Grrr
The Management of Domestic Policy ...
We know how to reduce the human footprint by 75-90 percent yet we’re taking no steps in that direction. For example, we’ve constructed 100,000 energy-inefficient office buildings since 1980 that could be retrofit to save 90 percent of their energy use, paying for the retrofit.
· More than 75,000-plus manmade chemicals are now in use worldwide; all are heading somewhere. Where? More than 500 measurable chemicals are found in our bodies that were not in anyone’s body before the 1920s, including a range of endocrine-disrupting chemicals linked to an array of adverse (and transgenerational) health effects, including weakened immune systems, reproductive problems, metabolic maladies and functional deficits in intelligence, sexual function and behavior. EDCs are largely the downstream result of hydrocarbon-derived products (EDCs are also known as “gender benders”).
· Relying on trend data indicating that almost half of U.S. males and one-third of females will contract a non smoking-related cancer, Dr. Samuel Epstein, a cancer specialist, documents as the causal factor non-optional exposure to carcinogenic elements, resulting in a particularly high incidence of cancer among children. Breast cancer now strikes one in eight women, up from one in 25 since our mothers’ era. Autism rose 278 percent in California in the 1990s.
· With 4% of the world’s population, the U.S. generates 25 percent of the pollution that contributes to global warming.
· A 2.7 mpg increase in the nation's light-vehicle fleet would end the need for Middle Eastern oil. Instead, fuel efficiency fell again in 2002, to 20.4 mpg, and the Department of Justice filed suit against California to halt its newly proposed fuel efficiency standards. A key objective of the proposed war against Iraq is to lower the cost of oil, ensuring increased use.
· The U.S. relationship with oligarchy-run Russia also includes that oil-driven objective. One-third of Russians live on $38 or less per month, a key reason Russia has emerged as a source of weapons of mass destruction (imagine nuclear scientists supporting families on that basis).
· With political commitment, we reached the moon but we’ve yet to see any commitment to the planet’s obvious need: the need to shift from a hydrocarbon to a hydrogen economy.
· We manufacture 17 million cars each year. Yet we’re told it’s impossible to make 10 million windmills over the next 20 years. Research needed to advance the conversion to wind-power, photovoltaics and hydrogen instead is diverted to putting weapons in space.
· We began the 1980s $900 billion in debt - already a huge burden on the next generation. That debt was projected to top $6523 billion in 2003 but that’s before the largest one-year budget swing in history, adding $330 billion for a potential $6853 billion in debt - and that’s before the full fiscal cost of the War on Terrorism, the War in Iraq or Homeland Security.
· At every turn, that increase in debt has been structured to make the already-rich far richer (only 4 percent of U.S. taxpayers receive interest on government bonds). Imagine interest on $6853 billion. The war effort fails even to include an excess-profits tax, as in WWII.
· Forbes magazine reports that $91 million was required to make their Forbes 400 list in 1982. Average wealth was then $200 million.
· In 1981, a Reagan/Bush supply-side tax package was enacted at a projected cost of $872 billion -- 100 percent deficit-financed. That leveraging-up of the economy included a long-term GOP strategy designed to reduce the size of government by reducing its fiscal capacity, a budgetary “crowding out” strategy acknowledged by then-Budget Director Dave Stockman.
· By 1986, average Forbes 400 wealth topped $500 million.
· Clinton/Gore also embraced a deficit-financed supply-side tax stimulus at a cost of $268 billion. By 2000, $725 million was required to make the Forbes 400 list as average wealth of those on the list topped $1.4 billion.
· From 1998-2000, the wealth of the Forbes 400 increased an average $1.9 million per day or $240,000 per hour, 46,602 times the minimum wage.
· Tax cuts enacted in 2001 came at a fiscal cost of $1,350,000,000,000 ($1.35 trillion). When fully phased-in, one-half of the benefits will flow to the topmost 1 percent.
· Making those cuts permanent will cost $4,000 billion commencing in 2010. Half the benefits will flow to the topmost 1 percent - precisely when baby boomers most need those resources.
