McDonald's can afford to triple their CEO's salary. Do you want lies with that?

McDonald's can afford to triple their CEO's salary. Do you want lies with that?

by MinistryOfTruth

We can't afford to raise the minimum wage?
But we can always afford a big pay increase for the CEO. Always. Even when sales are down for the year.

   McDonald's Corp. more than tripled the pay packages last year for its new CEO Don Thompson and the man he replaced, Jim Skinner. ~snip~
    McDonald's, based in Oak Brook, Ill., gave Thompson a package worth $13.8 million, up from the $4.1 million he received in 2011, according to a regulatory filing made Friday.
    Skinner's pay meanwhile rose to $27.7 million from $8.8 million the year before, reflecting a $10.2 million payment as part of his retirement under his contract agreement.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

   McDonald's gave a $9 million dollar raise recently to their new CEO. $9 million dollars that didn't "Trickle Down", $9 million dollars that didn't help workers at McDonald's unless they have a second, better paying job as a waiter at the nicer restaurants the CEO of McDonald's goes to. McDonald's can't afford paying their workers enough to climb out of poverty but just happened to find $9 million lying around to give to their CEO. The golden arches are actually golden parachutes too.     Over the last 40 years this has been the trend. Worker's wages stagnate but for some reason CEO salaries go through the roof. The result is growing poverty. No one who works full time should be poor. No one.
And yet these CEO's then proceed to lecture us about being lazy and how they can't afford raises this year, maybe next year, and the stock markets rise and the CEO salaries rise but the rest of us will just have to wait.
But the CEO never has to wait. He always gets his raise. Always.
Over the last few decades the CEO's of corporate America have made themselves filthy rich by paying themselves instead of labor. The boss gets a raise, you don't. You are lucky just to keep your job. Any profit made goes straight to the wealthiest 1% and stays there.
And if you complain they call you a socialist.
If you notice the 800 lb CEO in the room, they say you hate capitalism.
We all have to ignore how rich the rich have become in order for the never ending austerity brigade's working class death march to make any sense.
Because you must suffer so that record corporate profits can live.

With Wall Street and corporate profits at record highs we should be swimming in trickle down goodness right freaking now.
But we are not. Because trickle down is bullcrap.
So the boss gets a raise and you don't. The boss gets a bigger raise than he would have otherwise by not giving you a raise. Scrooge gets to count coins, Cratchet gets a piece of coal, maybe. If he is lucky.
And Tiny Tim? Humbug!
Overpaid CEO's can not be the end-all-be-all of our economy, sneering Mitt Romney types who think you are lazy and want to be dependent on food stamps, because working to death being dependent on the kindness of a heartless millionaire wasn't good enough.
I could understand maybe if NO ONE at McDonald's was getting a raise this year. If they were cutting executive salaries and that sort of thing, but McDonald's isn't, nor is WalMart or the other big box stores that wiped out your local Mom and Pop stores. All those businesses are still chugging out profits and raises for executives, but the workers are ass out in the deal, No raise for you, Cratchet! Because the CEO's of these huge corporations have decided they would rather steal your raise so they can get a bigger raise themselves. That's the only way we get record profits AND growing, record poverty at the same time, the rich are making the poor even poorer for their own profit. It's that simple.
The rich are getting richer by PREVENTING "trickle down" from happening.
And they don't even bother lying to you about how it will "Trickle Down" anymore, do they? It's all austerity all the time now, and if you even mention that it isn't "Trickling Down" conservatives get mad at you for even bringing it up. The say you are engaging in class warfare if you dare mention that the "Trickle Down" isn't working. The Right Wing's plan for the poor is basically "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", meaning the right wing has nothing to offer the poor other than animosity and Republicans would rather you not ask since they don't like to talk about the poor anyway.
So you get pushed into whatever low wage job you can get and you struggle to survive and your measly pay isn't even enough to get by on and here comes your local Republican to make things harder for you if you ever need food assistance or unemployment insurance. We can't have you being dependent on anything other than your credit card, can we? In Republican America paying taxes is slavery and working for poverty wages until you die is freedom so quit complaining.
The next time you hear some meathead tell you that we can't raise the minimum wage or prices will go up ask them if that means ANYBODY should ever get a raise again? I mean, if rising wages means rising prices doesn't that mean that all wage increases are bad, or is that just wage increases for poor people? Does that mean that giving huge pay increases to the already rich might drive up the price of certain things like oh say housing? This logic says that paying poor people more is a bad thing, but paying rich people more is good because "trickle down".
Try as you might to make sense of this you can't. There is no logic to talking points against raising the minimum wage. It is just rooted in poor people = bad/lazy and rich people = Randian Supermen who must be coddled at all times and told how awesome and brilliant they are. The same crap Mitt Romney embodied that the GOP breathes on a daily basis, open hostility towards the poor and working class, is embedded in this notion, that poor people have it too good and should just try harder. Because if poor people aren't kept in constant misery they may get lazy and stop contributing, unlike rich people who shit pure rainbows.
McDonald's can afford to pay their workers better, they just don't want to. They refuse to. McDonald's, WalMart and all of these other big box stores has created a class of poor people stuck in dead end jobs who will always be poor and they call them "Associates". McDonald's and these other corporations will not pay their employees decent wages until they are forced to. The rich will lie and lie and say they can't afford to pay their employees, they will lie and say raising wages will force them to raise prices, it's a lie, a lie to keep you poor so they can continue to make themselves rich.
They will say anything to justify not paying their employees a better wage. And this is the basis for our entire economy. The rich are getting richer BECAUSE they are keeping the poor as poor as they can. Keeping you from getting a raise means my CEO compensation might triple this year. Some businesses like CostCo might do the right thing and pay their workers a good wage, but others will not, and that is why we need laws to set a fair floor for wages so that people don't get trapped having to work until they die just to stay poor. Poor people wouldn't need food stamps if they just got paid better, and if some CEO's weren't as grossly overpaid as they are maybe there would be a little money leftover to pay everyone else a raise.
Justifying greed is what conservatives live for. Hating the poor is just a bonus. The people who nominated Mitt Romney as their Presidential candidate a year ago bristle with hostility whenever you mention the poor. Resentment is a dish best served buffet style at the RNC convention. But at the heart of it is this, when conservatives say they are against raising the minimum wage they are admitting that trickle down is not supposed to help "those people". Conservatives are admitting that helping the poor simply isn't in the trickle down plan. Nope, the plan is bigger tax cuts for the rich. The better to eat you with.
So let's give a big round of applause to the people who are marching against McDonald's and WalMart and all the big box stores that make huge profits by keeping their workers underpaid, and remember, they always have money to give their CEO's a big pay increase each year, so when they say they can't afford to pay better wages they are just lying to you.
My apologies for not having written much lately, getting adjusted to life with my newborn daughter Janis has made it difficult for me to sit down and think, let alone write. I will be on the Ed Schultz show tonight on MSNBC. Hopefully you catch me there.
Peace and love to all,
Cheers

Originally posted to MinistryOfTruth on Fri Dec 06, 2013 at 08:13 AM PST.

