We're in a Recession Because the Rich Are Raking in an Absurd Portion of the Wealth

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

Why the ** are lefties so concerned about what other ppl make? I didnt here much ra ra when the banks were lending to the POOR! I believe I am observing the last desperate voices of a party that is about to be put on the endangered species list.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

They like their plastic money, and want Uncle Bama to bail them out before the store takes back their new LCD HD 80" Multiplexer.

[Usui Takumi 1,562]

Why the ** are lefties so concerned about what other ppl make? I didnt here much ra ra when the banks were lending to the POOR! I believe I am observing the last desperate voices of a party that is about to be put on the endangered species list.

Lefties? Here is John McCain's statement on the subject "income inequality poses a threat to stability and free market democracy".

Edited July 14, 2010 by Sousuke

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Yep. McCain is just another Progressive. The country is infected with them.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

You can always tell when Right Wingers are losing an argument. They go off on tangents and ignore the logical arguments.

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

Lefties? Here is John McCain's statement on the subject "income inequality poses a threat to stability and free market democracy".

Non answer! Name someone you know that was forced to work for a wage they didnt agree to.

[Usui Takumi 1,562]

Non answer! Name someone you know that was forced to work for a wage they didnt agree to.

Existence forces people to work accept wages that they don't agree to. If a person is starving they'll work 5 hours for a dollar (see third world countries).

Edited July 14, 2010 by Sousuke

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Existence forces people to work accept wages that they don't agree to. If a person is starving they'll work 5 hours for a dollar (see third world countries).

Libertarian ideology imagines a perfect world where true choice always exist and therefore no one is really forced to work.

[^_^ 5,021]

Libertarian ideology imagines a perfect world where true choice always exist and therefore no one is really forced to work.

'imagines' being the key word.

One wonders what it would take to wake them from their slumber. It's like they're all collectively high on Rand.

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

They like their plastic money, and want Uncle Bama to bail them out before the store takes back their new LCD HD 80" Multiplexer.

Its so TRUE!

[^_^ 5,021]

Its so TRUE!

You know, ####### and you should put your powers of clairvoyance to better use. You could make a killing in the stock market, make mawilson and Lord Infamous look like girls.

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

Existence forces people to work accept wages that they don't agree to. If a person is starving they'll work 5 hours for a dollar (see third world countries).

So are you saying when Obama spends us into the next depression you will do anything for money?

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

You know, ####### and you should put your powers of clairvoyance to better use. You could make a killing in the stock market, make mawilson and Lord Infamous look like girls.

Beats the ** outta playin a scratch ticket!

[^_^ 5,021]

Beats the ** outta playin a scratch ticket!

There's that clairvoyance again. Impressive. Do another one!

[one...two...tree 2,762]

For anyone interested, Tavis Smiley interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, David Cay Johnston, author of best-selling books on tax and economic policy, including Free Lunch.

Listen to the interview here.

Transcript:

Tavis: Are wealthy Americans really that bad? Enriching themselves at government expense and sticking us with the bill?

Johnston: Well, there are an awful lot of them who are getting enormous benefits from the government. You know, we live in a country where the government will tell you to the penny how much it spends on free school lunches, on widows or orphans, and keeps a record of anything that goes down. But the subsidies that go upward, which are enormous, I had to dig all of these out. There is no central point. There's no statistics.

But Donald Trump got $89 million dollars from a taxed New Jersey levies for the poor. Warren Buffett was given a $100 million dollar tax benefit for a $40 million dollar investment in New York. The Walton Family, the richest family in America, in many of their stores, Wal-Mart Stores as well as others, Target, Home Depot, a lot of the big box retailers, when you walk into those stores, the sales tax you have to pay at the cash register does not go to the government.

By law, the owners of the store get to keep it. It pays for building the store. They say it creates jobs. It destroys other jobs and it also means the schools, the police, the libraries, they don't get that money to provide us with services.

Tavis: What you're talking about here is when we hear that term "corporate welfare", is this what we're basically talking about?

Johnston: Yes. In fact, I call it "corporate socialism".

Tavis: "Corporate socialism."

Johnston: "Corporate socialism."

Tavis: That's a strong title.

Johnston: Well, because what we're doing is, we are taking from those with less, from the poor, the middle class, even the affluent, and giving to those at the very, very top. All of the work that I do comes out of the official government data. I don't go around talking to politicians about what they say. I go dig through the government records and find the statistics and the reports that identify these.