· Repeal of the estate tax will cost another $740 billion commencing in 2011. Half the benefits will flow to the topmost one-hundredth of 1 percent while dramatically reducing charitable bequests, de-capitalizing the nonprofit sector and creating a fiscally induced financial aristocracy. In 1999, half of all estate taxes were paid by 3,300 estates, 0.16 of the total, while a quarter of the taxes were paid by 467 estates worth more than $20 million each.
· The fiscal cost of tax subsidies for retirement plans now averages $110 billion per year (a projected $553 billion, FY 2002-2006). To date, pension fiduciaries have allowed executives to skim at least $500 billion while embracing an investment model that put $1,540 billion in the hands of just 400 families (the wealth of the top 30 families grew 10-fold, 1982-1997).
· Over the past 30 years, Fortune magazine reports that the average pay of the top-paid 100 executives (i.e., where the bulk of pension funds are invested) skyrocketed from $1.3 million to $37.5 million, or from 39 times the average employee’s pay to 1,000 times.
· The nation’s share of after-tax income received by the topmost 1 percent nearly doubled from 1979-1997. Over that period, the average income of the richest fifth jumped from nine times the income of the poorest fifth to 15 times. By 1998, the richest one percent had as much combined income as the 100 million poorest Americans. The top fifth of U.S. households now claim 49.2 percent of national income while the bottom fifth gets by on 3.6 percent.
· Between 1983 and 1998, half the total gain in real income (47 percent) flowed to the topmost one percent while 12 percent trickled-down to the bottom four-fifths. Sixty percent of the income gains captured by the top one percent went to the top 0.1 percent while almost half that flowed to the top 0.01 percent -- 13,000 taxpayers with annual incomes of at least $3.6 million. By 2000, the topmost one percent were pocketing 21 percent of national income.
· At one end of the market-fundamentalists’ food chain, the annual pace of personal bankruptcies continues to hold steady at 1.4 million for each of the past five years, an average 7,000 per hour as household debt topped $7.6 trillion in 2001, a record-breaking 73% of GDP, while home mortgage foreclosures reached a 30-year high. At the other end, expecting brisk sales, Chrysler launched over the July 4th 2002 weekend its $300,000 Maybach luxury sedan while high-end boatyards report strong demand for super-luxury yachts, 150-feet or longer. On 9/11, ten of them were berthed in a Hudson River boat basin adjoining the World Financial Center, one block west of the World Trade Center.
· Fast-widening wealth and income disparities fueled one another as households worth $5 million doubled between 1983 and 1998 while those worth at least $10 million quadrupled, all with the help of retiree savings turbo-charged with massive tax subsidies for retirement.
· Money managers have thrived on tax-subsidized fees for managing funds that by 2000 exceeded $17 trillion, over half that due to tax subsidies provided for retirement. By 2000, money managers and stockbrokers accounted for 71 of the nation’s top 400 political contributors. Of the top-ten zip codes for campaign contributors, five run up the posh East Side of Manhattan, home to the nation’s money management and media elite. One fifth of the 275,000 households worth more than $10 million live in the New York area.
· Wall Street’s proposal to partially privatize Social Security would redirect $100 billion in job-tax revenues into financial markets where, from 1983 to 1998, 53 percent of market gains flowed to the top 1 percent of households. That’s also $100 billion per year that won’t be available to pay out to current Social Security recipients, ensuring more crowding out.
· By using pension assets to pursue short-term returns with no concern for long-term economic distribution results, pension fiduciaries created one family in Arkansas (the five heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton) with $100 billion. Taxpayers are now pressing for Medicare prescription drug coverage for seniors financed with a Medicare tax (i.e., on jobs). Where will seniors fill those prescriptions? Wal-Mart has more than 2,500 drugstores.
