Sobering Statistics

14 million able bodied Americans are out of work. That's a robust 9.1%. It's worst in Nevada (12.9%) and California (12.0%). It's 10% or above in 8 other states plus the District of Columbia. 

As if that news weren't sobering enough, the U.S. Census Bureau released their annual report Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States (2010).  

46 million Americans now live in poverty, an addition of 2.6 million impoverished since last year's count. That's 15.1% of all Americans live in poverty. 15.1%. That's more than 1 in 7 Americans. 

50 million Americans are without health care coverage. That's 16.3%, or nearly 1 in 6 Americans. 

Nationally, median household incomes have declined -2.3% since last year, or $1,154 per family. 

The Congressional response to these trends in employment, income, poverty, and lack of healthcare coverage is startling. Slash federal spending, push to reduce benefits from entitlement programs, challenge legality of the health care reform law, all while steadfastly refusing to raise taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations in order to cover the revenue gap. 

Our country is hurting ... badly. And Congress is more interested in protecting special interests than in helping our citizens weather this storm. Shame on them. And shame on us for electing them. 

Voters get what they deserve. 

 

 

Proud to be an American?

I liken the U.S. to Sir Winston Churchill's quote ... "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried." I'd say America is the worst country to live in, except for all the others. 


That's not exactly true, of course. There are a number of lovely countries with idyllic landscapes, great weather, robust economies, and representative (free) governments. But the U.S. with its unparalleled freedoms, cultural diversity, widely varying topography, ample arable land, etc. is a pretty unique place in the world. 


But our American exceptionalism has disappeared. Evaporated. 


Take a look at this graphic from the New York Times. And then let's break it down column by column.  


1. We now have higher income inequality than all but Hong Kong and Singapore among "Advanced Economies". Analogous to this, though not shown in the figure, is that wages as a percentage of U.S. GDP have reached an all-time low. Let me repeat that. Wages - our paychecks - have reached an all-time low as a percentage of our economy. Since the government began keeping statistics on this issue, at no point have American workers taken home a smaller piece of the economic pie.  


2. The second column reflects the current unemployment rate for each advanced economy. As you can see we're not the worst at 9%, but we're at more than double a number of "social democracies", which are supposedly bad for business. Well, we're at a point where "bad for business" means "good for workers" so we're at a stalemate I guess. 


3. "level of democracy" ... should be our bread and butter, right? Nope. We're in the middle of the pack. I haven't researched how this metric is calculated, but if we take it on face value we're pretty much "average" when it comes to our democracy, at least among advanced economies.


4. "wellbeing index" ... that's the percentage of our citizens who are "thriving" ... we're at 57% ... or middle of the pack again. 


5. "food security" based on a question about whether in the past 12 months people have lacked having enough money to put food on their table. This is expressed as a percentage of the country. A full 16% of Americans answered yes to this question. 16% of us have not had enough money to adequately feed our families or ourselves in the past 12 months. Compare that to 3% in Denmark. Or 6% in Germany. 


6. Life expectancy at birth. Here we're in the "red zone" ... We rank ahead of just 5 of the 32 other advanced economies. We're fat. We're unhealthy. We're eating copious amounts of processed foods high in salt and preservatives. We have limited access to quality health care thanks to our predominantly employer-based private health insurance system. It's now being estimated that our children will have shorter life expectancy than we do.


7. We have more than twice the prison population (as a percentage of our citizens incarcerated) of any other advanced economy. 


8. We now rank equivalent to the Czech Republic in math and science scores based on international standardized tests. The Czech Republic. 


We can do better, people. But it requires cooperation, hard work, and sacrifice. All things that seem to be rapidly becoming exceptional behaviors in our republic. 

Obama's Tax Defeat

Make no mistake. The bipartisan tax agreement between the White House and Congressional Republicans will save you money over the next 2 years. 

That is unless you make less than $20,000 a year ($40,000 for a couple filing jointly). 

That's right. This big tax cut agreement increases the tax burden on the lowest earners. You see, the Making Work Pay credit goes away. That credit for low and middle wage earners gave them $400 to individuals or $800 to families. But the benefits of this new plan are less than $400/$800 for those lowest earners so they actually end up losing a few dollars a week. A few dollars a week that these lowest earners need more than the top 1% of earners need their average $70,000 tax cut under this plan.

That's right. The rich just got richer. It happens every time.

Of course, they were already rich. In fact, the super rich make out best of all. Those in the top 1% will receive 25% of the benefit of this new tax plan.

There was also no movement on closing the loophole that allows hedge fund managers to file their income under capital gains, because they earn fees and a percentage of the take on whatever their hedge fund makes their investors each year. Why does this matter? Because they aren't investing or earning off their own money. They're investing and earning off their investors. So it's income, not capital gains. These guys who make millions and even billions of dollars each year currently pay a 15% capital gains tax. That's the equivalent to the 2nd lowest tax bracket in our income tax structure for 2010. An individual making over $34,000 will move into the next bracket, taxed 25% on anything over that amount. So a hedge fund manager is taxed at a substantially low rate than is his secretary. 

Further, there's a one year reduction in our Social Security tax. For an individual at the maximum social security income ($106,800), they'll save $2,136 this year. Think about that for a minute. We've cut back on our Social Security revenue collection at a time when we're worried that Social Security will be insolvent soon. Well, it just got sooner. Well done.

Of course, none of this will be paid for by spending decreases. Nope, it'll just go into the deficit. Into federal bonds that those with excess money can invest in to earn interest on top of their tax breaks. Makes perfect sense, right? We lend money to ourselves and charge ourselves interest. All so we can have a little extra cash in our pocket. 

President Obama defended this tax plan with this, “I’ve said before that I felt that the middle-class tax cuts were being held hostage to the high-end tax cuts. I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage-takers, unless the hostage gets harmed. Then people will question the wisdom of that strategy. In this case, the hostage was the American people, and I was not willing to see them get harmed.”

This is a perfectly reasonable response. Most of President Obama's reasons are soundly rational.
At a time when the average American is really hurting financially. When millions of homes are being foreclosed upon. When there are 5 potential workers for every available job. When unemployment stands at 9.8%. That's not the time to draw a line in the sand and dare your opponents to cross it. That's the time to stand up, do what is right, and protect the interests of the working class. If that means you have to make concessions to the wealthy, that's apparently the price you pay in today's political environment. 

The trouble is, of course, he didn't stand up for the weakest of the weak - for the working poor making less than $20,000 a year. I guess they were the hostages that didn't make it out alive. Pity.