Pitting Us Against Each Other

[philunderwood]

Pitting Us Against Each Other

By Walter Williams

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party have led increasingly successful efforts to pit Americans against one another through the politics of hate and envy. Attacking CEO salaries, the president — last year during his Midwest tour — said, "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money."

Let's look at CEO salaries, but before doing so, let's look at other salary disparities between those at the bottom and those at the top. According to Forbes' Celebrity 100 list for 2010, Oprah Winfrey earned $290 million. Even if her makeup person or cameraman earned $100,000, she earned thousands of times more than that. Is that fair? Among other celebrities earning hundreds or thousands of times more than the people who work with them are Tyler Perry ($130 million), Jerry Bruckheimer ($113 million), Lady Gaga ($90 million) and Howard Stern ($76 million). According to Forbes, the top 10 celebrities, excluding athletes, earned an average salary of a little more than $100 million in 2010.

According to The Wall Street Journal Survey of CEO Compensation (November 2010), Gregory Maffei, CEO of Liberty Media, earned $87 million, Oracle's Lawrence Ellison ($68 million) and rounding out the top 10 CEOs was McKesson's John Hammergren, earning $24 million. It turns out that the top 10 CEOs have an average salary of $43 million, which pales in comparison with America's top 10 celebrities, who earn an average salary of $100 million.

When you recognize that celebrities earn salaries that are some multiples of CEO salaries, you have to ask: Why is it that rich CEOs are demonized and not celebrities? A clue might be found if you asked: Who's doing the demonizing? It turns out that the demonizing is led by politicians and leftists with the help of the news media, and like sheep, the public often goes along. Why demonize CEOs? My colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell explained it in his brand-new book, "The Thomas Sowell Reader." One of his readings, titled "Ivan and Boris — and Us," starts off with a fable of two poor Russian peasants. Ivan finds a magic lamp and rubs it, and the jinni grants him one wish. As it turns out, Boris has a goat, but Ivan doesn't. Ivan's wish is for Boris' goat to die. That vision reflects the feelings of too many Americans. If all CEOs worked for nothing, it would mean absolutely little or nothing to the average American's bottom line.

For politicians, it's another story: Demonize people whose power you want to usurp. That's the typical way totalitarians gain power. They give the masses someone to hate. In 18th-century France, it was Maximilien Robespierre's promoting hatred of the aristocracy that was the key to his acquiring more dictatorial power than the aristocracy had ever had. In the 20th century, the communists gained power by promoting public hatred of the czars and capitalists. In Germany, Adolf Hitler gained power by promoting hatred of Jews and Bolsheviks. In each case, the power gained led to greater misery and bloodshed than anything the old regime could have done.

Let me be clear: I'm not equating America's liberals with Robespierre, Josef Stalin and Hitler. I am saying that promoting jealousy, fear and hate is an effective strategy for politicians and their liberal followers to control and micromanage businesses. It's not about the amount of money people earn. If it were, politicians and leftists would be promoting jealousy, fear and hate toward multimillionaire Hollywood and celebrities and sports stars, such as LeBron James ($48 million), Tiger Woods ($75 million) and Peyton Manning ($38 million). But there is no way that politicians could take over the roles of Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga and LeBron James. That means celebrities can make any amount of money they want and it matters not one iota politically.

The Occupy Wall Street crowd shouldn't focus its anger at wealthy CEOs. A far more appropriate target would be the U.S. Congress.

[philunderwood]

Political truism:

When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on Paul’s vote.

[philunderwood]

Obama's Class Warfare: It's All He's Got Left

By David Limbaugh

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

There he goes again. President Obama, on the campaign stump, rails against the "rich," saying our "wealth gap" shows a need for a "fairer approach."

Does he really believe our economic problems have been caused by insufficient taxes on the rich? Insufficient taxes overall? If not, then what can we conclude about his insistence on hammering this point rather than addressing the real causes and real solutions?

Obama's ceaseless attack on the "rich" and his effort to divide Americans on the basis of their income and wealth can best be seen as a diversion, an attempt to distract Americans' attention from his failure to address our interrelated economic malaise and fiscal crises.

Before we can solve our problems, we have to correctly identify them. For starters, we have catastrophic national debt; reckless deficits in excess of $1 trillion since Obama took office, with no end in sight; unsustainable entitlement programs, including Obamacare, which, contrary to Obama's assurances, will dramatically drive up the cost curve further; obscene levels of discretionary spending; administration-driven anti-business regulatory policies; and a depressed economy that is exacerbating our deficit and debt problems.

How about possible solutions? There's a consensus that increasing income taxes during hard economic times, especially on the major wealth producers, is economically suicidal. Everyone also understands that economic uncertainty and excessive regulations suppress economic growth. No one can rationally deny that our entitlement programs, as presently structured, will bankrupt themselves and the nation. And, undeniably, our discretionary spending is out of control.

So how has President Obama approached these problems so far? He was able to force through a massive stimulus package on the theory that government-generated spending of borrowed money would stimulate the economy. He didn't say, "It may or may not work, so we have to take the risk of dangerously increasing the already dangerous national debt, because we have no other options." Rather, he promised that unemployment would come down if we followed him over the cliff. Well, we didn't follow him, but his Democratic Congress did, and he got his stimulus bill passed. And it not only didn't alleviate the problem but also made it much worse; the economy is sicker than it was, and the national debt continues to explode.

