The Republicans' Akin Heart

Swarms of Republicans are now calling for Todd Akin to withdraw from the Senate race in Missouri. Akin is drawing fire for comment he made on a television show about pregnancy resulting from rape:

From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.

Republicans are worried that Akin will lose his race against Claire McCaskill, reducing the chance of a Republican takeover in the Senate, and that his continued presence will allow the Democrats to characterize him and other Republicans as continuing the war on women. Worse, they're afraid that this may influence the attitudes of women in general, possibly costing the Romney/Ryan ticket the election.

So now Republicans are falling over themselves to distance themselves from what Akin said. But many of them have been advancing this very idea. For example, Paul Ryan co-sponsored legislation in 2011 that would strengthen federal prohibitions on abortion funding, redefining rape so that only "forcible rape" (Akin's "legitimate rape") would be exempt. That is, if you go out on a date with a guy and he rapes  you, or a coworker rapes you in the office, or your brother rapes you at home, tough luck: you've got to bear the scumbag's child.

Republicans thought they had put the war on women behind them. The public's memory is fleeting, and the all-male Congressional hearing on birth control was months ago, as were Rush Limbaugh's despicable comments about Sandra Fluke, the elections in which states tried to define human life as beginning at conception, effectively outlawing all abortion, and so on.

But now Akin has committed the unpardonable sin of saying out loud what so many Republicans believe in their heart of hearts: that women who get raped deserve it, that they should suffer the consequences for tempting men, and all women should pay the price for Eve eating the apple and bringing all this sin down upon mankind.

The Generosity Gap

A new study claims that religious people and Republican-leaning states give more money to charity than the non-religious. Like most such studies there are some picky details that undermine the entire gist of the report.

The study found:

The most generous state was Utah, where residents gave 10.6 percent of their discretionary income to charity. Next were Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina. The least generous was New Hampshire, at 2.5 percent, followed by Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Hmm... 10.6%. Why does 10% sound so familiar?

In Mormon teachings, for instance, Latter Day Saints are required to pay a 10% tithe to remain church members in good standing, which helps explain the high giving rate in heavily-Mormon Utah.

In other words, the people who contribute the most to "charity" are actually giving their money to their church, which threatens them with eternal damnation if they don't fork over the cash. This is like the bad old days when the Catholic Church offered "indulgences" to the wealthy, in which their "pardoner" would hold their soul hostage for the sins they had confessed, exchanging cash to avoid harsh penance.

Giving money to a church isn't charity. It's primarily an insurance plan for your immortal soul. It's also a fee-for-service arrangement that pays for the minister to act as an adviser and weekly stand-up comic. It's mostly used to pay for mortgages, building maintenance, operating expenses, and salaries, and sometimes subsidizes day care and education for church members. In large church organizations the local franchises send money off to headquarters to maintain the central hierarchy in the style to which it is accustomed and round up more customers ("missions"). Appeals for money for actual charitable works, such as the "poor box" and assistance for natural disasters, are made separately from the normally expected donations.

In other words, churches are and always have been big businesses. The ascendance of brazen money-grubbing televangelists is simply the logical extension of the model.

The article doesn't have enough detail to know for sure, but the numbers in Utah suggest that charitable giving is pretty much the same across the country, if you discount contributions to churches, or at least the portion that used for hierarchical overhead and services provided directly back to customers.

So it doesn't seem that the unchurched and Democrats are any less generous. In addition:

Alan Wolfe, a political science professor at Boston College, said it's wrong to link a state's religious makeup with its generosity. People in less religious states are giving in a different way by being more willing to pay higher taxes so the government can equitably distribute superior benefits, Wolfe said. And the distribution is based purely on need, rather than religious affiliation or other variables, said Wolfe, also head of the college's Boisi Center for Religion and Public Life.

People who live states with higher taxes fund the support infrastructure for better education, better roads and public welfare. That helps all people regardless of race, color or creed. Doesn't that seem more generous?

Wrong on Wind, Right on Ethanol

In a recent opinion piece George Will blurted out the following as if it were the most elementary truth you learn in grade school:

This may seem a minor matter, as well as an obvious and easy decision for a conservative. The wind tax credit is, after all, industrial policy, the government picking winners and losers in defiance of market signals — industrial policy always is a refusal to heed the market’s rejection of that which the government singles out for favoritism.

This is a completely fatuous proclamation, ignorant of history. The federal government has always picked winners and losers when setting industrial policy.

When the government wanted to expand westward it picked winners and losers by granting railroads rights of way that ran roughshod over anyone who happened to be in their way.

When the federal government built the freeway system it picked winners and losers by building a transportation system for the trucking industry, completely undermining the rail system that it has subsidized only decades before and giving automobile and oil companies huge market opportunities.

Oil companies reap huge subsidies from the government, thousands of times greater than the subsidies that wind power receives.

But what about Will's infamous "market signals?" The market has been sending signals about the price of oil for decades. In the Seventies the Arab oil embargo sent a huge shock through the American economy, and allowed the Japanese to gain entry into the American automobile market and almost crush Detroit. Saddam's invasion of Kuwait sent a signal strong enough for us to start a war. Every time Iran says boo about the Straits of Hormuz the price of oil spikes.

Every year or two there's another massive oil spill, sending another market signal. This summer's drought and the high price of corn sends another market signal: the warming climate, caused by excess CO2 from burning fossil fuel, will increase the cost of food and reduce yields.

Will is right about one thing: not all subsidies are equal. But instead of worshiping at the altar of the market, he should pay some attention to the sciences of geology, agronomy and physics. He lumps together the wind tax credit and subsidies for the production of ethanol, which is usually made from corn. He's dead wrong on wind, but right on ethanol.

Geology: there's only a finite amount of oil, and it's going to run out in our lifetimes, especially as Asia and Africa begin to demand the lifestyle Americans enjoy. Its price fluctuates wildly and constantly, and because it mostly comes from countries antagonistic to the United States (the Middle East, Venezuela, Russia), it's critical to ensure that we have other sources of energy.

Agronomy: corn-based ethanol is just about the worst form of fuel possible. It's made from a foodstuff, so every bushel of corn turned into ethanol is a bushel of corn that people and livestock can't eat. Corn requires massive amounts of water and often requires more energy (usually from oil) for cultivation, fertilizer, transport, and so on, than it produces as ethanol.

Physics: once the infrastructure in place wind power is essentially free. The wind will still be blowing strong across North Dakota long after the oil boom there busts and the derricks fall silent.

