That 6.7 percent share is the highest in the 35 years that the Census Bureau has maintained such records, surpassing previous highs in 2009 and 1993 of just over 6 percent.
Voltaire stated in his Dictionnaire Philosophique, (the chapter "Money," 1764) "In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other." The difficulty arises, Voltaire continues, in deciding whetther to take from the poor to give to the rich, or to take from the rich to give to the poor. As I have stated before, the trend since the Reagan Administration has been to take from the poor to give to the rich.
The idea of a good paying job for the child's parents, with benefits, is not a guarantee. Greg Kaufmann wrote an article for The Nation magazine's February 3, 2012 issue, titled "On Poverty: If It's Sunday, It's Myths in the Press, "in response to James Wilson's January 29, 2012, Washington Post op-ed, "Angry About Ineqaulity? Don't Blame the Rich."
Mr. Kaufmann makes a number of good points in rebutting Mr. Wilson's op-ed, but he misses two of the most salient points that make the very title of Mr. Wilson's op-ed a lie: the simple facts that twenty percent of the nation's wealth, and fifteen percent of our nation's individual annual income has shifted to the richest one percent of our population over the last forty years. This means that the rest of the American people have been dividing up an ever diminishing piece of the nation's economic pie. We have seen such a substantial shift of both the nation's wealth and income because of changes to our tax laws. This is due to the overweening political influence of the richest one percent of the population. The nation's median income--the figure that half of our population makes more than, and half makes less than--has (after inflation) remained stagnant or declined since the Reagan Administration. So my question to Mr. Wilson is quite simple: who else is to blame but the rich, and their venal political lackeys.
Joseph Stiglitz in his May 2, 2012 Daily Beast article, "The 99 Percent Wake Up," made one of the most concise statements about what is wrong with the neoliberal economic model embraced by so many political and economic movers and shakers today:
"But even before the crisis, the evidence was that the market economy was not delivering for most Americans. GDP was going up but most citizens were worse off. Not even the laws of economics long championed by the political right seemed to hold. Earlier, we explained how the theory that is supposed to relate rewards to social contributions had been falsified by the Great Recession . The theory holds that competition is supposed to be so strong in a perfectly efficient market that "excess" profits (returns in excess of the normal return on capital) approach zero. Yet each year we saw the banks walking off with mega-profits so large that it is inconceivable that markets are really competitive."
One of the greatest problems facing our nation's recovery from the Great Recession is the trillions of dollars, at home and abroad, that are being held back by American corporations.
David Cay Johnston in his July 16, 2012 Reuters article: "Idle Rich Cash Piles Up ," states that according to the IRS, $4.8 trillion dollars were being held out of the American economy in 2009 (the last year for which figures are available) by non-financial American corporations, equal to $5.1 trillion dollars today after inflation is factored in. This is in spite of soaring corporate profits: from less than $1.5 trillion dollars in 2009, to just under $2 trillion dollars in 2011.
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