There are other reasons of course, but poor education is a prominent reason for low income.
Thus, if my observation holds water it should also be evident how hypocritical Liberals are for even raising the issue of income disparity. They do so only for political gain. Why? Because it is Liberal's love affair with and protection of education unions, whose very actions are antithetical to education and educational progress, that promotes and sustains income disparity.
Yes,distasteful as it may sound, Liberal support and protection of education unions is one of the root causes of that about which they protest, Yet, they are allowed to get away with their deceit because the liberal media and press are loathe to challenge.
The populist political ploy of suggesting the advantaged take advantage of the under advantaged may win elections, because it stirs misguided passions and conservatives are too feckless to craft a response but I submit education and income disparity are peas in a pod and Obama and the new mayor of New York, among others, know they can reap political profit by throwing demagogic logs on this false fire. (See 1 below.)
===
Thomas was just a human being. He was unlike the current Reid who is incapable of bending in the wind. (See 2 and 2a below.)
===
On the assumption Christie has told the truth the controversy will still swirl because the media and press need stories to repeat 'ad nauseum'. That said, Christie's response also serves as a beacon of how an executive responds - get the facts, act swiftly and emphatically. Contrast his actions with 'President O'dither!"
Tonight I heard many Democrats say they do not trust Christie's denial but they give Obama a pass on his denials. Oh well, more hypocrisy so get used to it!
===
The job report was a 'bit disappointing' but then why should the unemployed worry since Obama is 'working' to insure they earn more by not working. (See 3 below.)
===
|
|
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)
The Democrats' Feckless Attacks on Income Inequality
By Michael BaroneAs Barack Obama scrambles to eviscerate key sections of his own signature health care law, he and other Democrats are trying to shift voters' focus to another issue -- income inequality.
Unfortunately, the solutions they advocate are pitifully inadequate or painfully perverse.
Start with the minimum wage, which some Democrats see as an election-winning wedge issue in 2014.
True, raising the minimum wage polls well. But does anybody really care much about it? Few minimum wage earners are heads of households; many more are teenagers earning spare cash.
Most economists agree that a higher minimum wage costs some low-skilled workers their jobs. And the economic redistribution it produces, from fast-food consumers to fast-food employees, is pretty minimal.
Another Democratic policy is to continue extending unemployment benefits. The intellectual argument for this is stronger.
Ordinarily, extended benefits tend to discourage the unemployed from looking for work. Their skills atrophy, and finding a job later gets harder.
But in the current new-normal economy, with record long-term unemployment, there simply haven't been enough job openings for many of the unemployed. Many Republicans look open to a compromise on this issue.
In any case the redistributionist effect will be only minor and, if robust economic growth returns, temporary.
One Democrat who argues for greater change is University of Arizona political scientist Lane Kenworthy. He believes the nation is and should be headed to a European-style welfare state, with the government taxing and spending 10 percent more of gross domestic product than at present.
Kenworthy would transform unemployment benefits into wage insurance, would start early education at age 1 and would vastly expand the Earned Income Tax Credit.
That's progressive economic redistribution, but with a catch. For as Kenworthy admits, you can't get the money for this just by raising taxes on very high earners: "The math simply doesn't work."
So he looks to a federal consumption tax, like Europe's value-added taxes. That would mean shifting from the current progressive income tax toward a more regressive European-style tax regime, with middle-income workers subsidizing non-workers.
Other proposals floated by Democrats, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren's call for substantially increased Social Security benefits, would have similarly perverse effects.
Social Security is already on an unsustainable trajectory. Increased benefits would, in time, require higher taxes on the young, who have negative or minimal wealth, to finance payments to the elderly, who tend to have significant net worth.
This echoes the Obamacare provision that limits premiums on the old and sick to no more than three times the premiums on the young and healthy. Is it really progressive to have the young subsidize the old?
Another left-wing Democrat, incoming New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, wants to raise income tax rates on those earning $500,000 to pay for universal preschool for the city's children.
That would certainly amount to economic redistribution, but to whom? Research over the last 50 years shows that Head Start and other publicly financed pre-school programs have no lasting positive effect on learning.
