Facts in the Congressional Budget Office’s Study of Incomes (1979 to 2007) Destroy Plutocratic Justifications for “Trickle Down” — Do Ordinary Americans Really Exist Just to Serve their Increasingly Greedy Plutocrat Masters?

28 October 2011

The CBO report exposes “The Grand Lie” about “trickle-down” and all the other economic nonsense that Reality-ignorers like to spout

Here is the CBO’s abbreviated webpage summary of what it found in evaluating American income trends from 1979 through 2007:

The share of income going to higher-income households rose, while the share going to lower-income households fell.

The top fifth of the population saw a 10-percentage-point increase in their share of after-tax income.

Most of that growth went to the top 1 percent of the population.

All other groups saw their shares decline by 2 to 3 percentage points.

© 2011 Congressional Budget Office, Summary: Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007, Congress of the United States — Congressional Budget Office (October 2011) (at the CBO’s non-PDF webpage)

The CBO’s more formal PDF Summary of the report adds:

[T]he share of household income after transfers and federal taxes going to the highest income quintile grew from 43 percent in 1979 to 53 percent in 2007 . . . .

The share of after-tax household income for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income more than doubled, climbing from nearly 8 percent in 1979 to 17 percent in 2007.

The population in the lowest income quintile received about 7 percent of after-tax income in 1979; by 2007, their share of after-tax income had fallen to about 5 percent.

The middle three income quintiles all saw their shares of after-tax income decline by 2 to 3 percentage points between 1979 and 2007.

As a result of that uneven income growth, the distribution of after-tax household income in the United States was substantially more unequal in 2007 than in 1979:

The share of income accruing to higher-income households increased, whereas the share accruing to other households declined.

In fact, between 2005 and 2007, the after-tax income received by the 20 percent of the population with the highest income exceeded the after-tax income of the remaining 80 percent.

What does this mean? — These facts destroy the self-serving propaganda that oozes from the Excessively Greedy’s lying lips

Fat Cat plutocrats like to trick the rest of us into thinking that the only difference between us is their superior skill in creating wealth. Their propaganda cleverly disguises how Wealth-holders have rigged our institutional system to favor them at the expense of most everyone else. That’s why they are so quick to project their own camouflaged “class warfare” onto everyone who opposes exactly that process in them.

The immensely moderate Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson, calls this subversion of our democracy “theft.”

I’d go a step further. Fat Cats are murdering most of the average person’s American Dream.

We are in a new and more subtle form of medieval serfdom. Serfdom is simply another name for slightly modified slavery.

The cognitive booby trap for us today is that slaves knew they were freedom-less. But we serfs keep wondering whether it’s something “we” did that keeps “us” in economic chains. Fat Cats like it this way, hence their “trickle down” propaganda.

With serfs fooled into thinking they deserve their suffering status, or can easily escape it through “hard work,” there is much less of a chance of the “rabble” causing a Lord of the Manor-toppling uproar.

Call it serfdom or slavery, both paths lead to the death of American Freedom’s soul.

Citation — to an outstanding alternative source of information about increasing income inequality

Timothy Noah, The United States of Inequality, Slate (03 September 2010) (webpage, first article in a series of 10)

Timothy Noah, The United States of Inequality: The Great Divergence, Slate (September 2010) (PDF, 40 pages)

PeteFree.com

Facts in the Congressional Budget Office’s Study of Incomes (1979 to 2007) Destroy Plutocratic Justifications for “Trickle Down” — Do Ordinary Americans Really Exist Just to Serve their Increasingly Greedy Plutocrat Masters?