Squandering 'Merica

Tuesday morning I found myself voluntarily doing two things that normally would sound like a punishment: 1) working out on the elliptical machine before 8am and 2) watching CSPAN. As it turned it out, it was actually kind of enjoyable, if not interesting.

Robert Kuttner was on talking about his new book The Squandering of America, and I actually found myself interested in the trends of the economy. Especially when he started talking about the widening economical inequality in ‘merica and the effects on the struggles of the adult children of the working class to have social mobility.

I don’t know anything about the host, so I could be completly off, but she seemed like an uncomfortable closet conservative that wanted to give him a piece of her mind but couldn’t so she read a section for this awfully shallow researched politically biased editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

The entire basis for the editorial is a study from the (Republican) Treasury Department that basically says “Don’t worry, everything is great! Poor people aren’t poor anymore. In fact if anyone is losing money it’s rich people. Really it’s true, look at this totally scientific and non-bias information that we have gathered.”

Except for even glancing at the editorial there are enough holes for all of the 96,000 tax filers they examined to drive trucks though.

Here are just a few:

1) The tax returns that they looked at were for people over 25 years old, did they take into account how many of those people were single in 1996 and married in 2005 when they looked again? Did it compensate for the taxpayer having a two income instead of one income household?
2) Saying a percent as small as 24% over 10 years is “impressive” is stretching it more than a little bit.
3) It only accounts for what people earned not what they spent or lost, you know things like foreclosures, medical bills, etc. The kind of thing that poor people often have to worry about and rich people don’t.
4) You only have to file a tax return if you make over something like $10,000/year. Hows about doing a study of all the people so broke that they don’t even file their taxes?
5) They use the word “hokum.” Seriously.
6) It doesn’t account in what people have to do to earn this huge 24% more- say working more hours or more than one job. ( And it says “those who start at the bottom but have full time jobs” what about those who have to work two or more part time jobs because they can’t get a full time job and also have to live without benefits)
7) They use all of this to say that rich people aren’t getting richer, and that if there are more taxes it would hold back “regular people” from climbing the income ladder. Surely this wouldn’t be just a scapegoat for the 1% that already owns 90% of the country’s wealth and is afraid to loose even a tiny bit to those dirty poors…