· Now that the Bush Administration has given Bill Gates a pass on what a Reagan-appointed judge found to be a clear monopoly, Gates may be back on track to become a trillionaire by March 2005 and a quadrillionaire (a million billion) by March 2020 (according to Wired). By 1999, Gates’s fortune stood at 1.4 million times the net assets of median household wealth, already well beyond the 1.25 million to 1 ratio achieved by John D. Rockefeller.
· Meanwhile, the typical American works 184 hours longer than in 1970 (an additional 4-/12 weeks) and is paid roughly 10 percent more - much of which they plowed into retirement plans. The bottom fifth saw their average after-tax income fall 9 percent from 1977-1999.
· With more people falling into lower-income brackets, the five-year fiscal cost of the earned income tax credit is projected to top $178 billion (FY 2002-2006), another crowding-out phenomenon that consumes $35.5 billion per year in budget resources.
· Social Security, a tax on employment, is the largest tax paid by 80% of Americans (90% of GenX) while the national economic policy remains full employment. The largest tax hike of the past two decades was enacted in 1983 after Alan Greenspan chaired a Reagan-era presidential commission that persuaded Congress to raise the Social Security tax, already the nation’s most regressive tax, a ‘flat tax’ now levied on the first $80,400 of income.
· Since 1980, prison outlays have increased at a pace six times that for higher education. In 1973, the U.S. imprisoned 350,000 people nationwide. By 2000, the prison population exceeded two million or roughly 687 per 100,000 (6,926 per 100,000 for African-American men). Europe-wide, the imprisonment rate is 60-100 per 100,000. Florida spends more on corrections that on colleges. California’s prison spending is projected by the Rand Corporation to top 16 percent of its budget by 2005. Prison guards were the second largest contributor to California Governor Gray Davis’s 2002 campaign (first in 1998).
· Federal statisticians predict that one of every three adult black males can anticipate being sentenced to a federal or state prison at some time during their lives. Nationwide, 1.4 million black males (13 percent) can no longer vote due to felony convictions (one of three in Alabama). In 1865, African-Americans owned 0.5 percent of the nation’s net worth. By 1990, their net worth totaled one percent.
We know how to reduce the human footprint by 75-90 percent yet we’re taking no steps in that direction. For example, we’ve constructed 100,000 energy-inefficient office buildings since 1980 that could be retrofit to save 90 percent of their energy use, paying for the retrofit.
· More than 75,000-plus manmade chemicals are now in use worldwide; all are heading somewhere. Where? More than 500 measurable chemicals are found in our bodies that were not in anyone’s body before the 1920s, including a range of endocrine-disrupting chemicals linked to an array of adverse (and transgenerational) health effects, including weakened immune systems, reproductive problems, metabolic maladies and functional deficits in intelligence, sexual function and behavior. EDCs are largely the downstream result of hydrocarbon-derived products (EDCs are also known as “gender benders”).
· Relying on trend data indicating that almost half of U.S. males and one-third of females will contract a non smoking-related cancer, Dr. Samuel Epstein, a cancer specialist, documents as the causal factor non-optional exposure to carcinogenic elements, resulting in a particularly high incidence of cancer among children. Breast cancer now strikes one in eight women, up from one in 25 since our mothers’ era. Autism rose 278 percent in California in the 1990s.
· With 4% of the world’s population, the U.S. generates 25 percent of the pollution that contributes to global warming.
· A 2.7 mpg increase in the nation's light-vehicle fleet would end the need for Middle Eastern oil. Instead, fuel efficiency fell again in 2002, to 20.4 mpg, and the Department of Justice filed suit against California to halt its newly proposed fuel efficiency standards. A key objective of the proposed war against Iraq is to lower the cost of oil, ensuring increased use.
· The U.S. relationship with oligarchy-run Russia also includes that oil-driven objective. One-third of Russians live on $38 or less per month, a key reason Russia has emerged as a source of weapons of mass destruction (imagine nuclear scientists supporting families on that basis).
· With political commitment, we reached the moon but we’ve yet to see any commitment to the planet’s obvious need: the need to shift from a hydrocarbon to a hydrogen economy.