What de Blasio's proposal would do is to put a lot more unionized teachers on the city payroll. The redistribution here goes from the very rich to the public employee unions and their allies in the Democratic Party.
Liberal pundits are hailing de Blasio and his politics as a harbinger of the political future and a return to the liberal tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and his political ally New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.
But in 1944, the heyday of FDR and La Guardia, the five boroughs of New York City cast 7 percent of the nation's votes. In 2012 they cast only 2 percent of the national vote.
It's interesting that New York, which has had more liberal and redistributionist public policies than almost anywhere else in the nation over those 68 years, also has one of the nation's highest rates of income inequality.
High tax rates and high housing costs (exacerbated for many years by rent control) have squeezed middle-class families out of New York. They have migrated in the millions to lower-tax, lower-housing-cost places such as Florida and Texas.
The Obama Democrats did reduce economic inequality somewhat by raising the top income tax rate back to 39.6 percent. The proposals they're talking about now are either small potatoes, or moves to have the working middle-class subsidize non-workers or the young to subsidize the old -- redistribution, but not very progressive.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)
Thomas Jefferson was a very remarkable man who started learning very early in life and never stopped.
At 5, began studying under his cousin's tutor.
At 9, studied Latin, Greek and French.
At 14, studied classical literature and additional languages.
At 16, entered the College of William and Mary.
At 19, studied Law for 5 years starting under George Wythe.
At 23, started his own law practice.
At 25, was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses.
At 31, wrote the widely circulated "Summary View of the Rights of British America ? And retired from his law practice.
At 32, was a Delegate to the Second Continental Congress.
At 33, wrote the Declaration of Independence ..
At 33, took three years to revise Virginia 's legal code and wrote a Public Education bill and a statute for Religious Freedom.
At 36, was elected the second Governor of Virginia succeeding Patrick Henry.
At 40, served in Congress for two years.
At 41, was the American minister to France and negotiated commercial treaties with European nations along with Ben Franklin and John Adams.
At 46, served as the first Secretary of State under George Washington.
At 53, served as Vice President and was elected president of the American Philosophical Society.
At 55, drafted the Kentucky Resolutions
At 57, was elected the third president of the United States .
At 60, obtained the Louisiana Purchase doubling the nation's size.
At 61, was elected to a second term as President.
At 65, retired to Monticello
At 80, helped President Monroe shape the Monroe Doctrine.
At 81, almost single-handedly created the University of Virginia and served as its first president.
At 83, died on the 50th anniversary of the Signing of the Declaration of Independence along with John Adams.
Thomas Jefferson knew because he himself studied the previous failed attempts at government. He understood actual history, the nature of God, his laws and the nature of man. That happens to be way more than what most understand today. Jefferson really knew his stuff. A voice from the past to lead us in the future:
John F. Kennedy held a dinner in the White House for a group of the brightest minds in the nation at that time. He made this statement: "This is perhaps the assembly of the most intelligence ever to gather at one time in the White House with the exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe ."
-- Thomas Jefferson
"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe ."
-- Thomas Jefferson
2a)
Harry Reid's Senate Shutdown
The Senate didn't pass a single appropriations or jobs bill in 2013.
By Kim Straassel
The popular judgment that Washington's dysfunction is the result of "partisanship" misses a crucial point. Washington is currently gridlocked because of the particular partisanship of one man: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. And Republicans are warming to the power of making that case to voters.
It's often said the 113th Congress is on track to become the "least productive" in history—but that tagline obscures crucial details. The Republican House in fact passed more than 200 bills in 2013. Some were minor, and others drew only GOP votes. But nearly a dozen were bipartisan pieces of legislation that drew more than 250 Republicans and Democrats to tackle pressing issues—jobs bills, protections against cyberattack, patent reform, prioritizing funding for pediatric research, and streamlining regulations for pipelines.
These laws all went to die in Mr. Reid's Senate graveyard. Not that the Senate was too busy to take them up. It passed an immigration and a farm bill. Yet beyond those, and a few items Mr. Reid was pressed to pass—the end-year sequester accord; Hurricane Sandy relief—the Senate sat silent. It passed not a single appropriations bill and not a single jobs bill. Of the 72 (mostly token) bills President Obama signed in 2013, 56 came from the House; 16 came from the chamber held by his own party.