The government has to be responsible for setting industrial policy for the long term, because multinational corporations have no concern about the future of the United States. They only care about profits in the next quarter and whether the stock price gains will garner the CEO his bonus. Wind power subsidies are ridiculously cheap compared to the amount of money the government spends subsidizing the oil and automobile industries with the highway system alone.

The only reason to oppose wind power subsidies is to hammer political opponents who support them. Wind power isn't some distant pipe dream. The United States has about 48,000 megawatts of installed capacity. That powers tens of millions of homes.

Wind: it's the conservative choice.

See, This Is What Happens...

The first term Senator from Missouri, Claire McCaskill, was pretty much toast this fall. Even with the nomination of the extremely conservative Todd Akin, she was likely going to lose the election.

Funny things always happen, though, when you have a far right wing candidate...things like them opening their mouths and talking. 

First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare…If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

Wow.

Do we really want to trust someone this ignorant with the task of running our country?

He Built It And He Had Help

James C. Roumell, one of those wealthy job creators, has a brilliant piece in The Washington Post which pretty much puts the last nail in the coffin on all the mouth foaming about President Obama's recent comment on having help to build a business. He also breaks a few myths about Detroit but I'll leave the denizens of Bill Whittle to continue to live in their fictional world on that subject.

First, let's find out a little about Mr. Roumell.

Today, I own a small business, an asset management firm with $300 million in assets. Last year we launched the Roumell Opportunistic Value Fund (RAMSX) and hired three more people. We’re growing and creating jobs.

Sounds like someone Mitt Romney would like to cozy up to as an example of what's great about America. But wait!

I suppose I could pound my chest and take credit for my journey from Detroit to Chevy Chase, from working class to professional. I could say I built it myself. But this wouldn’t be true.

Aw, snap. Well, fuck this guy. He's a collectivist!

It gets worse.

I went to college with the help of Pell Grants and government loans. Twenty years ago I met Claiborne Pell and was able to thank the former Democratic senator from Rhode Island for introducing the Higher Education Act of 1965, which allowed me to go to college. 

My business has been made possible by the Investment Company Act of 1940 and the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. These laws created practices and transparency that enabled a financial services industry to emerge. After the stock market collapse of 1929, the public rightly did not trust Wall Street and needed assurances that the industry would operate within a reliable set of rules.

A collectivist and a statist. Is he even an American?

Since Mr. Roumell is an investor, doesn't that mean he is a victim of Barack Obama's policies that have created uncertainty in the marketplace?

Nope.

Nothing in terms of “regulations” or “business uncertainty” has stopped me from investing capital for a return. In fact, the stability that government involvement brought to the capital markets over the past three years, evidenced by a 100 percent increase in the Standard and Poor’s 500-stock index since March 2009, probably enabled my business to survive. The federal government’s back-stopping of money market funds in the fall of 2008 ended, effectively in one day, what was turning into a 1930s-style bank run.

I thought the government was supposed to just let the free market do its thing. Otherwise, it always makes things worse, right? Oh, and on Friday, the S&P closed at 1418.16, near a four year high. 

Mr. Roumell closes with two simple facts.

The countries that spend the least on government as a percentage of their economy (gross domestic product) are countries with little business success. Haiti, Bangladesh and Afghanistan spend 16, 13 and 9 percent of their GDP, respectively. Our federal government has spent around 20 percent of GDP since World War II. Europe typically spends slightly over 50 percent, so we’re a long way off even after factoring in an additional 15 percent for state and local government spending.

Yep.

And to those people who still can't understand President Obama's comment?

I did work harder, and perhaps more imaginatively, than many colleagues. But does that mean I built it myself? Does it diminish my success to be grateful for the public investments that so clearly contributed to my success? Every successful person knows, and will admit if he is honest, that luck played a role in his good fortune.

Why is it so difficult for the right to admit this?

Managing Fantasies Indeed

Last in line asked me yesterday if I wanted to go see Dinesh D'Souza's new film about the president. I told him that I would pass (even if he paid for it) and here's the reason why: I'm not going to be a party to the continued population of a fictional world.

The record of the last decade or so suggests that the party these days is animated by two main goals. First, it seeks unchallengeable, absolute power. Its modus operandi for achieving that goal has been to use institutional power—the power of corporations, courts and legislatures—to acquire more institutional power. A recent case is the drive in Republican-dominated states around the country to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning constituencies, such as the poor and minorities, by legislating onerous requirements for voting.

The other goal has been a less familiar one. More and more, Republicans have exhibited a strong desire to take up residence in an imaginary world, an alternate reality—one in which global warming is found to be a fraud perpetrated by the world’s top scientists, Obama turns out to have been born in Kenya and is a Muslim (and a socialist), budgets can be slashed without social pain, firing government employees reduces unemployment, tax cuts for the wealthy replenish government coffers, and so forth. Perhaps it seems odd to identify such an objective as a political goal, but past ideological movements of the left as well as the right offer many examples of the power of such a longing.

There is nothing more dangerous than a very large group of people who refuse to admit error and continue anyway with their meglomaniacal fantasies.

Worse, they seem to slip effortlessly into what I've been calling recently, "Heading Off At The Pass" syndrome. A severely debilitating avoidance reaction, this can take many forms (rest assured, I will be talking about them quite a bit between now and the election). An excellent example of this is Kevin Baker's continued use of the phrase "Do it again, only harder." His complaint is that liberal and progressive ideas have failed and that's why we have all these problems. Liberals want to do more to try to make up for their "failures."

In reality, (not the fictional world in which Kevin, his ilk, and what is now the GOP reside) however, those policies have worked.  Since Social Security first started we've seen our country grow into a massive power in the world. We had massive debt, deficits, high taxes, big government and socialized medicine while we essentially became the financial and cultural hegemenon of the world. We defeated the Nazis, the Communists, and are about to defeat Islamic extremism all with our free market ideals, capitalism, and democracy.

There's no need do any of it again or harder. We've already won.

And by "we," I mean all of us. Of course, people on the right wont't accept this because they can't stand losing an ideological argument (in typical adolescent form). They will have you believe our world is going to end any minute. In a certain sense, THEIR world has ended, in their eyes, because they have been proven wrong.  Their enemy is the truth so they have to invent fiction. Since there is never a shortage of fearful and ignorant people, they have power and here's where the danger comes in.

As the very famous and accurate phrase goes, we hate in others what we fear in ourselves. Yet, it was THEIR policies of deregulation and free market fundamentalism that brought us to the tough economic spot we are in right now. THEY are the ones that want to "Do it again, only harder" because they simply can't stand being wrong or admitting fault.

