Let’s Get Our Priorities Straight
Focus on Helping the Middle Class, Not Tax Cuts for the Rich
SOURCE: AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez
A woman stocks up on bread at Sacred Heart Community Center in San Jose, CA, on September 16, 2010. The percentage of people living in poverty jumped for the third year in a row, reaching 14.3 percent in 2009. But all Washington wants to talk about is tax cuts for the rich.
By Michael Linden, Heather Boushey | September 30, 2010
Perhaps in some parallel universe there’s a world where it makes sense for the country’s main economic policy debate over the next two months to be the tax cuts for the rich. After all, they’ve been the ones least hurt by the recession and the only ones that benefited from the economic growth in the years prior to the Great Recession. I suppose it’s possible that there’s an alternate universe where giving them even more tax cuts is sanity. But in our reality it’s absolutely absurd.
The economic challenges we face are myriad and daunting. The unemployment rate is hovering near 10 percent. Our energy policy is stuck in the 20th century. We’ve got crumbling infrastructure all over the place. The budget is projected to remain badly out of balance. And perhaps most troubling, the middle class is barely keeping its head above water. Tax cuts for rich people address precisely none of these pressing issues. They would actually make matters worse in some cases.
Why, then, are we even discussing the possibility of cutting taxes for rich people? Is it because they’ve been hit particularly hard by the recession? Hardly. When the National Bureau of Economic Research announced recently that the Great Recession came to an end in June of last year that news must have come as quite a shock to the millions of Americans who are still out of work, working fewer hours for less pay, and struggling to make ends meet. But it probably didn’t surprise people at the top of the income ladder. They’ve been recovering quite nicely.
Recently released Census data confirm that the wealthy are back on track after suffering only minor setbacks. Incomes fell across the board from 2007, before the recession began, to 2008. Everyone took a hit, from the poorest quintile to the richest. But that’s where the shared pain ends. From 2008 to 2009 almost everyone’s income continued to fall except the rich. The richest 5 percent of Americans saw their average income rise last year by $1,800.
Not so for those in the middle. Median household income continued to slide from 2008 to 2009, falling by $335. In fact, the median household has lost almost $2,200 in annual income since the recession began. That is the largest two-year decline in at least 35 years and amounts to a drop of more than 4 percent.
Those at the very bottom are also falling further behind. Overall, the percentage of people living in poverty jumped for the third year in a row, reaching 14.3 percent in 2009. That’s higher than at any point in the last 15 years. The increase in poverty rates from 2008 to 2009 was the largest year-over-year percentage increase since 1980. And one out of every five children lived in poverty last year.
If that weren’t enough, the ranks of the extremely poor also swelled significantly. The percentage of people living below 50 percent of the federal poverty level rose to the highest point since the Census began keeping track.
It should come as no surprise, then, that income inequality is fast approaching record levels. The richest 5 percent of Americans claimed almost 22 percent of all income in 2009, and the top fifth took home fully half of the nation’s income. The poorest fifth, meanwhile, earned just 3.4 percent of all the income, and the share of national income going to the vast middle dipped as well. Income inequality in 2009 was higher than at any point since at least 1967, according to one measure.
All those facts and figures reinforce what most people already know: The middle class took this recession right on the chin while the rich suffered no more than a glancing blow. And yet somehow in Washington the talk is all about tax cuts for rich people.
The Bush tax cuts—which primarily benefited the wealthy—all expire at the end of this year. President Barack Obama wants to cut taxes for everyone making less than $250,000. That’s 98 percent of the people in the country. Conservatives refuse to go along with this plan unless they can also cut taxes for the richest 2 percent of Americans.
Keeping those high-end tax cuts in place would cost the federal government more than $800 billion over the next 10 years after including the costs of the added debt. More than 80 percent of the benefit will go to people making at least $1 million a year, and their average tax cut would be more than $100,000. That’s almost twice what the median American household makes in a year.
This is how absurd our national conversation has become. We’re actually fighting over whether we should borrow hundreds of billions of dollars and give that money to the only group of people in the country who are already back on track. Instead of focusing on a policy that would exclusively benefit those who make more than $250,000 a year we should be discussing how to get wages and middle-class incomes rising again, the best ways to bring people out of poverty, and what we can do to address the ever-widening disparities between the super-rich and everyone else. Our priorities are indeed skewed when the dominant argument over economic policy pertains to $100,000 tax cuts for millionaires while our middle class is barely treading water.
Michael Linden is the Associate Director for Tax and Budget Policy and Heather Boushey is a Senior Economist at American Progress.
