When the pampered Wall Street CEO class nuked the economy, shown by the red-colored needle shaped drop in corporate profits just before 2010, it was US wage earners who rode to their rescue, securing their multimillion dollar bonuses and cushy jobs. The same working middle class whose wages shown in blue never recovered. At first the CEO class strutted around and scolding us for taking on the debt to save them, then tried every trick in the book to slash our benefits and social safety net to pay off the debt we incurred to save them, then moved onto electing Teaparty Republicans to force us to pay off more of the debt that saved them, and now that that has failed they’ve banded together and cooked up a scheme to feign common cause pitching shared sacrifice to pay off the debt that saved them. You know, like they’re willing to nerf a tax deduction on a dancing horse collection as long as we skip a meal or two every day and the future diabetics of America promise to only use insulin for ‘real’ emergencies.
WaPo –By all accounts, the past month has been most difficult on Romney’s wife, Ann, who friends said believed up until the end that ascending to the White House was their destiny. They said she has been crying in private and trying to get back to riding her horses.
Golly, that is tearful. Can you imagine the horror if she didn’t have the tax deduction on the horses? That’s enough sacrifice for any zillionaire, don’t make the Romney’s pay a slightly higher marginal tax rate too! The horses alone are reason enough for all you single moms raising kids on nine dollars an hour and a deadbeat ex husband three months behind on child support to really dig down deep and sacrifice more …
You can see them all morning this fine Sunday on the talk shows. As I post this Wrong Way Dan Senor, a man who makes Romney’s pollsters look like sages, is making the case for Kochwhores on This Week.
Taking from the poor and the middle class and giving to the rich has always paid well, and it’s always been ugly and immoral. But let’s be clear: what’s tearing the country apart is not the legions of crazy uncle Joe’s at the dinner table or power mad pastors or even run of the mill moguls, it’s a tiny handful of super rich conservative robber barons who weren’t satisfied being zillionaires in the wealthiest nation on earth and went on to fund a multidecade movement to heist every last middle class benefit. These sociopaths and their TV toadies and political jesters cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be shamed, they can only be defeated. Stay frosty my friends.
They’ve arranged it so they control the situation, too. So the alternatives are – what? Wait until it gets so bad that it’s time for the tumbrils to roll?
After a certain point, money stops being the means to put food on the table and a roof over the head and becomes points in the power game. The middle and working classes aren’t in the game, so it’s pure selfishness on our parts to keep collecting and wasting points when they could be making the Koches and Romneys happier.
Eyeballing the graph, it seems that corporate profit increases are directly correlated with drops in wages. This makes sense, in a finite economy: as money moves from the working classes to business classes, there’s less money in the business class.
At first this appears to indicate that improving the quality of life of all people on average would require slashing corporate profits in deference to higher working wages. What complicates this is that recessions also seem to correlate to drops in corporate profit, and hence rises in working wages.
Recessions are generally considered bad (and have an adverse effect on quality of life), while increases in family income are good and represent an improved quality of life. The correlation of these two makes no sense to me, and I’m trying to come up with a way in which that correlation can make sense.
Any ideas?
yeah, didn’t LLoyd Blankfein recently get on CNN to say that, as part of this shared sacrfice, we must:
1) raise the age of retirement to 67
2) raise the age of medicare eligibility to 67
or something along those lines
oops, #1 should be ‘age of retirement to 70’
The numbers only show the people who are working. In a recession, the least well paid are cut loose, raising the average pay of employed people. That’s why it looks like things get better during a recession.
That sounds so like a quote from the Onion or Colbert.
#FirstWorldProblems :P