Who Actually Benefits From a Higher Minimum Wage?

The facts.

Also--

Bolstering Reconciliation Case, Study Shows $15 Wage Would Boost Federal Budget By $65 Billion

Quote of the Day -- On Labor

Brilliant woman.

“The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all... 

The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.”

― Helen Keller, Rebel Lives: Helen Keller

Links:

Helen Keller - Wikipedia

Helen Keller Biography - Biography.com

Helen Keller Biography - American Foundation for the Blind

The Former Republican Party

May we have THIS Republican Party back?

PLEASE??

If Someone Like Trump Can Do It, This Guy Should, Too

It would be fantastic if Democrats would start running candidates like this guy and end up winning.


Links:

Meet Randy Bryce: The 'Iron Stache' coming for Paul Ryan's

Randy Bryce for Congress 2018

Democratic union ironworker Randy Bryce running 

against Ryan

Randy Bryce for Congress - Home | Facebook

What Trump's Proposed Economic Plans Already Did To Kansas and Oklahoma

Donald Trump's plans of cutting taxes further for businesses and corporations and the already-wealthy have already, famously been tried before. Heck, we've seen this for some time, right next door in Kansas, since 2012 and Governor Sam Brownback's and the Republican's "trickle down economics."

Kansas expects budget shortfall 

around $350 million this fiscal year

As if that isn't and hasn't been horrible enough, check out what the rocket scientist Republicans have done in their beloved red state Oklahoma.

Oklahoma budget hole nearly $900 million

And besides these plans, of cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, Mr. Trump also wants to beef up our military and their budget, as though they don't waste millions and billions enough already.

Trump appears to subtweet Putin as both express desire to beef up nuclear capabilities

US Army fudged its accounts by trillions 

of dollars, auditor finds

So get ready, America. Those pesky, hard-headed Republicans, with their ideas of shoveling yet more money to corporations and again, the already-wealthy and the military are now coming at the entire nation.

God help us all.

And thanks, Republicans, once again, in advance!

Another--Big---Reason We Should Lift the Cap On Social Security

It's commonly known there is a cap on earnings for paying in on Social Security. If you're wealthy and making $118,500 per year or more, you don't get taxed on the rest of that income.

Basically, if you're already wealthy, you get one more break from the rest of us stooges. Thanks, Congress!

As if that's not bad enough---and it is---it's clear, too, that, given that the wealthy also famously and statistically live longer than the rest of us poor schlubs, they get more benefits from the system.

The Upshot:  Rich People Are Living Longer. That's Tilting Social Security in Their Favor.

So they live longer, already, what with the cushy lives and security and great food and second (or third or fourth homes), etc. So since they do, they reap more benefits from the system. It makes sense. They live longer so THEY GET MORE MONEY FROM THE SYSTEM.

Sweet deal, huh? They're already wealthy and they soak more from the rest of us. And being rich, I'd nearly bet most of them are "small government" Republicans and Right Wingers and Libertarians, to boot.

It's sick. It's just one more way "Them that has, gets", as the Andrews Sisters used to sing.

The great thing is that there is an obvious and simple solution.

How Taxing the Wealthy Could Save Social Security

News flash:  How about we lift that cap on what they pay in?

This way, they can still contribute to the system---the system they usually take more advantage of since they live longer. Meantime, THEY DO WITHOUT NOTHING. They pay in a bit more, up front. Is that asking so much? It seems clear the answer is no. They pay in on the incomes over $118,500 and they get back, later in life, thus saving Social Security for all of us.

It helps all of us, it actually strengthens the middle and lower classes, thus strengthening the economy. All that's true as if doing the right thing, as a rather human, even "Christian" nation isn't enough and doesn't have it make all the more sense. It's good for the people, yes, but good to great for the nation and even, hell, good for creating demand for products, for all the Capitalists out there.

It makes so much sense. It makes too much sense.

Probably why the Republicans in Congress will never go for it.

Explaining America and Middle-Class Support for Republicans

I held off one day, in an effort for us all to maybe just simply enjoy Thanksgiving to post something about this terrific article I found yesterday.

Here’s how delusional nostalgia is killing the white working class

There's a great deal of good information here, backed by scientific, sociological studies but I'll just point out a few of the best highlights:

A new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute finds there are a few things you can count on about those who believe America’s best days are behind us. They are overwhelmingly white, and if you dig a bit deeper and examine the socioeconomics, often working class. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they stubbornly believe white people are subject to the same levels of racism as black and other people of color. They think the U.S. was a better place in the 1950s, when Jim Crow was law, immigrants were overwhelmingly European, women knew their place, and gay people were essentially invisible.

