The more things change, the more things remain the same. It's almost
comforting to see the leisure class (rec.boats) condescending to the
working class about Bush's economy.

Corporations squeezed all of the productivity out of American workers
there is to get. There's nowhere else to scrape obscene profits for the
shareholder (shareholder = somebody who does no labor, but profits off
of the labor of others).

Corporations now must go to third world economies, give Americans' jobs
to those who will do it for pennies on the dollar. As soon as those
workers organize and demand more, corporations move the business to a
new third world country. Under NAFTA, products that used to be made in
America went to Mexico. Those same products are now being made in
China - Mexicans priced themselves out of Americans' jobs.

Outsourcing is a trend that's going to increase unless Congress stops
rewarding companies that move offshore, with tax breaks and incentives.
Yes, corporations are RECEIVING Americans' tax dollars to give
Americans' job to people in other countries.

Jobs are also being automated. There will be fewer jobs available and
more people wanting work. More competition for fewer available jobs.
Even education isn't the solution anymore. Having a higher education
will only get a worker so far - China and India value education and
support their citizens' education. Even with 90% of their population
being peasants, that still leaves 300 million at least as well educated
(if not better educated) as Americans, competing for the same jobs. And
they work cheaper.

September 13, 2004 by the Philadelphia Inquirer
'Ownership Society' is Flawed
by Matthew Miller

George Bush's "ownership society" - a vision most recently expounded in
his Sept. 2 acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention -
sounds so fabulous that it's almost a shame to expose it as a hoax. But
here are some facts: Forty-eight percent of households today have no
stock market holdings whatsoever, either directly themselves or
indirectly via pensions or 401(k) plans. Only 40 percent of Americans
hold stock (in any of these forms) worth more than $5,000. And of
households that do own stock, the least well-to-do 40 percent have
portfolios worth $1,800 on average.

OK, that was three facts - admittedly taxing the factual capacity of
public debate nowadays. But these data, drawn from the Economic Policy
Institute's indispensable annual volume The State of Working America,
show that easy talk of how "everyone is in the stock market now"
couldn't be more misleading.

Eighteen hundred bucks in a 401(k) does not a democracy of wealth make.


But it does make Bush's phony ownership agenda a close cousin of the
Marie Antoinette Diet. Why? Because Bush's proposals mainly involve tax
breaks to boost ownership for people who already own everything. For
the rest, compassionate conservatism's new subtitle reads: "Let Them
Own Cake!"

People buy stock with savings. Most lower- and middle-income families
today barely earn enough to make ends meet. They're already maxing out
on their credit cards to pay soaring health and tuition bills. They're
not saving a dime, let alone socking money away in the market.

Offering such folks a theoretical tax break to put cash into a 401(k)
is a sham. The folks who'll devour most of the extra break are people
already well off enough not to need new incentives to save. Draining
the Treasury to fund these new breaks thus becomes a double whammy,
since it makes it harder to bolster programs such as Pell grants that
genuinely ease the burden on ordinary Americans.

This reality should be obvious even to the national press, which
nonetheless stenographically touts Bush's faux ownership agenda as if
it were relevant to most Americans.

An honest (as opposed to a cynical) call to create an ownership society
would indeed be exciting. But the only way to make such a vision
progressive, and give average folks a bigger stake, is to have
government top off the savings of people who can't afford to save.

Don't take some liberal's word for it; take it from Newt Gingrich!

In a conversation the other day, I asked Gingrich about making these
ideas work for everyone. For low-income people to share in the benefits
of compound interest and accumulate assets, I said, don't you need some
kind of redistribution on their behalf to help fund accounts for them?

"Yes," Gingrich said simply.

"And doesn't that make the way that Bush is talking about this a real
charade?" I asked.

"No," he said. "It means the next stage is to see whether or not he has
the nerve to propose real redistribution."

(Now there's an interesting new litmus test for this President, I
thought: Real conservatives have the nerve to redistribute wealth!)

Gingrich points to Britain, which is experimenting with accounts that
assure every child has some assets from day one. Inspired partly by
Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott's book The Stakeholder Society (which
boldly called for every American to receive an $80,000 stake from the
government when he or she reaches adulthood), Tony Blair has introduced
"baby bonds." Blair's team is now weighing whether to increase the
estate tax to fund these modest stakes more adequately as part of his
reelection platform. It's a start.

Similar ideas have been floating around the United States at least
since Bob Kerrey pushed "Kidsave" accounts in the mid-1990s. Today,
Sens. Jon Corzine (D., N.J.) and Rick Santorum (R., Pa.) have a
bipartisan proposal along these lines. The ideologically androgynous
New America Foundation has been beating the drums in Washington for
such innovations.

For his part, Gingrich told me he sees such ideas as "the Information
Age equivalent to the Homestead Act." He's right.

But just as with Lincoln's Homestead Act, a 21st-century ownership
society means government has to help those who have little to build
something real. As it stands, Bush's version puts a new,
pretty-sounding gloss on his enduring economic policy: plunder from
above.

Surely a President whose personal asset accumulation came from various
endowments provided by Bush family friends, plus public financing of
the Texas Rangers' stadium, could wrap his mind around government's
proper role here if he chose.

Matthew Miller is author of "The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America's
Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love."

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0913-05.htm


While corporations have historically been responsible for over 20
percent of the tax burden, today they are paying just over 7 percent.
Combined with tax breaks for the wealthy, we are left with an economy
in which the middle class is shouldering a staggering load of the
burden.

Ironically, rather than funding the services most of us rely on, taxes
paid by the middle class are going directly into the pockets of the
wealthy in the form of tax breaks. And most working families have much
more to contend with than taxes. Many employers can no longer provide
health insurance; our parents can no longer depend on nutritious meals
delivered to their homes; Head Start cannot accommodate enough
deserving children; and students know that the president's much-touted
$100 increase per year in Pell Grants will not put college within their
reach.

The president has made his choices, and no matter how drastic the
change in circumstance - be it war or recession or his proclaimed
"crisis" in Social Security - he refuses to revisit those
decisions. Yet - as need permeates the middle class and not just the
destitute - it is hard to believe that the American people favor more
corporate handouts and endless tax cuts. And whether they live in red
states or blue states, whether they worship in churches or temples or
not at all, Americans do not want to see their neighbors bankrupted by
emergency medical care or watch military families barely scrape by on
meager salaries augmented by food stamps. Fairness, after all, is a
cornerstone American value.

http://yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_17821.shtml