This is the Romney-Ryan ticket in a nutshell. It's a fantasy world filled with promises of giving failed policies another shot because somehow it was the fault of liberals that they didn't work the first time. I've said this many times and I guess I have to say it again.

The party who champions individual responsibility claims none of it.

Something Doesn't Add Up

The other day when Mitt Romney was whining about how Barack Obama keeps picking on him, he said:

I just have to say, given the challenges that America faces — 23 million people out of work, Iran about to become nuclear, one out of six Americans in poverty — the fascination with taxes I paid I find to be very small-minded.

Small-minded?

• Small-minded is Mitt Romney's insistence on keeping his tax returns secret, in comparison to his father's release of 12 years of tax returns. Most other presidential candidates in the last 40 years have released five to 30 years.
• Small-minded is Mitt Romney's insistence on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, even as we were fighting two wars, and recovering from a recession that has hit the poor and middle class especially hard, while corporations have been wallowing in cash.
• Small-minded is the Republican fascination with the personal lives of gay people, and their insistence on dictating who they can marry.
• Small-minded is the majority of Republicans who insist that Obama's Hawaii birth certificate is false, that Obama is a Muslim, that Obama is a anti-colonialist born in Kenya. Apparently, 64% of Republicans are latched on to this fantasy (and still think Saddam had WMDs).

But back to Romney's tax returns: something just doesn't add up. In 2010 and 2011 Romney made $42.5 million, or $21 million a year. Estimates of Romney's wealth are between $190 and $250 million. Now, he's been "retired" since 1999, which means that he's quite probable that he's been making in the ballpark of $20 million a year for the last 12 years.

If you multiply $20 million times 12 years, you get $240 million, or Romney's current worth. What happened to the money that Romney made during the 20 or so years he worked at Bain and other jobs?

Unless Romney's got an incredibly profligate lifestyle, or made a lot of really terrible investments, there seems to be a lot of missing money. It looks like Romney's got a ton of money socked away in places we don't know about.

This is why we need to see Romney's tax returns for the last 10 years, if not 20 years. Something just does not smell right here.

Mitt Comes Clean

So Governor Romney has come clean and said that he looked through his taxes and paid around 13 percent every year for the last 10 years. Harry Reid's response? Prove it.

I'm trying to figure out why he would make any sort of comment at all if he's not going to release his other returns which he says he won't. He did say he would release 2011 but the deadline for that is Oct 15, 2012 (I guess he got an extension). That also makes no sense as it is right before the election. And, what if the returns do come out and Harry Reid is right or partially right? Then Mitt would be caught in a lie.

With the white board weirdness yesterday, their campaign plan seems haphazard bordering on the bizarre. Why aren't they out there talking more about Paul Ryan, who clearly has energized the crowds and the base?

Oh, Really?

Here is a link with all the letters in PDF format.

What...In...The...

A Billboard In Minneapolis

By A Landslide

On pretty much every political and social site out there, it won't take you long to see a reference to Barack Obama as the Goldman Sachs president. In 2008, he received around 10 million dollars in contributions compared to McCain who got around 7 million dollars so there was cause to call him this back then.

But after Dodd-Frank and his continued call for actually enforcing regulations on the financial sector, the party's over for the president. As of last June, Mitt Romney has raked in 37 million dollars from the financial sector compared to Obama's paltry 5 million dollars. 

So, if you are one of those folks falling all over themselves to look for a "Wall Street" candidate, it's Mitt Romney by a landslide. And please join us in the year 2012 and stop being childishly dishonest.

From Russia, Without Love

Ayn Rand is back in the news now that Rand acolyte Paul Ryan has been chosen as Mitt Romney's running mate. I found this link to an Ayn Rand interview on the Tonight Show from 1967. Hearing her speak is entertaining because she sounds exactly the way you would expect a Soviet spy to sound.

The usual slam on Ayn Rand is that her Objectivist philosophy is a selfish adolescent power fantasy. And there's good reason for that. The Russian Revolution took place when Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum (Rand's birth name) was 12 years old. It completely shattered her world and scarred her for life. Objectivism was literally born in the mind of an teen-aged girl whose father's pharmacy was confiscated when the Bolsheviks came to power.

Her family were non-practicing Jews. She decided in high school that she was an atheist, no doubt under the influence of the Soviet school system. Rand went to Petrograd State University and was purged with other bourgeois students, but managed to get a degree due to the intervention of visiting foreign scientists. She went to the United States in 1925 and eventually became a Hollywood screenwriter.

Rand believed that reason is the primary human attribute. She rejected absolutely any form of religion, and believed the very concept of altruism was incompatible with human life and happiness.

Ironically, this flies in the face of reason. Altruism is essential for human and animal communities to survive and grow, and even for the evolution of life itself. Since Rand's death there's been a great deal of research into altruistic behavior in other species, which exists even in bacterial colonies. There may even be an altruism gene. Without altruism, the only nations that could field an army and wage wars would be pirate states that conquered other countries for profit, and doled out the spoils of war to soldiers. Otherwise, why risk your life to defend your country? Let the addle-brained fools who believe in God and an afterlife get themselves killed on the field of battle. Better to stay home and get rich selling weapons to the government.

And, of course, altruism is the very basis of Christianity ("Christ died for our sins"). 

At its core Rand's philosophy is a childish refutation of Soviet Russia's revolution. Objectivism is Bizarro communism: the exact opposite of communism in every respect except its embrace of pseudo-rationality and rejection of religion. Rand's philosophy epitomizes what communists portray capitalists as: supremely selfish, narcissistic, profit-seeking automata.

The problem with Objectivism is that it is inherently weak and cannot work for large groups. It glorifies selfishness instead of loyalty and steadfastness. If there is no altruism, there is no love, no trust. All alliances are fleeting conveniences, to be abandoned instantly when reason indicates selfish gain is to be had. Life for objectivists is one long Machiavellian pissing contest.

Objectivism is so preposterous that it must be the product of a Hollywood screenwriter. Which, in fact, it is.

The cynic in me says that Ayn Rand is just the L. Ron Hubbard of capitalism. But it makes me wonder: was Ayn Rand really a Soviet mole sent to Hollywood to sabotage the West with a form of capitalism that was so toxic and self-destructive that it would collapse under the sheer weight of its selfishness?

Может быть, товарищ. Может быть...

Taking One for the Team

Early next year fiscal Armageddon is scheduled to take place when the budget is sequestered -- which means automatic spending cuts to everything. Conservatives have been screaming bloody murder about how this will gut the Defense Department, claiming that the budget will be "slashed by more than $600 billion."

Turns out this claim is false.