· We manufacture 17 million cars each year. Yet we’re told it’s impossible to make 10 million windmills over the next 20 years. Research needed to advance the conversion to wind-power, photovoltaics and hydrogen instead is diverted to putting weapons in space.
· We began the 1980s $900 billion in debt - already a huge burden on the next generation. That debt was projected to top $6523 billion in 2003 but that’s before the largest one-year budget swing in history, adding $330 billion for a potential $6853 billion in debt - and that’s before the full fiscal cost of the War on Terrorism, the War in Iraq or Homeland Security.
· At every turn, that increase in debt has been structured to make the already-rich far richer (only 4 percent of U.S. taxpayers receive interest on government bonds). Imagine interest on $6853 billion. The war effort fails even to include an excess-profits tax, as in WWII.
· Forbes magazine reports that $91 million was required to make their Forbes 400 list in 1982. Average wealth was then $200 million.
· In 1981, a Reagan/Bush supply-side tax package was enacted at a projected cost of $872 billion -- 100 percent deficit-financed. That leveraging-up of the economy included a long-term GOP strategy designed to reduce the size of government by reducing its fiscal capacity, a budgetary “crowding out” strategy acknowledged by then-Budget Director Dave Stockman.
· By 1986, average Forbes 400 wealth topped $500 million.
· Clinton/Gore also embraced a deficit-financed supply-side tax stimulus at a cost of $268 billion. By 2000, $725 million was required to make the Forbes 400 list as average wealth of those on the list topped $1.4 billion.
· From 1998-2000, the wealth of the Forbes 400 increased an average $1.9 million per day or $240,000 per hour, 46,602 times the minimum wage.
· Tax cuts enacted in 2001 came at a fiscal cost of $1,350,000,000,000 ($1.35 trillion). When fully phased-in, one-half of the benefits will flow to the topmost 1 percent.
· Making those cuts permanent will cost $4,000 billion commencing in 2010. Half the benefits will flow to the topmost 1 percent - precisely when baby boomers most need those resources.
· Repeal of the estate tax will cost another $740 billion commencing in 2011. Half the benefits will flow to the topmost one-hundredth of 1 percent while dramatically reducing charitable bequests, de-capitalizing the nonprofit sector and creating a fiscally induced financial aristocracy. In 1999, half of all estate taxes were paid by 3,300 estates, 0.16 of the total, while a quarter of the taxes were paid by 467 estates worth more than $20 million each.
· The fiscal cost of tax subsidies for retirement plans now averages $110 billion per year (a projected $553 billion, FY 2002-2006). To date, pension fiduciaries have allowed executives to skim at least $500 billion while embracing an investment model that put $1,540 billion in the hands of just 400 families (the wealth of the top 30 families grew 10-fold, 1982-1997).
· Over the past 30 years, Fortune magazine reports that the average pay of the top-paid 100 executives (i.e., where the bulk of pension funds are invested) skyrocketed from $1.3 million to $37.5 million, or from 39 times the average employee’s pay to 1,000 times.
· The nation’s share of after-tax income received by the topmost 1 percent nearly doubled from 1979-1997. Over that period, the average income of the richest fifth jumped from nine times the income of the poorest fifth to 15 times. By 1998, the richest one percent had as much combined income as the 100 million poorest Americans. The top fifth of U.S. households now claim 49.2 percent of national income while the bottom fifth gets by on 3.6 percent.
· Between 1983 and 1998, half the total gain in real income (47 percent) flowed to the topmost one percent while 12 percent trickled-down to the bottom four-fifths. Sixty percent of the income gains captured by the top one percent went to the top 0.1 percent while almost half that flowed to the top 0.01 percent -- 13,000 taxpayers with annual incomes of at least $3.6 million. By 2000, the topmost one percent were pocketing 21 percent of national income.