More from CAP on the Bush tax cuts:
- Three Good Reasons to Let the High-End Bush Tax Cuts Disappear by Michael Linden and Michael Ettlinger
- Golden Years for the Gilded by Michael Linden
To speak with our experts on this topic, please contact:
Print: Megan Smith (health care, education, economic policy)
202.741.6346 or msmith@americanprogress.orgPrint: Anna Soellner (foreign policy and security, energy)
asoellner@americanprogress.orgPrint: Raúl Arce-Contreras (ethnic media, immigration)
202.478.5318 or rarcecontreras@americanprogress.orgRadio: Nicole Murphy
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202.741.6397 or elindsay@americanprogress.org
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http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/v/?i=104052668As ThinkProgress has noted, there are currently two competing visions of governance in the United States. One, the conservative vision, believes in the on-your-own society, and informs a policy agenda that primarily serves the well off and privileged sectors of the country. The other vision, the progressive one, believes in an American Dream that works for all people, regardless of their racial, religious, or economic background.
The conservative vision was on full display last week in Obion County, Tennessee. In this rural section of Tennessee, Gene Cranick’s home caught on fire. As the Cranicks fled their home, their neighbors alerted the county’s firefighters, who soon arrived at the scene. Yet when the firefighters arrived, they refused to put out the fire, saying that the family failed to pay the annual subscription fee to the fire department. Because the county’s fire services for rural residences is based on household subscription fees, the firefighters, fully equipped to help the Cranicks, stood by and watched as the home burned to the ground:
Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won’t respond, then watches it burn. That’s exactly what happened to a local family tonight. A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.
The homeowner, Gene Cranick, said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn’t do anything to stop his house from burning. Each year, Obion County residents must pay $75 if they want fire protection from the city of South Fulton. But the Cranicks did not pay. The mayor said if homeowners don’t pay, they’re out of luck. […]
We asked the mayor of South Fulton if the chief could have made an exception. “Anybody that’s not in the city of South Fulton, it’s a service we offer, either they accept it or they don’t,” Mayor David Crocker said.
The fire reportedly continued for hours “because garden hoses just wouldn’t put it out. It wasn’t until that fire spread to a neighbor’s property, that anyone would respond” — only because the neighbor had paid the fee.
A local newspaper further pressed Mayor Crocker about the city’s policy, which has been in place since 1990. Crocker, a Republican who was elected in 2008 and serves with a county commission where every seat is also filled by a Republican, likened the policy to buying auto insurance. The paper said he told them that, after all, “if an auto owner allowed their vehicle insurance to lapse, they would not expect an insurance company to pay for an unprotected vehicle after it was wrecked.”
Ironically, in the county commission’s latest report on its fire services, which outlines which parts of the municipal area will receive fire services only through subscriptions, the commissioners and fire service officials brag that the county is “very progressive.”
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CNN’s supposed “media analyst” Howard Kurtz does his best to try to get Dana Milbank to downplay just how dangerous Glenn Beck is during this interview on Reliable Sources.
Digby has more on Milbank’s recent column on Beck and this interview. Go read the whole thing but here’s an excerpt.
What Actually Watching Beck Teaches You:
I have never been a great fan of Dana Milbank who has often seemed to have been competing for the chance to succeed Maureen Dowd as Queen Bee of the Mean Girls.But he is doin
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Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, and essayist. She is best known for her novels, in which she creates strong, often enigmatic, women characters and excels in telling open-ended stories, while dissecting contemporary urban life and sexual politics. She is among the most-honored authors of fiction in recent history. In addition to the Arthur C. Clark Award-winning “The Handmaid’s Tale,” her novels include “Cat’s Eye,” which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, “Alias Grace,” which won the Giller
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Question: Why are vampires so popular right now?
Guillermo del Toro: I think that, you know, the moment of the birth of the vampire myth in English literature is with essentially there is few writings here and there, a poem and this and that. But in fiction most everyone agrees that it was birthed by John W. Polidori with a short story, “The Vampyre.” Now, the fact that Polidori had an ambivalent relationship with his master and friend, Lord Byron and he based the character of the main vampire in that
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Question: What do you make of the need to perform one’s life on Twitter and Facebook?
Margaret Atwood: Well it is just an extension of the diary. And there is a wonderful book called, “The Assassin’s Cloak,” which takes diary entries from all centuries and arranges them according to day of the year. So you can turn to January the 1st and there will be an entry from Lord Byron, and there will be one from somebody during World War II, and there will be one from Brian Eno. And then on January 2, there will
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See The Most Dangerous Man in America October 5th on PBS @ 9PM
Co-winner of this years Freedom of Expression Award from the National Board of Review (and one of their Five Best Documentaries of the Year), Winner of the Special Jury Award at IDFA, and in contention for the years Best Documentary Oscar, The Most Dangerous Man in America tells the story of Daniel Ellsberg, a high-level Pentagon official and Vietnam War strategist, who in 1971 concluded that the war is based on decades of lies a..
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Read also: The rest of this special report and MoJo‘s daily political coverage.
