For the American ruling elite, life has
never been better.
The father of US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin just completed the most expensive purchase of a living artist’s work in US history, spending over $91 million on a three-foot-tall metallic sculpture. Ken Griffin, the founder of hedge fund Citadel, recently dropped $238 million on a penthouse in New York City, the most expensive US home ever purchased. And Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, has invested $42 million in a 10,000-year clock.
Punishing the Poor for Being Hungry
The Trump administration wages war on food stamps.
The Whitet House/Flickr
The United States might be the only country in the world where poverty is considered a moral failing—on the part of the victims, not the society. When conservatives are in charge of government, this judgment infiltrates policy. Republicans move repeatedly to twist regulations around an assumption that the poor don’t want to work and don’t make sound decisions. And when this bias affects children’s nutrition, it can cause lifelong impairment.
In the last year alone, the Trump administration has taken multiple shots at food stamps, now called SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), which helped feed about 40 million people last year. The latest change, one week ago, would cut benefits by $4.5 billion over five years. Even in a booming economy, one in seven households with children were considered “food insecure” last year, according to the Department of Agriculture’s 2018 survey, meaning that they weren’t sure of having enough food for everyone.
Research in the rapidly advancing field of neuroscience has documented the severe biological assaults caused by inadequate nutrition during sensitive phases of brain development. Numerous studies, compiled in a lengthy National Academy of Sciences report, From Neurons to Neighborhoods, portray a devastating landscape of cognitive deficiency resulting from nutritional deprivation. The insufficiency of healthy food during a pregnant woman’s second trimester can reduce the creation of neurons, the brain’s impulse-conducting cells. Malnutrition in the third trimester restricts their maturation and retards the production of branched cells called glia.
Iron is essential to promote the growth of the brain in size and the creation of the nerve-transmitting myelin sheath around the brain’s nerve fibers. The impact of iron deficiency in a baby, therefore, never disappears, even once the deficiency is eliminated. One longitudinal study that followed children from infancy through adolescence found that they scored lower “in arithmetic achievement and written expression, motor functioning, and some specific cognitive processes such as spatial memory and selective recall.”
Teachers reported that such children displayed “more anxiety or depression, social problems, and attention problems.” It is no great leap of logic to see learning disabilities as one result of malnutrition. And a child who can’t do decently in school, who can’t follow half of what a teacher is saying, is more inclined to drop out.
For those Republicans who are moved more by self-interest than empathy, it’s worth noting that high school dropouts earn less that those with degrees, pay less in taxes, have more serious medical problems, and are at higher risk of ending up in jail.
Yet Trump’s people have sought to saddle the $68 billion-a-year SNAP program with restrictions and cuts to the monthly benefits, which now come on debit cards with declining balances, and typically last a family only two or three weeks. Certain regulations that the Trump administration has either enacted or has openly considered would treat needy Americans with suspicion and distrust. For instance:
Officials have considered imposing a drug-testing regime on SNAP recipients (although not on farmers who receive huge federal subsidies as part of the same legislation).The Agriculture Department, which administers the program, published a rule in July to eliminate states’ option to raise eligibility limits above the federal ceiling, which is 130 percent of the poverty line. Previously, states could get waivers to enroll families earning more if their housing and child-care expenses soaked up a big percentage of their income. More generous housing subsidies would help, because in many parts of the country, where rent can consume 50 percent or more of a family’s budget, the money for food gets squeezed. The comment period on the rule change ended in September; once adopted, it will cut off about 3 million recipients.In last week’s action, the administration effectively took away $75 in benefits from one out of every five families by recalculating how housing and utilities costs are figured.The Trump administration tried to tighten work requirements in this year’s budget, Congress refused, and officials have gone ahead anyway to partially evade the legislative intent. Since 1996, single able-bodied adults with no dependents, up to age 49, could get SNAP benefits for only three months in a three-year period unless they worked or were in job training at least 80 hours a month. States could waive the rule in areas with acute joblessness. Trump wanted to expand the requirement to age 59 and, more harmfully, apply it to those with children over six years old. That was rejected by Republicans and Democrats in Congress. So last December the Agriculture Department did what it could administratively by making it much harder for states to get waivers.In his 2019 budget, Trump proposed replacing half of a family’s cash grants with a food package of cereal, pasta, peanut butter, canned fruit and vegetables, meat, poultry, and other items deemed good for them. Sending such packages to 40 million people would have been so costly and impractical that the idea collapsed of its own weight. But the notion seemed borne of a patronizing attitude toward the poor, who suffer from a disparaging stereotype that they do not act responsibly.
