Dean Baker: The Rich Get Richer While Nurses, Teachers, and Firefighters Get Trounced

[marmar]

via CommonDreams:




Published on Tuesday, March 29, 2011 by Huffington Post

The Rich Get Richer While Nurses, Teachers, and Firefighters Get Trounced
The Deficit Hawks Target Nurses and Firefighters

by Dean Baker


Many people might think that the country's problems stem from the fact that too much money has been going to the very rich. Over the last three decades, the richest one percent of the population has increased its share of national income by almost 10 percentage points (Excel spreadsheet). This comes to $1.5 trillion a year, or as the deficit hawks are fond of saying, $90 trillion over the next 75 years.

To put this in context, the size of this upward redistribution to the richest one percent over the last three decades is roughly large enough to double the income of all the households in the bottom half of the income distribution. The upward redistribution amounts to an average of more than 1.2 million dollars a year for each of the families in the richest one percent of the population.

And this upward redistribution was brought about by deliberate policy. We pursued a trade and high dollar policy that was intended to put downward pressure on the wages of manufacturing workers. The Federal Reserve Board deliberately kept unemployment higher than necessary in order to weaken workers bargaining power. We extended patent monopolies to allow drug companies to jack up prices, raking in hundreds of billions a year. And, we gave the Wall Street banks the benefit of "too big to fail" status so they can borrow with a government subsidy.

These policies and others fueled this enormous upward redistribution. But the deficit hawks don't want us talking about any of these things. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/29-4

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[Newest Reality]

2. Highly Recommend!!!

It sums-up some salient points.

[FiveGoodMen]

3. And traitors all across America go along with it

Believing...

1) That we are not a community and that others' problems are not our problems, and

2) That it won't happen to them.