The Right is Absolutely Correct - - The Class Warfare is in Full Swing

And the middleclass is under attack.

Like I always say when it comes to voting and I hear people say that there is no difference between the two major parties, I tell them that things can always get worse. The teachers, the firemen, the policemen, the civil servants, etc., of Wisconsin just learned this very lesson. If we lose the middleclass in this country, we will be the largest Banana Republic in the world with a wide chasm between the very rich and the vast majority of us living hand-to-mouth daily.

Wages have been flat for years. 1 in 8 Americans are enrolled for food stamps in this country the largest number in history. 83 percent of US stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people. 61 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008. For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together. In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one. Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.

You have to ask yourself: Who are the best friends of the wealthy? And why would I help them kill the middle class if I am middle class? Even if I am upper middle class, doesn't a rising tide lift all boats? I say trickle up!

 

Checking my politics at the door, what is the first step in a "trickle up" system?

 

Investments in small business, education, new technologies, green energy, shifting the tax burden off the middle class, ... the list is endless. Of course, we'd have to actually close all the tax loop holes for wealthy corporations and they would actually have to start paying federal taxes again. Tax breaks are just corporate welfare. If they actually created the jobs they were supposed to create, we'd be swimming in jobs by now. There is actually no proof whatsoever that giving large corporations tax breaks creates any jobs. Small business on the other hand, do exactly that and far more efficiently than the big guys. Maybe this is more than you asked for but it is all intertwined.

 

Based on the stats you gave in your OP, I thought your "trickle up" idea started at the lower rungs of society.

 

Do you mean like the poor?

 

I guess. You cited a number of statistics in your OP but your follow up post didn't address those same people directly.
I'm just trying to understand if you are advocating a "trickle up" from the bottom or a "trickle up" that starts with the middle class and excludes the poor.

 

The right wing admirers must be so damn proud to have you as one of their spokemen.

 

Having a better educated and better employed 'lower rung' can come from what he said. Investments in small business, education, etc. And then your 'lower rungers' go from needing aid to being taxpayers.

We do have some fundamental problems in this country, though, that I have a hard time believing our Dear Leaders are going to be able to solve. A lot of it has to do with the global economy and global work force and the developing global middle class which, at the current time, is lowering wages for the US middle class too. As well as probably a big factor in why we are in a semi-recovery but still have high unemployment. Scary thought....what if those jobs don't come back? What if they have been or will be created/recovered in a different country.

 

Stu & dr moen, I don't disagree with you...I merely questioned why dr moen cited stat after stat on the poor then advocated a system that seemed to jump to the middle (yet still referred to it as "trickle up") without specifically addressing the plight of the poor. Let me re-phrase, aren't you two really advocating a "trickle down" system with the only difference being it trickles down from the middle to the bottom rather than trickling down from the top to the middle to the bottom?
Don't misunderstand me here, I have a very open mind on this subject...I'm just trying to understand.

 

Honestly, the trickle stuff just seems like buzzwords to me. Decent paying jobs, however we get them, is the real need. In my opinion, a better educated and trained workforce and small business is the way to try for that because so much of the corporations are not creating the jobs here...especially if the work force is unskilled or untrained. And that is not a this President or that Party thing. It has been going on for a while. The recession, combined with the new global emergence of other countries, has just accelerated it.

So, if you want to think in trickles, maybe it starts with the worker who is better able to do the jobs that will define our economy for the next several decades. It would be hard to get a new high tech, higher paying segment of the economy to develop with (at best) high school graduates as your labor pool. An uneducated and untrained work force in the US is not going to be able to compete globally because we cannot maintain this country on those kinds of wages. Plus they don;t pay taxes.

If you want to see a revolution...cut wages by 50 to 75% for the working class to compete with the unskilled global work force or, alternatively, keep unemployment at 10 to 20% for the next 5 to 10 years. This country won't look the same if either of those things happen.

 

The key isn't to necessarily create a bunch of dead-end, unskilled jobs. We need to be the leader in hi-tech, well paying jobs...how about a society where we are unconcerned with unskilled jobs leaving the country while being the worldwide mecca for the better jobs? I agree education is the answer but 1) education has to be affordable (but not a noose of student loan debt upon graduation) and 2) the individuals have to want it. And I guess this leads us back to personal responsibility and not making those unskilled jobs attractive by forcing an artificially high wage to be paid.