Clinics treating childhood malnutrition see a broad array of causes. Lack of money is the centerpiece, but lack of knowledge about healthy eating can also contribute to some cases. Health providers find that some parents don’t know how to cook with relatively inexpensive ingredients. New immigrants unfamiliar with American food can be fooled by ads into thinking that Coke and Cheetos are healthy. So can Americans themselves. Lots of junk food is cheap and filling, hence the nation’s epidemic of obesity, which can be a sign of malnutrition.
Supermarkets with fresh, healthy food are scarce in many low-income neighborhoods. A child’s food allergies can be baffling without the funds and information required to have a large assortment of choices on hand. Single parents doing shift work can’t keep track of what their kids are being fed by multiple caregivers. Nor do they usually have the orderly life that allows them to sit children down calmly to feed them, or have a regular family meal.
In other words, childhood malnutrition is created at the confluence of problems and disabilities that magnify and reinforce one another. They must all be addressed. The cognitive impairment that results cannot be attacked by a country that keeps electing officials who entangle the safety net in a set of punitive impulses.
At the same time,
the tax cuts for big business are fueling the federal deficit, which will be
used by both Democratic and Republican politicians to call for further cuts in
social spending. The February monthly federal deficit hit an all-time high of
$234 billion this year, as a result of a 20 percent drop in corporate tax
revenue. The deficit for the first half of 2019 is projected at $961 billion,
and the deficit for the fiscal year ending September 30 is expected to reach
$1.1 trillion, as bad as the deficits posted in the immediate aftermath of the
2008 financial crash."
Richest 400 Americans paid lower taxes than everyone else in 2018
According to an analysis by noted economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, previewed this week by New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, the wealthiest American households paid a lower tax rate last year than every other income group for the first time in the country’s history.
Saez and Zucman, both professors at the University of California Berkeley, detail the phenomenon of declining taxes for the richest Americans in their soon-to-be released book, The Triumph of Injustice .
The pair compiled a historical database composed of the tax payments of households in various income percentiles spanning all the way back to 1913, when the federal income tax was first implemented. Their research uncovered that in the 2018 fiscal year the wealthiest 400 Americans paid a lower tax rate—accounting for federal, state, and local taxes—than anyone else.
The overall tax rate paid by the richest .01 percent was only 23 percent last year, while the bottom half of the population paid 24.2 percent. This contrasts starkly with the overall tax rates on the wealthy of 70 percent in 1950 and 47 percent in 1980.
The taxes on the wealthy have been in precipitous decline since the latter half of the 20th century as successive presidential administrations enacted tax cuts for the rich, suggesting that they would result in economic prosperity for all. Taxes that mostly affect the wealthy, such as the estate tax and corporate tax, have been drastically cut and lawyers have been hard at work on the beliefs of their wealthy patrons planning out the best schemes for tax avoidance, seeking to drive tax rates as close to zero as possible. The impetus for the historical tipping point was the Trump Administration’s 2017 tax reform, which was a windfall for the super-rich.
Supported by both the Republican and Democratic Parties, the two parties of Wall Street, Trump’s tax cuts were specifically designed to transfer massive amounts of wealth from the working class to the ruling elite.
The corporate tax rate was permanently slashed from 35 percent to 21 percent, potentially increasing corporate revenues by more than $6 trillion in the next decade. The bill also reduced the individual federal income tax rate for the wealthy and included a number of other provisions to further ease their tax burden.
The story is different for many middle- and working-class Americans. According to multiple analyses of the 2017 tax reform, 83 percent of the tax benefits will go to the top 1 percent by 2027, while 53 percent of the population, or those making less than $75,000 annually, will pay higher taxes. At the same time, the reform will sharply increase budget deficits and the national debt, granting the pretense for the further destruction of domestic social programs.
Furthermore, a majority of Americans are paying higher payroll taxes, which cover Medicare and Social Security. The tax increased from 2 percent just after World War II, to 6 percent in 1960, to 15.3 percent in 1990, where it stands today. It has risen to become the largest tax that 62 percent of American households pay.
The result of the multitude of changes to the US tax system over the last three-quarters of a century is one that has become less progressive over time. The 2017 tax reform effectively set up the foundation for a regressive tax policy where the wealthy pay lower tax rates than the poor.
The implementation of a regressive tax structure has played a major role in engineering the redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top that has brought social inequality in America to its highest level since the 1920s.
