Funny. The so-called ‘job creators’ told us they’d fix the unemployment problem (and maybe even stop outsourcing) if we just gave them a boatload of free cash, exempted them from taxes, and insured their profits with proceeds from US taxpayers. We’ve done all of these things, yet the catastrophic rise in poverty continues unabated, and even as Warren Buffett throws 5 billion into Bank of America’s coffers, they’re laying off 40,000 people.

It’s also funny that the people criticizing the President also largely support a man who touts the massive spread of minimum wage jobs under his administration as progress. Minimum wage jobs do not provide people with health care, nor do they expand a state’s economy. What they do is put people into a permanent debt situation. It’s a bit hypocritical to criticize a Democrat while supporting a Republican that is clearly clueless.

Now, what we have is a corporate system that is producing record profits even while tens of millions are laid off, with hundreds of thousands more every month. Folks who think that deregulation is needed are simply not paying attention. Big Business is raking in the cash hand over fist. The Democrats and Republicans have delivered in spades for their corporate handlers.

But the real disaster here is that middle class has been rendered irrelevant, and the rich no longer care about the potential for greater profit that comes with a successful middle class. They’d rather receive the benefits of American military strength, infrastructure, and stability without paying the tab, especially in the knowledge that their profits are insured by their proxies in Congress.

With that said, I don’t know that the answers have been found. As much as I like the President’s proposal here, I can only imagine that the people getting half of their payroll taxes back will do exactly what they did with the rest of the stimulus money that went in their pockets: save and pay debt, which in the end does absolutely nothing to stimulate the economy. I’m fortunate enough to have very little debt myself, but with my share of that payroll tax cut, I know that I’d stash it away for a rainy day.


Per KansasCity.com:

“I see too many people losing their jobs, who are taking whatever they can to keep food on the table,” Wood said. “I’m surprised the poverty level didn’t go up more.”

The bureau said Tuesday that 15.1 percent of the U.S. population lived beneath the federal poverty level in 2010 — the highest poverty rate since 1993 and up from 14.3 percent in 2009.

In its annual report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage, the Census Bureau also said the nation’s median household income fell, and the number of Americans under age 65 without health insurance throughout the year stayed stuck at more than 49 million.

About 46.2 million Americans were estimated to live in poverty last year, an increase of 2.6 million since 2009.

For a household of two adults and two children, that meant they lived on an income of less than $22,113.

abaldwin360:

‘Shrimp On A Treadmill’: The Politics Of ‘Silly’ Studies

by Nell Greenfieldboyce NPR

Biologist Lou Burnett was in his car when his cellphone rang recently. It was a CNN reporter, asking about the fact that his research had been featured in a new report about wasteful government spending.

That was news to Burnett, who works at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. “I was pretty irritated,” he recalls.

The report, put out by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), blasted the National Science Foundation, a major government funder of research, saying it squandered taxpayer money on questionable science projects, including one pursued by Burnett and his colleagues that involved putting shrimp on a tiny treadmill. [FULL STORY]

____

Oh the irony… legislators who don’t even read are pointing fingers indignantly at legitimate scientific research that helps people, and their staffmembers have the balls to defend such idiocy.  What a bunch of scumbags.

Good morning, Phil. I’m happy to provide my thoughts on the current economic situation, even though the topic is really depressing these days.

If you ask me, the fundamental problem of the Bush/Obama recession (And for those who deny it, it is a Obama’s as well), that the middle class has now largely become irrelevant in the economic formula. Even as tens of millions of people have lost their jobs in the last four years, corporate profits have soared, bolstered and insured by the Federal Government in complete transparency. At the same time, the American people buy into the myth that lower taxes equate to higher growth and a better economy, despite the fact that taxes have been lowered substantially for the past thirty years, and in the past decade we’ve seen a catastrophic lack of growth in workers’ wages along with the record unemployment.

