America’s rotting empire: Billionaires galore and a crumbling infrastructure - by CJ Werleman

“The game is rigged,” writes Senator Elizabeth Warren in her new book A Fighting Chance. It’s rigged because the rich and their lobbyists have rigged the rules of the game to their favor. The rules are reflected in a tax code and bankruptcy laws that have seen the greatest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich in U.S. history.

The result?

America has the most billionaires in the world, but not a single U.S. city ranks among the world’s most livable cities. Not a single U.S. airport is among the top 100 airports in the world. Our bridges, road and rail are falling apart, and our middle class is being guttered out thanks to three decades of stagnant wages, while the top 1 percent enjoys 95 percent of all economic gains.

A rigged tax code and a bloated military budget are starving the federal and state governments of the revenue it needs to invest in infrastructure, which means today America looks increasingly like a second rate nation, and now new data shows America’s intellectual resources are also in decline.

For the past three decades, the Republican Party has waged a dangerous assault on the very idea of public education. Tax cuts for the rich have been balanced with spending cuts to education. During the New Deal era of the 1940s to 1970s, public schools were the great leveler of America. 

They were our great achievement. It was universal education for all, but today it’s education for those fortunate enough to be born into wealthy families or live in wealthy school districts. The right’s strategy of defunding public education leaves parents with the option of sending their kids to a for-profit school or a theological school that teaches kids our ancestors kept dinosaurs as pets.

“What kind of future society the defectors from the public school rolls envision I cannot say. However, having spent some time in the Democratic Republic of Congo—a war-torn hellhole with one of those much coveted limited central governments, and, not coincidentally, a country in which fewer than half the school-age population goes to public school—I can say with certainty that I don’t want to live there,” writes Chuck Thompson in Better off Without Em.

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Economy: Entitlements? The rich get far more of them than anyone else does - by Michael Rappaport

The party could be over

"Entitlement" isn't the dirty word conservatives would have you believe.

It isn't just about food stamps or Medicaid or other benefits for the poor. At its most basic level, an entitlement is something to which someone has a right, either by law or by the fact of earning it.

Of course, when people use the word in a derogatory way, it always involves something being done for the poor or the middle class.

In many first-world countries, the rich don't begrudge help that is given to the poor. In Sweden, for example, the attitude is that all members of society — all the people who call themselves Swedish — have in some way contributed to the general welfare.

And even if they haven't, they are still part of the national family and worthy of respect.Makers and takers?\ Not there.

A bad thing to help others, as Ayn Rand suggested?  Not there or in most other countries in which people consider themselves free.

In this country, not only do we take a far different attitude toward helping people — the "deserving poor," for one — we act as if even without our help, the poor are still better off than most of the rest of the world.
Several clueless plutocrats, among them the Koch brothers and Bud Konheim (CEO of Nicole Miller), cited the median US income of $35,000 as a very good thing.

Konheim especially. "We've got a country that the poverty level is wealth in 99 percent of the world. So we're talking about woe is me, woe is us."

He then suggested that anyone unhappy with a $35,000 income should move to a poorer country where they would be better off.

Others talk about how good poor people have it, with air conditioning, cellular phones and big-screen televisions. But that doesn't mean they have better lives than the middle class in Europe, Australia, Canada or even some Asian and South American countries.

It's all part of the mythology. When I was 9 or 10 years old in the late 1950s, one thing my mother used to say to get us to eat everything on our plates was that there were children starving in Europe.

There had been, shortly after the war, but that was 10 or 12 years earlier.

Yes, we have been doing more for the poor and the elderly in our society, but look back over the same period of time and you'll see more and more being done for the rich.

Subsidies for corporate agriculture, subsidies for tobacco farmers (even as we try to eliminate smoking), subsidies for oil companies (even as they are making record profits), subsidies for defense contractors to build weapons we don't need or want.

Reducing income taxes for the rich, trying to eliminate the estate tax ...

Get the picture. We do far more for the folks who supposedly are succeeding on their own than for those who really need help.

It used to be that it paid off in them re-investing in their companies or starting new businesses, but now they just keep it or spend it on themselves. Hey, ask them and they'll tell you.  They're entitled.

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