The oft-repeated higher figure of $600 billion is actually the total in projected deficit reduction that the government would get by cutting $492 billion from the military. The extra $108 billion in projected savings would come via interest payments the government wouldn't have to make. Since the government would be spending less, it could borrow less and thus save on interest. [...]

Both a Congressional Budget Office report and the head of the Office of Management and Budget concur that the proper figure for the cuts is $492 billion, or about $55 billion annually over nine years.

Now the Defense Department's budget is $550 billion, so a $55 billion annual cut could easily be achieved by cutting a few junkets by DoD honchos, shutting down a few useless bases and eliminating a few worthless weapons systems that are sops to powerful congressmen funneling earmarks to their districts. In addition, the war in Afghanistan is drawing down, so defense spending just doesn't need to maintain its current levels.

Depending on how you want to count, the United States spends as much as the next 10 or 12 countries on defense. Yes, we are in a special situation, and we do have a larger responsibility to ourselves and the rest of the world for defense. But defense is just another government program, and is quite prone to overcharging and outright deception by private contractors to whom most of the defense budget flows. As someone who's worked in the industry I've seen firsthand how it works.

This whole problem could be solved if all those patriotic defense contractors pitched in and cut their prices by 10%. It would best for them in the long run to avoid having to make hard choices about which programs to cut, wouldn't it?

As Republican keep telling us, it's about time the people sucking on the government teat took one for the team.

Stop Them From Selling Their Potion

Yeah, Not So Much

Remember all that business about how voter fraud was rampant and every state needed to pass laws to stop this awful law breaking.

Yeah, not so much. 

The analysis of 2,068 reported fraud cases by News21, a Carnegie-Knight investigative reporting project, found 10 cases of alleged in-person voter impersonation since 2000.

10? Good grief, someone call the CDC. This epidemic is out of control!!!

With 146 million registered voters in the United States, those represent about one for every 15 million prospective voters.

Well, now I can see why this was such a concern and why we now need photo ID's.

Oh, wait. Here's why.

Placing the Blame Where It Belongs

There's an interesting article from Bruce Bartlett, a policy advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, in the New York Times.

In "Blaming Obama for George W. Bush's Policies," Bartlett points out that it was Bush's tax cuts, Bush's wars in the Middle East, and Bush's Medicare Part D that turned the $236 billion surplus Bill Clinton bequeathed to Bush into a $1.3 trillion deficit in 2009. And it was Dick Cheney, Bush's VP, who said that deficits don't matter.

Bartlett then likens the $787 billion stimulus package that Obama managed to push through Congress to an inadequate dose of medicine. Obama's advisors (and economists like Paul Krugman) said this was too small. It was like a tuberculosis patient taking only half the antibiotics: the disease is suppressed, but not cured. That's why there aren't more jobs: consumers don't have enough cash on hand to increase demand for products, so businesses can't hire more people to increase production.

Bartlett ends his piece with:

But it was Republican policies during the Bush administration that brought on the sickness and Republicans in Congress who have denied the economy an adequate dosage of the cure. Now they want to implicitly blame President Obama for causing the recession and the failure of stimulus to fix the problem, asserting that fiscal stimulus is per se ineffective.

There is a word for this: chutzpah.

There's another word for it: sabotage. Republicans have done everything they can to keep the economy in the tank to gain partisan advantage in the 2012 election.

Now Paul Ryan, the apostle of Ayn Rand, has been anointed to deliver the ultimatum of economic blackmail: give the wealthy gigantic tax cuts or they'll tank the economy again.

They Like Him But...

Nearly all of my conservative friends are overjoyed at the pick of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney's VP. I'm still trying to figure out why Mittens picked someone to fire up the base. With all of them foaming at the mouth about making President Obama a one term president, was he really worried that they wouldn't turn out and vote for him?

These same conservative friends of mine cry foul when I point out facts about Congressmen Ryan. They think I'm lying when I say he has never really worked in the private sector. They think I'm lying when I say that he has been a career politician. They really get pissed when I demonstrate how he used Social Security benefits to pull himself up by his bootstraps.

How pissed will they be when they read this? 

In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity — just empty sermons.

That's not some raging liberal writing here. That's David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's OMB guy from 1981-1985. In true propeller head fashion, Stockman breaks down the numbers of the Ryan Budget and shows it for all it is...a plan that won't reduce the debt or the deficit.

Folks, here are the facts about The Great Thinker's plans. His Road Map didn't see a balanced budget until the 2060s and added 60 trillion dollars to the national debt. His revised plan was at least a little better with a balanced budget in the 2030s and 14 trillion dollars to the debt. I challenge anyone to take a hard look at these plans and check the numbers.

So what does his plan actually do? Here's an excellent primer from The Christian Science Monitor.

It's True

Here's a photo that has been making the rounds lately...

Is it true? As we say in Minnesota, "You betcha!"

When Paul Ryan's dad died suddenly of a heart attack when the VP pick was 16, he used the Social Security death benefits to pay for college. Once again, I find it enormously frustrating that someone on the right shits all over the nice place in which he lives simply because he read Ayn Rand and is on an adolescent power trip.

Oh, and I also don't want to hear any more bitching about the "liberal media" after this piece in the New York Times. 

His self-reliance followed him to summer camp, where as a counselor he canoed and hiked, and into young adulthood, where he took up deer hunting, a fact noted in his engagement notice in 2000 in The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “Ryan is an avid hunter and fisherman,” the paper reported, “who does his own skinning and butchering and makes his own Polish sausage and bratwurst.”

Self reliance aided by...someone else...and something else...Social Security. In fact, isn't Paul Ryan a living example of what President Obama meant by not doing everything on your own?

Ryan Plan Reduces Taxes on 1% to 1%

Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney's pick for vice president, wants to make Harry Reid an honest man. His tax plan would eliminate taxes on wealthy people like Mitt Romney:

In his 2010 “Roadmap for America’s Future,” Ryan proposed eliminating taxes on corporate income, estates, dividends, interest and capital gains. He would simplify the individual income tax system into a two-rate structure topping out at 25 percent and impose what is effectively an 8.5 percent value-added tax.

Under Ryan's tax plan Romney would pay less than 1% in taxes because so little of his income is earned; most of Romney's income is in dividends, interest and capital gains. He earned a paltry $593,996 in 2010, while making $21.9 million dollars and paying only 13.9% in taxes. This is because the Bush tax cuts include a 15% capital gains tax rate, which means rich guys like Romney can loaf around and do nothing while people who actually have to bust their asses doing real work pay up to 35%.

Talk about picking winners and losers.

