Webster

The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions." --American Statesman Daniel Webster (1782-1852)


Sunday, August 26, 2012

Obama and the middle class..

I saw this from the WSJ


The Presidential race is boiling down to one dominant issue: which party's policies will do more to help the financially stressed American middle class. President Obama's campaign theme is that Mitt Romney and the Republicans cater to the rich, while Mr. Obama cares about struggling families.
He may care, but he sure hasn't done much for them. New income data from the Census Bureau, tabulated by former Census income specialists at the nonpartisan economic consulting firm Sentier Research, reveal that the three-and-a-half years of the Obama Presidency have done enormous harm to middle-class households.
image
In January 2009, the month President Obama entered the Oval Office and shortly before he signed his stimulus spending bill, median household income was $54,983. By June 2012, it had tumbled to $50,964, adjusted for inflation. (See the chart nearby.) That's $4,019 in lost real income, a little less than a month's income every year.Add the authors: "The overall decline since June 2009 was larger than the 2.6 percent decline that occurred" during the recession from December 2007 to June 2009. For household income, in other words, the Obama recovery has been worse than the Bush recession.
     It's true that the Bush years overall were also not great for household incomes. According to Sentier's analysis, real median household income is down about 8% from $55,470 in 2000 before the dot-com bubble burst. Some of this decline is due to the continuation of a trend of smaller family size, lower fertility rates and more Americans living alone. But some was also due to the subpar economic growth across the 2000s.
That slow growth trend has become worse since the latest recession, and this is where Mr. Obama is implicated. The President portrays the financial decline of American families on his watch as part of a decades-long trend. He's wrong. Real income for middle-income households rose by roughly 30% from 1983 to 2005, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The political left likes to blame the ebbing of union power. But nongovernment unionization fell dramatically in the 1980s and '90s, and incomes rose.
     So what does explain falling real incomes? Slow growth, yes, but another culprit has been rising prices—especially for food, gasoline, medical procedures and college tuition—that have eroded worker purchasing power. The Federal Reserve claims this is no problem because "core inflation" has been relatively contained. But core inflation excludes food and energy prices, which are two of the biggest components of consumer budgets.
image
The big pay freeze is also the bitter fruit of public schools that have failed to teach the basic skills and knowledge needed to succeed in a competitive global economy. Rising health-care costs have also forced employers to take money that used to go into higher wages to pay higher premiums.
A key driver of higher wages in the 1980s and 1990s was a surge of capital investment in computers, plant and equipment, which made Americans workers more productive. When Mr. Obama pledges to raise taxes on investment income (capital gains, dividends and small-business profits), he is making it costlier to innovate and modernize. That plays out over time into slower gains in productivity and wages.
Consider the toll from America's corporate tax rate, which is the highest in the industrial world. A 2011 study by economists at the American Enterprise Institute found that because of the capital flight from the U.S. as a result of this high rate, "every additional dollar of tax revenue [from the corporate tax] leads to a $4 decrease in aggregate real wages." American workers would be the biggest beneficiaries of tax reform.
The new income data reveal other eye-opening trends. The group that has suffered the most during the Obama Presidency has been black Americans, whose real incomes have fallen by more than 11%.
Mr. Obama also likes to say that government workers like teachers are hurting and the private economy is doing "just fine." But the data indicate that over the past three years households with government workers saw their incomes decline less than households with private workers. The public-private pay gap is now wider than ever ($77,998 government versus $63,800).
Every age group has seen a decline in income—except the elderly. Those between the ages of 65 and 75 saw an average 6.5% gain in income, though most are not working and collect Medicare and Social Security.
The last time incomes fell this fast was during the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, and it's no coincidence that economic policies then and now are so similar. If Mr. Obama succeeds in convincing voters that he really is the tribune of the middle class, it will be the political conjurer's trick of the century.

2 comments:

  1. 1.open up your reading up from the murdock news. there is a world out there that he don't own.
    2. Remember, according to murdock, his news does not have to be accurate, correct or truthfull, its entertainment, therefore a fantasy. there is a difference.
    3. Learn to read between the lines, take a course in the psychology of communications, learn about expression of and the meaning of their communication. and why they communicate that way, very helpful to see the progression.
    4. take a history course that explores the "yellow" press. It shows what the modern papers have become.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I will take this statement by statement

    I read a lot of things..the WSJ, a respected economic newspaper is one of them along with a bunch of foreign newspaper(the english versions) I get news that our own newspaper will not print because it is unkind to the ChicagoMessiah because they have a vested interest in him since they support him and the democrats. Most of the newspaper reporters are liberal, like 93% vote democrat if I recall the last statistic about political views. People tehd to write things that support their own point of view.
    Murdoch sell spin as does MSNBC and CNN. For that matter NPR does the same. We call NPR "National Proletariat Radio" It also provides a spin. A person gets information from different sources to formulate an opinion.
    I know the term "yellow Journalism" Hearst was famous or infamous for it, the muckraking newspapers he had flooded the country. His newspapers is what got us into the Spanish American war.
    I write things about what I see, I have been all over the world, I have been to Europe, Asia, Africa, Middle East and of course North America. Most of the places don't have the rule of law...they have the rule of man...where due process is where they ask you which ear do you want the bullet or they wrap a bunch of tires around you and set them on fire. I don't like Obama because he abuses the rule of law here in America..the U.S. Constitution is how we are supposed to govern. He appoints czars by decree and side steps congress in doing so. He rules by imperial decree, he has no respect for America, he has no idea what American exceptional ism is. He has no pride as an American, he wants to see us more like Europe with the socialist system that they have along with the debt. That is my biggest subject that I write about on my blog is the debt. The new generation that is coming up will not be as well off as the older generations. We are passing to my kids and potential grandkids all the debt that we have accrued.

    ReplyDelete

I had to change the comment format on this blog due to spammers, I will open it back up again in a bit.