In tandem with the findings of another recent study revealing middle-age, working-class white Americans are the only group in the country whose health and mortality rates are worsening, the survey offers more than just a look at the ideas and attitudes that characterize a slice of the population. It provides a possible diagnosis for what ails, and may very well be killing, an entire demographic.

There have been previous indications—scientific, sociological, and anecdotal—of some of PRRI’s findings. A 2011 Tufts University survey showed white Americans believe they actually experience more racism than African Americans, and a Pew survey from the same year found non-college-educated, working-class whites are the least hopeful group in the country about the future. The rightwing rallying cry to “Make America Great Again” (a recycled political slogan that is now the property of Donald Trump) is proof that a decent portion of white voters think America was at its best when fewer citizens had civil and political rights, at some arbitrary point in this country’s rich history of morally indefensible state-sanctioned injustice, violence and oppression. One cannot avoid noticing that the current culture wars, full of incoming attacks from the right on nearly every civil and human rights gain of the last 60 years, are being fought with renewed vigor by those who want to turn back the hands of time.

Really, this explains so much.

It explains why some people from my own, very deeply middle-class family would buy off on the Republican Party, its platform and so many of the things that come out of the Right Wing. It's just sad. But additionally, it's frustrating, even to the point, at their worst, frightening. 

What's also scary and even odd is that these people of the middle-, lower- and working classes who hold these views and vote Right Wing and Republican are also so very deeply proud of their membership in the Right Wing and Republican Party and so proud of their views. And along with being proud, they're also very emotional about their views and opinions and that's where hate and disdain for others with opposing views and even racism can and do, too frequently, jump in.

Here's one part of the studies that's exceptionally disturbing, if not frightening:

The 2015 American Values Survey reaffirms the myopic outlook of an astounding portion of the country. Researchers, who polled nearly 2,700 adults from every state and Washington, D.C., found that 43 percent of Americans overall believe racial bigotry against whites has become a problem on par with discrimination against black people and other people of color...

It goes on:

On “reverse racism,” half of white Americans overall agree “discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”

This certainly explains things I see even out of our own Kansas City and St. Louis and Springfield, let alone across the nation.

In all, it's stunning. What I don't know is how we change this. I don't know how we educate and inform people of how our nation actually is, today, let alone the total picture of our nation's history that got us to today, to where we are today. These people are adults, after all. They certainly aren't going back to any classroom to study American history they need to know, let alone any current events or civics or sociology classes that could get them up to speed with how things actually are, especially for people of other races in our country.

And in the meantime, Fox and Breitbart and Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are out there spreading untruths and emotionalism and ugly opinions and racism and all kinds of ugliness and negativity. Making things worse--worst, really--there's a Right Wing, racist, hating nutjob, Donald Trump, who's in first place in opinion polls in next year's presidential race.

Usually, I can end these things with hope.

Additional link:  Why Does the (White) Lower Middle Class Vote Republican?

Karl Marx --- And the Wall Street Journal?

There is what I think to be a pretty good, if brief and fairly light article in none other than Right Wing-owned, Rupert Murdoch's own Wall Street Journal, describing where America and Americans are today, financially and socially:

The Middle-Class Squeeze

Seeing it, I was pretty stunned.

It recognizes that America's middle class is struggling, shrinking, in fact, along with what got us here, where it stands in history and what we should maybe do to correct our financial, national problems. It begins with this sub-line heading:

Over the past few decades, the Western World has increasingly become a society of "have lesses," if not yet of "have nots." 

They already had me right there, just with that opening, recognizing that the middle-, lower- and working-classes were being crushed with our economic system in that business-supporting rag. But then they go on to outdo themselves:

If Western countries want to disprove the dire forecasts of Karl Marx, we must think creatively about how to make the middle class more prosperous and secure.

They had me at "Karl Marx."

Some of the article:

In the U.S. and Britain, the percentage of citizens owning stocks or houses is well down from the late 1980s. In Britain, the average age for buying a first home is now 31 (and many more people than before depend on “the bank of Mom and Dad” to help them do so). In the mid-’80s, it was 27. My own children, who started work in London in the last two years, earn a little less, in real terms, than I did when I began in 1979, yet house prices are 15 times higher. We have become a society of “have lesses,” if not yet of “have nots.”

In a few lines of work, earnings have shot forward. In 1982, only seven U.K. financial executives were receiving six-figure salaries. Today, tens of thousands are (an enormous increase, even allowing for inflation). The situation is very different for the middle-ranking civil servant, attorney, doctor, teacher or small-business owner. Many middle-class families now depend absolutely on the income of both parents in a way that was unusual even as late as the 1980s...