Poor people who currently pay no taxes would pay drastically more with a VAT tax, which is a sales tax on everything.

Middle-class workers would see the price of everything they buy go up almost 10% because of the VAT, and their net taxes would actually go up because loopholes like the home interest deduction would have to be eliminated in order for the Ryan plan to work at all. That's because, even though corporations are people, my friends, they would pay no taxes under Ryan's plan, and someone has to pay for the gigantic military budget increases Romney is promising.

Meanwhile, rich people could simply rearrange some deck chairs with their fund managers to pay zero tax.

And that's why porn star Jenna Jameson endorsed Mitt Romney from the stage of a strip club, saying "When you're rich, you want a Republican in office."

Yes, Please

Sometimes The Bible Is Wrong

Who was it again who was telling me that conservative Christians were nothing like Islamic fundamentalism? just-dave? Some TSM commenters?

Yes. Yes, It Can

The Veep

Today, Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan to be his vice president. Here are my initial thoughts.

By choosing Ryan, Romney has shown that he is essentially going to be a piss boy for the hard right. As Grover Norquist noted, all they really need is a guy to sign his name. I can't think of a more perfect way to illustrate a Romney presidency.

The "Ryan Budget" will now get an immense amount of scrutiny and I think that's a great thing. As is usually the case with the right, they thump their chest and issue loud declarations about how things like this will save us all before any serious analysis is done. Their emotions and beliefs kick in and they stop thinking. Well, now we get to critically examine the plan which means you can be certain his ideas for Medicare are going to be ripped to shreds.

How is Paul Ryan going to run as a Washington outsider? He's a 7 term congressmen. It will be interesting to see how that plays with the Tea Party crowd as he has never worked in the private sector.

And I'm still wondering why conservatives love Ryan so much...at least the Christian ones. As a card carrying member of the Rand Cult, that isn't really congruent. I want someone to ask him why he uses her as an ideological center-a woman who despises Christianity (and all religion for that matter) and is pro abortion.

People say the VP choice never really matters. Certainly that wasn't the CSS with Sarah Palin. I think the choice of Ryan will matter very, very much and perhaps moreso than Palin. How will this all play out?

Yep

Oh, Snap...

Perhaps he was deprogrammed from The Cult...

Shouldn't Romney Be Ahead By Now?

The question above is the exact question that Roger Simon asks in a new post over at Politco. 

But what do the Great Gods of Politics, the opinion polls, show? They show a country that still likes Obama more than it likes Romney. And by quite a bit. As I have written for years, I have a simple — OK, simple-minded — way of determining who is going to win the presidency: The more likable candidate wins. Not always, but almost always. On Aug. 2, a survey published by the well-respected Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found Obama was leading Romney by 51-41 percent for the presidency, the eighth time in a row since January that Obama has led Romney by between 4 and 12 percentage points.

But more importantly by my Simple Simon standard of likability, Romney’s favorable/unfavorable rating was 37/52 compared with Obama’s 50/45. Which means Romney had a net unfavorable rating of 15 points while Obama had a net favorable of 5 points. 

Very true and nicely illustrated at our year end tennis party this summer. Two of my co-workers, both of whom voted for John McCain in 2008 (and one who is my supervisor and life long Republican), were completely confounded by Romney's statements on his recent trip abroad.

"That was just rude...what he said about London," my supervisor remarked. "What was he thinking? You don't do that. And he wants to be president?"

"Yeah," my other co-worker said, "Obama is going to wipe the floor with him in the debates. Romney's a complete idiot and I don't really like him. I am voting for Obama."

"I may actually as well," my supervisor said. "He's not as bad as everyone makes him out to be. He's done a good job. I like him."

The conversation completely torpedoed the notion that your average Joe doesn't pay attention to politics until after Labor Day. People are paying attention to what Romney is doing and they don't really like what they see. Will they ever?

Oh, and why is John McCain, who has seen all 23 years of Romney's tax returns, not calling Harry Reid  a "dirty liar?" I wonder why he hasn't really said much on the subject.

Could It Be ... Atheists?

Like Dana Carvey's Church Lady invoking Satan at every turn, Pat Robertson is now trying to blame atheists for the shooting at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin.

As with every hurricane that approaches the Florida coast, Robertson has to blame the tragedy on gays, or abortion, or atheists:

What is it? Is it satanic? Is it some spiritual thing, people who are atheists, they hate God, they hate the expression of God? And they are angry with the world, angry with themselves, angry with society and they take it out on innocent people who are worshiping God.

This was not the first shooting in a place of worship. Just three years ago a doctor was shot in cold blood in a Kansas church. That shooter, in case you're wondering, wasn't an atheist.

Now, why accuse Wade Page of being an atheist? There is plenty of evidence that he was a neo-Nazi, Jew-baiting, Obama-hating racist, so why not blame the Wotanists or the Folkish Asatru?

Robertson may not realize it, but atheists have much in common with him. Just like Robertson, they don't believe that Vishnu and Xenu and Odin and Zeus exist. They don't believe that Mohammed is God's one true prophet. They don't believe the angel Moroni give Joe Smith the Golden Plates. Many atheists are perfectly willing to accept that Christ actually lived, was crucified, got stabbed in the side on the cross, and got up again after lying in a coma for three days in a tomb. They may even find Christ's teachings admirable, and wish that more self-styled Christians actually followed them.

Mathematically speaking, the difference between Robertson and an atheist is the number one: Robertson disbelieves in n gods, while atheists disbelieve in (n+1).

So no, atheists don't hate God, or even the expression of God. They may hate how people like Robertson take money from old ladies to build their fancy buildings and run their big TV networks. They may hate how Osama bin Laden and the Taliban used religious fervor to recruit people to murder Americans as well as their own countrymen. They may hate how millions of people were burned at the stake for disagreements over subtle points of doctrine like the Trinity and transubstantiation. They may hate how church hierarchies have shielded child molesters and rapists for centuries. They may hate how organized religion so often allies itself with autocratic regimes. They may hate lies that make people do evil things. But hating God is like hating the tooth fairy.

People of belief seem to think atheists are amoral, nihilistic hedonists who live only for the moment. But the essence of atheism is rationality, discarding myths and illusions in search of the truth. If you're an atheist you realize that this is the only life you have, that your children, your works and other people's memories of you are the only forms of immortality that exist. There are no do-over reincarnations, no 72 virgins, and no sitting at God's feet bored out of your skull for the rest of eternity. Once you mess up this life, it's game over.

So if you're an avowed atheist, would you cap yourself after pulling such a catastrophically stupid boner like shooting up the temple of a religion that the vast majority of Americans have never even heard of?