When it comes to corporate donors, Democrats and Republicans may be closer than you think.
The Senate: Lawyers, Drugs, and Money
The Senate
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Jon Stewart: The Most Trusted Name In Fake News
In July 2009, Time magazine held an online poll asking who America’s most trusted newscaster was; Jon Stewart won with 44 percent of the vote.
Comedy CentralIn July 2009, Time magazine held an online poll asking who America’s most trusted newscaster was; Jon Stewart won with 44 percent of the vote.
October 4, 2010On Oct. 30, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will host dueling rallies on the National Mall. Called “The Rally to Restore Sanity” and the “March to Keep Fear Alive,” respectively, the two rallies closely mimic Glenn Beck’s recent “Restoring Honor Rally,” also held in Washington, D.C.
Stewart sat down with Terry Gross on Sept. 29 in front of a live audience at New York City’s 92nd Street Y to discuss his time on The Daily Show, his role in the media, and the upcoming rally — which is being billed as “Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement.”
“Like everything that we do, the march is merely a construct,” he says. “It’s merely a format, in the way the book is a format, a show is a format … to be filled with the type of material that Stephen and I do and the point of view [that we have]. People have said, ‘It’s a rally to counter Glenn Beck.’ It’s not. What it is was, we saw that and thought, ‘What a beautiful outline. What a beautiful structure to fill with what we want to express in live form, festival form.”
For the past 11 years, Stewart has been expressing his opinions nightly on The Daily Show, which consistently ranks among the top programs viewed by the 18-34 age demographic. His quick wit and biting satire have taken the once-obscure fake-news show and made it an influential voice in American humor and politics.
To make the bits that go into the nightly show, Stewart says, the writers and producers follow a daily schedule that includes a lot of research, writing and rewriting.
Joyce Culver/92nd Street YTerry Gross interviewed Jon Stewart on Sept. 29 at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.
“You’d be incredibly surprised at how regimented our day is and how the infrastructure of the show is mechanized,” he says. “People say, The Daily Show, you guys just sit around and make jokes,’ but to weed through all of this material … and decide what to do, we have a very strict day that we have to adhere to. And by doing that, it gives us the freedom to improvise.”
Each day at 9 a.m., Stewart sits with his writers and producers. They go over all of the previous day’s top news stories and how they’ve been covered by the 24-hour news channels and other news programs.
“The 9 o’clock is to kind of rehash the analysis we were going over the night before, to see if the premises and hypotheses we came up with the night before have come to pass, and what’s the video evidence,” Stewart says. “And we take that and we start to knit it together for writing assignments. And those writing assignments are usually coming back in at 11:30, at which point we begin to read them. Then we go over the notes of how we’re going to attack it. The day basically goes as sort of a little dance between writing and rewriting and including all of the other elements — graphics and other things.”
The final hours before the 6 p.m. live taping are spent rewriting chunks of the script that didn’t work during the dress rehearsal, or adding material that the staff has found between writing sessions. Sometimes, Stewart says, entire elements are completely reworked during the show’s rewrite — and then performed for the first time in front of the studio audience.
But even though The Daily Show often comes up with facts and stories missed by other news sources, Stewart says, it would be wrong to describe what he does as “journalism.”
“We don’t do anything but make the connections,” he says. “We’re just going off our own instinct of, ‘What are the connections to this that make sense?’ And this really is true: We don’t fact-check [and] look at context because of any journalistic criteria that has to be met; we do that because jokes don’t work when they’re lies. We fact-check so when we tell a joke, it hits you at sort of a gut level — not because we have a journalistic integrity, [but because] hopefully we have a comedic integrity that we don’t want to violate.”
Stewart is the co-author of America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democratic Inaction and Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race. He also hosted the 78th and 80th Academy Awards and has received two Peabody Awards for his work on The Daily Show‘s election coverage in 2000 and 2004.
More ‘Daily Show’ on ‘Fresh Air’
Interview Highlights
On similarities between himself and Glenn Beck
“He’s a reaction to what he feels like is the news, and so are we. We actually share quite a bit in common in terms of, not point of view necessarily, but reason for being. We’re both in some ways an op-ed. We consider ourselves editorial cartoonists in some respect. Not him, but the show. Op-ed cartoonists, or the Messiah. We’re both different. I very much wanted to avoid the idea that [the march] would be a reaction to him. ‘Cause I don’t think that’d be fair to him and it’s not meant to ridicule activism or the Tea Party movement or religious people.”
On deconstructing Beck
“The beautiful thing about what he does is, it’s very difficult to argue with his facts. It’s the conclusions [that are problematic]. … It’s that slippery slope. … So what you do is, you just grab together facts and put them together and then do a grab bag of conclusions. Everything is discovered as evidence of secret plots, of secret things that could be occurring.”
