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neo- liberal an Larry Summers takes a populist turn:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/op...sing.html?_r=1
The Typical Household, Now Worth a Third Less
The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline,
according to a studyfinanced by the Russell Sage Foundation. Those are the figures for a household at the median point in the wealth distribution — the level at which there are an equal number of households whose worth is higher and lower. But during the same period, the net worth of wealthy households increased substantially.
The Russell Sage study also examined net worth at the 95th percentile. (For households at that level, 94 percent of the population had less wealth and 4 percent had more.)
It found that for this well-do-do slice of the population, household net worth increased 14 percent over the same 10 years. Other research, by economists like Edward Wolff at New York University, has shown even greater gains in wealth for the richest 1 percent of households.
For households at the median level of net worth, much of the damage has occurred since the start of the last recession in 2007. Until then, net worth had been rising for the typical household, although at a slower pace than for households in higher wealth brackets.
But much of the gain for many typical households came from the rising value of their homes. Exclude that housing wealth and the picture is worse: Median net worth began to decline even earlier.
“The housing bubble basically hid a trend of declining financial wealth at the median that began in 2001,” said Fabian T. Pfeffer, the University of Michigan professor who is lead author of the Russell Sage Foundation study.
The reasons for these declines are complex and controversial, but one point seems clear: When only a few people are winning and more than half the population is losing, surely something is amiss.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/07/27...less.html?_r=0
neo- liberal an Larry Summers takes a populist turn:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/op...sing.html?_r=1
The pile that he helped create is too big now.
Repugs love piles when the 99% are underneath, so Repugs will OBSTRUCT any digging out of the 99%.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 03-09-2015 at 07:22 PM.
You can’t rent a one-bedroom apartment anywhere in America on a minimum-wage job
Hours needed at minimum wage to afford a one-bedroom apartment (National Low-Income Housing Coalition)
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/05/you-...e+Raw+Story%29
5 Lies Paul Ryan Needs You To Believe About Poverty
The prophet George Carlin said,
“Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest.
As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money.”
1. The “War on Poverty” didn’t work.
This lie is so invidious even some conservative writers have started pushing back against the idea that government spending hasn’t made a dent in poverty. But it’s the basic premise of Ryan’s attack on our safety net and it’s been repeated recently by GOP presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee.
Conservatives compulsively ignore that many measures of poverty are taken before adding government aid into the equation. A new study shows that government programs are even more effective than previously thought at keeping Americans out of poverty. In 2012 alone, we lifted 48 million of our neighbors out of extreme need with the safety net.
The idea that the War on Poverty doesn’t work should be most offensive to seniors.
By any measure, we’ve cut the percentage of elderly Americans living in poverty by more than half since Lyndon Johnson declared the War on Poverty some 50 years ago. And they are the only group that didn’t see a e into poverty due to the Great Recession.
Ironically, seniors are now the core of the GOP’s political power in America, and the only reason Republicans are able to pursue savage cuts to the stability we’ve created for our grandmothers and grandfathers.
2. The poor are lazy.
This is the true gospel of the right. It’s how they justify opposing every government program including Medicaid expansion, which only helps Americans who earn too much to qualify for regular Medicaid. And it’s built entirely on a misunderstanding of who the poor are.
Demos’ Matt Bruenig looked at census data and found that the vast majority of the poor in America are children, the elderly, the disabled, and students.
Sadly, 20 percent or so are working poor who would likely be pushed out of poverty if the minimum wage were raised.
Ah, what about the “Rest”? They sound lazy! They must be the shiftless hammock dwellers whose main goal in life is to suckle at the taxpayer teat. Yeah. Notsomuch.
Bruenig found that the vast majority of them are occupied with “Caring” for children or another loved one. That leaves fewer than 1 out of 10 poor Americans as the sort of jobless moochers conservatives would like you to believe all poor Americans long to be.
3. Government help creates dependency.
Who ends up on welfare in America? About half of us. And of the 1 out of 2 Americans who gets government help, only 5 percent end up taking that help for 10 straight years.
“The idea of welfare dependence is an utter fabrication invented by rich Republicans to gut the social safety net,”Demos’ Sean McElwee wrote. “But this safety net has actually been incredibly effective. Which is why these rich Republicans want to get rid of it.”
Otherwise, we many not be able to afford the help we give to people who don’t need it so badly — like tax breaks for vacation homes, gluttonous business lunches, and private jets. Too bad the poor don’t enjoy such luxuries, or those too might become “hammocks.”
4. A lack of morals is the problem, not a lack of cash.
It’s always a little freaky when conservatives who don’t believe government can fix roads think it can fix “culture.” But this is the exact argument of the right whenever there’s an event like the riots in Baltimore that unearth the horrors of what it’s truly like to be poor in this country.
Crime is way down in America, as is teenage pregnancy and most other “immoral” behaviors that we measure, which makes you think the “morality” the right wants to see is a more theocratic and controlling government with more say in what women do with their bodies, and less of that “helping the poor” crap.