If Wade Michael Page was an atheist, it had about as much to do with the commission of this crime as his preference for boxers or briefs. From what we know so far he was just another pathetic, drunken, failed, frustrated racist whack-job with a gun who wanted to achieve immortality in the most ignominious way possible. He won't get his wish, though: in the end he'll be forgotten by everyone except other racist whack-jobs. And bloggers who know how to use Google.

Free Pussy!

How the worm has turned. A mere 20-odd years ago the Soviet Union was an atheist country, its leaders calling religion the opiate of the masses. Now the first Communist country in the world has put three women from the punk performance art group "Pussy Riot" on trial for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred." Ekaterina Samutsevich, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina have been in jail since February, and could face seven years in prison.

What constitutes "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred?" Singing a "punk prayer" called "Holy Shit" on the altar of Moscow's main cathedral. Pussy Riot (the actual name of the group, in English and not a translation from Russian) recorded their crime and conveniently posted it on the Internet for Moscow prosecutors:

The translation:

Mother of God, Virgin, deliver us from Putin
Deliver us from Putin, deliver us from Putin

Black robes, golden epaulets
All the parishioners are crawling to worship
The ghost of freedom in the heavens
Gay pride is sent to Siberia in chains

The head of the KGB, their chief saint
Leads protesters to prison under escort
In order to avoid offending the Most Holy.
Women need to give birth and love

Shit, shit, Holy Shit
Shit, shit, Holy Shit

Mother of God, Virgin, become a feminist
Become a feminist, become a feminist

The church praises corrupt leaders
The procession of black limousines
The preacher comes to your school
Go to class -- bring him money!

Patriarch Gundyayev [the head of the Orthodox Church in Russia] believes in Putin
It would be better if he believed in God, bitch
The cincture of the Virgin is no substitute for protest
The Ever-Virgin Mary will be with us!

Mother of God, Virgin, deliver us from Putin
Deliver us from Putin, deliver us from Putin

Yeah, it ain't Bob Dylan. But does it deserve seven years hard time?

At a concert in Moscow Madonna showed her support for Pussy Riot by stripping to her bra and showing the group's name written on her back. Yoko Ono, Peter Townshend and other artists have also voiced their support for the women.

That this is all happening in front of the world, all over the Internet, shows how much Russia has changed since the days of the Soviet Union. That the Orthodox Church is letting an autocrat use them to oppress the dissent of three women shows how little organized religion has changed since the days of the tsars.

And That's The Problem

The recent shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin has been officially declared an act of domestic terrorism. Wade Page has been connected to various white supremacist movements and took it upon himself to rid the world of some non whites. Sadly, he was successful.

My first thought (as it always is) was that it won't be too long before we find out that he was taking an SSRI and suffered from some sort of clinical depression. After that, I rolled my eyes at the renewed calls for gun control as anyone with a brain can see that these incidents happen less often and violence is, in fact, continuing to drop every year. Remember, folks, the media likes to make money and they make this shit seem like it happens all the time and right NEAR YOU!!! Ahhhhh, look out!!!!

As I reflected further about this latest shooting and tried to make sense of all of it, I started thinking about Jared Loughner and how my thoughts at the time were off base. My main contention then was that people like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Michele Bachmann created a culture (through their words and actions) that led to Loughner going on his rampage. But that's not quite right.

Even if the police found Palin stickers and a Limbaugh radio subscription, they still wouldn't be responsible. Even if Loughner or Page came out and said, "I love Michele Bachmann and am a proud supporter. Her talk of Muslim infiltration and enemies of the state made me do it!" they still wouldn't be responsible. The ones that are responsible are Loughner and Page. But that doesn't let the Terrible Trio off the hook. Not by a long shot.

While it's wrong to say that their creation of a culture of hate and fear caused these shootings, it's absolutely correct to say that their backwards as fuck ideology (bordering on psychotic) doesn't help. 

And that's the problem.

Each of these people (along with many more like them) have a responsibility as public figures to serve the common good. When they talk about traitors and infiltration as opposed to working together and respecting everyone's rights and freedoms, the don't advance any sort of social cohesion. There may not be causation or correlation between their words and actions and this type of violence but it's continued practice and existence is divisive, not constructive. 

I know that folks like Limbaugh, Palin. and Bachmann are earning their livings off of panic mongering but ti shouldn't be at the expense of this nation. This is now true more than ever as the power in our world shifts to shared responsibilities. We have no time for secret plots, dog whistles, reverse racism and subtle intimations of non whites threatening our way of life. 

That is, of course, if we want to continue making money.

Hoo-Ra!

Is this Cool, or What?

The American Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took a picture of the Curiosity rover as it landed on Mars last night about 12:30 AM.

Curiosity decelerated from 13,000 mph as it hit the Martian atmosphere to 2 mph in about seven minutes using a heat shield, a parachute and a retro-rocket that dangled the rover gently above the Martian surface and then cut loose at the last second. The rover landed a couple hundred yards from its intended landing spot after traveling eight months and 350 million miles.

People who keep saying that government in general is incompetent and can't do anything right don't know what they're talking about. The US military and NASA are perfect examples of government agencies that can accomplish the impossible with that old-fashioned can-do American attitude.

Even after getting hammered by the terrible human disasters of the Apollo 1 fire, the Challenger explosion in 1986, the disintegration of the Columbia over Texas, and the loss of the Mars Polar Lander, NASA soldiered on, landing on the moon, completing the shuttle's mission, and landed three more rovers on Mars.

There's no reason why the rest of government can't have similar successes, if our politicians would quit using the people who work there as political whipping boys and just let them do their jobs.

On Stiglitz (Part Two)

In the second chapter of The Price of Inequality, Joseph Stiglitz discusses how an unequal society is created. From the outset, he discusses how this is allowed to happen.

Much of the inequality that exists today is a result of government policy, both of what the government does and does not do. Government has the power to move money from the top to the bottom and the middle, or vice versa.

Wow. What a commie.

He then goes on to discuss the concept of rent seeking and how people in power use it to manipulate the government into doing their bidding, hence the increased inequality. But aren't these people in power faced with a choice?

To put it baldly, there are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others. The former adds to society. The latter typically subtracts from it, for in the process of taking it away, wealth gets destroyed. A monopolist who overcharges for his product takes money from those whom he is overcharging and at the time destroys value. 

Right. That's the erosion of consumer surplus of which I often speak. So how does the latter (taking away wealth) actually happen? Well, it starts with many wealth creators not being satisfied with their wealth. So they seek to monopolize or rent seek even further. We saw this with the railroad barons of the nineteenth century and I think we are seeing it again today. So does Stiglitz.

