America For Purchase

Republicans love the top 1% of the wealthiest Americans along with mega corporations and they will continue to protect, defend and support them at the expense of middle and poor Americans.  Even the activist Republican Supreme Court has now given citizen status (Citizens United) to corporations as they overturned decade’s long precedent which prevented corporations from buying elections. President Obama called the ruling “a major victory for Big Oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”

Republicans for years have provided the rich and corporations with massive tax breaks, yet they whine about the middle class and the poor who receive unemployment benefits in a recession they created, and they plan to reduce or eliminate Social Security and Medicare if they regain political leadership.  The GOP fought against health care reform, the stimulus bill, banking reform and even financial reform for America’s college kids. The middle class has turned into the “peasant class”. We have been taken over by a few wealthy people who control our politicians and government. We have become an Aristocracy. Except the ones in control are not royalty, they are businessmen hiding behind a cloak of deception that is Corporate America.

In a nation wracked with unemployment and recession, where more than 1 in 5 children live in poverty, Wall Street firms are still paying billions of dollars in bonuses.  When Republicans and George W Bush gave Wall Street a $700 billion bailout, Wall Street hoarded the money, rewarded themselves and continued to turn their backs on the very Americans who bailed them out.  Outlined below are 22 Statistics That Prove the Middle Class is being systematically wiped out.

The biggest sham against Middle America was the tax cuts enacted by Republicans and George W Bush.  These tax cuts for America’s wealthiest were deficit-financed, not paid for and will cost the U.S. Treasury $2.48 trillion over the 2001-2010 period and it was these tax cuts which caused the U.S. deficit to skyrocket.  Republicans NEVER attempted to replace the lost revenue and are now poised to continue to place more tax burden on hardworking taxpayers as they launch a new effort to continue the tax cuts for America’s rich, again without paying for them.   Who caused our deficit is answered by the article “Study: Bush Tax Cuts Cost More Than Twice As Much As Dems’ Health-Care Bill“.

The results of Republican tax cuts? Decayed infrastructure, mandatory two-income families, bad schools, fast food, cheap imports, poor health and obesity, job outsourcing, increased consumer debt, privatization of public services, free-market monopolies, a corrupt financial sector, and corporate-controlled media and government.

The Republican argument will be allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire will cost jobs.  The irony is there were no jobs created as a result of the Republicans’ sponsored tax cuts; the rich got richer and again hoarded the financial windfall as the deficit continued to set new records.  In fact Republicans have stood against jobs bills for the past 18 months and have the worst job creation on record during the George W Bush years. Economists have proven tax cuts do not create jobs!  And all the while the income gap set historical records as more millionaires were created and taxpayers set records in filing for bankruptcy.  If these Republican tax cuts are extended, they will add at least $2 trillion over the next decade to the national debt!

What are the tax changes?  Americans making between $250,000 and $375,000 per year will grow from 33% to 36%, and those earning more than $375,000 will increase from 35% to 39.5%; which are the same tax levels when President Bill Clinton was in office; leaving George W Bush a budget surplus which Republicans quickly turned into more than a trillion dollar deficit and placed the debt on the backs of American families.

What’s more, if the Republicans succeed in continuing the Bush tax cuts and increasing the deficit, they will next come after hardworking Americans as they attack Social Security and Medicare arguing the U.S. budget can no longer afford these entitlement programs; all the while Wall Street, the GOP and Corporate America are laughing all the way to the bank as they continue bankrupting the U.S. Treasury.  Just this month Republicans voted against help for the jobless, but insist the rich must keep their tax cuts, choosing tax cuts for billionaires over benefits for the unemployed!

Republican Michele Bachmann said she would like to “wean everybody off” of Social Security — even though that would be taking away money Americans have been paying for years.  Republicans openly intend to destroy, during their next watch, the twin pillars of the nation’s public social insurance system, the 75-year-old Social Security and 50-year-old Medicare. Check out H.R. 4529, introduced by Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and S. 1240, introduced by the most right wing member of the Senate, Jim DeMint of South Carolina.

