Why Widening Inequality is Hobbling Equal Opportunity

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/why-widening-inequality-hobbling-equal-opportunity



***SNIP

In fact, America’s savage inequality is the main reason equal opportunity is fading and poverty is growing. Since the “recovery” began, 95 percent of the gains have gone to the top 1 percent, and median incomes have dropped. This is a continuation of the trend we’ve seen for decades. As a result:

(1) The sinking middle class no longer has enough purchasing power to keep the economy growing and creating sufficient jobs. The share of working-age Americans still in the labor force is the lowest in more than thirty years.

(2) The shrinking middle isn’t generating enough tax revenue for adequate education, training, safety nets, and family services. And when they’re barely holding on, they can’t afford to — and don’t want to — pay more.

(3) Meanwhile, America’s rich are accumulating not just more of the country’s total income and wealth, but also the political power that accompanies money. And they’re using that power to reduce their own taxes, and get corporate welfare (subsidies, bailouts, tax cuts) for their businesses.

All this means less equality of opportunity in America.

[Laelth]

1. k&r for the truth, however depressing it may be. n/t

-Laelth

[marmar]

2. k/r

[Agony]

3. Oh, those Democratic Operatives, always looking out for us peons!

"Democratic operatives have been hitting back hard against the President or any other Democratic politician talking about income inequality, preferring that the Democrats talk about equality of opportunity instead."

Just like Paul Ryan asks them to, how nice!

"
Over cocktails at the White House this month, some Senate Democrats, including Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, spoke with Mr. Obama about the importance of framing their arguments in terms of opportunity and upward mobility. In December, in a speech on the theme in a struggling Washington neighborhood, Mr. Obama spoke of income inequality two dozen times, though he usually did so in combination with mobility or opportunity.

...

“He’s shifting us away from the American idea — from a society of upward mobility — and we’re talking to each other more in class terms,” said Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin. “Instead of focusing on equality of outcomes,” as Mr. Ryan said the president does, “we should be focusing on equality of opportunity.”

Told that Mr. Obama has said the opposite — “While we don’t promise equal outcomes, we have strived to deliver equal opportunity,” the president said in his December speech in a Washington neighborhood — Mr. Ryan dismissed those words.

“He has a very interesting rhetorical technique,” Mr. Ryan said, “which is to borrow the language of those he disagrees with to sell what he’s peddling.”
" http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/us/politics/obama-moves-to-the-right-in-a-partisan-war-of-words.html?_r=0
Oooops, there goes Chuck Schumer, my favorite progressive Senator doing it as well.

So, don't talk about the root cause lest
the pure become the enemy of the good... there all better now!

[xchrom]

4. +1

[JDPriestly]

5. +1000

[TheKentuckian]

9. What Ryan actually opposes is equal opportunity, he knows equality of outcome is about impossible.

He cannot express that of course so he is left with shameful distortions and convoluted contortions to fling shit accusations to justify their opposition to timid, market oriented adjustments that Republicans historically have seen as the normal course of business to a broken and arguably irredeemably captured system.

[Agony]

10. I think that Ryan believes you should pull yourself up by your own bootstraps or die in a ditch...

you are more eloquent than I in saying pretty much the same thing.

Cheers,
Agony

[daleanime]

6. K&R....

[jsr]

7. +1

[Agony]

8. obviously we don't have equality of opportunity...