On Christine O’Donnell
“The last thing that I would suggest is that her witchcraft or masturbation stance should be what we should be thinking about or focusing on, and I think that’s an enormous mistake that the Democrats will make. We like to sit around the office and we have a little game called ‘How will the Democrats blow it?’ And that’s the way they’ll do it. They’ll think somehow that that will resonate with voters, that 20 years ago Christine O’Donnell on MTV said ‘Masturbation is a sin.’ And they’ll play it, and they’ll ridicule it, and the voters will be like, ‘Yeah, I don’t have a job.’ That’s how they’ll blow it.”
On politicians and the media
“I think it made me less political and more emotional. The [more] you spend time with the political [world] and media, the less political you become and the more viscerally upset you become at corruption. I don’t consider it political, because ‘political’ I always sort of note as a partisan endeavor. But I have become increasingly unnerved by the depth of corruption that exists at many different levels. I’m less upset with politicians than [with] the media. I feel like politicians — the way I explain it, is when you go to a zoo and a monkey throws feces, it’s a monkey. But when the zookeeper is standing right there and he doesn’t say, ‘Bad monkey’ — somebody’s gotta be the zookeeper. I feel much more strongly about the abdication of responsibility by the media than by political advocates. They’re representing a constituency. Our culture is just a series of checks and balances. The whole idea that we’re in a battle between tyranny and freedom — it’s a series of pendulum swings. And the swings have become less drastic over time. That’s why I feel, not sanguine but at least a little bit less frightful, in that our pendulum swings have become less and less. But what has changed is the media’s sense of their ability to be responsible arbiters. I think they feel fearful. I think there’s this whole idea now that there’s a liberal media conspiracy, and I think they feel if they express any authority or judgment, which is what I imagine is editorial control, they will be vilified.”
On home vs. work
“You’d be surprised at how easily I turn it off when I go home. … The kids and I, we watch The Wizards of Waverly Place, and I don’t think about it again. … The real challenge is when I’m at work, I’m at work. I’m locked in, I’m ready to go, I’m focused. When I’m at home, I’m locked in and I’m ready to go and I’m focused on home. We don’t watch the show. We don’t watch the news. We don’t do any of that stuff. I sit down, I play Barbies. And sometimes the kids will come home and play with me.”
via npr.org -
Are Democrats Really Doing Better?
Oct 4 2010, 5:18 PM ET
Are Democrats doing better? Are they closing the enthusiasm gap? Why are Republicans exuding less confidence about the Democratic Party’s scheduled root canal on November 2?There is some obvious perception-framing here. Republicans want to make sure that a 45-seat pick-up is seen as a “win” for the party, particularly when pundits like Charlie Cook talk about a landscape with more than 70 seats in play. (Of course, Cook knows that Democrats will win many of the seats, but when people hear 70, they expect 70). Precisely because the 2010 election is not a vote of confidence for Republican leaders in Congress — it has become in so many races the opposite — if Republicans win, they will need to claim a mandate. It won t appear. Expectations must be managed.
By the same token, nothing will hurt Democratic turnout more than a Democratic Party that telegraphs losses. If the election seems more competitive than it is, more Democrats will vote. If it seems as if their votes will be wasted, if Republicans are simply going to win regardless, then they won’t. This is basic political psychology, but it always seem to kick in in early October.
Secondly, the Republicans have succeeded in defining their party in a way that is helping Democrats get clarity about the stakes of the election. This is to be expected in an era of intense polarization. It is why the national Democratic Party is not running for something; it is why they are running against the Palin-O’Donnell-Beck-Paul Ryan-Austerity party.
Thirdly, news coverage of the midterms has increased. People are paying more attention. Republicans have been paying more attention for a while, and now everyone else is. That, in and of itself, will bleed into the likely voter screens. Races that are naturally tight but don’t appear that way because of the attention gap will suddenly seem tight. This is an artificial (but welcome) momentum booster for Democrats.
All of the above is mechanical.
Most of the major prognosticators are forecasting a two-to-one Republican sweep of the marginal districts, which is about right for a wave election. But importantly, Democrats are keeping these races, many of them they are certain to lose, competitive. The party has enough money to keep these races in play. It does not have to publicly abandon House races because, with about a dozen examples, their candidates are either within a few points of the Republican candidate, are tied, or are leading.
In 1994, Democrats did not see the wave until it was right under their noses. In 2010, Democrats saw the eddies being generated before the wave was, and fortified their candidates with as much nutrition as possible. A lot of Democrats were able to escape bad votes — with the permission of the Speaker — because they’d face tough races. The Rahm Emanuel-recruited frosh class of Democrats is benefiting from the “sophomore surge” phenomenon.
It’s time for a concluding anthropomorphic synecdoche. Democrats are hanging in there. By this point in 1994, they’d already fallen off the cliff.
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