Posted on 10/11/2011 3:53:28 PM PDT by Dallas59
The American dream is alive and well for the wealthiest 1% of Americans, but unfortunately, if you are in the other 99% the jury is still out.
"America is obviously a country where you can go from being middle class to upper class, but right now class mobility has sort of collapsed in the United States," says Zaid Jilani, senior reporter for the progressive think tank ThinkProgress.org. (See: America's Middle Class Crisis: The Sobering Facts)
This grim reality is in part the impetus for the Occupy Wall Street movement, which, now in its fourth week, will take to the streets of Manhattan's Upper East Side Tuesday in what it is calling the "Millionaire's March." Demonstrators will rally outside the homes of some of the city's wealthiest, including News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon, to protest New York state's 2% millionaire tax set to expire at the end of the year.
(Excerpt) Read more at finance.yahoo.com ...
U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines
Amnesty International
Human Rights Watch
Americans for a Sustainable Economy
National Education Association
USA Network for Habitat II
Catholic Charities
National Council of Negro Women
Center for Law and Social Policy
Witness for Peace
Children's Defense Fund
Child Welfare League
National Black Child Development Institute
Urban League
Economic Policy Institute
Brookings Institute
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare
Defenders of Wildlife
Veterans for Peace
National Rainbow Coalition
AFL-CIO
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
UNITE
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
National Association of Public Hospitals
National Council of Senior Citizens
Long-Term Care Campaign
Consumer's Union
Center for Responsive Politics
Latin American Working Group
Public Campaign
ThinkProgress.org.
The who’s who of the Looney Left.
http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/occupywallstreet
Up to the minute postings on the Occupy Wallstreet website wall -Adbusters
And the Communist Party is siding with the Democrat Party in expressing Solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street idiots
Zaid Jilani is Senior Reporter/Blogger for ThinkProgress.org and The Progress Report at American Progress. Zaid grew up in Kennesaw, Georgia, and holds a B.A. in international affairs with a minor in Arabic from the University of Georgia. Prior to joining ThinkProgress, Zaid interned for Just Foreign Policy and was a weekly columnist at The Red & Black, University of Georgia’s official student newspaper. He is a co-founder of Stand Up Magazine, a co-editor at the Georgia-based blog Georgia Liberal and on staff at BasedonBooks, the first website ever dedicated to movie reviews of book adaptations.
Zaid Jilani: loose cannon or meme generator?
@ThinkProgress employee Zaid Jilani indulges in ugly speculation on Twitter. Should Zaid be more careful with what is written under a Twitter account connected to Think Progress? Is Zaid trying to generate a meme on behalf of OBL? Does this kind of rank speculation undermine Zaid’s trustworthiness as a reporter and blogger for Think Progress?
Pentagon official Monday said OBL “was firing behind her” [the human shield]. Now it turns out there was no gun and no shield.Reply Retweet Favorite
elliottjustin 03/May/2011 11:43:19 AM PDT .....
..@elliottjustin eventually this story is going to morph into OBL begging for his life and an assassination style killing.Reply Retweet Favorite
ZaidJilani 03/May/2011 11:44:36 AM PDT .....
The True Meaning of The Tea Party Phenomenon - Zaid Jilani ...
http://trueslant.com/zaidjilani/2009/11/22/the-true-meaning-of-the-tea-party-phenomenon/
MORE UNIONS!!!
KellyRek RT @willspencer: Hey #OccupyWallStreet, the same guy who funded Obama's campaign also funded #OWS. You can't fight the status quo when you are tools of it.
MarkinTenn Occupy L.A. Speaker: Violence will be necessary to achieve our goals http://t.co/HmD0Yvg5 #ows #tcot29 seconds ago · reply · retweet · favorite
alexsobolev RT @HalfSight: RT @lclarkx3: Protestor being grabbed by the throat by Boston police. Wow. #occupyboston http://t.co/jKttgf9y #ows #bostonpd #corruption
wigglefishy RT @OccupyMapUs: Some Cops Furious NYPD Officer Flashed Peace Sign In Photo With Occupy Wall Street Protester #OWS http://t.co/VynTYuia
lavendargoose RT @AKaczynski1: @AndrewBreitbart #OWS outside the home of David Koch. A greedy man who has donated 750M$ to fight cancer & 100M$ to renovate lincoln center.
tedkeystrio RT @DownWithTheBull: BREAKING: VISA rejected $144,000 in donations for #OWS and froze $40,000 that had already been donated but not yet pocketed
Dimon at least was an O crony. I guess there is still room under the bus.
The top 1% collected 19.4% of national income, not 24.5% as the article claimed. While that may seem to be a small error, it leaves out something very important: the income for the top 1% tends to be heavily concentrated in capital gains, rather than wage and dividends.
And in case you didn't realize it: those capital gains could have just as easily been capital losses. If you lose your job, your income stops until you get another. If you take a loss on an investment, you end up with less money than when when you started.
Examining the data over the past three decades reveals that the top 1%'s share of national income varies wildly, as the economy goes through boom and bust cycles:
Note that the latest comprehensive data is for 2007. The CBO published this report in June, 2010. They haven't published an update this year that would presumably include 2008.
As you may remember, 2007 was a pretty good year, at least for the stock market. Then, the bottom fell out in 2008.
Should the left get what it wants, we won’t have to worry about upward mobility, middle class or wealth. There will be the ruling elite and the poor. Most of the Occupy terrorists will fit into the latter category.
Key thing to keep in mind too is that the Left Liberals Democrat Communist Party speak of “percentage of income” like income is a pie. A finite number. The Left ALWAYS speaks of income this way.
They never express income as a number that can grow and be shared by all who are part of the producers.
They would rather destroy the world than repeal two bad laws that would turn this all around on a global scale.
How do they reconcile the “Rich are evil” cry with the “and why can’t I be rich too?” whine?
That's a good point, and another graph from the same source illustrates it:
The numbers in this graph has have been adjusted for inflation, so that the numbers are 2007 equivalent, all the way back to 1979. The top 1% has certainly been growing through that period, with a lot of variation (because of the reliance on capital gains, which aren't consistent).
But, the scale of the graph is misleading. If you were to look at the actual numbers here:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/USFederalTaxRatesAndTaxShares.1979-2007.PDF
and scroll down to page 7, the second table on that page shows that income has been rising for ALL quintiles and categories for the entire period. The lowest quintile hasn't gained much in comparison, but it has gained.
However, there's another secret that is buried in another CBO report: income mobility. Liberals like to look at income categories as static: i.e. you are destined to be in the same category your entire life. That's simply not true. See this report:
Changes in the Distribution of Workers Annual Earnings Between 1979 and 2007
Skip to pages 27 and 28 in the PDF (pages 17 and 18 in the document). Look at tables 4 and 5: Earnings Mobility for Men/Women, 2000 to 2005.
The tables are a bit hard to read unless you understand what you are looking at. But, I'll sum it up with a simple statistic: 50% of men and 54% of women in the lowest 20% income category back in 2000 were in a higher income category in 2005. In other words, slightly more than half of the lowest income people in the US in 2000 were no longer low-income five years later.
Want a real surprise? 2% of of men and 3% of women in the lowest 20% were in the top 1% 5 years later.
This is what so many people miss: over their lifetimes, almost everyone that puts ANY effort into themselves: either education, on the job training, or just experience -- will climb into a higher income bracket. Those that sit and complain and blame everyone but themselves will be stuck.
So, where did the other people in the lowest 20% come from in 2005? Some of them fell from higher income brackets. But, I believe that the lowest 20% are mostly new entry level workers, who move up to the next income bracket as soon as they gain experience and/or training.
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