According to Leonhardt’s preliminary Times review of The Triumph of Injustice, Saez and Zucman offer a solution to the current unjust tax system in which the overall tax rate on the top 1 percent of income earners would rise to 60 percent. The pair claim that the tax increase would bring in approximately $750 billion in taxes. Their tax code also includes a wealth tax and a minimum global corporate tax of 25 percent, requiring corporations to pay taxes on profits made in the United States, even if their headquarters are overseas.
In an interview with Leonhardt, Zucman states that history shows that the US has raised tax rates on the wealthy before so therefore it should be possible to do so now.
However, the last half century of counterrevolution waged against the working class makes the parasitic nature of the ruling elite absolutely clear, and underscores the well-known fact that the US is ruled by an oligarchy that controls the political system. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, who both represent this oligarchy and bear responsibility for the tax system, will make any effort to implement Saez and Zucman’s modest proposal.
California became a Democratic stronghold not because Californians became socialists, but because millions of socialists moved there. Immigration turned California blue,
and immigration is ultimately to blame for California's high poverty level.
Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other Americans
2:46
The wealthiest Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
For the first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman finds.
The analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class. Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23 percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47 percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
The analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt writes:
For middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat. [Emphasis added]
The report comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich and working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the elite.
“The same consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade, open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national security or for American workers or for American families or for American principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,” Hawley said in an August speech in the Senate.
That increasing worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by economic research showing a rise in servant-class jobs, strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times the rate of other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Dozens of giant US corporations, including 60 of the Fortune
500, used deductions, credits and other tax loopholes to avoid paying any
federal income tax for 2018, according to an analysis issued by the Institute
on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). The report was published April 11, just
in time for the April 15 deadline for most American working people to file
their tax returns.
The 60 companies in the Fortune 500 who paid no federal income
tax had net incomes just from US operations of nearly $80 billion
($79,025,000,000, to be exact). They include such household names as Amazon,
Chevron, Deere, Delta Air Lines, General Motors, Goodyear, Halliburton,
Honeywell, IBM, Eli Lilly, Netflix, Occidental Petroleum, Prudential Financial
and US Steel.
Meanwhile, millions of moderate-income families are finding that
their income taxes have either increased or their expected tax refunds have
evaporated because of restrictions on the itemization of tax deductions, the
imposition of a $10,000 cap on state and local tax deductions and a cut in the
mortgage interest deduction.
Nearly all of the 60 companies that paid no taxes qualified to
receive a refund from the US Treasury, although most will not collect a check,
instead using the credit to offset future taxes. But whatever the bookkeeping
process, American taxpayers are effectively paying money to them, despite their vast
profits. The biggest refunds include those going to Prudential, $346 million
(added to its $1.44 billion in profits); Duke Energy, a whopping $647 million
(added to $3.02 billion in profits); and Deere, $268 million (added to $2.15
billion in profits).
Among the report’s most outrageous findings:
Amazon more than zeroed-out its
tax bill on $10.8 billion in profits, making use of accelerated depreciation
deductions on equipment as well as favorable tax treatment of stock-based
compensation for executives like CEO Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest man in the
world. The stock compensation deduction alone was worth $1 billion. Amazon will
actually show a credit of $129 million from the US Treasury, not paying one
cent in federal income taxes.
IBM is another corporate giant
that has gamed the tax system by shifting earnings to its foreign operations to
escape US taxation. The company reported worldwide profits of $8.7 billion, but
only $500 million in the United States. It will reap a $342 million credit from
the Treasury.
Delta Airlines accumulated
$17.1 billion in federal pre-tax net losses as of 2010, partly as a consequence
of a protracted crisis of the airline industry, partly as a result of the 2008
Wall Street crash. It has used these losses as well as the accelerated
depreciation credit for purchase of new planes to “dramatically reduce their
tax rates,” according to the ITEP report, receiving a credit of $187 million in
2018 despite net profits of more than $5 billion. According to Delta’s chief
financial officer, the actual tax rate the company expects to pay going forward
is between 10 and 13 percent, far below what a typical Delta worker pays on his
or her income.
EOG Resources, a renamed
remnant of Enron, perpetrator of the biggest corporate fraud in American
history, can collect $304 million from US taxpayers on top of $4.07 billion in
profits.
For one company, the federal tax refund would actually exceed
net profits. Gannett made a $7 million profit, while showing
an additional $11 million credit from the Treasury, giving the newspaper
publishing giant an effective tax rate of negative 164 percent.
IBM’s tax rate was a negative 68 percent, while software maker
Activision Blizzard and construction company AECOM Technology both posted
effective tax rates of negative 51 percent.
