Where is the Middle Class?

November 29, 2007

Machiavilli 'The Prince'
Who is he?
I’ll make it easy for you, he’s The Prince of darkness
and he’s considered the master of controlling realms.

Something that has always struck me when looking at the politics of America, Britain & Australia is how similar the lies are, how similar are the supposed solutions and then finally how similar are the results. To use a reasonably famous; or is it infamous, line… I wonder who are the real ‘Evil Doers’, certainly they are behind the political donations going both to the Right & ‘Left’, but the ones actually making the donations are relatively low level acolytes, the real powers are hidden through trusts, jiggery pokery, hey presto deals set up by teams of Lawyers (spit on the floor) specializing in Loopholes largely set up by other Lawyers (spit on the floor again) voted in with the help of political donations.

I am a big fan of the Australian ABC… and SBS. The other night I listened to an interview on Radio National with Paul Krugman, a Princeton Professor of Economics, here is some of the transcript along with links to both the transcript and the MP3.

“Why haven’t we had a backlash? Or put it this way, how has it been that during this period of rapidly rising inequality, we’ve seen the top tax rates fall. But back when that socialist Dwight Eisenhower was President, the top marginal tax rate was 91%, and it was 70% through much of the ’60s and ’70s, and it’s now 35%. Our capital gains tax rate has been cut from 28% to 15% and so on down the line. The taxes that apply most heavily to the people who have been the big beneficiaries of growing inequality have been cut. Social programs have been eroded where it was possible, although social security and Medicare are still there.”

“Governor Alquist, Americans for Tax Action, we like him in a way. Somebody pointed out that Governor Alquist is sort of like a James Bond villain, who explains at length his evil plans, and so we like to quote him. The quote everyone uses, the one about getting the government down to the size where you can drown it in your bathtub. But the one I always liked is when asked what he wants, he said he wants to get America back to the way it was before Teddy Roosevelt and the socialists came in. So, undo the 21st - OK.”

“So if we can get up with health care reform, that in itself is a big plus for the American public and it also has political implications. So one of the funny things I found is I’m actually in total agreement on one thing with William Kristol, of The Weekly Standard. During the failure of the Clinton health care initiative in the early ’90s, Kristol wrote a famous memo to Republicans, saying ‘Our goal is not to improve this plan, it is to kill it.’”

“I should say one more thing. There is a view on inequality that you hear all the time, which is what’s all about the increased demand for skills for education in the modern world economy, and there’s no doubt something to that, but if you actually look at the numbers, the huge growth in disparities has not been between the college educated and the non-college educated. Yes, people with college degrees have done better than people without, but most of the increase is among people with a lot of education. So that most dramatic statistic, high school teachers, tend to have post-graduate degrees, and so do hedge fund managers. And as we all know, last year the highest paid hedge fund manager in the United States made an amount equal to the salaries of all 80,000 New York City school teachers for the next three years. So it’s not education that is driving this. It’s not that simple.”

So it’s a case of a relatively few sociopathic ‘elite’ trying to distance themselves still more from the majority of humans and having zero respect for the planet… they don’t even respect themselves, they are truly pathetic.

Website: ABC Radio National



Written by Beam · Filed Under Climate, Energy, Environment, Food, Fuel, People, Political 

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