Tavis: Who could we ever count on - with all due respect to our new president - who could we ever count on, Republican or Democrat in the White House, to do something about corporate welfare, never mind their protestation, given that no matter who you are, your money is coming from corporations to be elected president, either Democrat-friendly corporations or Republican-friendly corporations?

But how does this issue ever get dealt with, to say nothing of the fact that members of Congress get their money from these same corporations? So I hate to say you wasted your time writing this book, but how does that ever get attacked?

Johnston: Well, in fact, it's actually brought some changes. The burglar alarm industry has changed its ads on TV because of the book and Congress has passed a lot of laws as a result of my work. President Bush signed at least five laws as a result of my work to stop some of these abuses. But so long as we have the current campaign finance system where free speech is equal to dollars in the view of the Supreme Court, you're fighting a terrible battle.

I suggest one way to get around this is that we as taxpayers stop trying to get a free lunch with Congress. We don't pay the real costs of Congress. We allow members of Congress to go on sponsored trips to investigate conditions. I think we should pay every one of those costs.

I think we should put a shield around Congress that says whatever expense you have, just as with the Franklin privilege where you can send out unlimited amounts of mail under the Constitution, we will pay whatever business expense you have provided that we get a receipt for everything, we get a record of everyone you met with, not exactly what was talked about, but the general substance of it.

If you as a senator need to go inspect, because you're on the health committee, the cleanliness of a sink behind a bar in Tahiti, you go right ahead and go, but we're gonna know all about it. But if you take a shot of whiskey from a lobbyist or a cup of coffee, we're gonna send you to prison.

We're gonna insulate you from that and pay all the costs. I think that would be a lot cheaper than what goes on now where basically lobbyists and the people they work for invest in politicians as a form of venture capital. They don't always get what they want, but when it pays off, the payoff is so big that it's worth it.

Tavis: One of the issues about campaign finance reform that we have to talk about tonight is - with all due respect to our new president, his career before being elected president; he spent dedicated to the notion of campaign finance reform, as you well know because you covered this campaign as I did.

There were a whole lot of folk who were disappointed when he did a 180 on the money issue. First he said he would take matching funds, then he said he wouldn't take matching funds. His argument for not taking matching funds is that he had discovered a new way to raise money. Most of his donations were coming from small donors, so he wanted to circumvent what he said he was gonna do earlier, which is to take money from the system.

All that said, John McCain took the money; Barack Obama didn't. Obama raises, what, $750, almost a billion dollars, $750 million dollars this guy raised in campaign contributions. How does that particular president now do something about what you're raising in this book, campaign finance reform, when he walked around that issue?

Johnston: Well, he may have changed the ballgame here. I mean, we've gone on the assumption here that wealthy individuals who are trying to buy something from Congress, corporations are funding all of these campaigns and we can't do anything about it. What Obama did was show that, well, wait a minute. Maybe you can get enough popular support that, in small contributions, you can get around that.

But this is a bipartisan fundamental problem and it stems largely from the Supreme Court decision that treats dollars and free speech as being equal. We're gonna have to probably live with that for a long time, given the current makeup of the Supreme Court. Obama, immediately when he took office though, began to do some things that indicate that he's serious.

One of the very first two executive orders he apparently signed and it's not even up on the White House website was to instruct that you will comply with the Freedom of Information Act. You will be transparent. The exact opposite of what the Bush administration did.

Tavis: But specifically on the issue of campaign finance reform, in this new White House and in this new Congress, what hope do you hold out for doing something about campaign finance reform?

Johnston: If the public demands it, we'll get a change. The whole idea of America is we can solve any problem we have. Problems we want to solve, we solve. We can solve this problem if there's enough public noise and uproar. But, you know, we've been outsourcing a lot of government to the lobbyists.

By the way, the number of lobbyists in Washington has doubled since 2000, more than doubled. All the layoffs going around in the country, lobbying is a big business because mining the government for money is as very profitable enterprise.

If enough people demand, "We want a government that represents us. We want a government that stops taking from the poor and the middle class and the affluent to give to the rich", we'll get that kind of change and we'll get fundamental campaign finance reform. But it has to be from the popular will.