Also republished by In Support of Labor and Unions.

20 Things the Poor Really Do Everyday That the Rich Never Have to Worry About

Just staying alive is a struggle.

December 5, 2013  |  

 

This post first appeared on Ben Irwin's blog. 

Financial advisor and evangelical Christian Dave Ramsey probably wasn’t expecting this much pushback when he shared a piece contrasting the habits of the rich with those of the poor. In her response on CNN, Rachel Held Evans noted that Ramsey and Corley mistake correlation for causality when they suggest (without actually proving) that these habits are the cause of a person’s financial situation. (Did it never occur to them that it might be the other way around?)

Ramsey fired back, calling the pushback “immature and ignorant.” This from a guy who just made 20 sweeping assertions about 47 million poor people in the US — all based on a survey of 361 individuals.

That’s right. To come up with his 20 habits, Corley talked to just 233 wealthy people and 128 poor people. Ramsey can talk all he wants about Corley’s research passing the “common-sense smell test,” but it doesn’t pass the “research methodology 101” test.

To balance the picture a bit, I wanted to take a fact-based look at 20 things the poor do on a daily basis…

1. Search for affordable housing. 
Especially in urban areas, the waiting list for affordable housing can be a year or more. During that time, poor families either have to make do with substandard or dangerous housing, depend on the hospitality of relatives, or go homeless.
(Source: New York Times)

2. Try to make $133 worth of food last a whole month. 
That’s how much the average food stamp recipient gets each month. Imagine trying to eat well on $4.38 per day. It’s not easy, which is why many impoverished families resort to #3…
(Source: Kaiser Family Foundation)

3. Subsist on poor quality food. 
Not because they want to, but because they can’t afford high-quality, nutritious food. They’re trapped in a food system that subsidizes processed foods, making them artificially cheaper than natural food sources. So the poor are forced to eat bad food — if they’re lucky, that is…
(Sources: Washington Post; Journal of Nutrition, March 2008)

4. Skip a meal.
One in six Americans are food insecure. Which means (among other things) that they’re sometimes forced to go without eating.
(Sources: World Vision, US Department of Agriculture)

5. Work longer and harder than most of us.
While it’s popular to think people are poor because they’re lazy (which seems to be the whole point of Ramsey’s post), the poor actually work longer and harder than the rest of us. More than 80 percent of impoverished children have at least one parent who works; 60 percent have at least one parent who works full-time. Overall, the poor work longer hours than the so-called “job creators.”
(Source: Poverty and Learning, April 2008)

6. Go to bed 3 hours before their first job starts. 
Number 15 on Ramsey and Corley’s list was, “44% of [the] wealthy wake up three hours before work starts vs. 3% of [the] poor.” It may be true that most poor people don’t wake up three hours before work starts. But that could be because they’re more likely to work multiple jobs, in which case job #1 means they’re probably just getting to bed three hours before job #2 starts.
(Source: Poverty and Learning, April 2008)

7. Try to avoid getting beat up by someone they love. 
According to some estimates, half of all homeless women in America ran away to escape domestic violence.
(Source: National Coalition for the Homeless, 2009)

8. Put themselves in harm’s way, only to be kicked to the streets afterward. 
How else do you explain 67,000 63,000 homeless veterans?
(Source: US Department of Veterans Affairs, updated to reflect the most recent data)

9. Pay more than their fair share of taxes. 
Some conservative pundits and politicians like to think the poor don’t pay their fair share, that they are merely “takers.” While it’s true the poor don’t pay as much in federal income tax — usually because they don’t earn enough to qualify — they do pay sales tax, payroll tax, etc. In fact, the bottom 20% of earners pay TWICE as much in taxes (as a share of their income) as do the top 1%.
(Source: Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy, January 2013)

10. Fall further behind. 
Even when poverty is the result of poor decision-making, often it’s someone else’s choices that make the difference. If you experience poverty as a child, you are 3-4 times less likely to graduate high school. If you spend your entire childhood in poverty, you are 5 times less likely to graduate. Which means your future has been all but decided for you.
(Sources: World Vision, Children’s Defense Fund, Annie E. Casey Foundation)

11. Raise kids who will be poor. 
A child’s future earnings are closely correlated to their parents’ earnings. In other words, economic mobility — the idea that you can claw your way out of poverty if you just try hard enough is, more often than not, a myth.
(Sources: OECD, Economic Policy Institute)

12. Vote less. 
And who can blame them? I would be less inclined to vote if I didn’t have easy access to the polls and if I were subjected to draconian voter ID laws that are sold to the public as necessary to suppress nonexistent voter fraud.
(Source: The Center for Voting and Democracy)

13. When they do vote… vote pretty much the same as the rest of us. 
Following their defeat in 2012, conservatives took solace by reasoning that they’d lost to a bunch of “takers,” including the poor, who voted for Democrats because they want free handouts from big government. The reality is a bit more complex. Only a third of low-income voters identify as Democrats, about the same for all Americans, including wealthy voters.
(Sources: NPR, Pew Research Center)

14. Live with chronic pain. 
Those earning less than $12,000 a year are twice as likely to report feeling physical pain on any given day.
(Source: Kaiser Health News)

15. Live shorter lives. 
There is a 10-14 year gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor. In recent years, poor people’s life expectancy has actually declined — in America, the wealthiest nation on the planet.
(Source: Health Affairs, 2012)

16. Use drugs and alcohol pretty much the same as (or less than) everyone else. 
Despite the common picture of inner city crack houses, drug use is pretty evenly spread across income groups. And rich people actually abuse alcohol more than the poor.
(Source: Poverty and Learning, April 2008)

17. Receive less in subsidized benefits than corporations. 
The US government spends around $60 billion on public housing and rental subsidies for low-income families, compared to more than $90 billion on corporate subsidies. Oil companies alone get around $70 billion. And that’s not counting the nearly $60 billion a year in tax breaks corporations enjoy by sheltering profits offshore. Or the $700 billion bailout banks got in 2008.
(Source: Think By Numbers)

18. Get themselves off welfare as soon as possible. 
Despite the odds, the vast majority of beneficiaries leave the welfare rolls within five years. Even in the absence of official welfare-to-work programming, most welfare recipients enroll in some form of vocational training. Why? Because they’re desperate to get off welfare.
(Source: US Department of Health and Human Services)

19. Have about the same number of children as everyone else. 
No, poor people do not have loads of children just so they can stay on welfare.
(Source: US Department of Health and Human Services)

20. Accomplish one single goal: stay alive.  
Poverty in America may not be as dire as poverty in other parts of the world, but many working poor families are nonetheless preoccupied with day-to-day survival. For them, life is not something to be enjoyed so much as endured.

