From Hot Air:
Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of this year, a USA TODAY analysis of government data finds.
At the same time, government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high during the first three months of 2010.
Those records reflect a long-term trend accelerated by the recession and the federal stimulus program to counteract the downturn. The result is a major shift in the source of personal income from private wages to government programs.
The trend is not sustainable, says University of Michigan economist Donald Grimes. Reason: The federal government depends on private wages to generate income taxes to pay for its ever-more-expensive programs. Government-generated income is taxed at lower rates or not at all, he says. “This is really important,” Grimes says.
This comes before the federal health-insurance subsidies hit in 2014, too. That program provides federal welfare payments to families making less than $88,000 a year who buy their health insurance through the state-run individual exchanges. As more employers dump health-insurance coverage (and they will), more Americans will move into the dependent class despite making as much as 400% above the poverty level and better household income than 60% of their fellow Americans.
It’s more than just unsustainable. We were already on an unsustainable path before Barack Obama got elected President, with pending entitlement disasters in Medicare and Social Security threatening financial oblivion. In the past sixteen months, we’ve doubled down on disaster, and the accelerated redistribution of wealth through entitlements has us careening towards it at breakneck speed.
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Conservatives don't seem to mind the redistribution of wealth when it is redistributed to those who are wealthiest; President Bush used many legal and "acceptable" routes such as tax cuts for the wealthy to ensure that the cash flow in this country continues to be siphoned to the minuscule amount of the population who controls an overwhelming majority of the country's wealth. If President Obama uses equally legal, equally "acceptable" measures to favor middle- and lower-income people (who make up a much more substantial portion of the US population), he's just doing what he can for those who elected him.
ReplyDeleteWhy is it that conservatives abhor the poor in this country so much? George Laskoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at UC Berkley, has a theory; conservatives often baselessly link morality to wealth accumulation. They believe that morality and wealth accumulation both require a sort of discipline, and therefore those who are wealthy must also be morally restrained. Of course, most rational people realize that this link breaks down when applied in reality, as some of the most wealthy people in our country (CEOs and politicians) are often the most morally bankrupt. But conservatives see those who are pursuing wealth as the most morally "straight," and therefore believe that acting in self-interest is always the most morally acceptable course of action.
This explains the contradiction in conservative ideology that allows them to claim to be against "big government" while supporting the world's largest military, and allows them to claim to be against "hand-outs" for the impoverished while supporting rewards for the wealthy (like the Bush tax cuts) and subsidies for large corporations, both fairly large "hand-outs" in their own right.
Conservatives aren't against big government, or welfare, or the redistribution of wealth at all: they just oppose helping people who haven't accumulated large amounts of money and therefore, in the eyes of conservatives, are not morally sound people. In this irrationally-minded way, conservatives can act against the interest of the vast majority of the US population and claim to be doing it in the name of morality.