 

You also can't just significantly cut people's current wages and expect to keep a healthy, stable country either. Especially not during a period of prolonged high unemployment.

 

I guess what I was referring to when I threw out the phrase trickle up was small businesses which create 2/3 of new jobs in this country. So technically, it is a bit of both trickle down and trickle up since the very poor probably create very few jobs and the very wealthy do not have the bang for the buck that small businesses do. I think that very large businesses should be used as cash cows for the government to grow smaller businesses. Just my opinion though.

When the trickledown theory is discussed it is usually understood as handing the people at the very top all the cash in the form of tax breaks in hopes that they will feel like adding jobs to their businesses. I tend to think of small businesses, in the range of 250-300 thousand to about 500-600 thousand as seeds that are constantly looking to grow and get bigger. The biggest guys tend to level off and hire from time to time but only as much as their industry as a whole is grows which can be at a glacial pace.

I think that the priorities our government has with regard to creating and supporting job growth are simply bassackwards.

 

I think we need both skilled and unskilled workers. There will always people that just do not have the patience for academics. They'd much rather be working with their hands than have their faces buried in a book. We need both kinds of talent in this country. I know this first hand. My brother is one year younger than myself. I went with education while he was always one of the most naturally gifted mechanics I had ever met. He has made a good living running his own business doing any type of home rehab you can think of. He does such good work that he has never run out of customers and he loves the work he does. I'm mechanical but I couldn't stand doing it day in and day out and I know that I certainly couldn't hold a candle to how well my brother does anything from rehabs to building cars from the ground up. The point is, some people will always enjoy what they do and be successful at it and others will be successful in other ways and we need them all.

 

A mechanic who can make money doing it is a pretty skilled dude.

But any economy will certainly need unskilled workers too. However, it would seem to me that, the more skilled workers you have and if you create an economy that needs them, the stronger the economy will be overall. And, along with that, unskilled wages should rise too, I would think. The problem comes when you have a glut of unskilled labor that outstrips the need for it. Wages plummet and unemployment rises. That is where you can end up little better off than a 3rd world economy.

 

I think that there is a narrative out there today that attempt to pit workers on workers. For example, non-public employees against public employees. The narrative goes something like this... The public workers are greedy and living off of the public dole. They have better benefits than the non-public workers and we can't afford it.

OK here is the truth. Public pensions in almost every state were funded at the 80% or above level until 2008 when the market crashed. The public pension funds held many of the Wall Street toxic assets that were sold with a triple A rating which is almost impossible to lose money on. These are the types of investments are what pension funds are supposed to invest in. They were doing exactly what they were supposed to not knowing that they had been sold garbage. Now, it is the workers that are being blamed for being greedy. No heads of banks ever saw jail time.

 

What are you referring to here? Sales? Income?

 

Since it is a wide range and higher than many small businesses actually are, I tend to go with this definition knowing that others may look at it differently.

The most widely used method to value and determine an asking price for a small business is based on the adjustment or recasting of a business's most recent annual profit and loss statement. The goal in this process is to determine the true earning power of the business by adding back to the net profit all the non-essential or discretionary expenses not necessary to run the business to demonstrate a more realistic net cash flow for the owner.​

So essentially it is the sale price of the business or what you'd walk away with if you decided to retire and sold off all your customers and assets. By my definition, a large apartment building is a small business because it both brings in income and has a large physical asset.

 

But now we're getting back into higher earning folks who are being villianized by the left.

 

I don't see people in that range as anything but good business managers for the most part because they don’t have the financial clout to adversely affect the political process. I just think it is tough to define the problem simply by pinning it to a particular income range and saying everyone above or below this line is either good or bad. However, when you are big enough to crash the economy, sway both legislation and elected officials with piles of cash, you just might be part of the problem. I don't know anyone Right or Left that looks at a local business and says they are evil but often the Right has the need to paint the entire Left as anti-business which is a gross over-statement of the reality of the situation.

I know several local business leaders that are very wealthy and they are pillars of the community. I also know that after receiving 100's of millions of dollars in bailout money B of A made a 2009 profit of 4.4 billion and paid zero in federal taxes. How do I or any of my local business leaders get that deal? Oh yeah, we have to pay off, I mean lobby, some member of congress with suitcases full of cash and a wink and a nod.

There certainly are people that have slanted the playing field in their direction and we, the workers of this country, are the ones that are being blamed while they walk away with our tax money and never see a day behind bars. Something’s got to change this dynamic.