In the lead article in the April 25 issue of The New Yorker, “Deepest Cuts,” award-winning author and staff writer George Packer wrote: “The most persistent and corrosive feature of American life over the past three decades is income inequality.” According to the New York Times, the richest one percent of Americans take home 24 percent of all income generated in the U.S. In 1976, they were taking home nine percent. That’s the key statistic for the economic trend of the last three decades. Timothy Nash in Slate wrote: “The U.S. now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.” Really! This, I believe, is the America that congressional Republicans are trying to make permanent and, from the looks of things, they are conning us well and succeeding. I’ll describe the methodology of the con in a moment.
Packer wrote, in “Deepest Cuts”: “The Republicans now hold just one house of Congress, yet they have controlled the terms of the debate, because they understand that budget battles are far more than numbers, and they’ve made the ideology behind their various bargaining positions startlingly clear: government should be reduced to gasping for air.” Have you been feeling squeezed lately too?
Grover Norquist, leading conservative tactician, put it this way: “Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.” And they’ve been pushing that goal long and hard and with fierce determination. Make no mistake - along with the government they’re attempting to drown, they will waterboard American workers and the middle class to keep us all gasping and vulnerable as hard as they can, for as long as we let them.
http://www.independent.com/news/2011/apr/29/big-con-job/
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