Why does this happen? Stiglitz submits that Smith's invisible hand doesn't apply to our financial sector because their interest are not aligned with societal returns. They are, instead, aligned with their own interests and that of other people in the one percent. It's not a zero sum game but a negative sum game, where the gains to the winners are less than losses to the losers. As Smith himself said

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

We saw this go on with the stock pools in the 1920s and the credit default swaps and CDOs in 2008. In fact, Stiglitz argues that private financial firms act to ensure that markets don't work well. Why? Because they can make more money. If markets are competitive, after all, profits above the normal return to capital cannot be sustained.

That is so because if a firm makes greater profits than that on a sale, rivals will attempt to steal the customers by lowering prices. As firms compete vigorously, prices fall to the point that profits (above the normal return to capital) are driven down to zero, a disaster to for those seeking big profits. 

He goes on to discuss how they teach students in business school to create barriers to competition and entry to a market as well as circumvent government regulation. Essentially, how to erode consumers surplus, make markets less efficient, and continue to widen the gap between the interests of the financial sector and the interest of society. In short, increase inequality.

Indeed, the financial sector has become quite adept at doing this. On pages 36-38, there is a section called  "Moving money from the bottom of the pyramid to the top" in which Stiglitz offers examples of how exactly this is accomplished.

-Taking advantage of asymmetries of information (selling securities that they had designed to fail, but knowing that buyers didn't know that)

-Taking excessive risk-with the government holding a lifeline, bailing them out, and assuming the losses, the knowledge of which, incidentally, allows them to borrow at a lower interest rate than they otherwise could

-Getting money from the Federal Reserve at low interest rates, now almost zero

And the worst, according to Stiglitz?

-Taking advantage of the poor and uninformed., as they made enormous amounts of money by preying upon these groups with predatory lending and abusive credit card practices. This took many forms...changing high interest rates, sometimes obfuscated by fees...the abolition of usury laws...circumventing regulations. Rent-a-Center, for example, claimed to be renting furniture but was really selling it and lending money at high interest rates. 

One poor person by themselves couldn't have done this. As there were so many, the amount of debt was astronomical. If the government had intervened in the best interests of social justice or concern of market efficiency, none of this would have happened.

Now there are many who think that it was the government, not the private sector, that drove this rush to lend to poor people through the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. To put it bluntly, this is a giant load of shit. Here is one example of why that is.  And here is another.  And another. And another.  As we saw in House of Cards and Inside Job, this debacle originated in the private sector (specifically California) and happened simply because people in the financial sector (and then everyone else) wanted to make more money.

So, the financial sector was (and still is) more focused on circumventing regulations and exploitative activities than economic growth. As I have shown repeatedly, they don't contribute to our society in any meaningful way from an economic standpoint. Indeed, from Adam Smith's standpoint.

What other ways shift money from the bottom to the top?

-Those at the top have managed to design a tax system in which they pay less than their fair share-they pay a lower fraction of their income than do those who are much poorer. We call such tax systems regressive.

-The hollowing out of the middle class and the increase in poverty due to laws that govern how corporations interact with the norms of behavior that guide the leaders of these corporations and determine how returns are shared among top management and other stakeholders. If monetary authorities act to keep unemployment high (even because of fear of inflation), then wages will be restrained. 

And who is it that heavily influences those authorities?

Moreover, the very sharp attacks on unions have weakened have weakened the individual's power over the corporation. We currently have about 7 percent of our population that are in private sector unions.

Stiglitz concludes this section by stating that market forces combined with politics (both of which should work in a balance to lessen inequality) have actually joined forces to increase income and wealth disparity.

All in all, it's not a pretty picture and it continues to get worse. There are no words that I can use to express my frustration at the right who view this information as being "commie talk." I urge all of you to read the rest of Chapter 2 of Stiglitz's book as it details more ways (too lengthy to mention here) that the wealthy are rent seekers.

They May Not Like Big Government But...

Take a look at this poll conducted earlier in the year by Gallup.

29 percent of Americans are satisfied with the size and power of government. No surprise there. But only 30 percent are satisfied with the size and power of corporations. Americans may not like Big Government but they don't like Big Corporations either. Take a look at how the numbers break down by political ideology.

A couple of key numbers here...independents distrust corporations nearly as much as the government. And I was fairly shocked to see that Republicans are split on corporations. What do you suppose that means?

Amen

A Bad Week (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Harry Reid)

I've been pretty critical when it comes to the subject of Harry Reid. In the past, I've referred to him as several limp noodles on two slices of milk dunked toast.

But his recent indictment of Mitt Romney is a stark contrast to his previous persona. I think the thing I like about it the most is how much in common it has with statements made by the right on a daily basis. In other words, it's about fucking time a Democrat started saying things that may or not may not have any basis in fact but have absolutely everything being pissed off and pulling shit out of one's ass (sort of like how the government forced banks to loan to black people and Hispanics and that's why the economy collapsed).

We really don't know if Romney paid taxes or not but what's great about Reid's statement is how fucked Romney is right now. If he does not release his taxes, the "lie" is out there and people will doubt him. If he does release his taxes and they show that he did pay them over a ten year period, Reid has manipulated Romney (just as the right manipulates the left all the time) into doing something he doesn't want to do: release his taxes...which will undoubtedly show that Romney made a shit ton of money, has hid some of it offshore, was more involved at Bain during their layoffs and outsourcing, and paid less than Warren Buffet's secretary. Heck, even the National Review is calling for Romney to release his returns now. 

Of course, Romney's own tax plan doesn't help him at all. 

But what does the TPC analysis actually tell us–meaning us people who aren’t campaigning to be president–about the Romney tax plan? It’s well summarized by Figure 2 from the paper, above, which decomposes the bottom line conclusion that a revenue-neutral Romney plan would give generous tax cuts to the rich paid for with net tax increases on everyone else, into two parts: (i) how much the tax cuts from the tax rate reductions are skewed toward the rich; and (ii) how much the revenue offsets from (Romney-limited) base broadening are skewed toward lower- and middle-income households. Combined, we would end up with a revenue-neutral (relative to a business-as-usual, policy-extended baseline) and highly “regressive” tax reform, with relative and absolute tax burdens falling for “the rich” (defined here as households with incomes above $200,000–about the top 5%) and increasing for everyone else.

Seriously, are you fucking kidding me? What a massively stupid idea given the current perception of government and the economy. Yes, let's give the wealthy more breaks...that's going to go over well with the middle class, non college educated whites voting in the coming election.