These are the real habits of the poor, those with whom Jesus identifies most closely.

Why? How Republicans get Americans to vote against their own best interests 

Robert Sobel 

Orlando Liberal Examiner

April 21, 2012

 

 

The general stigma and opinion of the majority of the American people is that the Republican party and their policies favor the wealthy. If so many people believe that a particular political party has only a small elite in their best interest, why do so many still continue to vote for them? A question needs to be asked, why do working class, low and middle income families, continue to support a party that gives little to no benefit to them?
A New York Times/CBS News poll was released last October and showed that 70 percent of all Americans believed that the policies of congressional Republicans favored the rich. In addition to the backlash towards congressional Republicans, two-thirds of Americans actually disapprove of continuing tax cuts for corporations and millionaires. In 2012, President Obama spoke about the "Buffett Rule", which would place a minimum tax rate of 30 percent on millionaires, but ultimately failed in the Senate with a 51-49 vote. Only one Republican voted for the bill, falling nine votes short of the 60 vote super majority it needed to move to the House of Representatives.
Though the "Buffett Rule" failed in the Senate, if a 60 percent threshold was needed among the American people, the bill would have passed with flying colors. According to a CNN poll, 72 percent of Americans favor the "Buffett Rule," blowing away the numbers shown in congress. These numbers show where the majority of Americans stand when it comes to economics, but it doesn't translate in the polls when it comes to election time. On most occasions, both the Republican party and the Democratic party each gain around 45 percent of the electorate, with the remaining 10 percent swinging in either direction depending on the mood of the country. While Democratic voters are mostly working class Americans who are more inclined to change and accepting others, Republican voters stick to their ideology and are much more resistant to change.
It makes economic sense for the wealthiest Americans to vote for the Republican party because they want to protect their own private finances without giving others, including themselves, the chance for more upward mobility. What makes people scratch their head is the idea of a working class family, making $50,000 a year, voting for a party that continues to give tax breaks to the wealthy and paying for it by cutting the programs that benefit the lower and middle class income families. The Locust Fork News-Journal did a story about a retired Auburn History professor and author, Wayne Flynt, who has written about why Americans often do vote against their best interests in his book "Poor but Proud."

“It’s partly because preachers tell them that the Democratic Party is a godless party...It’s party because the Democratic Party is made up of a large number of African-Americans, and working class whites just won’t vote that way.”

Dr. Flynt points out that before the 1960s and 1970s, social issues such as abortion, gay rights and religion weren't talked about as much as they are today. As the years have gone on, social issues and their importance have mixed together with the economic issues of our time. In many southern states, Evangelical Christianity makes up the majority of the voters, most of them Republican. With the recent insurgence of the Tea Party movement into the national Republican party, religion and Christianity has made its way into the secular society of the United States. Today, more than ever before, religion has found its way out of the home and churches and into the public square, a place where religion was never intended to be when our founding fathers began to craft the United States constitution. Dr. Flynt makes a very important statement when it comes to Americans and their idea of the importance of their religion and its impact on society.

“If you are a truck diver, a plumber, an electrician or a steel worker and you live in Alabama, you say, ‘Well, I think my religion is the way everybody ought to think,... but, let that same guy move to Salt Lake City, Utah (where the majority is Mormon) or New Jersey or Connecticut (where the majority is Catholic) or Dearborn, Michigan, (where the majority is Muslim), and he won’t think so highly of the idea that the majority of people ought to impose their religious values on the minority.”

Even when conservatives leave the comfort of their conservative church, they quickly turn the TV to the right wing news station, Fox News, or set the radio dial to conservatives mouth pieces like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or Michael Savage. Fox News, owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, has been accused of multiple instances where they have taken a far right bias when reporting the news. The "journalists" on Fox News twist facts around to misinform their viewers and push them towards the Republican party. While conservatives hold Fox News close to their hearts, the rest of America can't take them seriously. With conservative talking heads like Bill O'Rielly and Sean Hannity blasting any political position that isn't far right conservatism, independent voters often see through the bias and turn the TV off.
The Republican party and the pundits who support them, use an agenda of fear, channeling the ways of former Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. In the 1950s, McCarthy had accused hundreds of Democrats in the United States of being members of the communist party without having any proof of his claims. As the years went on, the American people took McCarthy and his fear agenda as a sad and pathetic joke. The current Republican party goes further than McCarthy did, using what conservatives hold close to them against them, their religion. Republicans push the fear of gays, Muslims, atheists and others who aren't evangelical Christians onto conservatives voters, using those fears to bypass many economic issues that could normally work against them.
Whether it's religion, fear or simply a case of misinformation, conservative voters have been getting the wool pulled over their eyes for years and it's not only affecting them, but the entire country. The Democratic party is far from perfect, but more often than not, their policies represent the best interest of the majority of the American people. Until the media becomes accountable for the truth in their reporting and Americans start to think outside the box and accept that others might have some good ideas, the American people will have to continue to weather the storm of Republican destruction.

If Increasing the Minimum Wage Doesn't Cost Jobs, How Does It Get Absorbed? 