· At one end of the market-fundamentalists’ food chain, the annual pace of personal bankruptcies continues to hold steady at 1.4 million for each of the past five years, an average 7,000 per hour as household debt topped $7.6 trillion in 2001, a record-breaking 73% of GDP, while home mortgage foreclosures reached a 30-year high. At the other end, expecting brisk sales, Chrysler launched over the July 4th 2002 weekend its $300,000 Maybach luxury sedan while high-end boatyards report strong demand for super-luxury yachts, 150-feet or longer. On 9/11, ten of them were berthed in a Hudson River boat basin adjoining the World Financial Center, one block west of the World Trade Center.
· Fast-widening wealth and income disparities fueled one another as households worth $5 million doubled between 1983 and 1998 while those worth at least $10 million quadrupled, all with the help of retiree savings turbo-charged with massive tax subsidies for retirement.
· Money managers have thrived on tax-subsidized fees for managing funds that by 2000 exceeded $17 trillion, over half that due to tax subsidies provided for retirement. By 2000, money managers and stockbrokers accounted for 71 of the nation’s top 400 political contributors. Of the top-ten zip codes for campaign contributors, five run up the posh East Side of Manhattan, home to the nation’s money management and media elite. One fifth of the 275,000 households worth more than $10 million live in the New York area.
· Wall Street’s proposal to partially privatize Social Security would redirect $100 billion in job-tax revenues into financial markets where, from 1983 to 1998, 53 percent of market gains flowed to the top 1 percent of households. That’s also $100 billion per year that won’t be available to pay out to current Social Security recipients, ensuring more crowding out.
· By using pension assets to pursue short-term returns with no concern for long-term economic distribution results, pension fiduciaries created one family in Arkansas (the five heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton) with $100 billion. Taxpayers are now pressing for Medicare prescription drug coverage for seniors financed with a Medicare tax (i.e., on jobs). Where will seniors fill those prescriptions? Wal-Mart has more than 2,500 drugstores.
· Now that the Bush Administration has given Bill Gates a pass on what a Reagan-appointed judge found to be a clear monopoly, Gates may be back on track to become a trillionaire by March 2005 and a quadrillionaire (a million billion) by March 2020 (according to Wired). By 1999, Gates’s fortune stood at 1.4 million times the net assets of median household wealth, already well beyond the 1.25 million to 1 ratio achieved by John D. Rockefeller.
· Meanwhile, the typical American works 184 hours longer than in 1970 (an additional 4-/12 weeks) and is paid roughly 10 percent more - much of which they plowed into retirement plans. The bottom fifth saw their average after-tax income fall 9 percent from 1977-1999.
· With more people falling into lower-income brackets, the five-year fiscal cost of the earned income tax credit is projected to top $178 billion (FY 2002-2006), another crowding-out phenomenon that consumes $35.5 billion per year in budget resources.
· Social Security, a tax on employment, is the largest tax paid by 80% of Americans (90% of GenX) while the national economic policy remains full employment. The largest tax hike of the past two decades was enacted in 1983 after Alan Greenspan chaired a Reagan-era presidential commission that persuaded Congress to raise the Social Security tax, already the nation’s most regressive tax, a ‘flat tax’ now levied on the first $80,400 of income.
· Since 1980, prison outlays have increased at a pace six times that for higher education. In 1973, the U.S. imprisoned 350,000 people nationwide. By 2000, the prison population exceeded two million or roughly 687 per 100,000 (6,926 per 100,000 for African-American men). Europe-wide, the imprisonment rate is 60-100 per 100,000. Florida spends more on corrections that on colleges. California’s prison spending is projected by the Rand Corporation to top 16 percent of its budget by 2005. Prison guards were the second largest contributor to California Governor Gray Davis’s 2002 campaign (first in 1998).
· Federal statisticians predict that one of every three adult black males can anticipate being sentenced to a federal or state prison at some time during their lives. Nationwide, 1.4 million black males (13 percent) can no longer vote due to felony convictions (one of three in Alabama). In 1865, African-Americans owned 0.5 percent of the nation’s net worth. By 1990, their net worth totaled one percent.