The author asks an important question, an extremely important one;

What is the use of capitalism if its rewards go to the few and its risks are dumped on the many?

And here is where the under-rated, discounted and even disregarded, if brilliant Karl Marx comes in:

Where might one find a useful analysis of what is happening today in the market democracies of the West? How about this: “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.”

Or this: “Modern bourgeois society…is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the power of the nether world which he has called up by his spells.” 

Or this: “The productive forces no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property: on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions…[and] they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.”

The celebrated bearded communists had argued that capitalism would reduce all of society to only two classes: the prosperous bourgeoisie, who owned the capital, and the impoverished proletariat, who contributed their labor.

Who, today, is able to say this isn't precisely what's happening and what's been happening here in America? Who can honestly deny this? It's incontrovertible.

Is that not what's been happening in the last at least 30 years? I can't count the number of articles and news segments pointing out how the "people at the top", the "1%", with hedge fund managers as the best example, have been getting many more millions upon millions of dollars and wealth and riches while, again, the middle-, lower- and working classes have seen their costs escalate but wages stagnate---shrink, in fact.

And here is where the article and the Pope's visit, this week, to our shores coincidentally converge:

The relationship between money and morality, on which the middle-class order depends, has been seriously compromised over the past decade.

I'm not advocating Communism here by any means. While I think Karl Marx was correct in his writing, I also know Mr. Marx didn't take into account the human factors, especially the factor of just sheer greed, let alone the love of power. Communism would only work in a perfect world. Would that we were so lucky.

But the fact is, what we have going on in America now and what we've had doing on financially, fiscally and economically is precisely what Karl Marx and Friederich Engels described in their famous-through-the-ages "The Communist Manifesto."

The author of the article ends it very well and correctly:

...Marx did have an insight about the disproportionate power of the ownership of capital. The owner of capital decides where money goes, whereas the people who sell only their labor lack that power. This makes it hard for society to be shaped in their interests. In recent years, that disproportion has reached destructive levels, so if we don’t want to be a Marxist society, we need to put it right.

What we need to do as a nation, through our government is get our government back for the people. We have to end the Supreme Court's Citizen United ruling and end campaign contributions--both--so we can then begin to put back into place the simplest of rules to keep corporations and the already-wealthy, and the greedy and power-hungry among them, from crushing these 3 classes (middle, lower and working) with rules and government that only works for them.

We have to get the government back for the people.

Links:  Believe it or not: Karl Marx is making a comeback

Marx Was Right: Five Ways Karl Marx Predicted 2014

Happy Labor Day

The American Economy: How We Got To Here

What Americans need to know about our nation and economy, from an economist.

The One Presidential Candidate Asking the One Big Question

Vermont Senator and 2016 Democratic Party Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders asks an important, timely question.



It's a question that needs answering, frankly, and that no other candidate is asking or seeking the answers to.

Quote of the Day -- On Paths Forward

Lessons the Republican Congress Must Acknowledge for America

Here's hoping.

The Real War --- On the American Middle Class

Kev Mo

Kev Mo

The Seven Biggest Economic Lies (guest post)

The Seven Biggest Economic Lies from economist Robert Reich:

1. Tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else. 

Baloney. 

Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both sliced taxes on the rich and what happened? Most Americans' wages (measured by the real median wage) began flattening under Reagan and has dropped since George W. Bush. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke.

2. Higher taxes on the rich would hurt the economy and slow job growth. 

False. 

From the end of World War II until 1981, the richest Americans faced a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent or above. Under Dwight Eisenhower it was 91 percent. Even after all deductions and credits, the top taxes on the very rich were far higher than they've been since. Yet the economy grew faster during those years than it has since. (Don't believe small businesses would be hurt by a higher marginal tax; fewer than 2 percent of small business owners are in the highest tax bracket.)

3. Shrinking government generates more jobs. 

Wrong again. 

It means fewer government workers -- everyone from teachers, fire fighters, police officers, and social workers at the state and local levels to safety inspectors and military personnel at the federal. And fewer government contractors, who would employ fewer private-sector workers. According to Moody's economist Mark Zandi (a campaign advisor to John McCain), the $61 billion in spending cuts proposed by the House GOP will cost the economy 700,000 jobs this year and next.

4. Cutting the budget deficit now is more important than boosting the economy. 

Untrue. 

With so many Americans out of work, budget cuts now will shrink the economy. They'll increase unemployment and reduce tax revenues. That will worsen the ratio of the debt to the total economy. The first priority must be getting jobs and growth back by boosting the economy. Only then, when jobs and growth are returning vigorously, should we turn to cutting the deficit.

