It is time for the public to start yelling bloody murder.
I have just watched President Obama give up on taxing the wealthy without a fight.
I was looking for a news story to use as a reference to show you what I mean. I found it in The Los Angeles Times news story Obama says budget deal must include higher taxes on the wealthy.
Allowing the tax rates on higher income levels to go up in the new year would hurt small-business owners, Boehner argued, which “would slow down our economy.”
The president said he “was encouraged to hear Speaker Boehner agree that tax revenue has to be part of this equation,” and would look forward to discussing plans in detail next week.
Here is a perfect example of the President continuing his failure to communicate that has been his downfall over the last 4 years. The Boner of The House is addressing the electorate with propaganda that has sunk in with his and other Republican’s repetition. The President is addressing Speaker Boner without even offering a story to the public to counter the propaganda wallop that Boner delivered. Boner knows where the power is. Despite going to Harvard to learn where the power is, the President apparently did not learn much. You could dismiss my griping as coming from a country hick who knows nothing about power if you hadn’t already observed this kind of travesty many times yourself.
The wealthy and the big corporations are drowning in so much excess money that they don’t know where to invest it. They are not investing it in making jobs to produce more goods since the middle-class does not have enough money to buy the goods that the currently employed and currently open factories can produce. What foolish capitalist would invest money to produce goods for which there are no customers and there are not going to be customers? Instead the wealthy are putting their money into financial finagling trying to see which one can gain an advantage over the other. As a side line, they are buying up troubled companies, selling off the assets that could have been used to create future jobs, and increasing their share of the country’s wealth. They are stealing the workers’ pension funds and health care accounts to add a little more to their wealth.
Look at the above comparisons, if you think I am kidding.
- For poor and median households, Great Recession wipes out 20 years of net worth accumulation
- For the rich, only small decline
The net worth of the rich and the poor are in terms of today’s depressed values. If and when the values come back, the wealthy will have gotten even farther ahead of the middle-class and poor. Even without the recovery of values, the share of the shrinking pie that is owned by the wealthy is skyrocketing.
Taxing the wealthy and using that extra government revenue to buy infrastructure, education, health care, retirement benefits, basic science, and a myriad of other things the society needs will increase jobs and make further deficit spending unnecessary. In other words increasing the taxes on the wealthy and not cutting spending is what we need, while Boner tries to justify the exact opposite policy. Where is the public outrage going to come from if the President won’t explain this?
Whatever liquidity that the Fed has been pumping into the economy to boost its performance has been sucked right back out of the economy by the hoarding of wealth by the rich. The only way to break this cycle is to tax this wealth out of the hoarders’ hands and put it back into the economy as the Fed intended.
Do you think the President could get the public to put pressure on Boner and the other Republicans if he explained all of this to the public and asked for their help? Instead, the President is treading lightly so as not to offend Boner who has on his Army boots and is stomping all over the President.
What can we do, when the President we just re-elected is too weak to stand up for us? If we don’t rise up in a second Occupy movement, then we will get what we deserve for our inaction.
I am issuing this call from this blog. How many of you can help me spread the word? The longer you wait, the less chance we have of overcoming the forces of the wealthy.
Lest you think I am only complaining about what the wealthy are doing to me, I need to say that my personal net worth history looks more like the right hand graph than it does the other two. I have learned a little about how to play the game with the rules cast as they are. However, for the good of the country, I am hoping that things can be made more even. There is every likelihood that I will do OK unless the greed of the wealthy takes us all into a depression. Then even my skills may not be enough to protect me. That is my real worry.
Of course, how my descendants might fare is another worry. I may have enough cushion to protect Sharon and me (I hope), but I doubt it is enough to protect anybody else.