Sixteen of the 60 companies made more than a billion dollars in
net income on their US operations, to say nothing of foreign subsidiaries. Oil
and gas producers and utilities comprised more than one-third of the total, led
by Chevron and Occidental among the oil companies, and DTE Energy, American
Electric Power, Duke Energy and Dominion Resources among the utilities.
The 60 companies profited enormously because the Trump tax cut
bill cut the basic rate for corporations from 35 percent to 21 percent, while
not eliminating the loopholes they had previously used to keep their taxes low.
They had the best of both worlds, paying lower rates while still enjoying
loopholes.
Overall, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, an arm of
Congress, the cut in the corporate tax rate alone will pump $1.35 trillion into
the pockets of the corporations over the next 10 years. For this year alone,
corporate taxes have been cut by 31 percent.
For the 60 companies in the ITEP report, “Instead of paying
$16.4 billion in taxes, as the new 21 percent corporate tax rate requires,
these companies enjoyed a net corporate tax rebate of $4.3 billion, blowing a
$20.7 billion hole in the federal budget last year.”
This figure by itself is an irrefutable answer to all the bogus
claims—made to workers in every part of the United States—that there is “no
money” to pay for needed social programs, for wage and benefit increases, or to
hire additional workers to reduce overwork and understaffing. The $20.7 billion
would pay for a $7,000 bonus to every public school teacher in America.
The bonanza that these 60 corporations are enjoying is three
times the amount that Trump proposes to cut from the budget of the Department
of Education. It is 10 times the total amount budgeted for the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, which provides services for more than 2 million Native Americans. It
is nearly 20 times the budget of the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration, which conducts workplace safety inspections.
The ITEP report, issued by a group with close ties to the Center
on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington think tank, warns of the
explosive political consequences of the corporate plundering of the Treasury.
“The specter of big corporations avoiding all income taxes on billions in
profits sends a strong and corrosive signal to Americans: that the tax system
is stacked against them, in favor of corporations and the wealthiest
Americans,” the report says.
At the same time, the tax cuts for big business are fueling the
federal deficit, which will be used by both Democratic and Republican
politicians to call for further cuts in social spending. The February monthly
federal deficit hit an all-time high of $234 billion this year, as a result of
a 20 percent drop in corporate tax revenue. The deficit for the first half of
2019 is projected at $961 billion, and the deficit for the fiscal year ending
September 30 is expected to reach $1.1 trillion, as bad as the deficits posted
in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crash.
The number of U.S. companies paying zero federal taxes DOUBLED when
Trump's tax plan took effect in 2018
·
60 large companies managed to escape 2018
taxes under Trump's new plan
·
Many of those corporations actually received
tax rebates totaling $4.3 billion
·
The businesses include: Amazon, Netflix,
Chevron, Delta Airlines, JetBlue Airways, IBM, General Motors, Goodyear, Eli
Lilly and United States Steel
·
The result is a $20.7 billion budget hole
that is adding to America's federal debt
President Donald
Trump's tax policy doubled the number of highly
profitable companies that were able to avoid paying any federal taxes in 2018,
according to a new report.
Amazon, Netflix,
Chevron, Delta Airlines, IBM, General Motors and Eli Lilly were among those who
managed to escape taxes for last year, according to the study by the
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
'Instead
of paying $16.4 billion in taxes, as the new 21 percent corporate tax rate
requires, these companies enjoyed a net corporate tax rebate of $4.3 billion, blowing
a $20.7 billion hole in the federal budget last year,' the report says.
The
Washington, D.C. think tank analyzed America's 560 largest publicly held
companies, finding that 60 of them paid nothing in taxes for last year – double
the average of roughly 30 companies that got away scot-free each year from
2008-2015.
Republicans
in Congress pushed through the tax law signed by Trump in 2017, and its
policies favoring the richest Americans and most valuable U.S. companies took
effect in 2018.
Scroll down for the full list of companies and rebates
+2
·
The
change cut the tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent and allowed companies to
take advantage of deductions, tax credits and rebates. That change alone is
projected to save corporations $1.35 trillion over the next decade, according
to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
'We
know that there's this pretty glaring contrast between what the proponents of
this tax law promised back in 2017 and what it's delivering now,' lead
author Matthew Gardner told DailyMail.com.
'The
whole argument was that the reason companies were avoiding taxes is because tax
rates are so high,' he added. 'What we're seeing is that isn't coming to
pass.'
Collectively, the 60 companies that avoided
all taxes last year managed 'to zero out their federal income taxes on $79
billion in U.S. pretax income,' according to the study, which was first
reported on by the Center for Public Integrity and
NBC News.
For
example, the John Deer farm equipment company earned $2.15 billion before
taxes, yet owed no U.S. taxes and used deductions and credits to extract $268
million from the federal government.
