Income Inequality, the Real Divide in this Country
Take a look at this chart.
The changes in this country regarding income inequality since 1980 are a direct consequence of the policies, acts, bills, and other actions created and taken, or not taken, by our representative government during the 1980 to present time period and some years prior.
Now we have Trump and the Billionaires, set up masterfully by current billionaire caretaker Obama, who are all ready to intensify the impoverishment of the working class and the violent suppression of popular opposition.
It's not hard to see there are a lot of people in this country doing quite well financially. The availability of cheap debt skews the appearance somewhat but the money is flowing to the top 20-40%. Big houses, new cars, packed shopping malls, packed stadiums, many millions are living the high life in the United States Empire. With a country of 330 million people, 20-40% totals out to 60 - 120 million people. That's a lot of people.
But the ones getting left behind in this runaway, ruling class engineered societal assault far outnumber those benefiting from these economic and political systems. And as the chart shows, the tilt toward the very top has reached Twilight Zone levels. Everything is going to the top.
One thing I've warned people for years, at least since the start of the 2007 recession when many of us realized why it was occurring, is that there has been absolutely nothing done by those we elect to stop or even slow down the insane trajectories, on the upside and downside, of income and wealth inequality in this country. On the contrary, everything our "representatives", and our two oligarchy political parties, do continues to be for the benefit of the rich. Everything has been facilitated through our political system.
Stardate 2017, Trump and The Billionaires take over. The Billionaire Class, the Ruling Class, the Ruling Elite have completely and utterly captured our system of government.
The question is, what are We the Serfs going to do about it? Or maybe better yet, IS there anything we can do about it?
Comments
"It's worse than we thought"
It doesn't look like it
It seems that those in the past had more of an ability to rebel or even call for revolution when things got too horrible to endure. Nowadays, the art of propaganda has been perfected, displacing workers without fellow workers caring or lulling people to sleep while they rob them from behind. There is a sense of learned helplessness here and around the world; that no matter what you do, things will always stay the same. How many times now have politicians campaigned on the idea of Washington being corrupt and greedy and they will be the ones to clean it up? It's almost laughable how many of these campaigns sound exactly the same. And then, of course, nothing changes.
What's even worse is that those at the top have manipulated and conned those below them to fight their wars for them, whether it is class warfare or actual invasions. Even if many on the bottom rise up in unison to fight against the stacked deck, they would fight many of their own neighbors who have been enlisted to fight against a better tomorrow.
*Attributed
The gap between the truly wealthy and the wealthless is so
great that the wealthy cannot imagine the lives many of us live. The ruling elite lacks the necessary expertise to rule.
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
That presupposes that they want to rule fairly
They are well qualified to continue to enrich themselves at least until the system falls apart and then we have paramilitary police waiting to keep us in line.
1% ?! How did
those 50% slacker futhermuckers gain 1% ?! Where did we go wrong?! – said the 0.001% (or Ubers and Filthys as I call them).
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
They still got some work to do.
time for a....
Never leave out WEALTH INEQUALITY!
Politicians have finally begun using the tert income inequality, but, so far, Sanders is the only politician I've heard talk about wealth inequalty. Why?
Here's what I think: Politicians believe that Americans will not expect them to step in and cut the salaries (and perks) of executives making millions of dollars a year. So, what do Americans expect politicians to do about income inequality? What they've always done: raise the minimum wage--usually by so little and in so many increments that their action is worse than meaningless.
But, if we talk wealth inequality, what is the remedy? Nothing they want us thinking about, that's for sure.
Another study was recently published that showed Americans
greatly underestimate the wealth disparity in the USA. We need to keep talking about it and hope it gets a lot of play on the social media(because we know it won't be mentioned in the for-profit press).
It's important for people to understand that the concentration of wealth has soared since the 1990's and that this concentration of wealth costs the average person a lot in terms of wages, health care, and education.
Many states tax common people's wealth if you consider the annual property tax you have to pay on your automobile. I think wealth across-the-board needs to be taxed. I also think sales of stocks and bonds should not be exempt from sales tax.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
"Politicians believe
That Americans will not expect them to step in & cut the salaries of executives making millions of dollars."
The US government already does this. Unless something has changed from when I took my class, only the 1st $250,000 of executive salaries can be included in the costs charged to Federal contracts. All the money they get paid above that? The contractor has to make enough fee (profit) on the contract to cover it.
If it's good enough for Pentagon, why isn't it good enough for the rest of us? For example, why should policy holders with anthem blue cross have to pay the $17 million in compensation the anthem CEO made in 2013?
+1,000,000
For the Rage Against The Machine video!
Without a doubt, income inequality is the greatest issue facing us at the present. Climate being a close second, and arguably, the two are inextricably linked.
What were they raging against?
They had a contract with Sony...
" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "
What was the source for that chart?
I've discovered an interesting protip in my conversations with my centrist-Republitarian housemate (I just coined that term, btw):
Liberals should back up our economic arguments to conservative and moderate-conservatives (read: sane Republicans) using conservative or moderate-conservative sources whenever appropriate. It's very doable if we pay attention to what argument we make and how we make it, and doing so goes a long, long way toward affirming to those listeners our argument's credibility and that of our information sources.
Here's an example. Recently my housemate and I had a long, rambling conversation about how progressive policies were "bad for business" in the United States. Because I disliked the base assumption of the argument- that progressive economic policies provide lower returns on investments to business and by extension that capitalism must therefore naturally thrive best under an umbrella of financial conservatism which precludes the implementation of socialist-leaning government policy- I chose to use as a source for my counterargument the Forbes list of most business--friendly nations for 2014.
The results were illuminating. Not because of what Forbes said about the topic- I was less surprised that so many socialist democracies were on the list than I was that the US wasn't even in the top 20- but because the fact that these results, which do not paint US economic policies in a good light at all relative to the conversation's underlying assumption, came from Forbes and were readily accepted as a legitimate and acceptable basis for my own point: socialist government policies can comfortably walk hand-in-hand with capitalism, can do so very successfully, and that the one does not preclude the other.
I have a suspicion that the source for that chart at the top isn't exactly a bastion of liberalism. Liberals have a better eye for design than to use the default Excel table style, but... am I right?
Where'd that table come from? I'm honestly curious.