Death spiral of the American middle class

By Tyler Durden

December 18, 2012--Read this and weep...it’s from Reuters' and it’s two years old.:

You mean we knew this crap for a whole year? Now it’s two years old?
 
We’re totally screwed! Totally!

The Unequal State of America: Redistributing Up.

Gee, the same people who paid the politicians off to jimmy the tax code so they can keep more of the money they stole from the taxpayer through other means are now wealthier for doing so?

Looks that way, doesn’t it? The fux!

Showing the flattening of America's wealth distribution Gaussian curve, aka the plunder and accelerating destruction of America's middle class, at the expense of the poorest and the wealthiest. (I didn’t include the chart. Just google Gaussian curve if you insist on additional pain.)

This is nothing but the inevitable outcome of a co-opted, conflicted and controlled marionette government, which does the bidding of the wealthiest lobby powers (read corporate shareholders and Wall Street), partitioning the bulk of the wealth to the richest, while sending the scraps to the poorest in order to keep itself in power due to the power of the ever poorer, democratic majority.

Double fux!

But wait! Can’t we, the middle class, organize and hire lobbyists, too?

Alas, since there is never a free lunch, and since the Fed does not create wealth but through its currency debasement merely accelerates the transfer of wealth, someone ends up footing the bill?
Who?

Don’t tell me! Me? And you? Us schelps? I told you not to tell me!

None other than that part of the US population which made the United States of America the greatest country in the world, and is now watching it implode first slowly, then fast.

Did you notice that, too?

How does Reuters frame this ever-so-critical topic that only impairs the ever more disenfranchised, ever declining middle class, thus few actually bother discussing:

In the town that launched the War on Poverty 48 years ago, the poor are getting poorer despite the government's help. And the rich are getting richer because of it.    

The top 5 percent of households in Washington, D.C., made more than $500,000 on average last year, while the bottom 20 percent earned less than $9,500--a ratio of 54 to 1.

Phuque!

That gap is up from 39 to 1 two decades ago. It's wider than in any of the 50 states and all but two major cities.

This at a time when income inequality in the United States as a whole has risen to levels last seen in the years before the Great Depression.

Americans have just emerged from a close presidential election in which the government's role as a leveling force was fiercely debated.

The right argued the state does too much; the left, too little.

The issue is now at the center of tense negotiations over whose taxes to raise and what social programs to cut before a Jan. 1 deadline.

And the government's role will be paramount again next year if Congress takes up tax reform.

Those fux won’t take up anything but space; which may be a blessing. 

“Tax reform” is just another way of saying “how to get the rest of our money.”

The federal government does redistribute wealth down to struggling Americans.

Bless their hearts.

But in the years since President Lyndon Johnson took aim at poverty in his first State of the Union address, there has been an increasingly strong crosscurrent:

The government is redistributing wealth up, too--especially in the nation's capital.

Fux!

The beneficiaries are not the billionaire financiers and celebrities who
have come to personify income inequality in the 21st century.

Yet the Washington elite are just as much part of the trend, having influenced laws and decisions that alter the entire country's distribution of income.

In summary: crony capitalism for the wealthiest, scrappy socialism for the poorest, and everyone else (that soon to be extinct creature known as the middle class) left to fend for themselves.

Oh, that’s what’s happening.

So, folks, kiss off the middle class; it’s the Mexican model we’re striving for...the super rich and the super poor.

We need to be careful who we vote for to make the process as painless as possible. Look at the bright side....there will always be a job for garbage collection!

Watch for my next post. It is a Naomi Klein dvd explaining how the Argentines dealt with this, after seeing their factories shuttered up and their jobs moved to the lowest bidder.