The question most on the Watchdog’s mind these days is “Why do so many middle class working people vote against their own and their families’ economic interests?”
Pulitzer Prize winning reporter David Cay Johnston writes in “Free Lunch; How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)”:
“For the bottom 90 percent of Americans…annual income has been on a long, mostly downhill slide for more than three decades….Most of the increase went to the top half of 1 percent and most of that to the top tenth of 1 percent, who made at least $1.7 million that year…”
He continues “Beginning with the New Deal in 1933 and, especially, with bipartisan consensus after World War II, our elected leaders worked to build and strengthen the middle class… For more than a quarter century now our government has been adopting rules that tilt the playing field in favor of the rich, the powerful and the politically connected.”
To illustrate this he points out “In less than three decades presidents of companies have gone from apologizing when they had to lay off workers to boasting of the riches they obtained through mass firings.”
The sham prosperity at the turn of the century was based upon the middle and lower-middle class sustaining their buying power through borrowings that generated a huge trade and debt deficit with the Chinese, because there was little if any increase in real earnings and domestic production. (The super sized yacht business thrived, however they were built mostly overseas.) One of the reasons the nation remains stuck in a deep recession is the lack of buying power of the general population, in part the result of an ineffectual, at times corrupt, and shrinking union movement.
It is time for blue color, gray color and even most white collar Americans to wake up and practice their own version of “Greed is good” and vote for candidates that are beholding to them…if and when they can find them. Joe Sestak seems to be one.
When middle class working people (a group that includes myself and all of my friends and relatives) vote for TRULY conservative candidates, they are voting in favor of the libertarian principles on which this country was founded, the principles which (until we stopped following them) led America to become the world’s largest exporter of goods and have the world’s largest economy. They are NOT voting against their own and their family’s self-interest.
Watchdog, the course you seem to favor is EVEN MORE of the things that led to the decline in the incomes of middle class workers. Government wage controls, excessive corporate and personal income taxes, and thousands of government regulations resulted in entire industries moving to other countries, depriving millions of Americans of decent-paying jobs.
Mr. Johnston laments the “shrinking union movement”, but why did the labor unions shrink? Because excessive demands (from the government and from he unions themselves), drove so many union-labor-employing companies out of business, or led them to curtail their U.S. operations. They were unable to compete against foreign companies, who face no such demands.
Watchdog and Mr. Johnston think that more progressive policies will help working-class Americans, but how much more progressive can we get? The United States already has the second highest corporate income tax rate in the world, with a combined government rate of 40%. As for personal income, the top 1% of income earners paid 40% of all federal income taxes in 2007 (Source: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/08/tax-reform ). Meanwhile, 47 percent of U.S. households pay NO income tax, and FORTY PERCENT of U.S. families who file a tax return actually PROFIT from the federal income tax: they get more money in tax credits than they owe in taxes, so some of what they call their “tax refund” is, in effect, a government subsidy (Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/07/national/main6372418.shtml ).