Add all of this in with his stumbles on his recent trip abroad and it's understandable why Romney has lost ground in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.  With less than 100 days to go before the election, Governor Romney is going to have a very difficult time making up that ground. The Obama team has already pulled their ads in Pennsylvania to focus on other key swing states. In short, it's not been a good week for Mitt Romney.

And all of this just before he picks his VP...

Nope. No racism here. Please move along....

On Stiglitz (Part One)

I first heard of Joseph Stiglitz's new book, "The Price of Inequality," from a very conservative friend of mine on Facebook. His comment was...

How about stop focusing on making things "fair" and let the chips fall where they may? Kind of like....oh...I don;t know...OLD SCHOOL AMERICA? No, no, better to listen to the liberal commie fuck professor who never worked in the private sector and wants MORE taxes, rules and regulations to make things "fair." Fucking idiot.

Anytime I see this sort of mouth foaming, I know it must be something worth reading!

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be discussing Stiglitz's book and highlighting the parts of it that I think are important. Each post I put up will more than likely be on one specific point although not always as is the case with this first one.With over 100 pages in sourced information, there is going to be a lot to choose from and I want to make it clear from the outset that there is no way I can get to it all. This would be why I would recommend reading the book for yourself so you can study the full argument from the one who put in all the research that led him to a central and inevitable conclusion: the inequality in this country endangers our future.

Now, before we get started, I want to clear up an issue that came up in comments the last time we talked about inequality. I was tasked to come up with a number of what is too much inequality. As Stiglitz points out in the first chapter in the book, relying solely on a quantitative analysis isn't an accurate way of examining inequality.

On page 23, he discusses the Gini Coefficient and how it is used as a standard measure of inequality. A GC of 0 (in which the bottom 10 percent get 10 percent of the income, the bottom 20 get 20 etc) is the most equal. A GC of one (in which all the income goes to 1 person) would be the most unequal. In between 0 and 1 are where countries are measured. More equal societies have around 0.3 (Sweden, Norway, Germany) and less equal countries have 0.5 or above (African nations and South America). The US stands at .47, up from .4 in 1980. We are more unequal than Iran or Turkey and very much more equal than any country in the EU.

Yet, as Stiglitz notes,

Measures of income inequality don't fully capture critical aspects of inequality. America's inequality may, in fact, be far worse than those number suggest. In other advanced industrial countries, families don't have to worry about how they will pay the doctor's bill, or whether they can afford to pay for their parent's health care. Access to health care is taken as a basic human right. In other countries, the loss of a job is serious, but at least there is a better safety net. In no other country are so many persons worried about the loss of their home. For Americans at the bottom and in the middle, economic insecurity has become a fact of life. It is real, it is important, but it's not captured in these metrics. If it were, the international comparisons would cast what's been happening in America in an even worse light.

So, choosing a number shouldn't be the exclusive focus when you consider the multiple factors (some of which he mentions above) that make each country's economic concerns unique. Obviously, it's a starting point but it needs to be put into context with other, qualitative factors. An example of this would be the current economic situation in the EU. They may have 0 3 on the GC but isn't that equality an illusion considering what they are facing right now?

Further, is the GC even accurate? What are the factors that they use? Why? And why don't they leave out some factors, if any? The answers to these questions illustrate the flaws in focusing on one measure of inequality.

Now that we have gotten that out of the way, let's take a look at the first point Stiglitz makes in Chapter 1: the disparity in income. Stiglitz is quick to point out that he is looking at median, not average income, as that is more of an indicator of how the various income groups are doing. If you look at average income, it might seem like the lower groups are doing well since the upper groups are seeing their wages and wealth rise.

But if you look at median income, you see the following:

Median household income was actually lower in 2010 ($49, 445) than it was in 1997 (adjusted for inflation, $50, 123). Over the longer period (1980-2010), median family income essentially stagnated, growing at an annual rate of only .36 percent. Adjusted for inflation, male median income in 2010 was $32, 137. In 1968, it was $32, 844. (source and source.)

Add in the fact that the top one percent now earns 20 percent of the nation's income with the top 0.1 percent  earning 220 times larger than the average of the bottom 90 percent and the picture of gross inequality is stark and evident.

So, why does this matter? Page 85.

Moving money from the bottom to the top lowers consumption because higher income individuals consume a smaller proportion of their income than do lower income individuals (those at the top save 15 to 25 percent of their income, those at the bottom spend all of their income). The result: until and unless something else happens, such as an increase in investment or exports, total demand in the economy will be less than what the economy is capable of supplying-and that means that there will be unemployment.

Unemployment can be be blamed on a deficiency in aggregate demand; in some sense, the entire shortfall in aggregate demand-and hence the US economy-today can be blamed on the extremes in inequality. 

As we have seen, the top 1 percent earns 20 percent of the national income. If that top 1 percent saves some 20 percent of its income, a shift of just 5 percentage points to the poor or middle who do not save-so the top 1 percent would still get 15 percent of the nation's income-would increase aggregate demand directly by 1 percentage point. But as that money recirculates, output would actually increase by some 1.5 to 2 percentage points.

This kind of shift in income would decrease the unemployment rate from 8.3 percent to 6.3 percent. A broader redistribution, from the top 20 percent to the rest, would have brought down the unemployment further to a more normal 5 or 6 percent. 

This is at the heart of what the president and the Democrats are trying to do because they know it's what must be done in order to get the economy on track. Businesses aren't going to hire more people unless more people start coming through the door and buying their goods and services. We've seen that tax cuts don't spur hiring.

Eventually, the 0.1 percent, the 1 percent, and the top 20 percent are going to realize that if they want to continue to enjoy their wealth in a healthy society, this redistribution is going to have to happen. People like Warren Buffet and Nick Hanauer have already accepted this fact. Whether or not the government "forces" them to do so is irrelevant.

It's no longer a question of "if" but of "when."

Personally, I'd like the wealthy of this country to do it on their own. That way we can leave the sensitivity about the federal government (see: paranoia, hysterical old ladies) behind in the trash heap where it belongs. Obviously, this isn't likely but we have to do it. As Stiglitz puts it,

Countries around the world provide frightening examples of what happens to societies when they reach the level of inequality toward which we are moving. It is not a pretty picture: countries where the rich live in gated communities, waited upon by hordes of low income workers; unstable political systems where populists promise the masses a better life, only to disappoint. Perhaps most importantly, there is an absence of hope. In these countries, the poor know that their prospects of emerging from poverty, let alone making it to the top, are minuscule. This is not something we should be striving for.