Nationally,
corporate tax revenues decreased 31 percent in 2018 to $204 billion.
'This
was a more precipitous decline than in any year of normal economic growth in
U.S. history,' wrote Gardner, a senior fellow for the Institute on Taxation and
Economic Policy, in the report.
We know that there's this pretty
glaring
contrast between what the proponents of
this tax law promised back in
2017 and
what it's delivering now.
Matthew Gardner, Institute on Taxation and
Economic Policy
Trump
had said that the corporate tax cut would pay for itself by sparking a business
boom that would create more jobs, thus generating growing income tax revenues
for the nation.
That
reality hasn't emerged. Instead the nation's budget deficit is higher than it's
ever been in this nation's history.
That's
despite Trump's campaign promise to eliminate the $19.9 trillion national debt
in eight years. So far it has ballooned 41.8 percent in the first four months
of the 2019 fiscal year (which runs October 1 – September 30.
The
Government Accountability Office announced in April that the 'federal
government's current fiscal path … (is) unsustainable.'
Presidential
economic adviser Larry Kudlow has said that 'economic growth' has 'paid for a
good chunk' of the tax cuts, and that the budget's outlook is 'not as bad' as
it's perceived.
+2
·
U.S. Congressman
Says Many of His Colleagues Are 'Struggling' Financially
Rep. Jared Huffman (U.S. government
photo)
EDITOR’S NOTE: As originally posted, this story included inaccuracies and
omissions in the transcription of Rep. Jared Huffman’s answer to the question
that CNSNews.com asked him. It has now been corrected so that the transcription
is verbatim.
(CNSNews.com) -- Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) told CNSNews.com on Wednesday
that many of his colleagues in the House of Representatives are
"struggling" financially. He made the observation in response to a
question about whether members of Congress, who now earn $174,000 per year,
deserve a pay raise.
“I’ll let the body and the public
opinion and other factors decide whether we get a cost of living
increase," he said, "but I do know a lot of my colleagues are
struggling.”
CNSNews.com asked Huffman:
“Congressman Huffman, at $174,000 members of Congress get paid a salary that is
370 percent of the median earnings of a full-time American worker. Do you think
the Congress deserves a raise?”
Huffman responded: “I think no
one goes into this line of work to get rich. A lot of my colleagues are
struggling with the fact that we have housing costs both in home, at our home
district, in some cases where real estate values are very high and housing
costs are high. And then you have to also have housing here in D.C. So, I know
a lot of members are struggling."
“I’ll let the body and the public
opinion and other factors decide whether we get a cost of living
increase," he said, "but I do know a lot of my colleagues are
struggling.”
According to the Congressional
Research Service (CRS),
regular senators, representatives, delegates, and the resident commissioner
from Puerto Rico are paid an annual salary of $174,000.
"The only exceptions include
the Speaker of the House (salary of $223,500) and the President pro tempore of
the Senate and the majority and minority leaders in the House and Senate
(salary of $193,400)," reported the CRS. "These levels
have remained unchanged since 2009."
According to the U.S. Census
Bureau, the median annual earnings of a U.S. worker are $47,016. A salary of $174,000 is 3.7 times the median earnings of
$47,016, or 370% higher.
"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP
Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the
10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that
another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout
on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social
unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central bank actions
in driving inequality between asset owners and labor."
“Our entire
crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a
kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the
way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THEAMERICAN
THINKER.com
STRIKES
ALL OVER AMERICA, THOUSANDS OF RETAIL STORES CLOSING, CAR SALES SLUMP, REAL
ESTATE IN THE DOLDRUMS… That is the real “recover”… It only happened for the
rich!
Despite
a booming economy, many U.S. households are still just holding on
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-federal-reserve-household-survey-20190523-story.html
By MATTHEW
BOESLER
Many U.S. households find themselves in a fragile position
financially, even in an economy with an unemployment rate near a 50-year low.
(David Sacks / Getty Images)
Many U.S. households find themselves in a fragile position
financially, even in an economy with an unemployment rate near a 50-year low,
according to a Federal Reserve survey.
The Fed’s 2018 report on the economic well-being of households, published Thursday, indicated “most measures”
of well-being and financial resilience “were similar to, or slightly better
than, those in 2017.” The slight improvement coincided with a decline in the
average unemployment rate to 3.9% last year, from 4.3% in 2017.
Despite the uptick, however, the results of the 2018 survey
indicated that almost 40% of Americans would still struggle in the face of a
$400 financial emergency. The statistic, which was a bit better than in the
2017 report, has become a favorite rejoinder to President Trump’s boasts about a strong economy from Democratic politicians, including 2020 presidential
candidate Sen. Kamala Harris of California.
