Plutocratic hocus-pocus
That Was Reagan?
At a press conference, visibly embarrassed leaders of the Republican National Committee acknowledged that their nonstop, effusive praise of Ronald Reagan has been wholly unintentional, admitting they somehow managed to confuse him with Dwight Eisenhower for years. The GOP's humiliating blunder was discovered last weekend by RNC chairman Reince Priebus, who realized his party had been extolling "completely the wrong guy" after he watched the History Channel special Eisenhower: An American Portrait. "Wait, you're telling me Reagan advocated that trickle-down nonsense that was debunked years ago? That was Reagan?" Sen. John Thune (R-SD) said upon hearing of the mistake. "I can't believe I've been calling for a return to Reagan's America. I feel like an asshole."
http://www.theonion.com/articles/embarrassed-republicans-admit-theyve-been-thinking,19248/
The Great Tax Con Job
A very small niche of America's uber-wealthy have pulled off what may well be the biggest con job in the history of our republic, and they did it in a startlingly brief 30 or so years. True, they spent over three billion dollars to make it happen, but the reward to them was in the hundreds of billions -- and will continue to be. This money was spent to convince Americans that up is down and black is white. The uber-rich are spending hundreds of millions to make sure words like "burden" are associated with the word "tax," and to convince average working people that they should throw out of office any politicians who are willing to raise taxes on the rich. "No new taxes" is a mantra that is meaningful to the very rich, but largely irrelevant to average working people. The math is really pretty simple. When the uber-rich are heavily taxed, economies prosper and wages for working people steadily rise. When taxes are cut for the rich, working people suffer and economies turn into casinos.
Trickle-Up Economics
The number of Americans making $50 million or more was 74 in 2009. The average wage in this category increased from $91.2 million in 2008 to an astonishing $518.8 million in 2009. That is nearly $10 million in weekly pay. You read that right: in the Great Recession year of 2009 (officially just the first half of the year), the average pay of the very highest-income Americans was more than five times their average wages and bonuses in 2008. This group's total compensation was 3.2 times larger in 2009 than in 2008, which was 0.6% of total pay. These 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America, who constitute one in every eight workers.
http://www.tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/Permalink/UBEN-8AGMUZ?OpenDocument
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