The middle class, it’s their fault!

Demonizing the middle class seems to be a rather stupid-ass way to fix state budgets, at least on the political side of the coin, but the rightwing Republicans are doing just that and making it work for them. One would think the elected Democrats would love to have this fight, but so far...they are saying very little, at least on the national level. From Robert Reich:

The second part of the Republican strategy is being played out on the state level where public employees are being blamed for state budget crises. Unions didn’t cause these budget crises — state revenues dropped because of the Great Recession — but Republicans view them as opportunities to gut public employee unions, starting with teachers.

Wisconsin’s Republican governor Scott Walker and his GOP legislature are seeking to end almost all union rights for teachers. Ohio’s Republican governor John Kasich is pushing a similar plan in Ohio through a Republican-dominated legislature. New Jersey’s Republican governor Chris Christie is attempting the same, telling a conservative conference Wednesday, “I’m attacking the leadership of the union because they’re greedy, and they’re selfish and they’re self-interested.”

The demonizing of public employees is not only based on the lie that they’ve caused these budget crises, but it’s also premised on a second lie: that public employees earn more than private-sector workers. They don’t, when you take account of their education. In fact over the last fifteen years the pay of public-sector workers, including teachers, has dropped relative to private-sector employees with the same level of education – even including health and retirement benefits. Moreover, most public employees don’t have generous pensions. After a career with annual pay averaging less than $45,000, the typical newly-retired public employee receives a pension of $19,000 a year. (emphasis mine)

Nothing the rightwing governor's are attributing to the unions and their workers is true.  So, why aren't the nationally-elected Democrats addressing these lies in the national media? Why is it being left to the state Democrats to deal with these lies and obfuscations from the rightwing Governors?

This should be a national debate, but it isn't. I do not understand why Obama, Reid, Pelosi and all the rest of the Congress critters are mute. It's maddening to say the least. Whatever their logic, it isn't working as the rightwing nutters have the media in their court.  I am sick of seeing Chris Christie's mug on the national news slamming hardworking middle class state employees. He continues to scream about Social Security even though the fund is solid until 2035 at the earliest and currently contributes nothing to either the state or national budget woes. In fact, NJ has no one to blame but themselves for the public pension liabilites they currently are drowning in. From CNN:

To figure out how such a wealthy state (with a median household income of $65,933, New Jersey ranks No. 1) dug itself into this hole, set the clock back almost 20 years.

In 1990 the country was hit by a recession, and the new Democratic governor, James Florio, responded with a wildly unpopular $2.8 billion income and sales tax increase to balance the budget. Two years later, facing another budget shortfall, he turned to the state pension system for help. With almost unanimous support in the legislature, he pushed through the Pension Revaluation Act of 1992.

We'll spare you the minutiae of pension accounting and just say that the law permitted the state to recognize investment gains in the fund more quickly than under previous rules. It also lifted the projected rate of return on the fund's investments to 8.75% from 7% (since lowered to 8.25%). These "adjustments" had a big impact: According to an official Benefits Review Task Force report published in 2005, they allowed the state to cut its pension contributions by more than $1.5 billion in 1992 and 1993.

Republican Christine Todd Whitman, running on a tax-cutting platform, defeated Florio in the 1993 governor's race. To help pay for her promised tax cuts, Whitman, like her predecessor, turned to the pension fund. In 1994, at her urging, the legislature adopted another pension "reform" act that allowed her to reduce state and local contributions to the plan by nearly $1.5 billion in 1994 and 1995, according to the task force report. Florio's and Whitman's accounting changes were "the one-two punch from which the retirement system has never recovered," says Douglas Forrester, who was the assistant state treasurer under Kean.

Instead of nailing the former Republican governor Whitman and the Democrat Florio, Christie is using the time-honored tradition of blaming everyone else, but the guilty, for NJ's monetary problems. The fact is NJ has had this problem for decades and some, not all of the governors ignored it or tried to quick-fix it using smoke and mirrors.