Jared Bernstein

Fmr. Obama administration economist; CNBC and MSNBC contributor

As I stressed in a recent post, the economic arguments against moderate increases in the minimum wage lack robust empirical support. Most importantly, the majority of studies looking for the job-loss effects that opponents assert will be large enough to offset the benefits to low-wage workers come up short. Such "disemployment" effects hover about zero, as shown in Figure 1 from economist John Schmitt's recent reviewof the literature.
This fact raises another question: if not through job loss, how is the mandated wage increase absorbed? It's got to come out somewhere. Have economists identified the absorption channels?
We have, though there's more evidence for some absorption channels than others. Here's a quick primer on what we know and what we suspect.
First, as alluded to at the end of my earlier post, the initial question you want to ask is what share of the workforce is in the affected range and just how "affected" are they? A small increase, particularly one that's come after many years of inaction, will affect few workers and in such cases there's just not that much absorption that needs to take place.
Moreover, once a worker is in the "sweep" of the higher minimum (i.e., their hourly wage is between the old and new wage), there's the issue of where they are in the sweep. If their wage puts them a few pennies below the new minimum, we'd expect less of an impact than if it will take $1 to bring them up to the new floor.
Schmitt examines this question from various angles in the context of recent minimum wage increases (see his table 1). Starting in the late 1980s, he finds 6 percent or less of the workforce has been in the sweep, with the average hourly wage increase ranging from around thirty to fifty cents. Is this a lot or a little?
History suggests that it's a small enough impact that the wage increase tends to be absorbed not by job loss but by the various mechanisms discussed next. Let's start with the three p's: profits, productivity, and prices. Increased labor costs can be offset by:
-Shaving profit margins: This is an attractive alternative right now, as the profit share of national income is at an all-time high while the compensation share is at a 50-year low. As James Surowiecki points out, this mechanism is limited by the fact that profit margins are thinner at retail and fast food companies than at tech firms and investment banks. Still, the fact is that Walmart, for example, is a highly profitable enterprise with low-labor costs as a key part of their model.
There's little evidence for this mechanism, though a recent study from the UK finds a significant effect. You ask me, the fact that the affected lobbies fight so hard against higher minimum wages is pretty strong circumstantial evidence that this channel is at work.
A related mechanism emphasized by Schmitt is wage compression, i.e., along with some redistribution from profits to wage, there's some empirical support for "... the possibility that employers may compensate for higher wage costs at the bottom by cutting wages of workers who nearer to the top."
-Higher productivity: One of the inefficiencies that low-wage firms face is high rates of turnover and vacancies. Raising the wage floors can help offset such costs by making easier to recruit, train, and hold onto workers. Schmitt cites numerous studies as this process at work, as labor turnover has been found to decrease substantially following an increase in the wage floor.
-Higher prices: This one has been carefully studied, and the results show that part of the cost of the wage increase is passed through to higher prices. The literature finds small overall effects on the price level: a 10 percent increase in the minimum is associated with less than half a percent increase in the overall price level, though larger increases are found in low-wage labor intensive industries (around 1-4 percent).
Schmitt ticks through other possible absorption sources but there's either little research on them or what there is doesn't find much impact, including reduced hours, lower non-wage benefits, less spending on training, or greater product demand by recipients of the now-higher paychecks.
So there are lots of ways in which firms and economies absorb minimum wage increases. Not all are benign -- higher prices, lower profits -- though the fact that some of increase is absorbed by squeezing inefficiencies out of the low-wage labor market seems like an unequivocal plus. But at the end of the day, what's most important here is that the research supports the contention that the benefits of the increase in the wage floor to low-wage workers significantly outweigh the costs.
That's why you see such workers and their advocates pressing hard for the increase. And to the lobbyists who say they're really just trying to protect these benighted workers from the unintended consequences of the increase, I'm quite certain they'd say, "thanks, but no thanks... we got this."
This post originally appeared at Jared Bernstein's On The Economy blog.

 

Follow Jared Bernstein on Twitter: www.twitter.com/econjared

The Facts Are in: Austerity Politics Doesn't Work

The Facts Are in: Austerity Politics Doesn't Work

Wednesday, 04 December 2013 09:20 By Sally Kohn, Yes! Magazine | Opinion 

(Photo: Austerity protesters march on Parliament in opposition to government spending cuts on March 26, 2011 in London, UK. An estimated 250,000 people took part in the rally. via Shutterstock) 
From England's double-dip recession to Portugal's spiking unemployment, there is now conclusive evidence of the complete failure of austerity.
The idea that rational thinking should govern political decision making in America dates back to our very founding. “Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams said, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
Oh, John Adams, where are you when we need you? Facts have been buried in a political era in which partisan ideology overrides reason. And while the Republican Party has embraced fact-free governance as its personal brand, Democrats are not entirely innocent either.

Take the case of “austerity politics.” Persistent, despite the facts. There is now conclusive evidence, both practical and theoretical, of the complete failure of austerity politics.

First was the United Kingdom, the practical test case for austerity. In 2010, faced with a recession similar to those gripping most other industrialized nations, Britain’s conservative government instituted a series of austerity measures to dramatically cut spending and taxes. Parts of the U.K. government were slashed by upwards of 30 percent.
The result? Utter and unquestionable failure. The deficit remained high while the country suffered through a double-dip recession. Austerity shaved 6 percent from the country’s GDP over the last three years. Major credit agencies downgraded Britain’s AAA rating for the first time in generations. The Fitch ratings agency blamed weak growth performance, “partly due to … public sector deleveraging.”
In other words: austerity. The International Monetary Fund has been pressuring the United Kingdom to back off austerity for its own good and the good of the global economy—which is funny because it was the International Monetary Fund that pressed for austerity measures in the first place.
Take another example, Portugal—which was forced to slash spending drastically in order to qualify for an IMF and EU bailout. The result? The Portuguese economy worsened, with the nation’s debt-to-GDP ratio going up not because its deficit increased but because the economy contracted. The nation’s already-painful 13 percent unemployment rate grew to more than 16 percent. And there are similar examples of austerity’s failures from Ireland to Italy to Spain.
Okay, mumble conservative economists, a few countries may have stumbled but the theory of austerity is still sound. Around the same time Britain launched its austerity experiment, two American professors—Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff—published a study arguing that economic growth suffers when a nation’s public debt level reaches 90 percent of GDP. Reinhart and Rogoff’s study became the calling card for pushing austerity politics in the United States and abroad. And then, in April 2013, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst found a simple spreadsheet error that, when corrected, entirely ruined Reinhart and Rogoff’s theory.
Suddenly, the research used to back the case for austerity was 100 percent disproven.
And yet, conservatives—as well as a few too many spineless Democrats—continue to assert that austerity makes for good economics, in spite of the fact that real-world evidence and theoretical science now decisively prove otherwise. In Spain and Greece and beyond, citizens have been mounting protests against a backdrop of skyrocketing rates of suicide and devastating unemployment wrought by austerity measures. And yet these mass protests receive far less attention than the outmoded assertions by the monied elites. In their case, whether there’s evidentiary support for austerity or not is irrelevant—the powers that be simply seek convenient window dressing on their ideology that insists we should cut taxes and spending in good economic times and in bad, that basically there is never a case for anything other than severe austerity. And so while the facts behind austerity politics have collapsed, the ­ideology remains—as hollow and destructive as ever.