“Relatively small, unexpected expenses, such as a car repair or
replacing a broken appliance, can be a hardship for many families without
adequate savings,” the report said. “When faced with a hypothetical expense of
$400, 61% of adults in 2018 say they would cover it, using cash, savings, or a
credit card paid off at the next statement,” it added.
“Among the remaining 4 in 10 adults who would have more difficulty
covering such an expense, the most common approaches include carrying a balance
on credit cards and borrowing from friends or family,” according to the report.
Based on a survey of 11,000 people in October and November 2018,
the report showed that a quarter of Americans don’t feel like they are doing
"at least OK" financially. That number was higher for black and
Latino Americans, at roughly one-third for both. For those making less than
$40,000 a year, the share who felt they weren’t doing well was 44%.
“We continue to see the growing U.S. economy supporting most
American families,” Fed Gov. Michelle Bowman said in a press release
accompanying the report.
“At the same time, the survey does find differences across
communities, with just over half of those living in rural areas describing
their local economy as good or excellent compared to two-thirds of those living
in cities,” Bowman said. “Across the country, many families continue to
experience financial distress and struggle to save for retirement and
unexpected expenses.”
Boesler writes for Bloomberg
"While America’s working and
middle class have been subjected to compete for jobs against
a constant flow of cheaper foreign workers — where more than 1.2
million mostly low-skilled immigrants are admitted to the country annually
— the billionaire class has experienced historic
salary gains." Sen. Josh
Hawley
The millennial generation in the US: Life on the brink
For the American ruling elite, life has
never been better.
The
father of US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin just completed the most
expensive purchase of a living artist’s work in
US history, spending over $91 million on a three-foot-tall metallic
sculpture. Ken Griffin, the founder of hedge fund Citadel,
recently dropped $238 million on a penthouse in New York City, the
most expensive US home ever purchased. And Amazon’s Jeff Bezos,
the world’s richest man, has invested $42 million in a 10,000-year
clock.
The stock market is booming, and President Donald Trump is
boasting at every turn that the unemployment rate is lower than it has been in
five decades.
However, the working class, the vast majority of the population,
is confronting an unprecedented social, economic, health and psychological
crisis. The same processes that have produced vast sums of wealth for the
ruling elite have left millions of workers on the brink of existence.
Perhaps no segment of the population reflects the devastating
consequences of these processes so starkly as the generation of young people
deemed the “millennials,” those born roughly between the years 1981 and 1996.
More than half the 72 million American millennials are now in their 30s, with
the oldest turning 38 this year.
A recent exposé by the Wall
Street Journal noted that millennials are “in worse financial
shape than prior living generations and may not recover.” The article,
“Millennials Near Middle Age in Crisis,” concludes by stating that people born
in the 1980s are at risk of becoming “America’s Lost generation.”
The older side of this generation was born at the beginning of
the Reagan years, which heralded in an era of social counter-revolution against
the working class that saw the dismantling of much of the industrial
infrastructure of the country, and the restructuring of economic life to
benefit the banks, hedge funds and other financial firms, with the
collaboration of the trade unions.
By the time these youth reached the job market, the 2008
financial crash hit, vastly accelerating all of the processes begun in the
1980s. The Obama administration organized the bailout of the banks and a
massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich.
The results have been devastating.
Education
More millennials have a college degree than any other generation
of young adults. In 2013, 47 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds received a
postsecondary degree. For most, however, getting a college education has not
led to a significant increase in quality of living.
Instead, millions of young people are working jobs for which
they are vastly overqualified and are shackled with unprecedented levels of
debt. For the millennials who did not go to college, the situation is even
worse.
·
Millennials have taken on 300 percent more student debt than
their parents’ generation. [Source: The College Board, Trends in Student Aid
2013]
·
The number of hours of minimum wage work needed to pay in-state
tuition and fees for each year of a four-year public college for the “Baby
Boomer” generation (born between 1946 and 1964) was 510. For millennials, it is
1996. [Source: National Center for Education Statistics. Calculations based on
four-year public universities from 1973–1976 and 2003–2006]
·
Since 2010, the economy has added 11.6 million jobs, and 11.5
million of them have gone to workers with at least some college education. In
2016, young workers with only a high school diploma had roughly triple the
unemployment rate and three-and-a-half times the poverty rate of college grads.
[Source: America’s
Divided Recovery, Georgetown University]
·
Average college debt for millennials that have debt is around
$33,000, with the median household income remaining the same since 1999.
