recently announced that they are laying off 3,500 of their higher-earning people (ie., just above the poverty line) to have their jobs done by newer, lower-paid people (just below the poverty line). Those "higher paid" people had the nerve to cart off $17 and $18 an hour. WalMart is doing the same but glossing it over with self-glorifying TV commercials.
Meanwhile, even the government’s own figures show that the top one percent of Americans (whose incomes exceed $348,000 and average $1.1 million a year) are getting 22% of the nation’s personal income. In 2005 their incomes rose 14% while incomes for the rest of us (the bottom 90%) fell by 0.6%.
The top earners also got most of the Bush tax breaks.
The top 10% of earners took home half of the wages. For the bottom half (let them eat cake) average incomes slipped a bit in 2005 and, in fact, have not budged since Bush took office. Healthcare insurance costs have budged, though, and gasoline prices. And incomes of the rich have soared.
In the 1960s, corporate CEOs were getting paid roughly 60 times as much as the average workers in their companies. That was bad enough, but now they’re getting over 500 times the average. They "earn" the big bucks by figuring out ways to scuttle pensions and healthcare benefits and to fire people like the Circuit City and WalMart employees who had the audacity to work their way up almost to a living wage.
Yes, the cost squeezes of globalization play a role and, yes, there’s always a wealth gap. But under Republicans and their imbedded corporate lobbyists, it has reached extremes not seen since 1929.
Yes, 1929. Remember what happened next?
The time before that was in the early 1900s, the age of the robber barons. It took Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting and the rise of the American labor movement to correct those extremes.
What on earth will it take this time?