The Obama administration and the current crop of Congressional Democrats have to step up and point out the fallacies in the rightwinger's arguments. It's time to back your state brethren on the national stage...stop letting them languish and flail about. Do not let the media and the rightwing nutters control the discussion as it only serves their own political interests, which is all they care about anyway.

Allowing the rightwing Republicans to attack the middle class is unconscionable on every level. Allowing them to pit public sector vs private sector workers is pure bullshit. The election cycle isn't anywhere near us at this point, but the extreme rightwing Governors are laying the groundwork now for 2012. If the Democrats wait much longer to address the lies and bs being spewed daily, they serve no one.

Call it what it is: Demonizing hardworking middle class public servants who make less than their private sector counterparts is contemptible and should be called out as such. It isn't just the teachers, as Governor Scott the tool Walker states daily, it's all sectors of public employees being drawn and quartered by the right, from sanitation workers to secretaries and all workers in between.

Get off your asses Obama, Pelosi, Reid and the rest of the Congress Critters, and fight as hard as the workers in Wisconsin have been fighting for weeks now. It's the least you can do. Anything less is not acceptable and downright fucking disgusting to this voter.

Safety net my ass: How the system screws the middle class.

Susie Madrak has a good post up at C&L about the govt program known as Welfare and how it fucks the middle class folks that are hurting the most right now. From her piece:

In addition to being severely underfunded during this crisis, the welfare programs simply aren't set up to help the formerly-middle class people who are trying to get into the system. For instance, here in Pennsylvania, someone I know was turned down because his bank statement showed transfers from Paypal into his checking account, and they counted that as monthly income. He tried to explain that he'd sold everything he had left on eBay, and there was nothing left to sell, but the caseworker wouldn't listen. Contrary to popular myth, it's quite difficult for anyone with any assets at all to get onto welfare:

She quotes a WaPo article on the state of the Welfare program:

The number of families getting welfare checks, federal figures show, increased by about 185,000 between the start of the recession in late 2007 and this spring. During roughly the same period, the number of families living in poverty rose by more than 400,000 to record levels, according to the Census Bureau, which reported this week that, in Washington, three out of 10 children were poor last year.

*snip*

Nearly three years after the start of a grave economic downturn, it now is clear that "despite extremely high levels of employment, that has not translated into welfare increases as much as many people expected," said Douglas J. Besharov, a University of Maryland professor who has studied welfare for years.

People are barely hanging on by their fingernails. Not everyone is walking away from their now, over-priced, mortgages. I have friends and family members that are kept awake at night trying to figure out how to pay the simplest of bills: electricity, mortgage or rent, water and of course put food on the table and gas in the car to go to work....that is, if they still have their jobs. People are giving back their vehicles that they still owe money on and are buying what I call 'beaters' just to get around. As long as it runs, its great...right?

Wrong. The Middle Class has been the backbone of our nation for decades upon decades. They were the ones buying homes, cars, RV's, flat screen tv's, etc. and never blinking an eye when the bills came due...they just paid them like they were raised to do.  They are the consumers that retail sales depend on.

Problem was/is, they were not saving for this 'rainy day' we call The Recession. No one was it seems...

Next week, the emergency welfare funding for states will end. Since the Welfare program is run by each state differently, its hard to gauge how this will affect our citizenry.

But we are going to find out since Congress has put off this issue until next fucking year.

Robert Reich cuts through the bs...

When the video, from his Countdown appearance tonight,(alert, its at the bottom of this post) is available I will post it...until then, here is RR's post from his blog today on the topic of Bush's tax cuts for the rich and how full of shit the rightwing nutters are on this issue:

The economy is slouching backward because consumers can’t and won’t spend enough to revive it. Congress is about to recess for the summer without doing anything to fill the gap. And it looks like the only issue it will be debating when it returns is who, if anyone, should pay more taxes next year – just the very rich, everyone, or no one? The cuts enacted by George W. Bush will expire in January, and with midterm election pending in November we’re about to be treated to months of tax demagoguery.

Here’s a guide to the perplexed.