Tavis: Let me ask - I'm not being naïve about this and I'm not, you know, unduly pressing this issue, but I do want to bring it down to the level of the everyday person in this particular conversation. How does an average voter - and there were so many of them who were engaged by this process, most of them because of Mr. Obama - how do we enact what you say ought to be the answer here? How do everyday people impact this process?

Johnston: That's a wonderful question. Get together with your friends. Find out when your Congressman or Senator is gonna show up in public, which isn't that often. Politicians in ancient Athens were the same as they are today. They get up in the morning and they see which way the wind is blowing. Go to a public forum with practiced questions. "Congressman, what are you going to do about this?" And when the Congressman tries to slither away from that question, somebody else in the audience who's your friend gets up and asks the question.

Enough Congressmen run into things like this. They get letters, not long diatribes, but short pointed letters or emails. The contact people have with radio talk show hosts, the letters to the editor of the newspaper. If they begin changing the conversation by individual acts, millions of people saying, "I'm gonna speak up briefly on this point and pay attention", it will change the tone of the conversation.

Talk about the issues, especially, I hope, the issues in "Free Lunch" about the redistribution of wealth upward and incomes upward to the top and how this is done. At your church, at the hair salon, at your neighborhood bar, at dinner with your friends and your family. We need to be actively engaged citizens and how we talk about things changes things. It is not meaningless when we talk with our friends and neighbors about the system we want.

Tavis: You do realize because you watched this campaign as I did that the one thing that John McCain got just a wee bit attraction on was attacking Obama on this notion of the redistribution of wealth and now you're telling me that we need to talk about the redistribution of wealth. A lot of folk don't like hearing that phrase. That sounds like - you used socialism earlier. McCain says and other Republicans say that's the very essence of what socialism is.

Johnston: But, in fact, we're living in a country that has this national myth that we take from those at the top and give to those at the bottom. School teachers, nurses, police officers, office workers pay a marginal tax rate - that means the last dollar of their income - of more than 40% because of social security and income taxes.

People who run hedge funds? They used to pay a marginal rate of 0 if they deferred the money and, because partly of the stories that I wrote, Congress changed the rules, now they're gonna have to pay 15%.

But they're still only paying a third of what working Americans pay out of their income and Americans don't know this. They don't know about all the gifts that are being made. Their whole industry, as I describe in "Free Lunch", including commercial sports, you know, football, baseball, basketball and hockey, who derive all of their profits not from the market, but from hidden subsidies from the taxpayers.

So we have a socialist redistribution scheme in America, but contrary to the myth, the official government data is overwhelming in showing that we've been distributing money up. It's not trickle down economics; it's Niagara up.

Tavis: Why don't we see - and I know there are a couple. I can think of a couple myself and I know you know them better than I do - why don't we see folk inside of government, folk on The Hill, folk in the White House, taking on this kind of issue more publicly?

Johnston: Well, once you get a cultural myth of any kind, it's incredibly pervasive. You can turn on any one of the radio programs in the morning. It doesn't matter if it's Fox or it's NPR. You'll get the same narrative. It's like the sun rose in the east this morning. There's no attribution to it. So very few people are aware in this country.

For example, Americans in 2006 - that's the last year we had the data - made the same income in the bottom 90% that they did back in 1980. From 1980 to 2006, the incomes of the bottom 90% of Americans went nowhere. But at the top, peoples' incomes rose to unbelievable levels.

Just 1,100 Americans get 1.3 cents of every dollar of income in this country. Just 300,000 Americans, the best-off 300,000 Americans, have as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. So we have this enormous problem where government has been stripping away benefits, it's made college which was free when I went to college and the only reason I was able to go, now it's an $85 billion dollar a year business, unbelievably profitable business.

We have reduced spending in all sorts of things that help people rise and improve their lives so that we can subsidize jets for corporate executives, baseball luxury boxes. You the taxpayers are paying for that stuff. We're doing all these works where we take from those with less to give to those with more, and what is it in the Bible that is denounced more than anything else as evil? Taking from those less to give to those who have more.

I don't think our politicians, by the way, realize at all what they're doing because they all do it piecemeal. That's why we don't have any statistics on these things and I had to dig them out one at a time.

Tavis: He dug them out one at a time and he put them all in a book. The book is called "Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You with the Bill". His name is David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winner and reporter. David, thanks for the text. Glad it's out in paperback and glad to have you on.

Johnston: Thank you.

Tavis: Good to see you.

http://www.pbs.org/k...3_johnston.html

Edited July 14, 2010 by El Buscador