[Source: PEW Research and USA
Today]
·
National college debt is now at $1.3 trillion, and college
tuition has increased by 1,140 percent since the late 1970s. [Source: Economic
Policy Institute (EPI) Wage
Stagnation in Nine Charts]
·
By 2014, 48 percent of workers with bachelor’s degrees are
employed in jobs for which they’re overqualified. [Source: Labor Economist
Stephen Rose, published by Urban Institute.]
Graph from
the Economic Policy Institute
Decades of
decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide. While the rich
accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages and benefits have been
under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the population took in 70
percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that fell to only 61 percent.
"This
is how they will destroy America from within. The leftist
billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked
with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the
cost of the invasion of millions of migrants. They have nothing
but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our
communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and
human traffickers. These people have no intention
of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have
contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government
owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To
destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between
corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of
today.” THEODORE ROOSEVELT
"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at
the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it:
gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral,
immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That
should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ----
Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com
“The couple parlayed lives supposedly spent in “public service”
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes."
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes."
In 2014 the
Russell Sage Foundation found that between
2003 and
2013, the median household net worth of those in the United States fell from
$87,992 to $56,335—a drop of 36 percent. While the rich also saw their wealth
drop during the recession, they are more than making that money back.
Between 2009
and 2012, 95 percent of all the income gains in the US went to the top 1
percent. This is the most distorted post-recession income gain on record.
Watch–Josh
Hawley Rips ‘Aristocratic Elite’ for Engineering U.S. Economy Against American
Middle Class
JOHN BINDER
16 May 2019184
6:00
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) ripped what he called
the country’s “new aristocratic elite” for engineering the United States
economy against the American middle class.
For his first major speech on the
Senate floor, Hawley slammed the “big banks, big tech, big multi-national
corporations, along with their allies in the academy and the media,” whom he
said have created an economic structure in which they, the well-connected,
benefit while the American working and middle class increasingly struggle to
get ahead.
Hawley said:
The chattering class often tells us
that all of this—the jobs, the despair, the loss of standing—is the result of
forces beyond anyone’s control. As if that’s an
excuse to do nothing. But in fact, it’s not true. [Emphasis added]
Today’s society benefits those who
shaped it, and it has been shaped not by working men and women, but by the new
aristocratic elite. Big banks, big tech, big
multi-national corporations, along with their allies in the academy and the
media—these are the aristocrats of our age. They live in the United States,
but they consider themselves citizens of the world. [Emphasis
added]
They operate businesses or run
universities here, but their primary loyalty is to their own agenda for
a more unified, progressive—and profitable—global order. These modern
aristocrats often claim to be a meritocracy. And many of them truly believe
they are. What they don’t see, or won’t acknowledge, is that the society they
have built works mainly for themselves. They’ve effectively run this
country for decades. And their legacy is national division and national decline.
[Emphasis added]
Defending the needs of the American
middle class against a growingly powerful “aristocratic elite” is the “crisis
of our time,” Hawley asserted.
“After years of sacrifice, the great
American middle is being pushed aside by a new, arrogant aristocracy,” Hawley
said. “The new aristocrats seek to remake society in their own image: to
engineer an economy that works for the elite but few else, to fashion a culture
that is dominated by their own preferences.”
“This town has embraced a politics
of elite values and elite ambition rather than building opportunities to thrive
in the great and broad American middle. This has left middle America—the great
American middle class—under siege: battling the loss of respect and work, the
decline of home and family, an epidemic of loneliness and despair,” Hawley continued.
“This is the crisis of our time.”
Specifically, Hawley blasted
multinational corporations for outsourcing American middle class jobs overseas
— wreaking economic, cultural, and social havoc on rural and small town
American communities in the process — and both political establishments for
treating American citizens as mere consumers.
“In places like the one where I grew
up, in middle Missouri, good-paying jobs that you can raise a family on are
going away,” Hawley said. “The jobs go overseas or south of the border or to
cities on the coasts. And once-vibrant towns decline, taking with them the
network of schools and neighborhoods and churches that make up middle class
life.”
Hawley continued:
Rural America has been particularly
hard hit. Rural Americans’ life expectancy has not just leveled off,
its actually dropped, and for women without a high school degree, that drop has
been staggering. In some rural places, residents struggle with outright
deprivation. [Emphasis added]
My home state contains some of the
poorest counties in America, all in rural places that once boasted thriving
small towns. As those communities struggle,
want sets in. But the crisis reaches well beyond economics. [Emphasis added]
The message that Washington has sent
our whole society is loud and clear: our elites are the people who matter—and those who aspire to join them. Everyone else is
unimportant or backwards. And millions of Americans are left with
the sense that the people who run this country view them with nothing but contempt
and value them as nothing but consumers. [Emphasis added]
Indeed, working and middle class
Americans have been hit the hardest from decades-long political consensus
between the Republican establishment and Democrats.
