Just before the annual gathering of the global elites last January (at the Swiss mountain resort of Davos), the anti-poverty charity Oxfam released an eye-opening report that showed the world’s 85 richest billionaires hold as much wealth as 3.5 billion of humanity’s poorest half. That shocking statistic quickly went globally viral. Now there's a new report.
While America still suffers with repressed wages, increasing poverty and a vanishing middle class, Wall Street and big Multinational Corporations are having a party. Bonuses increased 15% and are back to their pre-financial crisis excesses Corporations hording cash offshore increased 11.8% in 2013 to a whopping $1.95 trillion.
It's been said that money is the root of all evil. But does money really make people more likely to lie, cheat and steal? New research released by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencessays "yes".
The rich get richer and the rest of us get the economic shaft. That is the theme of this so called economic recovery since 2009. A new Pew Research report, A Rise in Wealth for the Wealthy; Declines for the Lower 93%, analyzes newly released Census data on wealth. What they found is the rich got richer and the rest of us got poorer. The great American wealth transfer continues.
A flurry of studies have been released telling us what we already know. America is not the land of opportunity for most folk.
Social mobility is the ability to rise or fall economically in relation to one's peers. Increased social mobility implies people get ahead by their own efforts.
The financial crisis that grips our nation's states and cities has a malicious source, and Governor Tim Pawlenty recently named that source: public school teachers.
"It used to be that public employees were underpaid and over-benefited. Now they are over-benefited and overpaid compared to their private-sector counterparts."
The school teacher, the policeman, the firefighter - these are now the faces of what is wrong with America today. It doesn't matter that studies by the Bureau of Labor Statistics say otherwise, America can no longer afford their overpaid, middle-class salaries.
At least that is what the right-wing media is telling us. Tea party members also want to see a drastic pay cut for the same people who teach their children. A familiar comment on the internet is, "I took a pay cut last year. Why shouldn't they?"
The economic crisis has the country flailing.
That's not a controversial statement. Since early 2008 the federal government has been trying various, and expensive methods, of jump-starting the economy and propping up the housing market. Since December 2007 the Federal Reserve has created an alphabet soup of programs to stabilize the credit markets.
So far all of these attempts to stabilize the economy have had mixed results at best. Trillions of dollars have been spent and yet the economy is still crippled. Why?
The problem is that the people in charge are asking the wrong question. They are asking, "How do we get back to where we were before this crisis?" The question they should be asking is, "How did this happen?"
Unless we understand what happened and why, we will never be able to fix the economy.
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