Non-Partisan Congressional Tax Report Debunks Core Conservative Economic Theory-GOP Suppresses Study

 Non-Partisan Congressional Tax Report Debunks Core Conservative Economic Theory-GOP Suppresses Study

via: Forbes

What do you do when the Congressional Research Service, the completely non-partisan arm of the Library of Congress that has been advising Congress—and only Congress—on matters of policy and law for nearly a century, produces a research study that finds absolutely no correlation between the top tax rates and economic growth, thereby destroying a key tenet of conservative economic theory?
If you are a Republican member of the United States Senate, you do everything in your power to suppress that report—particularly when it comes less than two months before a national election where your candidate is selling this very economic theory as the basis for his candidacy.
Initially released on September 14, 2012, the study—authored by Thomas Hungerford who is a specialist in public finance at the C.R.S.—correlated the historical fluctuations of the highest income tax rates and tax rates on capital gains dating back to World War II with the economic growth (or lack of the same) that followed.
The conclusion?
Lowering the tax rates on the wealthy and top earners in America do not appear to have any impact on the nation’s economic growth.
This paragraph from the report says it all—
“The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution.”
These three sentences do nothing less than blow apart the central tenet of modern conservative economic theory, confirming that lowering tax rates on the wealthy does nothing to grow the economy while doing a great deal to concentrate more wealth in the pockets of those at the very top of the income chain.
Not surprisingly, the results of the study caught the attention of a great many conservatives—so much so that, according to a New York Times piece, Republican’s in the United States Senate successfully pressured the Congressional Research Service to withdraw the report shortly after it was released. The withdrawal came over the objection of the CRS economic team and the author of the study.
The Times further reports that, according to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s spokesperson, Senator McConnell—along with additional GOP senators— “raised concerns about the methodology and other flaws,” adding that additional people outside of Congress were also criticizing the study.
The nature of these alleged flaws?
That the report included terms such as “the Bush tax cuts” and references to “tax cuts for the rich.”
Added Antonia Ferrier, spokesperson for the Republican members of the Senate Finance Committee, “There were a lot of problems with the report from a real, legitimate economic analysis perspective. We relayed them to C.R.S. It was a good discussion. We have a good, constructive relationship with them. Then it was pulled.”
While a spokesperson for the C.R.S. refused to comment on the discussions between the Senate Republicans and her agency, she did confirm that the report was no longer in ‘official circulation’. However, the New York Times reports that a source requesting anonymity confirmed that the decision to pull the study was done against the advice of the economics division and that the author, Mr. Hungerford, stood by the report’s findings.
On Thursday, Senate Democrats republished the study following a letter sent to the C.R.S. by the ranking Democratic tax expert in the House, Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI), which reads, in part—
“I was deeply disturbed to hear that Mr. Hungerford’s report was taken down in response to political pressure from Congressional Republicans who had ideological objections to the report’s factual findings and conclusion. It would be completely inappropriate for CRS to censor one of its analysts simply because participants in the political process found his or her conclusion in conflict with their partisan position. I would like your explanation as to why this report was removed from the CRS website, who made that decision and what considerations led to it.”
For almost 100 years, the Congressional Research Service has worked to assist Congress by providing well-researched and accurate data to be utilized in the creation of important public policy.  It has done so when Congress was controlled by Democrats and when Congress has been under the control of Republicans. No matter what party was in charge, the C.R.S. has always endeavored to keep politics out of their work in the effort to provide data that would inform and advance our public policy.
Apparently, solid, well researched data no longer matters—at least not when it comes to the Congressional Republicans.

The Minimum We Can Do

By ARINDRAJIT DUBE

The Great Divide is a series about inequality.

During most of the 20th century, wages in the United States were set not just by employers but by a mix of market and institutional mechanisms. Supply and demand were important factors; collective bargaining and minimum wage laws also played a key role. Under Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard M. Nixon, we even implemented more direct forms of wage controls.
These direct interventions, however, were temporary, and unions have become rare in most parts of the United States — virtually disappearing from the private sector. This leaves minimum wage policies as one of the few institutional levers for setting a wage standard. But while we can set a wage floor using policy, should we? Or should we leave it to the market and deal with any adverse consequences, like poverty and inequality, using other policies, like tax credits and transfers? These longstanding questions take on a particular urgency as wage inequality continues to grow, and as we consider specific proposals to raise the federal minimum wage — currently near a record low — and to index future increases to the cost of living.
The idea of fairness has been at the heart of wage standards since their inception. This is evident in the very name of the legislation that established the minimum wage in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act. When Roosevelt sent the bill to Congress, he sent along a message declaring that America should be able to provide its working men and women “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.” And he tapped into a popular sentiment years earlier when he declared, “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.”

This type of concern for fairness actually runs deep in the human psyche. There is a widespread sense that it is unfair of employers to take advantage of workers who may have little recourse but to work at very low wages. For example, the economists Colin F. Camerer and Ernst Fehr have documented in numerous experimental studies that the preference for fairness in transactions is strong: individuals are often willing to sacrifice their own payoffs to punish those who are seen as acting unfairly, and such punishments activate reward-related neural circuits. People also strongly support banning transactions they see as exploitative of others — even if they think such a ban would entail some economic costs.
Of course, if most minimum wage workers were middle-class teenagers, many of us might shrug off concerns about their wages, since they are taken care of in other ways. But in reality, the low-wage work force has become older and more educated over time. In 1979, among low-wage workers earning no more than $10 an hour (adjusted for inflation), 26 percent were teenagers between 16 and 19, and 25 percent had at least some college experience. By 2011, the teenage composition had fallen to 12 percent, while over 43 percent of low-wage workers had spent at least some time in college. Even among those earning no more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 in 2011, less than a quarter were teenagers.
Support for increasing the minimum wage stretches across the political spectrum. As Larry M. Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt, shows in his book “Unequal Democracy,” support in surveys for increasing the minimum wage averaged between 60 and 70 percent between 1965 and 1975. As the minimum wage eroded relative to other wages and the cost of living, and inequality soared, Mr. Bartels found that the level of support rose to about 80 percent. He also demonstrates that reminding the respondents about possible negative consequences like job losses or price increases does not substantially diminish their support.
These patterns show up in recent survey data as well, as over three-quarters of Americans, including a solid majority of Republicans, say they support raising the minimum wage to either $9 or $10.10 an hour. It is therefore not a surprise that when they have been given a choice, voters in red and blue states alike have consistently supported, by wide margins, initiatives to raise the minimum wage. In 2004, 71 percent of Florida voters opted to raise and inflation-index the minimum wage, which today stands at $7.79 per hour. That same year, 68 percent of Nevadans voted to raise and index their minimum wage, which is now $8.25 for employees without health benefits. Since 1998, 10 states have put minimum wage increases on the ballot; voters have approved them every time.
But the popularity of minimum wages has not translated into legislative success on the federal level. Interest group pressure — especially from the restaurant lobby — has been one factor. Ironically, the very popularity of minimum wages may also have contributed to the failure to automatically index the minimum wage to inflation: Democratic legislators often prefer to increase the wage themselves since it allows them to win more political points. While 11 states currently index the minimum wage, only one, Vermont, did so legislatively; the rest were through ballot measures.
As a result of legislative inaction, inflation-adjusted minimum wages in the United States have declined in both absolute and relative terms for most of the past four decades. The high-water mark for the minimum wage was 1968, when it stood at $10.60 an hour in today’s dollars, or 55 percent of the median full-time wage. In contrast, the current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, constituting 37 percent of the median full-time wage. In other words, if we want to get the minimum wage back to 55 percent of the median full-time wage, we would need to raise it to $10.78 an hour.