Instead of restoring certainty to the economy, he has refused to allow the Bush tax cut rates on the highest incomes to become "permanent." He has substantially ramped up excessive anti-business regulations in pursuit of the environmental crusade of the week. He tried to pass cap and tax, which would have made things much worse, and when he couldn't get Congress to go along, he had his Environmental Protection Agency unlawfully impose unprecedented emission regulations. He continues to submit and deliver budget deficits in excess of $1 trillion as far as the eye can see. He has ignored most spending cut recommendations, even those of his own bipartisan deficit commission. And he's shamelessly scared the elderly to obstruct essential structural entitlement reform.

How is he approaching the problems going forward? Instead of accepting accountability for his failures and reversing course, he has continued to blame his failures on George W. Bush, the Japanese tsunami, the GOP Congress and the wealthy. Instead of tightening his belt in light of the failure of his stimulus plan, he is demanding yet more mind-blowingly enormous stimulus spending.

The blame-Bush meme doesn't pass the laugh test anymore, and the tsunami excuse is embarrassing and pathetic. His effort to blame Republicans is similarly absurd on its face because he did get his agenda through, Obamacare and all, except for cap and trade, which he couldn't get passed even with his Democratic-controlled Congress.

So, how about his continued assault on the rich — his fail-safe scapegoating device, one that flies in the face of everything Obama has ever claimed about himself in terms of bipartisanship, unity, civility and fundamental honesty?

The rich are not under-taxed, as objective statistics and empirical data demonstrate. Not one of the problems plaguing the nation today has been or is being caused by the rich, and punishing them will make the economy and our debt problems worse.

Nevertheless, Obama is ramping up class warfare, trying to turn Americans against one another by stoking the flames of envy and greed. He's even encouraging civil unrest among the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Have we ever had any other president do such a thing?

Obama blames the rich for problems he's causing, despite the absence of causal relationship between the distribution of our national income and wealth and the economic and debt problems we face.

Why? Simply because that's what demagogic community-organizing, Marxist-leaning Alinsky disciples do — and it's disgraceful.

[philunderwood]

Numbers Games

By Thomas Sowell

www.JewishWorldReview.com |

One of the things that has struck me, when I have gone on luxury cruise ships, is that most of the passengers look like they are older than the captain — and luxury cruise ships don't have juveniles as captains.

The reason for the elderly clientele is fairly simple: Most people don't reach the point when they can afford to travel on luxury cruise ships until they have worked their way up the income ladder over a long period of years.

The relationship between age and income is not hard to understand. It usually takes years to acquire the skills and experience that high-paying jobs require, or to build up a clientele for those in business or the professions.

But those in the media and in politics who are currently up in arms, denouncing income inequalities, seldom mention age as a factor in those inequalities.

The shrill rhetoric about differences in income proceeds as if they are talking about income inequalities between different classes of people. It would be hard to get the public all worked up over the fact that young people just starting out in their careers are not making nearly as much money as their parents or grandparents make.

Differences in wealth between the young and the old are even greater than differences in income. Households headed by someone 65 years old and older have more than 15 times as much wealth as households headed by someone under 35 years of age.

But these are not different classes of people, as so often insinuated in runaway political rhetoric. Everybody who is 65 years old was once under 35 years of age. And most people under 35 years of age will someday be 65 years old.

Differences in age are just one of the reasons why the insinuations about income and wealth that are thrown around in the media and in politics are often remote from reality.

While the rhetoric is about people, the statistics are almost invariably about abstract income brackets.

It is easier and cheaper to collect statistics about income brackets than it is to follow actual flesh and blood people as they move massively from one income bracket to another over the years.

More important, statistical studies that follow particular individuals over the years often reach diametrically opposite conclusions from the conclusions reached by statistical studies that follow income brackets over the years.

Currently we are hearing a lot in the media and in politics about the "top one percent" of income earners who are supposedly getting an ever-increasing share of the nation's income.

That is absolutely true if you are talking about income brackets. It is totally untrue if you are talking about actual flesh and blood people.

The Internal Revenue Service can follow individual people over the years because they can identify individuals from their Social Security numbers. During recent years, when "the top one percent" as an income category has been getting a growing share of the nation's income, IRS data show that actual flesh and blood people who were in the top one percent in 1996 had their incomes go down — repeat, DOWN — by a whopping 26 percent by 2005.

How can both sets of statistics be true at the same time? Because most people who are in the top one percent in a given year do not stay in that bracket over the years.

If we are being serious — as distinguished from being political — then our concern should be with what is happening to actual flesh and blood human beings, not what is happening to abstract income brackets.

There is the same statistical problem when talking about "the poor" as there is when talking about "the rich."

A University of Michigan study showed that most of the working people who were in the bottom 20 percent of income earners in 1975 were also in the top 40 percent at some point by 1991. Only 5 percent of those in the bottom quintile in 1975 were still there in 1991, while 29 percent of them were now in the top quintile.

People in the media and in politics choose statistics that seem to prove what they want to prove. But the rest of us should become aware of what games are being played with numbers.

[Ritty77]

This is sad. This is #OWS.