July 18, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

TWO FOR THEM, ONE FOR ME . . . .

We hear a lot about the robust stock market. Things have got to be great in the U. S. economy if the stock market is booming, right? On the other hand, right-wingers bemoan the "entitlement crisis." We baby boomers will be retiring in a few years and the apocalypse is upon us with the payouts in social security and medicare--or so we're told. We know that right-wingers are challenged when it comes to the truth. This article by Heather Boushey and Joshua Holland is at www.alternet.org:

What reconciles these two themes is absent from our mainstream economic discourse: we "can't afford" all sorts of programs that are clearly in the common good because most of the benefits of our growing economy have gone to a very small group of Americans, who have, in turn, seen their taxes slashed again and again in the past six years. It's a story that isn't told as often as it should in the commercial press because it's a supposedly "liberal" narrative -- never mind that über-conservative former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan told Congress that there is a "really serious problem here, as I've mentioned many times … in the consequent concentration of income that is rising."

Saying that the majority of the country's economic gains in recent years have gone to the top one percent of the income ladder understates the trend. You have to cut the pie into even smaller slices to get the full picture. Because while the bottom half of the top one percent of the income distribution have done far better than the average wage slaves, it is a smaller slice still -- the top .01 percent -- that has grabbed most of the gains--seeing an impressive 250 percent increase in income between 1973 and 2005 -- from an economy that's grown by 160 percent.