Posted on 11/07/2010 8:04:56 AM PST by blam
IT'S OFFICIAL: America Is Now A Banana Republic
Henry Blodget
Nov. 7, 2010, 9:06 AM
One of the hallmarks of banana republics, says the NYT's Nicholas Kristof, is income inequality.
In some countries, the wealthiest 1% of the population takes home 20% or more of the national income.
And now the same is true in America:
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
[snip]
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
It’s not like I’ve had the same tagline for nearly two years now...
And one of the hallmarks of a liberal is not that he hates poverty, but that he hates wealth.
Import tens of millions of 3rd world illegal and legal immigrants and then ask yourself why you have an income gap? Geez, are these people stupid?
Not the entire US....but the parts that are are growing.
When we continue to allow immigrants who are functionally illiterate come in droves to the country and continue to have babies that don’t finish HS..then the income differences will get greater. If our country continues on the current course we are doomed.
Just look at CA. Huge welfare rolls..huge illegal population(and growing). Chain immigration from undeveloped and uneducated countries. They vote for socialists who promise to keep the benefits rolling and the unions in control. It has become a banana republic and the Rat like it that way.
How Ben Bernanke Sentenced The Poorest 20% Of The Population To A Cold, Hungry Winter
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/how-ben-bernanke-sentenced-poorest-20-population-cold-hungry-winter
“Stein reminds us of Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodget in the last overdone market; Merrill hyped tech stocks to investors, while Blodget privately called them “junk” to his friends. In 2003, he was permanently disbarred from the securities industry.”
—strangely enough, there is no comment about what percentage of taxes those “haves” pay vs. the “have nots”-—
but the real story is that the big increase in the gap occurred after the Democrats during the Clinton era made equity compensation of executives acceptable with their demogogic $1,000,000 limit on deductibility of salary. That plus an historic bull market created this travesty. No custodial manager deserves 500 x the salary of the average employee. Boards who allow this should be fired for breach of fiduciary duty.
Except for his own.
We won’t be happy until we run this country into the ground from within. Have a care.
Of course permitting minimum wage (or less) unskilled workers and welfare mama babies from Third World countries really skews the stats, doncha think?
You make a good point, but I ask, "Who's in front of Congress demanding increases in H1B Visas? (hint: Bill Gates loves them.)
My only problem with Altas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's 1950s world view. Her premise of 'hard work = advancement' is about as relevant today as the Railroads she wrote about. In today's 'form-over-substance' society, Consultants are valued over High-Professional Employees because of their connections to other companies.
Mark Cuban once wrote an op-ed on winning the CEO lottery that rings very true: Once you are a CEO, you are invited to sit on boards of other companies, and you will be asked to participate on the Compensation Committee for CEOs who may very well sit on the Compensation Committee of your own company.
I do not see any of this changing until we all 'go Galt'.
“One of the hallmarks of banana republics, says the NYT’s Nicholas Kristof, is income inequality.”
A simplistic and childish class warfare style analysis. The question isn’t income inequality. It’s how does the income inequality occur.
In a free market, massive income inequality can occur when the best and brightest create massive wealth, jobs, innovation, etc. That rising tide lifts all ships.
In a banana republic, massive income inequality occurs when the wealthy collude with a corrupt government to bilk money, power, and resources from the citizenry.
Establishment republicans and democrats hate the former and participate in the latter. That’s why we are starting to look like a banana republic, and an instinctive or studied understanding of that is part of what is motivating the awakening called the TEA Party.
It’s the fault of the moderates and the liberals.
Yes, except his own. Many of them don’t recognize what they have as wealth. More than one well-off liberal has told me that taxes should be raised on the wealthy. When I ask them what they consider wealthy, the standard practice seems to be to imagine the most they could ever earn in their line of work, multiply it by about 1.5 (nice, safe buffer), and that’s where the taxing should start.
I agree. I have always felt that if we believe that we have lost, we have lost. I don’t go along with this story. We, as a country, have not lost. We go through tough times every once in awhile but we will come back. Count on it. Believe it.
When I coached football, there were two words I wouldn’t let the kids use..”I can’t.” If they did, I benched them long enough for them to think about what they said. When you say “I can’t” or “The battle is lost”....you have made up your mind and there’s no going back.
I will never give up on my country or its people.
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