In my last post I asked the question; why people consistently vote against their best interests?
If you support, and more importantly voted for, the Republicans and if you don’t make more then $250,000/Yr, you have voted against your best interests. Here’s why:
From an article on Commondreams.org.
† "All working people should be concerned about restrictions on their right to organize because unionization is a proven path to higher wages and greater job security. Even people who don’t belong to a union should care because high union density in an industry tends to increase wages for the industry as a whole, non-union workers included."
† Wage equality and the social contract
Election Day is a good time to reflect on the big questions: What do we owe each other as a society? What would a just economy look like? Mikhail Zinshteyn of Campus Progress argues that one of the basic tenets of the social contract in a capitalist system is that rewards should be proportional to production. If you produce more, you should get paid more.
Yet the widening gap between productivity and real wages in America shows that that our economy is not delivering on this basic tenet of fairness. Workers are more productive than ever, and in a just world, you’d expect they’d share in that extra wealth. Yet real wages have remained largely stagnant. The extra wealth is going overwhelmingly to those who own the companies. The people who actually create the wealth are being left out in the cold.
† The Great Recession is creating hardship for families in every part of the country. More than 6 million Americans fell below the poverty line in the last two years, and nearly a quarter of all children under the age of six are living in poverty. Unemployed workers are typically going jobless for six months, nearly twice as long as they have during any time since World War II. Median household wealth fell by 20 percent since 2007, retirement savings have evaporated, and now some are talking about dismantling Social Security.
Conservatives are that in name only. Being conservative you would think that they would not want a big deficit, but look at the track record. See graph here.
† Republican Ronald Reagan started with a deficit of $ 85 billion and after breaking the record of high deficits 4 years in a row to a high of $ 283 billion he raised taxes and finished his term with it at $ 255 billion. One of his famous quotes was “the deficit is big enough to take care of itself.”
† Republican George H W Bush started with a $ 255 billion deficit, breaking the record 2 times to a high of $ 432 billion and after raising taxes ended with $ 399 billion. One of his famous quotes during his campaign was “read my lips, no new taxes”.
† Democrat Bill Clinton started wit a deficit of $ 399 billion and reduced the deficit by $ 381 billion to $ 18 billion.
† George W Bush started with an $ 18 billion deficit and broke the record 3 times to an all time high of over $ 1 trillion; again I repeat that’s $ 1,017,000,000,000 DOLLARS! That’s a $ 999,000,000,000 increase of the deficit! Now if you don’t find that mind boggling there’s something wrong with you. The biggest factor in this was the Bush tax cut for the rich. The first time in our history that a president cut taxes while at war.
Think about that. More about this and also about Obama’s deficit on my next posts.
