Posted on 07/30/2013 3:42:05 AM PDT by onyx
President Obama is changing gears on the economy, highlighting income inequality as a growing problem in advance of pitched fall battles with congressional Republicans over funding the government and raising the debt ceiling. [WATCH VIDEO]
The focus is intended to make it easier for Obama to argue that new taxes on the rich — and not cuts to social spending — should be imposed to lower the deficit.
It also dovetails with Obama’s call for Congress to raise the federal $7.25 minimum wage and to end the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration.
“This growing inequality is not just morally wrong, it’s bad economics,” Obama said in remarks last week in Galesburg, Ill., where he began a new push on the economy.
“The income of the top 1 percent nearly quadrupled from 1979-2007, but the typical family’s incomes barely budged,” he said.
The president reiterated that message in an interview with The New York Times last week.
“If we stand pat, if we don’t do anything … income inequality will continue to rise,” he told the newspaper. “Wages, incomes, savings rates for middle-class families will continue to be relatively flat. And that’s not a future that we should accept.”
Obama is also discussing the matter in private.
During a meeting earlier this month with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) said he pressed Obama to issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to provide higher wages.
“He said it’s something that he would take a close look at,” said Ellison, the co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “He should seriously look at doing that because he might be able to help a whole bunch of workers.”
Opponents of raising the minimum wage, including many Republicans and business groups, argue an increase would hurt small businesses already injured by the recession and slow recovery.
And if those small businesses cannot afford to pay the mandated boost, they will end up laying off workers, opponents contend.
There is evidence that income inequality has grown since the economic recession of 2008-2009.
Economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that between 2009 and 2011, 121 percent of income gains went to the richest 1 percent of the population, according to a report in CBS News.
The other 99 percent, the two said, saw their incomes fall by about half a percent over the same period.
When adjusted for inflation, low-wage workers are actually making less now than they did 50 years ago.
According to a June study from the Congressional Research Service, inflation-adjusted wages have declined from a peak in 1968 and now stand roughly 26 percent below that level when adjusted for price growth. Workers would have to make $10.70 now to make an amount equal to the purchasing power of 1968’s $5.65 minimum wage.
Labor statistics indicate that a relatively small portion of the working population brings home the minimum wage. According to the Labor Department, just 4.7 percent of the 75.3 million workers in the U.S. in 2012 received the minimum wage or lower. (Some wait staff earn less than the middle wage because a portion of their income is paid in tips.)
Of that population, roughly half are under the age of 25 — employees aged 16-19 make up one-fifth of all minimum wage workers.
If Obama can’t convince Congress to raise the minimum wage, he’d be the first president since Ronald Reagan to not sign a wage hike into law.
The minimum wage hasn’t been increased since 2009, when the final stage of a three-step increase approved by Congress in 2007 was implemented.
Before last week, Obama had talked little about the minimum wage since calling for it to be increased in his State of the Union address.
Growing income inequality “undermines the very essence of America,” he told the crowd in Galesburg.
The White House is also making a last stand of sorts on the sequester.
It pressed Congress to undo the cuts earlier this year to no avail, and now faces another year of significant budget cuts unless a deal can be reached to replace them.
Republicans have shown little sign that they would accept the elimination of tax breaks, particularly after the fiscal cliff deal at the beginning of the year raised tax rates on households with annual income above $450,000.
House Democrats are pushing to end the sequester and have offered legislation that would boost the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour and index it to inflation.
Proponents hope protests from fast-food workers, along with Obama’s calls, will galvanize public support.
Ellison and other liberal Democrats are backing strikes held by workers at McDonald’s and other restaurants demanding a $15 minimum wage, as well as the right to unionize.
“There is a groundswell movement going on,” Ellison said. “They’re pressed so hard to the wall that they don’t have any other choice.”
Ellison, who worked at a McDonald’s between high school and college, said workers in the industry earn every penny they make.
“I know it’s hard work. You come home bathed in grease,” he said.
How can this rich man who never worked a day in his life other than stirring the excrement in the black community complain that some people make more money than others.
He is rich because Bill Ayres(a terrorist) wrote his book about his drunken womanizing Muslim father, and because of his political connection with radical Socialists, and he wants to take away the rewards of those who did actually work to get rich.
To the extent that the elites use regulations and immigration to depress wages, it is.
