Is America Falling Apart at the Foundations
The following is an edited excerpt from the Amped Status report, "The Critical Unraveling of U.S. Society."
The economic elite have launched an attack on the U.S. public and society is unraveling at an increased rate. You may have missed it in the mainstream news media, but statistical societal indicators are reading red across the board. Let’s look at the top 15 statistics that prove we are under attack.
1) The inequality of wealth in the United States is soaring to an unprecedented level. The U.S. already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the middle class and poor much harder than the top 1 percent, the gap between the top 1 percent and the remaining 99 percent of the U.S. population has grown to a record high.
2) As the stock market went over the 10,000 mark and just surged to a 13-month high, the three big banks that took taxpayer money and benefited the most from the government bailout have just set a new global economic record by issuing $30 billion in annual bonuses this year, “up 60 percent from last year.” Bloomberg reported: “Goldman Sachs, the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history, had a record profit in the first nine months of this year and set aside $16.7 billion for compensation expenses.” Goldman Sachs is on pace for the best year in the firm’s history, and it is also benefiting by only paying 1 percent in taxes.
3) The profits of the economic elite are “now underwritten by taxpayers with $23.7 trillion worth of national wealth."
As the looting is occurring at the top, the U.S. middle class is just beginning to collapse.
4) Workers between the ages of 55 to 60, who have worked for 20 to 29 years, have lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. During the same time period, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans went up by $30 billion, bringing their total combined wealth to $1.57 trillion.
5) Home foreclosure filings "hit a record high in the third quarter (of 2009)… They were the worst three months of all time… 937,840 homes received a foreclosure letter" in this three-month period; “3.4 million homes are expected to enter foreclosure by year’s end, with some experts estimating that next year will be even worse.”
........................................How to we get to this point, Who's to Blame for the Deficit Numbers?
The revised deficit numbers reported by the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget today show a lower deficit than previously estimated for 2009, with higher deficits for 2010 and beyond. Political opportunists will be busy looking for chances to score points over these numbers—pinning the dismal fiscal picture on the Obama administration.
The real story is, however, fairly obvious. The policies of the Bush administration, which included tax cuts during a time of war and a floundering economy, are clearly the primary source of the current deficits. The Obama administration policies that are beginning to give the economy a needed jumpstart—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in particular—place a distant third in contributing to the 2009 and 2010 deficit numbers. The deficit picture for the years beyond still needs to be painted.
To come to these conclusions, we calculated the relative importance of the several factors contributing to the 2009 and 2010 deficits by looking at the impact in those years of various policies. A detailed description of our approach is at the end of this column. Below is the percentage share of the major contributing factors to the total deterioration from the surpluses projected in 2000 to the current deficits according to our analysis. The policies of President George W. Bush make up the largest share, followed by the current economic downturn, and then President Barack Obama’s policies. ( Chart at the link)