5. Medicare and Medicaid are the major drivers of budget deficits. 

Wrong. 

Medicare and Medicaid spending is rising quickly, to be sure. But that's because the nation's health-care costs are rising so fast. One of the best ways of slowing these costs is to use Medicare and Medicaid's bargaining power over drug companies and hospitals to reduce costs, and to move from a fee-for-service system to a fee-for-healthy outcomes system. And since Medicare has far lower administrative costs than private health insurers, we should make Medicare available to everyone.

6. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. 

Don't believe it. 

Social Security is solvent for the next 26 years. It could be solvent for the next century if we raised the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax. That ceiling is now $106,800.

7. It's unfair that lower-income Americans don't pay income tax. 

Wrong. 

There's nothing unfair about it. Lower-income Americans pay out a larger share of their paychecks in payroll taxes, sales taxes, user fees, and tolls than everyone else.

They're "Job Creators", all right

Is America turning into a Third World "banana republic"?

Since the 2008 financial near-collapse in America and for the last 30 years, there's been an attack on the middle class in this country:

The Attack on America's Middle Class

7 Things the Middle Class Can’t Afford Anymore

Then, more recently, the UN says Detroit is violating human rights there by cutting off water to the poor:

UN Reps ‘Deeply Disturbed’ That Detroit Is Shutting Off Water To People Who Don’t Pay Their Bills

Now Amnesty International weighs in on the Ferguson, Missouri debacle:

Amnesty International: Ferguson Cops Committed Human Rights Abuses

Take this into consideration:

America Has The Worst Wealth Inequality Of All Developed Nations

What's become of us, America?

What's becoming of us?

And maybe most importantly:

What are we going to do about it?

The Blatant Immorality of America's Economic System (guest post)

When Republicans talk about morality, they talk about God and redemption. But they don't mention the immorality of one in five of American children being impoverished, of cuts in food stamps that are causing many to go hungry, and of reduced education funding that’s condemning them to lousy schools. They don't talk about the immorality of declining worker incomes when corporations are making record profits and CEOs are taking home record pay. They leave out the immorality of billionaires flooding our democracy with money to elect candidates that will make them even richer. We are in a moral crisis but it has nothing to do with private redemption. It is a crisis of public morality, and the redemption of America.

--Robert Reich, American political economist, professor, author, and political commentator

Quote of the day -- on the job creators

The real job creators are not CEOs or corporations or even entrepreneurs. The job creators are the middle class and the poor, whose purchases cause businesses to expand. If the middle and poor don't have enough purchasing power, businesses won't hire. Which explains why America's job picture continues to be so bad, with the lowest share of the working-age population now employed than in over three decades. Almost nothing has been trickling down to the middle class and poor. 

We don't need tax cuts for the wealthy or for corporations. We need a higher minimum wage, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and stronger unions.

--Robert Reich,  American political economist, professor, author, and political commentator

Celebrating May Day, all right

Yes, you can bet a lot of us are celebrating "May Day", May 1 today. But it's not just all about the flowers and Springtime.

This is the May Day we're celebrating:

L

36 Reasons Why You Should Thank a Union (even if you don't belong to one):

-Weekends

-All Breaks at Work, including your Lunch Breaks

-Paid Vacation 

-FMLA

-Sick Leave

-Social Security

-Minimum Wage

-Civil Rights Act/Title VII (Prohibits Employer Discrimination)

-8-Hour Work Day

-Overtime Pay

-Child Labor Laws

-Occupational Safety & Health Act (OSHA)

-40 Hour Work Week

-Worker’s Compensation (Worker’s Comp)

-Unemployment Insurance

-Pensions

-Workplace Safety Standards and Regulations

-Employer Health Care Insurance

-Collective Bargaining Rights for Employees

-Wrongful Termination Laws

-Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967

-Whistleblower Protection Laws

-Employee Polygraph Protect Act (Prohibits Employer from using a lie detector test on an employee)

-Veteran’s Employment and Training Services (VETS)

-Compensation increases and Evaluations (Raises)

-Sexual Harassment Laws

-Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA)

-Holiday Pay

-Employer Dental, Life, and Vision Insurance

-Privacy Rights

-Pregnancy and Parental Leave

-Military Leave

-The Right to Strike

-Public Education for Children

-Equal Pay Acts of 1963 & 2011 (Requires employers pay men and women equally for the same amount of work)

-Laws Ending Sweatshops in the United States

Via AFL-CIO --> http://bit.ly/R6QxXd