England: The Middle-Class Squeeze

[Sun Devil 92]

The Middle-Class Squeeze

Here are a few good paragraphs:

When things go backward in nations accustomed to middle-class stability, people start to ask questions. What is the use of capitalism if its rewards go to the few and its risks are dumped on the many? The rights of property do not seem so enticing if the value of what you own collapses or if that property is trapped by debt. What is so great about globalization if it means that the products and services you offer are undercut by foreign competition and that millions of new people can come to your country, take your jobs and enjoy your welfare benefits?

Great international banks and other corporations—and their top executives—can devise a life that escapes normal tax jurisdictions. Their successes are globalized and accrue chiefly to them; their failures crawl back home to die, at the expense of the rest of us.

So instead of feeling that it is a privilege to be an ordinary citizen of a free country, many of us start to feel a bit like suckers. Hope—the inseparable companion of progress—fades and is replaced by disappointment, even bitterness. It has always been understood that opportunity carries some price of insecurity, but what happens if insecurity rises and opportunity contracts?

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Here is big business screwing the little guy...again. They use the government like they'd use a lawyer.

And the final paragraph has some pretty nasty implications.

 

[Sun Devil 92]

Thom Hartmann: How America Killed Its Middle Class

Not a big fan of Alternet.....but this one makes a statement I think begs a question.

Piketty is right, especially about the importance of high marginal tax rates and inheritance taxes being necessary for the creation of a middle class that includes working-class people. Progressive taxation, when done correctly, pushes wages down to working people and reduces the incentives for the very rich to pillage their companies or rip off their workers. After all, why take another billion when 91 percent of it just going to be paid in taxes?

This is the main reason why, when GM was our largest employer and our working class were also in the middle class, CEOs only took home 30 times what working people did. The top tax rate for all the time America's middle class was created was between 74 and 91 percent. Until, of course, Reagan dropped it to 28 percent and working people moved from the middle class to becoming the working poor.

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So, as we continue to let the rich just go nuts...what is it that isn't there to prevent them.

Why does the far right vote to protect the interest of the rich ?

The answer lies, in part, in the fact that the far left is no better. First, they suck off the rich like others.

Next, they won't make a rational case. They need conservatives to join them. And yet they, like some of the assholes on this board, do nothing but antagonize them.

And the rich just eat it up......