Schlaraffenland

Schlaraffenland is a mythical land of milk and honey and idleness. The kind of thing charismatic tyrants promise the peasantry to keep them docile and obedient.

Promises are a kind of narcotic. Democracies do their own promising but because the people are in charge of their government and have to pay for the things they enact they tend to be less lavish. This self-denial can be redirected to withhold the good life from the people who work for a living and deliver it only to those who own for a living. The wealthy few become the inhabitants of this utopia we meant for ourselves. This has been the end-result of Reagan's sunny promises, a wonderland for the lucky few and a diminished reality for the many.

Republicans and The Greater Fool

I didn't realize that pretending to be charitable could save a person millions of dollars in taxes every year. But it's worked for Romney. He can promise to give to charity and take the deduction and then not give as much or at all, as this article in Bloomberg News explains.

Fuzzy Math? Voodoo Economics? Flim-Flam? Senate Republicans prove that math that you refuse to look at doesn't actually exist. At what point can you prosecute a political party for covering up the truth? Or for lying? There's a non-partisan report that shows clearly that cutting tax on the very rich doesn't help the economy at all. No wonder they're hiding it.

Information is power. Hiding it gives power to the powerful, who tend to be Republicans and their clients. Republicans prefer the public didn't listen to Nobel Prize economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. Listen anyway. Make them mad. And vote accordingly.

There is a weird consistency to Republican thought (if I can call it that.) They prefer Americans believe bad science and non-science rather than the best science. They want Americans to ignore what NASA and our top atmospheric scientists have been saying about climate change. They want us to ignore the evidence of Hurricane Sandy. Republicans persist in trusting numbers that don't add up, plans that their candidate won't show, voodoo economic policies that failed disastrously during the Bush years.

There is, in economics, something called the "Greater Fool Theory", which says that you can always sell a product, no matter how bogus, no matter how foul and dangerous, simply by finding someone more foolish than you are, or more ill-informed or gullible, to buy it. To increase the number of greater fools you can also lie.

(As Romney is doing in Ohio and Michigan right now with his ads falsely claiming Obama somehow forced Jeep to send American jobs to China. Obama saved Jeep and Jeep is increasing its hiring in Ohio and Michigan.)

The 1% Is Fine, Thanks For Asking

The New York Times headline reads "Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds". The story will spoil your lunch.

The Washington Post reports the same results under a different headline: "Nation’s wealthiest 1 percent triple their incomes, according to CBO report." The Times didn't want to upset the mandarin class too much. Double sounds less unfair than triple.

Either way the upper upper upper class is eating our lunch. And breakfast and dinner. Maybe the message is that once you are so very rich it doesn't matter whether your income tripled or doubled. Who can keep track? Poor them, with all that income to sort out. What a headache; let's give them some more tax breaks to help them deal with it.

Another thing that's making lives more unequal is that so much more of the government's "help" is dished out to people who don't need it but just heard it was available. Imagine if rich people demanded equal access to food stamps. Rich farmers and big farmers get more relief than poor and small farmers. Big companies get more help than the small businesses who stand in as the poster children of the Chamber of Commerce (which has been screwing them for decades.)

The financial rescue was supposed to help all of us, but notice who butted to the front of the line. The too-big-to-fail banks and financial companies and major corporations (many of whom, like GE, have bigger financial services sides than their old manufacturing sides) hogged it all. They are hoarding trillions, refusing to share it, pay it out, invest it or use it to hire people or order inventory.

They are using it instead to give enormous bonuses to their tip top people. Goldman Sachs reported a $393 million loss this past quarter, but that's a fraction of the $10 billion bonuses it will pay to its executives for delivering that loss. Go figure.

Never mind, it doesn't compute. Heads they win, tails they win. The 1% always win, the 99% always lose. At least since Reagan changed the rules.

The Day the Middle Class Died

Today's must-read is from Michael Moore. Sometimes he's a bit annoying. Sometimes he's a blowhard. Sometimes he goes too far (endorsing Nader over Gore). Sometimes he's right. He's right about this.

Let's Worship the "Job Creators"

(What jobs?)

I read in the New York Times today how the very rich are spending their money. (No recession there.)

Is this how "job creators" "create jobs"?

(I'd love to know which premium PR consultant the GOP hired to rebrand the filthy rich.)

So instead of taxing rich people we tax the middle class and the working poor. What jobs are created? Jewelers? Couturiers? Expensive pedicurists?

And there is this worrisome article from Reuters about how cuts in infrastructure spending is hurting us. Instead of needed infrastructure spending (which would employ a lot of people, who would pay taxes) we get spending on $9000 sequinned tweed outfits and $50,000 tennis bracelets.