From a strictly economic standpoint – as if economics had anything to do with this – it makes sense to preserve the Bush tax cuts at least through 2011 for the middle class. There’s no way consumers – who comprise 70 percent of the economy – will start buying again if their federal income taxes rise while they’re still struggling to repay their debts, they can’t borrow more, can no longer use their homes as ATMs, and they’re worried about keeping their jobs.

But the same logic doesn’t apply to people at the top, earning over $250K, who represent roughly 2 percent of tax filers. Restoring their marginal tax rates to what they were during the Clinton administration (36 and 39 percent) won’t inhibit their spending. That’s because they already save a large portion of what they earn, and already spend what they want to spend. (During the Clinton years the economy created 22 million net new jobs and unemployment dropped to 4 percent.)

But restoring those top marginal tax rates will help bring down the long-term debt, pulling in almost a trillion dollars of revenues over next ten years. That’s not nearly enough to make a major dent in the nation’s projected deficits, but it’s not chicken feed either. It would at least signal to financial markets we’re serious about cutting that long-term deficit – and the rest of us will chip in when the economy strengthens.

So-called supply-side economists don’t like raising taxes on anyone, of course, and argue that raising them on the well-off will slow economic growth. They say people at the top will have less incentive to work hard, invest, and invent.

Unfortunately for supply-siders, history has proven them wrong again and again. During almost three decades spanning 1951 to 1980, when America’s top marginal tax rate was between 70 and 92 percent, the nation’s average annual growth was 3.7 percent. But between 1983 and start of the Great Recession, when the top rate was far lower – ranging between 35 and 39 percent – the economy grew an average of just 3 percent per year. Supply-siders are fond of claiming that Ronald Reagan’s 1981 cuts caused the 1980s economic boom. In fact, that boom followed Reagan’s 1982 tax increase. The 1990s boom likewise was not the result of a tax cut; it came in the wake of Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase.

A final reason for allowing the Bush tax cut to expire for people at the top is the most basic of all. Although Wall Street’s excesses were the proximate cause of the Great Recession, its fundamental cause lay in the nation’s widening inequality. For many years, most of the gains of economic growth in America have been going to the top – leaving the nation’s vast middle class with a shrinking portion of total income. (In the 1970s, the top 1 percent received 8 to 9 percent of total income, but thereafter income concentrated so rapidly that by 2007 the top received 23.5 percent of the total.) The only way most Americans could continue to buy most of what they produced was by borrowing. But now that the debt bubble has burst – as it inevitably would – the underlying problem has reemerged.

Why make it worse? George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cut was a huge windfall for the wealthy. About 40 percent of its benefits went to the tiny sliver of Americans earning over $500,000. So rather than debate whether to end the Bush tax cuts for the top and restore the top marginal tax rates to where they were under Bill Clinton, we should be debating whether to raise the highest marginal tax rate higher than it was under Bill Clinton and use the proceeds to give the middle class a permanent tax cut.

I’m not suggesting this, mind you, but just to get the debate started: How about restoring the top rate to where it was under John F. Kennedy (76 percent), or under Dwight Eisenhower (91 percent)?

I really never re-post someone else's entire work. But Reich makes so much sense, I hope to hell he doesn't get pissed at me. We have conversed, via email, in the past and he gave me permission to re-post his writings...so I am using that for this specific issue.  I love that man, he breaks it down for yahoo's like moi to understand.


Beloww is Ezra Klein' pov on the same fuckery:

How dumb is the general voting population on this horseshit? Only time will tell...

Hillary hearts big business which means she loves NAFTA with all her heart.

David Sirota has a piece up about Hillary's position on NAFTA and the new NAFTA expansion the Senate will vote on next week. He made a YouTube vid of her response last night in the latest round of Presidential debates held on CNN.



Hillary is a DINO for the most part. She is a Rethug in Democratic clothing on many of the important issues. NAFTA expansion is one of THE most important domestic issues facing us today. NAFTA has affected our workforce as no other bill passed by our congress ever has in the last decade or so.. imho.