Ward on Words

Mark Thoma shares an article written by David Cay Johnston of Tax Analysts that compares 1961 income taxes with what we have now. Johnston's goal is to analyze if our tax system is helping us create wealth. What do you think the data shows? That the vast majority of Americans have seen only a modest rise in income in the last 45 years. In a span of years that stretches longer than a traditional career, the average income of the bottom 90% of wage earners has risen almost $9300, from an average of $22,366 in 1961 to $31,642 in 2006. In the last 45 years, GDP has grown - up 227 percent. Average income for the top 400 taxpayers has also grown from $13.7 million to $263.3 million. That's nearly 20 percent growth in 45 years. If you've felt a financial squeeze over the years, there's a big reason why. David Cay Johnston explains: But wages and fringe benefits did not grow with the economy. For most workers, they fell. Wages peaked way back in 1972-1973, were...

Two fascinating stories coming out of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) . First, a release issued by CBPP on 9/10/09 has this to say about the state of our economy: "Poverty increased, median household income fell, and the percentage of Americans with employer-based health coverage continued to decline in 2008...." Seems "trickle down" never worked all that well for those on the down-side of the policies. However, there was good news in a release issued by CBPP on 9/9/09 - for the top income earners: "Two-thirds of the nation’s total income gains from 2002 to 2007 flowed to the top 1 percent of U.S. households, and that top 1 percent held a larger share of income in 2007 than at any time since 1928..." Seems Bush/Cheney knew how to enact policies that really rewarded their base - at the expense of everyone else. Links to the releases below.... Poverty Rose, Median Income Declined, and Job-Based Health Insurance Continued to W...

Summer is here and the time is right to slash and burn jobs. At least that's the conclusion we can reach when we see that almost 500,000 people lost their jobs in June, making the jobless rate - 9.5 percent - the highest its been since Reagan was in office. That was back in 1983, when the Rust Belt cleared out all those jobs in steel and other manufacturing industries. Back in the early 1980s, Reagan promised he would bring "morning in America!" And we got a nasty recession and unemployment and states across the country dumped the mentally ill from asylums they could no longer afford to keep open. Reagan also promised the benefits of "the trickle down" theory - all those tax cuts for the rich would enhance the lives of everyone else. That "trickle down" boat seems to have sailed out to sea with just the very rich on board. Since Reagan, with rising prices and stagnant salaries, the middle class seems to be sinking, not rising, as promised, w...

The head spins trying to take it all in. The numbers. The spreads. The math. The odds. The payout. No it's not the odds of the filly winning the Belmont Stakes. It's a discussion of PPIP, the US government's private-public investment plan to unload the toxic assets from the balance books of the banks. Apparently the private organizations will do well under the plan. The public gets fleeced. At least according to Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, in a post that I found on Vox. Here's his take on PPIP: "Specifically, the FDIC is lending money at a low interest rate and on a non-recourse basis even though the FDIC is likely to experience a massive default on its loans to the investment funds. The FDIC subsidy shows up as a bid price for the toxic assets that is far above $360 billion. In essence, the FDIC is transferring hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth to the banks." And the reason Americans aren't marching ...