Instead of repairing roads that are falling apart and bridges that are falling down, we can comfort ourselves that a few very rich people are able to buy more fabulous new outfits and expensive foreign cars. To add to the closets and garages-full they already own. What jobs? No jobs. They don't need jobs.

Goodbye American Dream

MarketWatch is reporting that paychecks account for the lowest percentage of GDP in history, and corporate profits are taking the largest percentage ever.

So why are we shifting taxes off of corporations, their shareholders and CEOs and onto workers?

Because the Republican Party represents people who own, not people who work. And because of this work means less today, it pays less. Owners are the gods in this new America. They can hold the nation to ransom. Ordinary taxpayers pay taxes corporations used to pay. We pay their legal fees when they break the law. We pay their fines and penalties. We pay for their mistakes by bailing them out when they fail.

TooMuchOnline is reporting that top management consultants like Booz & Co. are telling American businesses to pay their employees less than they are worth so they can keep all the money themselves. That is the expert advice of the Harvard Business School. Stiff the worker. But obscenely overpaying executives is OK.

(What makes this relevant today is how it affects the budget deficit. The vast majority of average earners, those whose incomes have flattened or disappeared, are the ones who pay taxes. The individuals and corporations who have reaped the greatest income hikes are the ones who have had the biggest tax cuts. This is where the budget deficit comes from.)

If you look at the pay graph over the past four decades, they've already accomplished this––the pay of average employees has been level for that long. (see Lane Kenworthy's economics blog.) There've been no increases for the American worker at any level (except the very very top) since Reagan declared Morning in America. It was a very cold morning, and an end to the American Dream.

Who does the American Dream belong to now? Look at the numbers. The most favored Americans are those who don't work at all.

This economy, this dead economy––for millions of Americans––and insecure at best for most, is out-of-this-world rewarding for the top top people, the ones with the enormous Republican tax cuts, the ones with Boehner and Cantor and McConnell slugging for them. The ones who own instead of working.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that the income gap between the middle class and the extreme upper class has tripled.

The Washington Post reports on what this new exclusiveness creates: an insulation from the society that supports them, the society they live off of. As they earn more they care less about the people whose work creates their wealth.

Wall Street and the too-big-to-fail financial institutions, who taxpayers bailed out with trillions, reward themselves with billions apiece and handsome bonuses. But will they "loan money"? Will they hire? Will they get the economy going again? Why should they?

This bum economy is exactly the economy the bankers and Wall Street and Big Oil and their Republican operatives wanted.

Springtime for Millionaires

From Mother Jones, and from many non-partisan sources, a lot of useful visuals and diagrams describing what has happened to the middle class. Who stole our prosperity? Guess.

The best way to eliminate the deficit would be to pay all Americans better instead of restricting prosperity to the top one percent. This would make us all better taxpayers, better consumers. We would all feel more secure.

In the past forty years, since Reagan declared "morning in America", only the very few at the top of the income graph have seen an increase in income against the rising cost of living. To borrow a phrase from a popular musical, it was Springtime for Millionaires when Reagan began the reign of Reaganomics. It ended the broad prosperity begun by FDR and continued by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. Reaganomics stole from the many to enrich the few. Robin Hood in reverse. So why do people revere him?

A Republican Economy

This is a Republican economy. This is the economy they wanted.

This is where the money is going.

The money that would have hired people and created jobs and got money flowing through this economy to pay the mortgages and the grocery bills and the gas bill and the electricity and the middle class taxes, is instead being fed to the executive suite. This has been the pattern for the past few decades, and that is why the economy is flat.

How the Rich Became the Uber Rich (but no explanation about how we helped them to it.)

How the Middle Class Became the Underclass (but no explanation of how we voted for this to happen.)

The point is it's all driven by public policy, which is driven by money in politics, which was re-legalized by Republican appointees to the Supreme Court, who pushed every single de-regulation they could, which the super-rich demanded and paid for with campaign contributions and extortion tactics, it also got us a free predatory economy which the rich also wanted, which plundered working Americans' savings, which made the economy more unstable, which led to the financial collapse of 2008.

Are you happy now? Reagan's dreams have come true. The Republicans are ecstatic.

If you want evidence that the very very very rich are in control. Look at spending.

And do they have to carry their share of the load? No. Their money gives them license to evade taxes, and the middle class can't continue picking up the slack, which is why we have a deficit, which is why they'd like us to profitize Medicare and Social Security. Which would make things infinitely worse. Is this a solution?

Instead of listening to the attractive, expensively dressed "reporter" on some market-watch program, who probably gets his or her "scoops" by buying lunches for Wall Streeters, listen to a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who's covered this story honestly and aggressively for decades.