International comparisons also show how out of line our current policy is: the United States has the third lowest minimum wage relative to the median of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. This erosion of the minimum wage has been an important contributor to wage inequality, especially for women. While there is some disagreement about exact magnitudes, the evidence suggests that around half of the increase in inequality in the bottom half of the wage distribution since 1979 was a result of falling real minimum wages. And unlike inequality that stems from factors like technological change, this growth in inequality was clearly avoidable. All we had to do to prevent it was index the minimum wage to the cost of living.
The social benefits of minimum wages from reduced inequality have to be weighed against possible costs. When it comes to minimum wages, the primary concern is about jobs. The worry comes from basic supply and demand: When labor is made more costly, employers will hire less of it. It’s a valid concern, but what does the evidence show?
For the type of minimum wage increases we have implemented in the United States, the best evidence shows that the impact on jobs is small, although there is still a debate in the literature. There are estimates that do suggest job losses — most prominently associated with work by the economists David Neumark and William Wascher. Since the early 1990s, they have consistently argued that minimum wage increases lead to substantial job losses for low-wage workers: a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage can be expected to reduce jobs among a group like teenagers by between 1 and 3 percent. The methodology pioneered by Mr. Neumark and Mr. Wascher has a critical problem, however: it does not properly account for differences between high- and low-minimum-wage states. Essentially, they make the unrealistic assumption that low-wage employment trajectories are similar in states as diverse as Texas and Massachusetts.
As my colleagues and I show in our research, the states raising minimum wages have had very different trajectories when it comes to trends in demand conditions and business cycle variability. In fact, low-wage employment was often already falling (or growing more slowly) in the states raising the minimum wage — sometimes years before the actual wage increase. Such divergence in trends between the “treatment” and “control” groups is a telltale sign that the control group is being constructed improperly — a major issue for evaluating policies using nonexperimental evidence, otherwise known as real life.
The good news is that today we have much better tools in our toolbox. A particularly reliable methodology compares adjacent counties that are right across the state border but that experience different minimum wage shocks. Originally performed for a single case study of Pennsylvania and New Jersey by the economists David Card and Alan B. Krueger in 1994 and then again in 2000, this methodology has been substantially refined and expanded.
In my work with T. William Lester and Michael Reich, we use nearly two decades’ worth of data and compare all bordering areas in the United States to show that while higher minimum wages raise earnings of low-wage workers, they do not have a detectable impact on employment. Our estimates — published in 2010 in the Review of Economics and Statistics — suggest that a hypothetical 10 percent increase in the minimum wage affects employment in the restaurant or retail industries, by much less than 1 percent; the change is in fact statistically indistinguishable from zero.
In my most recent work with Sylvia Allegretto, Ben Zipperer and Michael Reich, we confirm these results using four data sets covering over two decades, other low-wage groups like teenagers, and five different statistical techniques, including an increasingly popular method that uses past economic trends to construct a “synthetic” control group. And other researchers have independently reached the same conclusion: minimum wage effects on employment are small.
While the evidence may not convince the most strident of critics, it has shifted views among economists. A panel of 41 leading economists was asked recently by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business to weigh in on President Obama’s proposal to increase the minimum wage and automatically index it to inflation. A plurality, 47 percent, supported the policy, and only 11 percent opposed it, while the rest were uncertain or had no opinion. Only a third thought that the raise “would make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment.”
But how can minimum wages rise without causing job losses? For starters, if the demand for burgers is not price sensitive, some of the cost increase can be passed on to customers without substantially reducing demand or jobs. Existing research suggests that if you raise the minimum wage by 10 percent, you can expect the price of a $3 burger to rise by a few cents, which is enough to absorb a sizable part of the wage increase.
Going beyond simple supply and demand, economic models are getting better at incorporating frictions caused by the costs of finding jobs and filling vacancies, which turn out to be quite important when analyzing labor markets. There are good jobs and bad jobs at the low end of the labor market, and movements between these lead to vacancies and turnover. If McDonald’s is required to pay a higher wage, fewer of its workers will leave to take other jobs. This means fewer vacancies at McDonald’s, and it means other employers are more likely to fill their job openings from the ranks of the unemployed — both of which can help keep unemployment down. So while higher costs may dissuade some employers from creating new positions, it also helps other employers recruit and retain workers. Moderate increases in the minimum wage, in other words, can reduce vacancies and turnover instead of killing jobs. In a follow-up study using our bordering areas methodology, we provide empirical evidence for this argument: while overall employment in low-wage sectors does not change much following a minimum-wage increase, worker turnover falls sharply as workers stay with their jobs longer.
But even if minimum wage policies reduce inequality and improve the functioning of low-wage labor markets, are there better alternatives when it comes to helping low-income families?
In a forthcoming study commissioned by the Department of Labor, I review the evidence using data from the past two decades and find clear evidence that minimum wage raises have helped lift family incomes at the bottom: a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage reduces poverty by around 2 percent.
The minimum wage can also increase the efficacy of a policy that is sometimes pushed as a substitute: the earned-income tax credit. This encourages more people to seek work, but can push wages down; a minimum wage ameliorates this. Of course, many families under the poverty line simply have no workers, making any work-based policy of limited help. This is why raising and indexing the minimum wage is just a part of the portfolio of policies we need to enact to ensure a decent living standard.
What are actual policy options when it comes to raising the minimum wage? At the federal level, the legislation proposed by Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, and Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, would raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, and index it to future cost of living increases. This is a sensible target that would be likely to put the minimum wage right around 50 percent of the median wage for full-time workers — close to the international standard and our own norm during the 1960s and ’70s. Indexation is critical — it replaces politics with economics as the adjustment mechanism and makes changes predictable. This is why even economists opposed to higher minimum wages support indexation.
Other policies can complement the federal minimum wage in building higher wage standards. City and state minimum wages play an important role in ensuring that places with higher costs of living have similarly higher wage standards. A number of cities have instituted “living wage” ordinances covering public sector workers and private city contractors. The most expansive of these ordinances cover major airports, like in the metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Los Angeles and most recently Seattle. Fast food workers in urban centers are beginning to organize and push for substantially higher voluntary wage standards at major chains. Together with a sensible federal minimum wage, these local initiatives can help rebuild wage standards and reduce inequality in a way that reflects our internal sense of fairness.

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Arindrajit Dube is an associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a research fellow at IZA.

A version of this article appears in print on 12/01/2013, on page SR5 of the NewYork edition with the headline: The Minimum We Can Do.