Recent research revealed that while coastal, elite metropolis cities have flourished in the last decade, small town and rural American communities have suffered depopulation, mass job loss, and continued economic strain since the Great Recession.
For instance, by 2016, elite
zip codes had a surplus of 3.6 million jobs, which is more than the combined
bottom 80 percent of American zip codes. While it only took about five years
for wealthy cities to replace the jobs lost by the recession, it took “at risk”
regions of the country a decade to recover, and “distressed” U.S. communities
are “unlikely ever to recover on current trendlines,” the report predicts.
Economic growth among the country’s
middle-class counties and middle-class zip codes has considerably trailed
national economic growth. For example, between 2012 and 2016, there were 4.4
percent more business establishments in the country as a whole. That growth was
less than two percent in the median zip code and there was close to no growth
in the median county.
While America’s working and middle
class have been subjected to compete for jobs against a constant flow of
cheaper foreign workers — where more than 1.2 million mostly low-skilled
immigrants are admitted to the country annually — the billionaire class has
experienced historic salary gains.
A study by the Economic Policy
Institute found that the country’s top 0.01 percent have enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the
bottom 90 percent of wage earners. Between 1979 and 2017, working and middle
class Americans’ wages grew by only 22 percent. On the other hand, the
plutocrat class saw their salaries grow by more than 155 percent over the same
period.
Likewise, free trade deals like
NAFTA — supported by Republicans and Democrats — as well as China’s entering
the World Trade Organization (WTO) has eliminated nearly five million American
manufacturing jobs across the country, devastating steel towns and U.S.
autoworkers. One former steel town in West Virginia lost 94 percent of its
steel jobs because of NAFTA, with nearly 10,000 workers in the town being
displaced from the steel industry.
Billionaire Class
Enjoys 15X the Wage Growth of American Working Class
3:00
The
billionaire class — the country’s top 0.01 percent of earners — have enjoyed
more than 15 times as much wage growth as America’s working and middle class
since 1979, new wage data reveals.
Between 1979 and 2017, the wages of the bottom 90 percent — the
country’s working and lower middle class — have grown by only about 22 percent,
Economic Policy Institute (EPI) researchers find.
Compare that small wage increase over nearly four decades to the
booming wage growth of America’s top one percent, who have seen their wages
grow more than 155 percent during the same period.
Breitbart TV
The top 0.01 percent — the country’s billionaire class — saw
their wages grow by more than 343 percent in the last four decades, more
than 15 times the wage growth of the bottom 90 percent of Americans.
In 1979, America’s working class was earning on average about
$29,600 a year. Fast forward to 2017, and the same bottom 90 percent of
Americans are earning only about $6,600 more annually.
The almost four decades of wage stagnation among the country’s
working and middle class comes as the national immigration policy has allowed
for the admission of more than 1.5 million mostly low-skilled immigrants every
year.
(Public Citizen)
In the last decade, alone, the U.S. admitted ten million legal immigrants, forcing American workers to
compete against a growing population of low-wage workers. Meanwhile, employers
are able to reduce wages and drive up their profit margins thanks to the annual
low-skilled immigration scheme.
The Washington, DC-imposed mass immigration policy is a boon to corporate executives,
Wall Street, big business, and multinational conglomerates as every one percent
increase in the immigrant composition of an occupation’s labor force reduces Americans’
hourly wages by 0.4 percent. Every one percent increase in the immigrant
workforce reduces Americans’ overall wages by 0.8 percent.
Mass immigration has come at the expense of America’s working
and middle class, which has suffered from poor job growth, stagnant wages, and
increased public costs to offset the importation of millions of low-skilled
foreign nationals.
Four million young Americans enter the workforce every year, but
their job opportunities are further diminished as the U.S. imports roughly two
new foreign workers for every four American workers who enter the workforce.
Even though researchers say 30 percent of the workforce could lose their jobs due to automation by 2030, the U.S. has not
stopped importing more than a million foreign nationals every year.
For blue-collar American workers, mass immigration has not only
kept wages down but in many cases decreased wages, as Breitbart News reported. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues importing more foreign
nationals with whom working-class Americans are forced to compete. In
2016, the U.S. brought in about 1.8 million mostly low-skilled immigrants.
No comments:
Post a Comment