Tag: Economy
PensitoWire
- The Nation: Obama’s Smart Economic (and Political) Calculus: Tax the Rich
- PR Watch: Koch Party Delivers SOTU Response
- Media Matters: Limbaugh: “The Americans With Disability Act Is One Of The Greatest Ruses That’s Ever Come Down The Pike”
- Vox.com: There Are about As Many Solar Jobs As Coal Jobs in the US
- RT: ‘Strong Correlation’ Between Quakes and Fracking in Kansas – Official
- Mediaite: Scarborough’s Claim Electorate Is ‘Increasingly Conservative’ Disproved by His Own Poll
Republicans Continue to Lie About the Economy
For years Republicans have been spewing doomsday rhetoric about the president’s policies, but the stock market is booming, the deficit shrinking, the economy adding lots of jobs and the dollar robust. … Virtually everything GOP critics have told us would follow from the policies put in place has not come to pass. You would think that this would occasion a few mea culpas, some rethinking, an admission of poor prognostication. But, alas, it continues. Rep. Paul Ryan is now warning in a column that Obamacare ‘is weighing down our economy and discouraging hiring’ and will ultimately ‘collapse under its own weight.’
— Daniel Gross, writing in the Daily Beast.
PensitoWire
- New York Times: The Vanishing Male Worker: How America Fell Behind
- TPM Cafe: Face It, We Don’t Have Another Fighter Like Barbara Boxer
- Salon: ‘Has America Gone Crazy?’
- NJ.com: Chris Christie’s Out-of-State Travel Cost Taxpayers at Least $1 Million
- Buzzfeed: Ben Carson’s History Book Plagiarizes SocialismSucks.Net And Many Other Sources
- Huffington Post: Latest GOP Obamacare Bill Could Add $53 Billion To Deficit, CBO Says
Economy Growing at Fastest Pace in a Decade
3.9%
Rate at which the gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, grew in the third quarter, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. The agency had previously estimated the third quarter’s growth rate at 3.5%. “The economy expanded at its fastest pace in more than a decade during the spring and summer, showing the U.S. sits on a solid foundation despite increasing global uncertainty,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
The Rich are Lying to Us
When the Heritage Foundation tells us that the top 10 percent of filers are cruelly burdened, because they pay 68 percent of income taxes, it’s hoping that you won’t notice that word “income” — other taxes, such as the payroll tax, are far less progressive. But it’s also hoping you don’t know that the top 10 percent receive almost half of all income and own 75 percent of the nation’s wealth, which makes their burden seem a lot less disproportionate.
— Paul Krugman, Nobel-winning economist, in a column in the New York Times called, “Our Invisible Rich.” Krugman says Americans’ ideas about the 1% are based on 1960s notions of wealth, and woefully inaccurate today.
The World Does Not Share the Belief That the Rich Always Deserve Their Wealth
The rich in America agree on one thing: They deserve their wealth. Recent research cited by Carol Graham of the Brookings Institute shows that unlike both the rich and poor in Latin America, in the United States the Mitt Romneys of the world believe they built that, all alone.
Even before a video exposed Mitt’s attitude toward what he termed the 47 percent who would never vote for him because they want their government assistance, wife Ann described in her speech before the 2012 GOP convention her skewed idea of how poor they were in their early days, after they spent their honeymoon in Hawaii and lived only investment income from stocks while attending the private Brigham Young University.
The Romneys are, unfortunately, typical of their cohort. This attitude is unfortunate because by being mistaken, it makes it harder to deal with America’s growing income inequality problem, which is transforming us, as often noted, into two countries.
