Venture capitalist Nick Hanauer explains why people create the demand which then creates the jobs. He says he makes 1000 times more than the average worker but that doesn’t translate to 1000 times the consumerism of the average worker. He can’t makeup the difference. So with more wealth accumulating within a small pool of wealthy people, that means less wealth spread across the rest of the country. It means less purchasing power and less demand for products and services from tens and hundreds of millions of Americans. This is why supply side (trickle down) economics doesn’t work. We’ve tried it for 30 years. How many more years do we need to continue failed economic policy before we wake up and realize it will never work?

The most important takeaway from this video starts at 1:33. If income distribution had remained unchanged from a few decades ago the media family income would be $92,000. Watch the video for the rest of the statistics. It’s an extremely damning indictment of supply side economics.

And this is what these greedy fuckers who support continued supply side economics fail to realize. Their failed policies will eventually lead to a massive economic collapse when Americans no longer have any purchasing power to drive the consumerism that fuels the economy. All of the wealth of the country will be in the hands of a few thousand people. Economic activity will dry up, tens of millions (or worse) will lose their jobs and thousands upon thousands of companies will go out of business.

Or to put it another way, Nick Hanauer says, “The economics will be the least of our problems at that point.”

dks

Regina Spektor – All The Rowboats from What We Saw From The Cheap Seats (to be released on Tuesday, May 29, 2012)

Mother Jones – What Regina Spektor Sees From the Cheap Seats

MJ: You incorporate lots of languages into your songs—French, Russian, Latin, Spanish. Is English not enough to express certain feelings or meanings?

RS: Really good question. I don’t know if it’s just going through immigration really early in life but, we went through three places. We went first into Austria, where you spoke German, and that’s why my last name is actually spelled with a K, because it’s the German way. And then we went into Italy and then into America, where I had to learn both English and Hebrew. So I think it kind of made me just all around feel like language is so arbitrary. It’s as arbitrary as borders and it’s all manmade. And if you deconstruct it, it’s just cool sounds. And certain feelings get triggered by those sounds. So, it feels like a color. Or a sample. I guess sometimes English doesn’t feel like enough. But, you know, I also make up words and make up sounds, so I guess nothing feels like enough! [Laughs.]

I’ll try to keep this as simple as possible for the thick skulls that seem to have a problem understanding how this works.

Rich people don’t create jobs, we do. Yes, you read that correctly. Demand for products and services is what creates jobs. Tens and hundreds of millions of low to middle-income Americans are responsible for improving the economy and creating more jobs, that is, if they have the purchasing power to do so. When incomes are stagnant and tens of millions are out of work, that reduces demand and that is why the economy is slow to crawl out of a huge hole. This is why we have government stimulus. Government is the only entity in this situation that is able to reverse the course of the economy. Once the economy is course-corrected it’s then left up to good old American consumerism to increase demand and get the economy really going.

So as you see, it’s got nothing to do with the supply side. I can assure you that the supply side is quite capable of ramping up employment if there is a reason to do so. In fact, a company would happily borrow money to increase employment if that is what it took to increase the sales of its products and services. That means there is zero need for further tax cuts to the so-called “job creators”. They will create the jobs when they need to create them.

If you give tax cuts to rich people when there is no need (demand) to create jobs you are simply increasing the federal deficit with no resulting payback. That is the height of fiscal irresponsibility.

dks

Gas prices have fallen for seven straight weeks. Heading into Memorial Day weekend gas prices are lower than they were a year ago.

Remember just a few short months ago when Republicans, especially Republican presidential candidates, were blaming President Obama for high gas prices? In fact, some of them, including Newt Gingrich, accused Obama of wanting higher gas prices so that he could push his agenda of alternative energy. Did they actually believe that a sitting president looking to be reelected would intentionally raise gas prices (if he had such power)?

Obama definitely doesn’t want higher gas prices, but you can call me guilty on that charge. I think the only way we make a big move away from petroleum-based energy to renewable energy sources is for there to be too much financial pain not to make the move. But that’s a topic for another article.

So, if Obama was responsible for rising gas prices as Republicans said, now that the price of gas is falling, will Republicans applaud Obama’s efforts? Of course I ask that question facetiously. The President of the United States has little power to control the price of gasoline. Anyone who tells you otherwise is hopelessly uninformed, lying for political gain, or both.

dks

An Associated Press study finds that CEO pay was up 6 percent last year with the average CEO of a public company earning $9.6 million in 2011. The study also revealed that companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index posted a 16% increase in profits last year.

The typical American worker would have to labor for 244 years to make what the typical boss of a big public company makes in one. The median pay for U.S. workers was about $39,300 last year. That was up 1 percent from the year before, not enough to keep pace with inflation.

Sounds to me like capitalism is working just fine for the 1%. It also seems like companies are doing just fine with profits up 16% last year. So what is President Obama doing wrong again that is scaring companies away? It seems to me like the problem is not Obama, the problem is a growing sense of importance and entitlement among the richest people in this country. If we don’t give in to their every demand they will ship more jobs overseas and stop investing in America. The Republican solution is to give these fuckers more tax breaks with the promise that this time they will magically start creating jobs. It appears to me these CEOs and their companies are already flush with cash, so where are the damn jobs? I mean, if we are to believe in trickle-down, supply side economics then those profits should result in millions of new jobs, right?

dks

I’ve said we need more grown-ups in congress, but I’d be happy if they just sounded like high school seniors, which brings us to our number of the day, 10.6. That’s the average of the language relative to school grade level of speeches delivered in congress. The Sunlight Foundation measured the length of the words and sentences, and on average, members of congress speak as though they’re about half-way through sophomore year. Of course, you do want your speeches to be understood. After all, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech comes in at freshman level, but King wrote speeches for wide public consumption. Members of congress mostly speak to each other, and that level of discourse has dropped almost a full grade since 2005. Plus, here’s a shock: The lawmakers who speak at the lowest grade level are among the most conservative members of congress. This may help explain some of the other high school antics from the Tea Party backed members of congress. They fight for no reason, won’t listen to anyone, and they want everything their way — right now. Certainly sounds like we’re dealing with 15-year-olds.