Don’t get mad at Obama. You have to realize that his calling in life is as a COMMUNITY ORGANIZER. In other words, a troublemaker.
He has no other experience in life and certainly not that of a President who actually manages and protects the security and laws of our country.
He’s doing what he does best....PROPAGANDA and HATE AND DISCONTENT.
The Bible would support that.
This thug with a manicure has nothing to lose.....and as a lame duck he's doubling-down to motivate and solidify his revolulutionary base for the midterm election.
Now he's inciting labor unrest and strikes along with the racial tension he's been promoting all along.....not to mention the ever-present class warfare propaganda.
He's a smiling but dangerous psychopath like Richard Widmark playing Tommy Udo in "Kiss of Death".
He's intent on ruling by fiat, he's surrounded by a marxist palace guard.....he's travelling the country setting the stage for rioting and street warfare......and he's actually out of our control because he's unchecked by any determined opposition or Justice Department reins.
What's happening in our country is like watching that Spanish train derailment video making the rounds.
Leni
It is not a pay gap it is a work gap. Those not making money are unwilling to work for it.
Ayn Rand was a prophet.
Inequality pf pay results from inequality of ability that is mostly the result if inequality if initiative.
If more pay is desired then more work is required. Work is leveraged by education. One hours work by a Physician or civil Engineer is leveraged by the work required to learn the trade
The “pay gap” or “income equality” is only morally wrong in cases of equal production. For instance:
Suppose I own a coal mine. I hire two guys to dig coal for me. One guy is weak and lazy and only digs up a ton a day. The second guy is strong and hard-working and digs up 2 tons a day. What would be fair—paying them the same amount (thus eliminating “income inequality”) or paying them according to their output?
Suppose I hire a third guy who is of a scientific bent and who invents a digging machine that can extract 100 tons of coal a day. He had worked for years developing the machine, which cost him a great deal of money to manufacture. By employing his machine in my coal mine, I can generate profits equal to that of 100 times that of my slow worker, or 50 times that of my fast worker. Is it “fair” if I pay the inventor the same amount that I pay digger one or digger two? Or is the “pay gap” that would occur if I pay the inventor an amount proportionate to his production unfair?
Liberals try to answer hypotheticals like this by begging the question and presuming that everyone is equal. That is, we all contribute equally, so we all should be paid equally. It’s called socialism. It has never worked and never will. With equal pay, digger two will slow down until he reaches the output level of digger one. And the inventor would never risk his time and capital to make a device for which he would never be compensated.
From neutral to reverse.
maybe to even things out obama needs to appoint more po’ folks as ambassadors and give others cush govt loans to start fake solar energy companies
> Don’t get mad at Obama. You have to realize that his calling in life is as a COMMUNITY ORGANIZER. In other words, a troublemaker.
I would think the more appropriate term would be Community Divider
Obama’s lying and confusing nominal income with real income. Worse, he’s ignoring all the good economic data and analysis that proves the origin of the “pay gap”.
1. Women who leave to become mothers fall behind, while those same dads work even harder to earn more.
2. The government education system has utterly failed the people most vulnerable to pay reductions and perishable skills.
3. Local licensing and permitting schemes, plus the too high minimum wage, cause massive unemployment and skills deterioration.
4. Toss in a too rich welfare system and viola - income inequality.
More specifically fascist. It was designed by Corrado Gini to prove the need for fascism. It’s also how democrats and Obama are using it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrado_Gini
There is no reason ever to want income equality. At that level we’re all at subsistence. Think about it.
Spot on. When you see a diminishing middle class the cause is socialism. It destroys the nascent poor that are moving toward middle class status, drives up or down the middle class, and politicizes wealth. Its goal is to trap the classes permanently.
Socialism is just feudalism without the sword play.
Because to a leftist, a teenager who would rather be playing video games, an engineer with a 4 year degree and a natural drive to make things work, and a CEO with a demonstrated ability to lead a company of tens of thousands to prosperity and profitability ... they are all worth the same, to the leftist. As people, yes. To the business community they are worlds apart.
Since leftists reject any/the objective basis for morals and right and wrong,
they should be told that we dismiss their morality because it is just a human opinion with no more weight than anyone else’s opinion, either contemporarily or historically.
However, our basis for morality IS objective and unchanging, it IS from God (logically provable), and it IS easily discernible with a bit of reading.
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