Bruenig points out that America has some of the worst poverty in the industrialized world for one simple reason: We spend less than the countries — like the Nordics — that have nearly eliminated poverty. “If you want serious anti-poverty policy that targets actual poverty,” he wrote, “and not stereotypes of it, then what you want is welfare-state expansions targeted at vulnerable populations.”
5. Cutting help to the poor will help the economy.
It hurts everyone when the poor don’t have the basic essentials to live.
“The societal cost of hunger, for example, is $167.5 billion per year as a result of factors such as lost economic productivity, the increased costs of poor educational outcomes, avoidable health care costs, and the increased costs of charitable assistance,” The Center for American Progress’ Joey Moes wrote in an analysis of Ryan’s 2012 budget.
Republican policies are especially bad for the poor. But they’re also bad for everyone else, except the very, very rich.
Still, Paul Ryan has done a lot to help poor people. For instance, he helped Mitt Romney lose.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/5-lies-r..._content=Final
and Europe socio/economic mobility is higher than USA's,
where most probably:
If you're born rich, you stay rich.
If you're born poor, you stay poor.
90% + of all growth in US income goes to the top 5%.
despite the record expansion during the Obama years and the putatively stellar US economy under Trump, food insecurity remains at levels higher than ten years ago.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/despite...elp-with-food/Food insecurity -- defined as not having enough food because of a lack of money or other resources -- is a daily problem for roughly one in eight Americans, statistics show. That rate remains higher than before the recession, when the numbers were slightly more than one in 10, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Men born into wealth stay rich. Rich women marry rich.
Some middle class women marry "new wealth" a.k.a athletes/musicians/reality stars which just ends up bankrupt anyway. Middle class men get divorced and their wealth is divided.
Increasingly people marry "for love", exotic taboos like interracial or just straight up stay single and live with roommates all their life.
Power couple are less frequent. Poland has half the poverty percentage as America because life is more simple & family based there. In the USA people gamble and just like casinos, you usually lose.
From 1990 to 2015, the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 births in most developed nations has been flat or dropping. In the U.S., the rate has risen sharply.1990 to 2015, the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 births in most developed nations has been flat or dropping. In the U.S., the rate has risen sharply.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-most-dangerous-place-to-give-birth-in-developed-world-usa-today-investigation-finds/
war, revolution or the plague:
https://www.economist.com/open-futur...tion-or-plague
revolution is out. The police/security/surveillance state is too strong.
And we see how LE and DHS Schustzstaffel will do anything they are ordered to do to Americans (job security rules,OK!), "like good Germans".
Look at the oil pipeline protests where LE from 6 states was recruited to counter, to make war on the protesters brutally, infiltrating the protestors' communications, etc.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 09-11-2018 at 12:34 PM.
sort of the origin story of how very rich people get away with not paying their fair share.
laws and taxes are for little people.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...?src=longreadsIf the bonds had been issued in Britain, there would have been a 4% tax on them, so Fraser formally issued them at Schiphol airport in the Netherlands. If the interest were to be paid in Britain, it would have attracted another tax, so Fraser arranged for it to be paid in Luxembourg. He managed to persuade the London Stock Exchange to list the bonds, despite their not being issued or redeemed in Britain, and talked around the central banks of France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Britain, all of which were rightly concerned about the eurobonds’ impact on currency controls. The final trick was to pretend that the borrower was Autostrade – the Italian state motorway company – when really it was IRI, a state holding company. If IRI had been the borrower, it would have had to deduct tax at source, while Autostrade did not have to.
The ulative effect of this game of jurisdictional Twister was that Fraser created a bond paying a good rate of interest, on which no one had to pay tax of any kind, and which could be turned back into cash anywhere. These were what are known as bearer bonds. Whoever possessed the bond owned them; there was no register of ownership or any obligation to record your holding, which was not written down anywhere.
As long as one country tolerated offshore, as Britain did, then the efforts of all the others came to nothing. If regulations stop at a country’s borders, but the money can flow wherever it wishes, its owners can outwit any regulators they choose.The developments that began with Warburg did not stop with simple eurobonds. The basic pattern was endlessly replicable. Identify a line of business that might make you and your clients money. Look around the world for a jurisdiction with the right rules for that business – Liechtenstein, the Cook Islands, Jersey – and use it as a nominal base.
If you couldn’t find a jurisdiction with the right kind of rules, then you threatened or flattered one until it changed its rules to accommodate you
workers got squeezed:
Bezos says the only way he can possibly spend all his money is to go into space.
He seems like a total prick, and the inhumane, slave-like conditions in his warehouses says he give no about his employees.
You'd also need to drop a Hamilton on a third Gofundme to outdo Bezos.
Wealthy people also don't marry down. Notice Jews stick to their own while preaching to the White middle class on how progressive it is to have chocolate babies.
You get the idea.
Dude is not a humanitarian.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Bezos besides his ownership of WaPo.
Ever heard of Amazon?
Why is that a reason to dislike him?
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Bezos besides his ownership of WaPo.
Ever heard of Amazon?
Why is that a reason to dislike him?
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Bezos besides his ownership of WaPo.
Ever heard of Amazon?
Do you use Amazon, bou? If so, protest by stop using it - don't contribute to his wealth.
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