To provide some perspective, last December, our leaders passed a 900 billion dollar tax package, and 600 billion of it was solely for the Bush tax cut extension. It’s no surprise that the immediate cuts in the so-called ‘debt ceiling deal’ total just slightly more than 900 billion.

Symptomatic of the problem is the complete defiance of the right to new revenues, no matter where those revenues come from. For instance, earlier this year a bill was introduced to end subsidies for the largest oil companies (who made 30 billion dollars in profit last year), and was blocked by House Republicans. (With the help of three Democrats) Granted, this bill would have saved taxpayers just two billion dollars annually, but that two billion dollars is going to go a lot further helping to feed families than it is funding the bonuses of energy moguls. House Republicans also blocked attempts to end taxpayer subsidies for NASCAR, among other things.

I concede that part of our economic problem is overspending, and that goes without saying. Our leaders are spending more than a trillion dollars a year on so-called national security, and another trillion on tax cuts that do little more than fill the bank accounts of the wealthy in this country. To help cover their asses they are raiding pre-paid and fully funded programs like Social Security and Medicare to help pay for it, in addition to borrowing tremendously from US taxpayers and foreign countries. For the sake of comparison, we’ve spent approximately 300-400 billion dollars total on social services over the entire length of the Bush/Obama recession, yet these programs are the ones targeted for significant cuts. It really doesn’t make sense to me.

I believe the ultimate solution is to lower national security spending significantly and restore the pre-1980 tax rates on all Americans, but you won’t find a single politician in Washington with the cajones to do it. Our leaders are less frightened by the unsustainable path of US foreign and tax policy than they are of confronting their corporate overlords.

Looks like the Republicans are still sour that they weren’t the ones to nab Osama Bin Laden, because they’re grasping at the flimsiest of straws to attack Democrats on national security these days. (That or their corporate overlords are paying them overtime to say the dumbest things.)

The latest: Calling seven billion in potential defense cuts “Armageddon” or “a national security crisis”.

As much as I love Mother Jones it infuriates me that I don’t see major networks calling bullshit on the idiotic statements that senators and Pentagon officials make over necessary defense spending cuts that probably won’t even materialize anyway. Cutting a paltry seven billion dollars from a trillion dollar budget is hardly “the knowing destruction of the US military”, as the distinguished blowhard Jon Kyl hyperbolized. I will give Defense Secretary Panetta a little credit for stating the obvious: “We must come to realize that not every defense program is necessary, not every defense dollar is sacred or well-spent, and more of everything is simply not sustainable”.


Per Mother Jones:

In theory, the debt deal will cut discretionary security spending by $7 billion over the next two years. How would those cuts impact the Pentagon? The Pentagon’s base operating budget typically runs between $500 and 600 billion a year. $7 billion is roughly the cost of 3 submarines, or 20 fighter jets, or one-fifth of one KBR contract in Iraq. In other words, chump change. And that’s if the cuts actually come from the DOD. According to the text of the debt bill (PDF), it’s up to Congress to decide what parts of the total security and defense budget—which includes the Veterans Administration, Homeland Security, international affairs, and nuclear weapons—actually take a hit. One thing that won’t take a hit is the funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is specifically preserved in the bill.

The White House and Congressional leaders insist that the debt compromise will slash $350 billion from the Pentagon over the next 10 years. Additionally, if Congress doesn’t cut another $1.2 trillion across the board by December, a “trigger” in the bill is supposed to kick in, reducing the defense budget by another $500 to 600 billion.

But those hard numbers aren’t spelled out in the bill. “The actual amount will be decided by Congress in the future,” Wheeler says. And there’s no guarantee that Congress, particularly Rep. McKeon and his pork-loving Armed Services Committee members, will take any cuts out of the Pentagon’s hide. The bill “is classic Washington Kabuki theater,” Gordon Adams, a political science professor who worked as a security budget expert for the Clinton White House, tells Foreign Policy. “The whole deal is designed to be opaque about the things you really want to know, such as how much defense will be cut.”