The Tax Policy Center has calculated that the Republican’s Roadmap’s passage H.R. 4529, would, on average, save taxpayers who make more than $1 million over $633,000 in 2014.  Citizens for Tax Justice ran the numbers to see what the Republican’s Roadmap in America would look like in 2011. In that year, with the Republican plan in effect, the nation’s bottom 80 percent of taxpayers “would pay about $1,700 more, on average, than they would if President Obama’s proposals were enacted.”  For the richest 1 percent: an average $211,300 tax savings.

Unashamedly many of the lawmakers who argued that the health care reform legislation was “too costly” are the same lawmakers who supported the Bush tax cuts.  These are the same Republicans who support the inequitable tax laws in the U.S. where many corporations pay no taxes or they only pay taxes to foreign countries where Republicans allowed them to relocate to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

Imagine if Republicans had succeeded in privatizing Social Security, a few stock brokers and Wall Street would have made a financial windfall and the bottom 99% of Americans would now be paupers.

There is no such thing as ‘free markets’ in America, it began its death with trickledown economics and Republicans giving all power to Wall Street and Corporate America.  There is no longer a level playing field as hardworking Americans now have to beg for a few financial crumbs at the feet of Corporate CEOs.

Remember Republican John Boehner’s jaw-dropping observation that President Obama’s financial regulatory reform legislation is “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon” has gladdened the hearts of Democratic political operatives from coast to coast.  Of course as President Obama correctly pointed out “This is the same financial crisis that led to the loss of nearly 8 million jobs; the same crisis that cost people their homes, and their life savings.”

How can anyone not in the top 1% vote for the GOP when it is patently obvious that in doing so they are voting against their own self interests?  Much of the Republican base are poor under-educated and lower income Southerners who vote against their own self-interest as they succumb to GOP propaganda, these are the people who quickly buy into hate and are easily lead with fear and war mongering, like sheep to the slaughter they are willing to buy into every lie perpetrated by Republicans.

“When liberty is skewed into the hands of a very small number of the population, then our ability to “self-govern” becomes a complete and utter illusion.”

Here are 22 Statistics That Prove the Middle Class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America:

• 83% of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
• 61% of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49% in 2008 and 43% in 2007.
• 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
• 36% of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.
• A staggering 43% of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
• 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32% increase over 2008.
• Only the top 5% of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
• As of 2007, the bottom 80% of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
• The bottom 50% of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1% of the nation’s wealth.
• Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17% when compared with 2008.
• In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
• The top 1% of U.S. households owns nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
• More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
• or the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
• This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
• Approximately 21% of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years.
• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
• The top 10% of Americans now earn around 50% of our national income.

Republicans have allowed the “upper” class to become too big to fail. As a result, the middle class is an endangered species which has to bail out the class that got us into this huge financial recession. This is how the French Revolution started.

Americans must wake up to the threat of the Republican Party and educate themselves with facts; realizing the destruction of America’s way of life and the elimination of America’s Middle Class is not a fallacy, it is already occurring.  The only way to avoid further economic erosion of American workers is to protest against the Republicans’ plan to continue the Bush tax cuts for the rich; to turn away every Republican seeking office and send a strong message that these United States belong to hardworking, taxpaying American families; not Wall Street, not Corporations and not the GOP.

Americans would do well to remember thanks to George W Bush and the Republican Party, tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans gutted the earnings and purchasing power of the middle class, and crippled the nation’s economy with huge historical debt.

Tags Bush tax cuts Citizens United decline of Middle Class elimination of Medicare elimination of Social Security GOP tax cuts health care reform income gap Jim DeMint jobless benefits John Boehner John Kyl Medicare Michele Bachmann millionaire tax cuts news politics Paul Ryan Republican deficit republican hypocrisy Republican spending Steve King TARP tea party unemployment wall street reform

Filed under: Republicans