Chained CPI Trick

$18,000.00 - Social Security Benefits  - LINK

The "Social Security Chain-CPI Massacre" Underhanded, Unnecessary, Unfair, Un-American

If Congress fails to act before the end of the year, every American family’s taxes will automatically go up. A typical middle-class family of four would see its taxes rise by $2,200 starting in 2013. - LINK

Middle-class families can’t afford that. That means less money to buy groceries or fill a prescription. It means a tougher choice between paying the rent and paying tuition. And because the middle class is the engine that drives our economy, our businesses can’t afford it either.

President Obama is calling on Congress to act on his proposal that would prevent 98 percent of American families making less than $250,000 a year and 97 percent of small businesses from paying higher taxes next year.

Middle Class Taxes. #my2K  - VIDEO LINK

Unless the House of Representatives takes action before January 1, 2013, taxes will go up on 114 million middle - class families. Republicans in the House of Representatives, however, are refusing to extend middle-class tax cuts without also giving massive tax cuts to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans

Inside Job -  VIDEO LINK

The global economic crisis of 2008 cost tens of millions of people their savings, their jobs and their homes.

This is how it happened. Charles Ferguson’s film – Inside Job – won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2011. It narrates the conflicts of interest between the finance industry, politicians, academics and regulators, which eventually led to the trillion-dollar collapse of 2008.

Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy ( 'Inside Job' documentary film; trigger for US-global financial recession)

click on chart - larger image 

 

Martin Feldstein ('Inside Job' documentary film)

Architect of de-regulation under President Reagan - WIKI

Natal Martin Feldstein

DOB November 25, 1939 

New York City, New York, U.S.

Glenn Hubbard ('Inside Job' documentary film)

       Architect of tax cuts for the 1% wealthy elite - WIKI

                      Natal Glenn Hubbard
                      DOB 9/4/1958 
                      Orlando, Florida, U.S.

The Archeology of Decline—Debtpocalypse and the Hollowing Out of America

“Debtpocalypse” looms. Depending on who wins out in Washington, we’re told, we will either free fall over the fiscal cliff or take a terrifying slide to the pit at the bottom. Grim as these scenarios might seem, there is something confected about the mise-en-scène, like an un-fun Playland. After all, there is no fiscal cliff, or at least there was none—until the two parties built it.

And yet the pit exists.  It goes by the name of “austerity.” However, it didn’t just appear in time for the last election season or the lame-duck session of Congress to follow. It was dug more than a generation ago, and has been getting wider and deeper ever since.  Millions of people have long made it their home. “Debtpocalypse” is merely the latest installment in a tragic, 40-year-old story of the dispossession of American working people. 

Think of it as the archeology of decline, or a tale of two worlds. As a long generation of austerity politics hollowed out the heartland, the quants and traders and financial wizards of Wall Street gobbled up ever more of the nation's resources. It was another Great Migration—instead of people, though, trillions of dollars were being sucked out of industrial America and turned into “financial instruments” and new, exotic forms of wealth. If blue-collar Americans were the particular victims here, then high finance is what consumed them. Now, it promises to consume the rest of us. 

In the 1980s, when Jack Welch, soon to be known as “Neutron Jack” for his ruthlessness, became CEO of General Electric, he set out to raise the company’s stock price by gutting the workforce. It only took him six years, but imagine what it was like in Schenectady, New York, which lost 22,000 jobs; Louisville, Kentucky, where 13,000 fewer people made appliances; Evendale, Ohio, where 12,000 no longer made lights and light fixtures; Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where 8,000 plastics makers lost their jobs; and Erie, Pennsylvania, where 6,000 locomotive workers got green slips.

Life as it had been lived in GE’s or other one-company towns ground to a halt. Two travelling observers, Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, making their way through the wasteland of middle America in 1984 spoke of “medieval cities of rusting iron” and a largely invisible landscape filling up with an army of transients, moving from place to place at any hint of work. They were camped out under bridges, riding freight cars, living in makeshift tents in fetid swamps, often armed, trusting no one, selling their blood, eating out of dumpsters.

Nor was the calamity limited to the northern Rust Belt. The South and Southwest did not prove immune from this wasting disease either. 

Laments about “the vanishing middle class” have become commonplace, and little wonder. Except for those in the top 10% of the income pyramid, everyone is on the down escalator. The United States now has the highest percentage of low-wage workers—those who earn less than two-thirds of the median wage—of any developed nation. George Carlin once mordantly quipped, “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Now, that joke has become our waking reality.

Think back to the days of junk bonds, leveraged buy-outs, megamergers and acquisitions, and asset stripping in the 1980s and 1990s. (Think, in fact, of Bain Capital.) What was getting bought and stripped and closed up supported windfall profits in high-interest-paying junk bonds. The stupendous fees and commissions that went to those “engineering” such transactions were being picked from the carcass of a century and a half of American productive capacity. The hollowing out of the United States was well under way long before anyone dreamed up the “fiscal cliff.”  

For some long time now, our political economy has been driven by investment banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, real estate developers, insurance goliaths, and a whole menagerie of ancillary enterprises that service them. But high times in FIRE land have depended on the downward mobility of working people and the poor, cut adrift from more secure industrial havens and increasingly from the lifelines of public support. They have been living instead in the “pit of austerity.” Soon many more of us will join them.

A spirited 23-minute June 2008 interview with Fraser by Bill Moyers can be watched here.