No, you may not “grade” the title of this article.

dks

Text version:

Did you know?

The original Constitution of the United States that was ratified in 1789 had only one reference to religion: [Article 6] No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

The de facto motto of the United States, adopted as part of the Great Seal of the U.S. by an Act of Congress in 1782 was E. Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One). Congress changed it 174 years later (1956) to “In God We Trust.”

The original ‘Pledge of Allegiance’ was written in 1892 by Baptist Minister Francis Bellamy who DID NOT INCLUDE the words “Under God.” Those were added by Congress 62 years later (1954).

The U.S. didn’t issue Paper Currency until 1861, and ‘In God We Trust’ didn’t appear on it for 96 years (1957).

Just after the Red Scare in the 1950′s, CONGRESS CHANGED the Pledge of Allegiance and our Nation’s Motto over the FEAR of COMMUNISM.

In a time when fear is traded like a commodity, and the word SOCIALISM is being used to create the same fear as the old word COMMUNISM, let’s REMEMBER that our country was NOT founded on fear. NO, OUR NATION was founded out of HOPE for a better world where all people were EQUAL – that we were ONE from MANY.

Let’s not let fear change our nation’s great tradition & direction again.

-

No credit is given on this graphic but I would be glad to add a credit.

“Over 1,000 of us made an unannounced visit to Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner’s home to demand he support a Robin Hood tax–a tiny tax of less than 0.5% on Wall Street transactions–and a thorough investigation of the bankers who caused this crisis.”

–

“National People’s Action (NPA) is a network of grassroots organizations with a fierce reputation for direct action from across the country that work to advance a national economic and racial justice agenda. NPA has over 200 organizers working to unite everyday people in cities, towns, and rural communities throughout the United States through direct-action, house meetings and community organizing.”

This is just ugly stuff. There is no other way to put it. Because we give religion and religious views a free pass from serious debate and scrutiny it allows this kind of bigotry to fester. No, I’m not saying all religious people are bigots, I’m saying that because religion is off-limits from public debate it allows for the resiliency of this kind of  hatred. It gives an intolerant extremist like Pastor Charles L. Worley (Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina) a soapbox to profess and spread his hatred to others, and do so with tax-exempt status from the United States government.

dks

The amazing thing during that nonsensical debate was that a number of these Tea Party Republicans, including GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, believed that there would be no harm if we failed to increase the debt ceiling. Let’s make one thing clear, it’s a rare person in this country who wants to see bigger deficits and more long-term debt if we can avoid it, but the debt ceiling is about debt we’ve already incurred. I have no better term to use than “reckless” to describe these Tea Party Republicans who had no problem risking (and ultimately achieving) a credit downgrade for the United States. If they had not reached a deal, the credit downgrade that resulted would be the least of our worries.

Debt that we’ve already incurred is money that we’ve already spent. Somebody expects to get paid. And contrary to popular belief, the biggest holders of U.S. debt are not foreign countries but instead Americans. We own the majority of our own debt. It’s in pension plans, 401Ks and other investment products. So, we are only screwing ourselves if we think we can get out of paying our debt obligations. But this is apparently too complex or simply too far outside the narrative for Tea Party Republicans to understand.

Now Speaker of the House, Republican John Boehner is threatening another debt ceiling showdown. The debt ceiling is likely to be reached before the end of the year. Will we have a repeat of last summer? Will the United States get downgraded yet again? Are Republicans credible when it comes to fiscal responsibility? On that last question, I think the clear answer is no:

Chris Hayes (from Up with Chris Hayes on Sunday, May 20, 2012):

Yesterday, the Republican controlled House passed the defense authorization bill, adding $8 billion more to the spending caps and last year’s budget, and almost $4 billion more than President Obama requested, which of course is par for the course. For all their railing against the debt, Republicans are almost always happy to pile it on when they’re running things.

So you see, Republicans can pile on the debt when it’s something they want. Just look at the eight years under President George W. Bush when we had the biggest increase in the long-term debt than any previous president in history. Unfortunately the cratered economy and tax cuts that Bush passed on to the next president means we are seriously piling on the debt now trying to dig out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. We have no choice, unfortunately.

Republicans think their message of fiscal responsibility will work with voters, and maybe this time they are really serious about fiscal responsibility and cutting the debt, but it would be at exactly the wrong time. Republicans had their chance to be good stewards of fiscal responsibility when they were handed a massive federal budget surplus from President Clinton. They squandered that surplus in the form of tax breaks for all, but especially for the rich along with two unfunded wars and an unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit. At the time George W. Bush took office,  we already had many trillions of dollars of debt, but Republicans decided it was a good idea to give us all tax breaks instead of paying down the debt. After giving us a tax cut they gave us another tax cut two years later, but this time after starting two unfunded wars. It’s the first time we cut taxes during wartime in our history. Does this sound like fiscal conservatism to you?

The Republican Party of 2012 is even more radical when it comes to irresponsible fiscal policy. They believe in lowering taxes and never raising them again under any circumstances. They believe in deep cuts to education and the social safety-net. Basically, the Republican vision for America is one where a few mega-wealthy individuals will have all the power and all the money. In a few decades, if Republicans get their way, the United States will no longer be a democracy, it will be an oligarchy. Hell, maybe it already is.

dks

photo by David Silver