What did happen is the Senate Democrats' filibuster-proof majority in the first years of the Obama administration—when Mr. Reid got a taste for unfettered power—and then the GOP takeover of the House in 2011. That is when the Senate broke, as it was the point at which Mr. Reid chose to subvert its entire glorious history to two of his own partisan aims: Protecting his majority and acting as gatekeeper for the White House.This is the norm in Mr. Reid's Senate, and for years he has been vocally and cleverly blaming the chamber's uselessness on Republican filibusters. This is a joke, as evidenced by recent history. Mr. Reid took over the Senate in early 2007, and it functioned just fine in the last two years of the Bush administration. It didn't suddenly break overnight.
Determined to protect his vulnerable members from tough votes, the majority leader has unilaterally killed the right to offer amendments. Since July, Republicans have been allowed to offer . . . four. Determined to shield the administration from legislation the president opposes, Mr. Reid has unilaterally killed committee work, since it might produce bipartisan bills. Similarly, he's refused to take up bills that have bipartisan support like approving the Keystone XL Pipeline, repealing ObamaCare's medical-device tax, and passing new Iran sanctions.
Here's how the Senate "works" these days. Mr. Reid writes the legislation himself, thereby shutting Republicans out of the committee drafting. Then he outlaws amendments.
So yes, there are filibusters. They have become the GOP's only means of protesting Mr. Reid's total control over what is meant to be a democratic body. It isn't that the Senate can't work; it's that Sen. Reid won't let it.
Pushed over the brink by Mr. Reid's November power play—scrapping the filibuster for Obama nominees—Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell began 2014 with a rip-roaring Senate-floor speech. On Wednesday he set the record straight on the Reid tactics that have created Senate dysfunction. He then outlined how a GOP majority would restore regular order and get Washington working. This is a "debate that should be of grave importance to us all," he said.
It's of growing importance to Republicans, who are taking up this theme in speeches and media briefings—putting greater attention on Mr. Reid's singular role in Washington paralysis. Asked this week whether the GOP would be allowed to amend an unemployment-benefits bill, Sen. John McCain quipped: "you'll have to go ask the dictator." Speaker John Boehner, at a recent news conference, lamented the "dozens" of House bills that "await action in the Senate," while Majority Leader Eric Cantor berated Mr. Reid for sitting on "bipartisan" jobs legislation.
This brings to mind Republican Sen. John Thune's 2004 defeat of South Dakota's Tom Daschle, which he did partly by highlighting Mr. Daschle's obstructionist majority-leader record. The comparison isn't perfect, since Mr. Daschle was up for re-election (Mr. Reid is not) and since the obstructionism was more noticeable at a time when the GOP ran both the House and White House. Then again, the Reid theme is the sort that will resonate with the GOP grass roots, refocusing their efforts on a Senate victory.
In an election that is going to be about ObamaCare, Republican Senate candidates are already reminding voters that it was Mr. Reid's Senate abuse that created the law. And in the wake of the shutdown and endless government-created "crises," more Americans are worried about the state of Washington institutions, and eager for change.
"Process" arguments are hard to make to voters, but Mr. Reid is a face for the process problem. Demoting Harry Reid won't in itself fix Washington. But it would be a grand start—and that alone makes it a potentially powerful campaign theme.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)
In what's seen as a massive disappointment, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics' jobs report came out today and found 74,000 jobs were added to the economy in December. This is way below the number that private forecaster ADP estimated were added in December - 238,000 - and could be a sign that estimates have become very variable in the recovery.
Despite the discouraging top-line number, the unemployment rate dropped three tenths of a percentage point, to 6.7%. The broader U-6 unemployment statistic, which takes into account underemployment, was steady at 13.1%. November's jobs report was revised upwards by 38,000 people as well.
The number of people employed part-time for economic reasons - also known as involuntarily employed part-time - was unchanged in December.
The reason for the dip in unemployment is obvious: 347,000 Americans left the labor force. There could be a number of factors that play into this, including retirements, but a large number of discouraged people left the labor force. The labor force participation rate is now at 62.8% - the lowest since 1978.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment