AMERICA NEEDS A PAY RAISE

Would you ask your employer for a 30% cut in pay? You have a theory: If you request a 30% cut in pay then maybe your employer would more than make up for your lost income at year’s end with a large bonus, since he’d make more money than he used to. So your employer says: “Sure, that can certainly be arranged. Thanks for asking - that's a brilliant idea! You’re a good loyal employee looking out for the best interests of the company. I'll do you right - count on it!”
Now you know you won't have enough money to pay your bills, so you will have to borrow extensively to pay them and maintain your standard of living. But that’s OK, you will be able to pay all your bills, pay back your creditors with interest, and have a good chunk of cash left over when you get your big bonus at the end of the year. You'll actually come out ahead in the long run.

But alas, your employer doesn’t pay you the bonus you were hoping for. Not this year, not next year, not any year. You are now hopelessly in debt and your future is becoming increasingly uncertain. You consider going back to the boss and asking for your original salary to be reinstated because it’s just not working out for you. After all, your employer has gotten filthy rich as a consequence of your pay cut. He was already rich before, but now he’s mega-rich. He’s become a billionaire as a result of your pay cut. You want to ask him, but you have a sinking feeling he’ll say no and throw you in his doghouse. So you hint around at it without directly asking him, thinking he might come to understand your plight and make it right for you on his own volition. You send up a trial balloon. You lament your sorry situation and comment out loud about how your life is going down the toilet and hope he'll be sympathetic. Well, he picks up on the hint but is haughty and unsympathetic. He confronts you with this: “Hell No! I’m not giving you a raise! Are you nuts? Further, I will not allow you to quit. I want to keep exploiting your hard work and keep rolling in the cash like there’s no tomorrow. I’m not gonna stop until I become a multi-billionaire, and then I'll keep right on going until I become a trillionaire!”
So your employer gets richer and richer while you go down the toilet. According to your employer: “Tough Bananas, chump! It’s a cruel world, ain't it? There are winners and losers in life – I’m a winner and you’re a loser! So go eat cake!”
But you say: "I'm not asking for a raise. It would just be nice if you could pay me what you were paying me before I asked for the pay cut. I'm just asking for my original wage to be restored so I can live".
But here's the problem. Your boss arbitrarily chooses to consider your request a raise, not a restoration of your original pay. He's guilty of twisted, self-serving, pathological thinking. You know it, even if some of your more ignorant, simple-minded co-workers can't see the obvious. They think the bonuses will still come someday, and they'll be better off. They're hopeless idiots - they're not going to lend you any support, so you're on your own. You're powerless to fix your situation. The boss has you and your co-workers bending over a barrel for him. And you know that's a terrible thing, for you and everybody else. Everybody, that is, but the Evil Boss.

There’s a clear analogy here. The lost income is equivalent to dramatic tax cuts over the last three decades which decreased revenue. These tax cuts were the result of an experiment in trickle-down theory. Trickle-down theory held that by slashing taxes for the people, especially for the already rich – it would allow them to hire more workers, thus increasing the tax base. The prosperity achieved by the already prosperous could then be shared by the less prosperous and allow them to become prosperous too. But trickle-down theory backfired badly. Trickle-down economics turned out to be "tinkle-down" economics - with the less prosperous ending up getting peed on by the already prosperous. Those at the bottom didn't end up sharing in the prosperity - instead, as we now clearly see, this policy produced a trickle-up phenomenon. The rich got richer while everybody else, in real terms, got poorer. Real wages and salaries for the bottom three quintiles of the income distribution spectrum have declined and contine to decline. In fact, the decline in the average people’s standard of living seems to be accelerating. The annual median income in the U.S. fell from $52,059 in 2008 to $49,777 in 2009 – a 4.6% decline in just a year. Meanwhile there is an ongoing inflation problem that further decreases the people’s spending power. Incidently, the low inflation numbers published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) do not reflect the real world since they don't reflect the rising prices of food and gasoline and diesel fuel. They do include falling housing values, which dramatically skews the numbers downward. Those who do not own their homes but still have to buy food to survive and gasoline to get to work are adversely affected. And even with those who can afford to buy a home, doing so is not something anyone outside of the housing investor/speculator community is likely go out and do on a regular basis, so housing has no effect on the bottom line of most people’s monthly household budgets. The upshot is this: decreasing housing values are arbitrarily counted in the inflation data while rising everyday living expenses such as energy and food are omitted. Hence, the artificially low inflation figures we see being published by the government.

Consider this: In 1978 there were a lot of rich people – industrialists, CEOs, and Wall Street types, but there were few, if any, billionaires. Now we have over 400 billionaires in this country alone – some worth tens of billions – with most of them beneficiarries of the government’s tax policies. There are hundreds more worldwide – almost all of them beneficiaries of business dealings with America that are often predicated on the importing of labor from America. These government taxation policies are driven by billionaire plutocrats and corporate oligarchs who are operating behind the scenes while surreptitiously using the government as a front. The business community that was supposed to hire more workers because of tax policies they promoted has shipped millions of jobs overseas instead. The corporate oligarchs are sitting on trillions of dollars in cash largely because of their job-slashing policies. This looks good on Wall Street - we see the stock market soaring while ordinary people keep losing jobs to other countries. There’s a profound disconnect there.

So the government (analogous to the employee) took a voluntary 30% pay cut by slashing taxes and creating loopholes that actually reward businesses for outsourcing jobs. There turned out to be no bonus for our hypothetical employee, (increased revenue and prosperity for everyone generated by trickle-down policies), we are drowning in debt (the deficit and National Debt), we can’t pay our bills, and the powers that be, the plutocrats and corporate oligarchs (the boss) that control the government (the company) won’t allow revenues to be increased (analogous to asking for original pay rate from the boss) because they want to become even richer and more powerful (like the boss). In fact, they want to reduce pay (cut taxes) even more for the employees (the government) so the boss can become obscenely rich.

As for our country, we the people must demand that the power be restored to us. This may sound like confused Tea-Publican/Palin rhetoric, but they've been duped into wanting the plutocrats to take it back, thinking the plutocrats will create jobs. This is the exact opposite of what will happen and needs to happen. The rich are already rich enough - it’s time to slow down their juggernaut and pay a little more attention to the plight of the poor and middle class who’ve been badly hurt by recent policies. They've seen their money drained away from them by means of this insideous trickle-up economic system practiced by the government at the behest of the plutocrats and corporate oligarchs who are really running the show.