Three of the Biggest Lies Republicans Tell About Themselves

Three of the Biggest Lies Republicans Tell About Themselves

November 25, 2013 By Allen Clifton  

 

When I talk with Republicans, I often feel like I’m speaking with someone who lives inside of a bubble where the outside world and all of its realities are simply unable to penetrate.  It’s the school teacher who votes Republican despite Republicans stripping teachers unions of collective bargaining power.  It’s the individual who’s soon to rely on Medicare and Social Security, claiming they don’t need the federal government.  The person on welfare who voted for the politician who just voted to cut their benefits.
But one area where Republicans excel at is propaganda.  They’re really good at it.  They’ve successfully convinced millions of people to be absolute hypocrites, vote against their own interests and believe that giving rich people more money benefits the rest of us.
Basically, they’ve convinced people to lie to themselves.
So I decided I would give a quick rundown of three of the bigger lies Republicans perpetuate about themselves (though there are far more than three).
1) They’re fiscally conservative 
This is probably the biggest joke of them all.  It’s amazing to me that this is real platform they actually run on, yet haven’t had a Republican president who’s actually balanced the budget since President Eisenhower in the 1950′s.  Hell, their “conservative hero” Ronald Reagan came close to quadrupling the national debt during his eight years.  How exactly is someone a “beacon for fiscal responsibility” when they almost quadrupled the national debt?
And I know some conservatives will do what they always do and blame Democrats for Reagan running up our national debt.  I love reading the asinine conclusion that the near quadrupling of our debt was the fault of Tip O’Neill, not Reagan.  I hate to break it to these people, but Reagan signed off on every single piece of legislation during his eight years in office that led to the massive growth of our national debt.  Congressional Democrats couldn’t simply enact legislation without Reagan’s approval.
Then again, conservatives who make this argument clearly don’t understand how government works.  They’re also the ones who give all of the credit for our balanced  budget in the 90′s to congressional Republicans.
Then look at George W. Bush.  He took a balanced budget and completely wrecked it.  It took him one year to send us back into deficits after President Clinton gave us a surplus.  And don’t even tell me that our budget surplus should be credited to the Republicans in Congress.  If they were the primary reason why we had a balanced budget, it would have continued after Clinton left the White House, when they were still in charge of Congress — but guess what?  It didn’t.
What Bush did was cut taxes, then started two wars.  That’s like buying an $80,000 sports car just after taking a massive pay cut at work.  He reduced our revenue then increased our spending.  How again is that being “fiscally conservative”?
The only area Republicans point to for this claim of “fiscal responsibility” is their opposition to tax hikes.  But guess what?  Cutting taxes has nothing to do with being smart with money.
Oh, but they’ll cut programs that help the poor and the needy, that’ll balance our budget, right?  But you damn sure better not mention cutting oil subsidies or closing tax loopholes for the rich — Republicans will have no part in eliminating either of those.
The only place Republicans are fiscally conservative is in their minds.
2) Small government 
This is another joke.  I love how the party which actively campaigns for president on the pretense of passing Constitutional Amendments that would define traditional marriage is somehow the party of “small government.”
Or the party that continues to pass laws in Republican-controlled states attacking the right for a woman to have an abortion, requiring ultrasounds or transvaginal probes before an abortion can be performed.  That’s small government? 
Hell, if they had their way there would still be a ban on homosexuals in the military.
The fact is, Republicans love government.  Well, as long as that government is supporting something they want.  The only time they’re advocates for “small government” is when the government forces them to do things like — give people civil rights.
I live in Texas, a highly Republican state, where you can’t even buy liquor on Sunday due to outdated laws passed decades ago.  Hell, there are some counties in Texas where you still can’t buy alcohol at all.  How “small government” of them.  Isn’t Texas supposed to be a beacon for “small government values”?  Right.
The truth is, Republicans love government when they can use it to try to enforce their bigotry and ignorance, but hate government when it prevents them from enforcing their bigotry and ignorance.
3) Pro-life 
Being anti-abortion doesn’t make you “pro-life.”  Just like supporting the right for a woman to have an abortion doesn’t make you “pro-abortion.”
Republicans constantly prove that they don’t give a crap about life the moment it’s out of the womb.  Sure, they’ll use a fetus to stir up anger within people to get votes, but the fact of the matter is once that baby is born — they couldn’t care less.
The GOP has consistently cut funding for programs that help the poor and the needy.  They’ve strongly stood against access to health care for all Americans.  There’s even a push now by many to privatize Medicare and Social Security so that these programs are handed over to greedy corporations that can gamble with the future of millions of Americans.
There are tens of millions of children who will have less to eat this holiday because of the Republican cuts to our nation’s SNAP program.  And if Republicans get their way, tens of billions more will be cut from the program.
In a state like Texas — where millions of its citizens go without health care — Rick Perry refused to expand Medicaid coverage so that millions of Texans could receive health care, some for the very first time.  This is a practice we’ve seen all over the country in many Republican-controlled states.
How “pro-life” of these Republicans to deny access to health care for millions of Americans who desperately need it.
And the sad fact is, Republicans only really “care” about a fetus because it helps them get votes.  Otherwise they wouldn’t oppose — and cut — funding to programs that would help millions of poor children all across the United States.
When Republicans say they’re “pro-life” all they really mean is they’re anti-abortion — that’s it.  To call Republicans “pro-life” is an absolute joke.  Because once that baby is born, they couldn’t care less what happens to it, as long as it votes Republican in 18 years.
Now of course these aren’t the only ways Republicans lie to themselves.  These are just three of the bigger “labels” they give themselves that I find completely absurd.
But I’m sure to any Republican reading this, I’m absolutely wrong.  Sure I am.  Of course, they’ve most likely never voted for a Republican president who’s balanced the budget, they probably support a Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage, and you can bet they support massive cuts to welfare programs that feed millions of poor children.
Like I said, it’s like they live in a delusional bubble that reality is simply unable to penetrate.

Wal-Mart's Employee Food Drive

As the greedy underclass continues to demand a living wage, Wal-Mart generously hosts a food drive for its own employees.  (02:40)

The Colbert Report
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You Might Be Surprised Who Collects on the Tips You Leave at Restaurants

By law your tip is supposed to go to restaurant workers -- often they don't.

