Huge Victory for the GOP – Bottom 90% Completely F’d!
by phil - August 7th, 2014 7:05 am
Victory in our time!
They said it couldn't be done, they said that people in a "Democracy" would never allow it to happen but, in the past 5 years we have actually taken 15% of the income AWAY from the bottom 90% of American wage-earners and re-distributed it to the top 10% and, since there are much less of them, it has boosted our top 10% incomes by 115% over the same period!
In the words of the great Winston Churchill (as redefined by the Conservative Bible): "Never was so much taken from so many for so few." As you can see from the chart above, the Reagan Revolution successfully reversed years of gains for the average American and began shoveling all of the economic progresss to the top 10% for the last 30 years but only in the last 5 has this policy gone into overdrive as we have begun to actively TAKE the money from the bottom 90%, Look how rich that makes us – no wonder we are all voting to keep this policy going!
As noted by Zero Hedge:
"Inequality in the U.S. today is near its historical highs, largely because the Federal Reserve’s policies have succeeded in achieving their aim: namely, higher asset prices (especially the prices of stocks, bonds and high-end real estate), which are generally owned by taxpayers in the upper-income brackets.
The Fed is doing all the work, because the President’s policies are growth-suppressive. In the absence of the Fed’s money printing and ZIRP, the economy would either be softer or actually in a new recession."
It's not just our Fed, of course, this morning we are getting more doveish noises from the ECB press conference as Draghi promises MORE FREE MONEY (for those of us with the credit scores or balance sheets to qualify) and that is already (8:30) pushing our Futures up half a point in pre-market trading. We're still watching our bounce levels (and shorting /TF at 1,130),…
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Wealth Levels, Wealth Inequality and the Great Recession
by phil - July 1st, 2014 7:10 am
By Fabian T. Pfeffer, Sheldon Danziger and Robert F. Schoeni
Pfeffer Danziger Schoeni Wealth Levels
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Wednesday: Wiping Out All of 2011′s Gains!
by phil - June 8th, 2011 7:54 am
S&P 1,260. That's the line we need to hold.
That's where we started the Year on January 3rd and we finished that day at 1,271, beginning a fine tradition of making almost all of our gains on the first day of the month, continuing a very disturbing (and very fake) year-long trend that I am calling "sell the next day (of the month) and go away." (chart by Bespoke).
Notice that this trend became very disturbing at the same time Uncle Ben announced his fabulous QE2 plan that showered money on his fellow Banksters according to a nice, predictable schedule that allowed them to lever up their investments to inflate stocks and commodities, trapping index fund investors (especially the working poor who make monthly contributions to IRA and 401K accounts in a nice, predictable and controllable fashion). It's a simple plan, index fund managers get your pension money at the end of the month, they are required to buy baskets of stocks to balance their funds and that action can be manipulated by clever bankers who jack up the prices and then sell into the fake demand they created – effectively stealing tens of Billions each month out of the paychecks of working Americans. Just another one of those great crimes they commit where they steal a little bit of money from everyone, every day.
Speaking of robbing from the rich to give to the poor (see "The Dooh Nibor Economy"), it's time we said happy 10th anniversary to the Bush/Obama tax cuts that have, as Barry Ritholtz put it: "driven the balanced budget he inherited from President Clinton deep into the red." So deep in the red, in fact, that even now Congress is still debating about extending the $14.5Tn deficit that the Congressional Budget Office says will double over the next 10 years if these cuts remain in place.
That's right, those same tax cuts that are "off the table" in negotiations in Congress are, other than war spending, the sole cause of our nation's deficit. This country does not have a spending problem, it has a collecting problem! As Mike Konczal, a research fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, noted: "It's not like this has unleashed a wave of productivity, or better incentives, or increased work output. It's mostly just rich…
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Government Policy Caused the Drought of Unemployment
by ilene - September 3rd, 2010 4:41 pm
Government Policy Caused America’s Unemployment Crisis
Courtesy of Washington’s Blog
Indeed, even after the government plays with the numbers to make them look better (using inaccurate birth-death models and other tricks-of-the-trade), this is how the current jobs downturn compares with other post-WWII recessions:
The Government Has Encouraged the Offshoring of American Jobs for More Than 50 Years
President Eisenhower re-wrote the tax laws so that they would favor investment abroad. President Kennedy railed against tax provisions that "consistently favor United States private investment abroad compared with investment in our own economy", but nothing changed.
For the last 50-plus years, the tax benefits to American companies making things abroad has encouraged jobs to move out of the U.S.
The Government Has Encouraged Mergers
The government has actively encouraged mergers, which destroy jobs.
For example, the Treasury Department encouraged banks to use the bailout money to buy their competitors, and pushed through an amendment to the tax laws which rewards mergers in the banking industry.
This is nothing new.
Citigroup’s former chief executive says that when Citigroup was formed in 1998 out of the merger of banking and insurance giants, Alan Greenspan told him, “I have nothing against size. It doesn’t bother me at all”.
And the government has actively encouraged the big banks to grow into mega-banks.
The Government Has Let Unemployment Rise in an Attempt to Fight Inflation
As I noted last year:
The Federal Reserve is mandated by law to maximize employment. The relevant statute states:
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.
***
The Fed could
…
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Are You Ready for the Next Crisis?
by ilene - October 29th, 2009 10:36 am
So we get the prize for extreme income inequality. The failure of our government – many people, over many years - to prevent the disaster is bad enough. Now the non-effort to correct the factors leading up to the financial meltdown supports the view that there are few people in government who have any desire to do so. Because, it’s simple, people do what they want to do. – Ilene
Are You Ready for the Next Crisis?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS at CounterPunch
Evidence that the US is a failed state is piling up faster than I can record it.
One conclusive hallmark of a failed state is that the crooks are inside the government, using government to protect and to advance their private interests.
Another conclusive hallmark is rising income inequality as the insiders manipulate economic policy for their enrichment at the expense of everyone else.
Income inequality in the US is now the most extreme of all countries. The 2008 OECD report, “Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries,” concludes that the US is the country with the highest inequality and poverty rate across the OECD and that since 2000 nowhere has there been such a stark rise in income inequality as in the US. The OECD finds that in the US the distribution of wealth is even more unequal than the distribution of income.
On October 21, 2009, Business Week highlighted a new report from the United Nations Development Program concluded that the US ranked third among states with the worst income inequality. As number one and number two, Hong Kong and Singapore, are both essentially city states, not countries, the US actually has the shame of being the country with the most inequality in the distribution of income.
The stark increase in US income inequality in the 21st century coincides with the offshoring of US jobs, which enriched executives with “performance bonuses” while impoverishing the middle class, and with the rapid rise of unregulated OTC derivatives, which enriched Wall Street and the financial sector at the expense of everyone else.
Millions of Americans have lost their homes and half of their retirement savings while being loaded up with government debt to bail out the banksters who created the derivative crisis.
Frontline’s October 21 broadcast, “The Warning,” documents how Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Deputy Treasury Secretary…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.
