Here in the United States, the plutocrats who have been providing the financing for the right wing's resurgence ever since Lewis F. Powell wrote his memo to the Director of Education for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971, have distilled their self-serving message for the public down to the simplistic and intertwined ones of less Government, together with God, Guns, and Gays. This clever group of opportunistic hypocrites--whose only real allegiance is to Mammon--have successfully painted in the mind's eye of many conservative Americans that Labor, Women's Rights, and even Civil and Voting Rights, are behind what they describe as the loss of "traditional American values" inherent in the Three G's, caused by the predations of Government on these values. (I had always thought that the real "traditional American values" were "liberty and justice for all.") They have been so successful in this undertaking that millions of Americans have voted against their own economic and social best interest for the last thirty years, in order to vote in favor of the Three G's.
This has led to an increase in the number of people living in poverty or near poverty in the United States. Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote an article "Putting Poverty on the Agenda" (The Nation, January 17, 2011), that places thirty years of the American people voting for contrived, hot button issues, rather than on issues that effect them directly, has done to America, "Indeed it is the shame of our nation that a record 47 million people now live below the poverty line-$22,400 for a family of four-and a stunning 1 in 3 Americans are living at less than twice that threshold. And yet we hear so little about this crisis in the mainstream media and Congress, where it seems off the radar not only for the GOP, but even for some of our progressive allies.
But the grim truth is that many of the same structural problems that are making life a struggle for the middle class-and resulted in the first "economic recovery" in 2003-2007 where productivity rose, but median income declined and poverty worsened--are also leading to record numbers of poor people. From 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent. Our economy is super-sizing the wealthy, while producing large quantities of low-wage jobs, unemployment and underemployment, and services are eroding. So the work of those who are waging today's war on poverty comes with a very different frame."
Indeed, without President Obama's Economic Recovery Act--whose effects are beginning to wane, as we were told they would--the situation would be much worse. Quoting Ms. vanden Heuvel again, "the Recovery Act included the largest (temporary) expansion of antipoverty programs in forty years . And according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, it kept more than 4.5 million people out of poverty in 2009 through unemployment benefits, food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC) and the new Making Work Pay tax credit. Those provisions will be difficult to extend under the new Republican House "cut-as-you-go" rule, which would require that they are offset by equivalent reductions in other mandatory spending-not, for example, by closing tax loopholes for corporations that shelter profits overseas. (In contrast, any new tax breaks for the wealthy would not have to be offset at all. If this doesn't speak volumes about the GOP's priorities and hypocrisy on the deficit, I don't know what does.)"
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/17-2
It is not only the corporations who have enjoyed this post-Second World War tax holiday. The richest Americans have accomplished the same goal, as Richard Wolff pointed out in his March 1, 2011 in the Guardian/UK, "How the Rich Soaked the Rest of Us."
http:// www.truth - out.org /how-rich-soaked-rest-us68155
While the tax rates for Americans with the lowest incomes have remained fairly constant since 1961--between ten and twenty percent--the tax on the highest incomes has dropped from 91 to 28 percent in the late 1980's, and now stand at a minimal 35 percent. And the Social Security/FICA tax, which is paid only on wages and salary, is capped at less than $110,000.00, less than one-third of what a person in the top one percent earns. With the loopholes that the richest Americans enjoy, and the rest of us can only dream of (including Treasury and other Governmental bonds, foreign investment, and hedge funds), none of the top one percent of income earners pays anywhere close to the top marginal rate. As Warren Buffet pointed out several years ago on 60 Minutes, he pays a lower percentage of his income in Federal taxes than his secretary does, and he is not an isolated case.
"http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki /Income_inequality_in_the_United_States
In fact, during the last thirty-five years, the richest Americans have almost tripled the size of their share of America's total income from 8.9 percent in 1976 to 23.5 percent in 2007 (Institute for Policy Studies, Program on Inequality and the Common Good; October, 2009.) www.extremeinequality.org .
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