 

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Rommel Canlas

November 17, 2013  |  

 

I was asked during a recent interview what happens to the tips we leave in restaurants. Do they actually go to the workers? I said they’re supposed to. Often they don't.
First, tips don't  only go to servers. They are typically shared—with bussers, runners, bartenders, floor captains, and more. These workers receive varying percentages of total tips on top of the abysmally low minimum hourly wage they receive for tipped labor—$2.13 at the federal level, and between $2 and $4 in most states. These workers live off low wages earned from their employers as well as the generosity given by their customers, who decide whether and how much to tip.
By law, restaurants are required to make up the difference between a server's hourly base pay and the federal minimum for all other workers, $7.25. That means restaurants are supposed to calculate how much servers make in tips and ensure that those tips exceed $7.25 per hour on average. This legally required business expense is offset by what's called a "tip credit"—a discount on workers' wages because we, the customers, are asked to pay workers' wages for restaurants.
Having to calculate whether tips actually bring workers' wages up to the federal minimum wage each week can put an incredible burden on small businesses. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Department of Labor reports a violation rate of 84 percent with regard to the tip credit.
Worse, these workers' paltry earnings are often stolen.
One in five servers reports being forced to share tips with management, according to a national survey conducted by my organization. You might think that happens only with cash, not with credit cards. Think again. Restaurants often deduct credit card-processing fees from workers’ tips.
Philadelphia recently passed an ordinance banning the deduction of credit card-processing fees from tips. When the bill was being debated, a local restauranteur complained that he'd lose $500,000 annually. It was a rare case of unintended honesty. He had been skimming half a million dollars from his workers' tips. Sadly, Philadelphia is just one of a few places to ban tip-skimming.
Workers’ tips are stolen in other ways. One of our leaders, Claudia Munoz, tells the story of having worked at the IHOP in Houston while in graduate school. Her hourly base pay $2.13. The IHOP did not bother making sure that her tips brought her hourly wages up to the federal minimum. It reported that she was earning $7.25 an hour regardless of what she earned in tips. The result? No paycheck. Ever. The real $2.13 an hour paid the taxes on the fictional $7.25 an hour.
Claudia describes not being able to afford food, and being so hungry that she’d wait to get to the restaurant so she could flirt with cooks to get extra food. One evening, Claudia worked an overnight shift at the IHOP, and earned some decent tips. But at the end of the night, a couple walked out without paying the bill. The restaurant's management—though it is illegal—required Claudia to pay for the walkout, which was more than everything she earned that night.
Claudia paid $20 to work for nothing.
What can we do as tippers? First, leave tips in cash. Second, demand that tips go solely and directly to workers, and that workers be paid a full, stable, livable base wage. Don't continue subsidizing an industry that should be paying its own workers. No one should be living off tips.

Saru Jayaraman is the co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Behind the Kitchen Door.

 

The Republican Alphabet

Author: Justin "Filthy Liberal Scum" Rosario April 27, 2013 11:55 am

 

Most people don’t know this, but in addition to a remedial civics class, Michelle Bachmann also taught a remedial English course. She started with the basics:
A is for Anti-Christ. See B & O.
B is for Barack – Isn’t that an “exotic” name for a President? George, Ronald and Sarah are far more American sounding.
C is for Christ, who informs all of my decisions, including the ones where I discriminate against the poor and sick. Just like He would!
D is for Death panels and they’re coming to unplug Grandma!
E is for Electoral Campaign Finance Reform. AHAHAHAHAAHH! Just kidding! The letter E is brought to you by, well, Citizens United says I don’t really have to tell you that anymore, do I?
F is for Fascism!!! BE READY TO VIOLENTLY FIGHT THE FASCIST LIBERAL GOVERNMENT AT ANY TIME!!! Nothing bad ever happens when you live your life by this doctrine. If it does, it’s an isolated incident (see I).
G is for God, Guns & Guts. Everything a population needs to run a country wisely.

H is for Health care reform. Get the guns! They’re coming to kill Grandma again!
I(1) is for Immigration. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and I will do everything in my power to disenfranchise and demonize them as a way to maintain the White (not white, White, how many times do I have to clarify that?) hegemony.
I(2) is for Isolated Incident. These unfortunate events that only appear to have been instigated by violent rhetoric are totally unrelated to any other letter in this list (See A,B,D,F,G,H,L,N,O,P,U,X).  Unless the offender is a liberal, then it’s MSNBC’s fault.
J is for Jesus. I can never have too much of him in my life and I want to make sure he’s part of YOURS too, whether you like it or not.
K is for Kansas and Kentucky where evolution is a four letter word. No, seriously, our education system is so bad we can’t spell but wee no wi ain’t relaytuhd 2 no munkey!
L is for Liberal. Liberals hate you and everything about you. They’re plotting to take over the country by force. They also happen to be total wimps and weaklings who hate guns. How are wimps and weaklings without guns going to take over the country? Please see Q.
M is for Marriage between a man and a woman ONLY. Even if it’s Brittany Spears’ 55 hour marriage, it’s still sacred, dammit!
N(1) is for Nazi. Nazis want to destroy America. Anyone who disagrees with you is one of these.
N(2) is for Nig…well I won’t say THAT word about those people or the liberal thought police will come for me but I think you know what I mean (wink wink).
O is for Obama. See N(1) and N(2).
P is for President 1.The highest office of the land. The most powerful man in the world (for now…Palin in 2016!), deserving of our respect and admiration and love and full support during a time of war 2. A secret Muslim foreigner terrorist sympathizer that is out to kill you and all you hold dear. It depends on who we are talking about. See O.
Q is for questions. Never ask any. Ever. About anything.
R is for Ronald Reagan. Ronnie represented a righteous religious revival and rapacious right-wing Republican revolution that ruined Russia. It doesn’t matter that, by the time he left office, he was unable to repeat or understand the previous sentence.
S(1) is for Sarah Palin. Sister Sarah symbolizes strength, serenity, sweetness and street smarts. She supports several serious stances on society’s struggles. Which ones? All potential interviewers please see Q.
S(2) is for Science, which is Satan’s tool. Again, please see Q.
T is for Tea Party. The Tea Party tactlessly trampled through a thicket of town halls by throwing tenacious televised tantrums about terrible tax increases that never happened. “Alliteration? That one of them fancy college words for taking away my Medicare?”
U is for Us vs. Them.
V is for Voting. Voting is a God given right that we would NEVER think of interfering with by forcing people to pay ofr ID they can’t afford, gerrymandering Congressional districts, underfunding voting machines in low income areas, mailing fliers to African Americans with false information, using robo-call centers to convince Hispanics to not vote in protest or anything else you can think of. If you do think of anything else, whatever you do, please don’t suggest it your local GOP campaign headquarters. (1-800-drty-trk)
W is for Wealth redistribution. What goes up must never come down. That would be class warfare!
X is for Xenophobia (courtesy of Chuck Hutchings). “HELLO? WHICH. WAY. TO. THE. BATHROOM? EL BANO? DO. YOU. SPEAK. AMERICAN? Good lord, I hate Canada!”
Y Is for Yesterday when things were so much better than they are today. Women and Negroes knew their place and pinko commie liberals were blacklisted. Don’t you wish we could go back to those good ol’ days? So do we and we’re trying as hard as we can!
Z is for Zero accountability (courtesy of Dave Mann). Words are completely powerless. If words had ANY kind of power at all, our Founding Fathers would have used them to declare our independence or elevated them to first among our rights. So stop blaming every death threat, attempted assassination, anti-government militia and shooting spree on us. It was an isolated incident. They all isolated incidents! See I(2)
Come join me on Facebook, my home blog or just follow me on Twitter @FilthyLbrlScum