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Bush Republicans Spread the Wealth—Among Wall Street CEOs
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All the recent talk by the McCain campaign about socialism is making me long for the time when this nation didn’t have any socialism—that is, for the pre-Wall Street bailout days when CEOs weren’t given taxpayer money which they are now using to buy up other companies, to go on half-a-million dollar retreats, to hoard, or to fund lobbying for, what else? More taxpayer money. In short, doing everything with our money but what they were supposed to do: return it to the market so credit again would flow on Wall Street and Main Street.
Spreading the wealth among CEOs via the Bush administration’s socialist policies is a bit unseemly. In fact, it’s downright un-American. Economist Dean Baker sums it up this way:
Last week, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson mailed $150 billion in checks to the big banks. From that point forward, the CEOs and all the other top executives of these banks are now our dependents. They are living off the tax dollars of schoolteachers in Iowa, truck drivers in Montana and even Joe the Plumber.
It is difficult to understand why we should be taxing people who make $40,000 a year to boost the paychecks of bankers who make more than $1 million a year and in many cases more than $10 million a year. Sen. McCain has called Sen. Obama a socialist because Obama believes that it is OK to impose higher tax rates on rich people than poor people. Sen. McCain considers this sort of redistribution unacceptable.
But, if redistribution from the rich to the rest of the country is socialist, what do you call the upward redistribution that Congress approved in the bailout package? It’s hard to justify taxing people who make $40,000 a year to benefit bankers who make more than 100 times as much.
Spreading the wealth—our wealth as taxpayers—through Wall Street socialism, means exacerbating the nation’s massive income inequality. Which, in turn, means an end to the American Dream of economic mobility. Just like in socialist countries.
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4 Comments
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ah, if he only were a socialist, maybe I would have some hope that things would really change…
btw, where can we get a printable copy of that poster?
Lets not forget it was the Democrats policies during Clinton that started the sub prime meltdown that was a major factor for the bailout. It was also a bipartisan effort that pushed it through against the will of the people. Both parties are out of touch with what the American people want.
Not exactly true. This goes back to Reaganomics and the deregulation that started back in the 80′s. A Republican majority Congress put these things in motion back then. It started to unravel during the Clinton administration, but remember, Clinton is not part of the Legislative branch, and he did what he could, but he was limited by a Republican dominated Congress. Things really escalated due to even more deregulation and less oversight during the Bush administration, with again a Republican dominated Congress (except for the last two years; but there is still no veto-proof majority for the Democrats; therefore Democrats get blamed for things they still cannot change even when they want to). If we can pinpoint one important item, it would be that Reagan appointed Alan Greenspan, who firmly believed that the markets can regulate themselves, with no oversight or interference. Perhaps, the one thing Clinton could have done was replace Greenspan with a more fiscally responsible head of the Federal Reserve.