Funds for Social Security and Medicare come out of our paychecks for our entire working lives. They are not transfer payments.
Tatin, when you talk about the people in power, it sounds like you’re talking about elected officials, lobbyists,etc. But they’re not generally the .01%. The people with the real power are the largely invisible puppet masters behind those folks. The Koch brothers, for example.
“I am sorry you take it that way. It was simply an illustration of a feeling, nothing else. That at that moment I knew how it felt to know I didn’t stand a chance simply because of my color! Well, at least that is what we white Americans are being told constantly, that this is how black people feel.
I worked in a virtual United Nations hospital pharmacy in an extremely diverse area. My bosses always tried to hire the best person for the job. Period.”
I’m not highly insulted, or anything. 
It’s just always been aggravating to me when people assume you were hired because of your minority status, when odds are, you were more qualified than they were, at time of hire. I do not believe that people of competence who are confident feel that way, no matter their color nor ethnicity. And anyone who is telling them they are not going to get the job because they aren’t white isn’t doing anyone any favors.
Although dressed up to appear superficially like pension plans, they are pay as you go schemes where current taxpayers’ money directly pays the recipients’ benefits, rather than going into a true pension fund to eventually pay current taxpayers’ benefits in the future. I.e. they are transfer payments.
The rise of the “1%” or whatever you want to call them is correlated to the decline of the working class and is responsible at least in part with the economic situation they are in. The gains in the top .5-1%, if you look at their income, is generally not in cash salaries, it is in the value of stock they are given in compensation. When you read about CEO’s making 30 million a year, their cash bonus and salary is likely only about 1 million of that, the rest is in stock. Likewise, among the top .5-1 %, a lot of their income is in investments (read stock)…and that stock based compensation has problems with it. In most companies, for example, ordinary workers, including middle level workers, make most of their compensation via cash salary and bonuses (if they have them), so it is a very small minority that benefit the most with the stock based system. The problem? We have switched from stakeholder management, to stockholder management, and guess what one of the biggest things you can do to boost stock prices? You got it, get rid of labor. The shift in manufacturing to China was driven by this, whether it was WalMarts gambit of ‘cheapest prices’, or if it was basically getting a huge, quick return, by shipping manufacturing to third world countries and using the same technology to produce it, they were cutting their labor costs by significant amounts and when stock analysts see that, guess what happens to the stock price…
Stocks and investments are weird beasts,and their valuation is not what Joe and Jane average think, it is based upon the analysis of the so called stock analysts, who quite frankly when they look at a company don’t give a rat’s tail whether a company just shipped 10,000 jobs to China and that those 10,000 people now can’t buy things, in a sense the stock analysts represent the pinnacle of this argument, because most of them are the elite products of the top business schools, the Harvard/Wharton/Yale/Kellog/Of of Chicago grads, who basically are taught not to care (want proof? Management books used to talk about stakeholder management, they don’t any more).
The other aspect is automation, that has also cut deeply into well paying jobs, and again gets rid of pesky labor and all the costs associated with it. Makes management and well of stockholders smile, the biggest beneficiaries of this stuff, but has left a lot of pain.
These job losses don’t affect the elites, they haven’t replaced CEO’s or COO’s or CFO’s with H1B visa holders, or robots yet, and likely won’t, and if you look at the numbers, the only group that consistently has had their income increasing at rapid rates is this group, pure and simple. The people the OP is talking about have seen their wages decline significantly, and have gone from being solid working class to being on the margins of the underclass.
This process has been going on for decades, the clothing manufacturing and furniture manufacturing that once went down south for cheaper labor, fled overseas, and now a lot of other manufacturers have either gone overseas or put in massively automated plants. The politicians in those areas for decades has fed a stream of propoganda, at first that the jobs were lost to affirmative action to blacks and women, then it became because of the mean old central govn’ment with its EPA and taxes and regulations, get rid of that, and why dear old conglomerate would come and open plants and they would flourish. The same populations told them that these policies were the results of damn liberals, and that it was those same liberals who were against the low tax policies in their states, wanted to raise taxes on them (meanwhile, of course, leaving out that those low tax states education systems were inferior and couldn’t produce the jobs for the new economy).
What has happened is the group in question IMO has realized they were played, that the tax cuts that were supposed to bring economic joy did only so to the upper 1%; that the ‘revolution’ being promoted ended up benefitting the elites while leaving them with nothing. The religious right was promised if they supported these views, which they did, putting religious teaching behind things like Jesus was a capitalist and taxes were the devil’s work, they would be given a 'Christian America", but they too have learned. A prominent evangelical minister (religious right) was asked why he supported Trump, even though Trump as a religious figure is more than a bit of a joke, and he said they were electing a president to try and make their lives better, not a preacher in chief (compare that to past elections…).
This group might still believe that blacks situation is their own fault, but they also no longer buy that their problems are the work of affirmative action or tax policy or regulation, they realize that the economic elites used them, they don’t trust them, and now we have the leading candidate who has seemingly turned his back on the elites, scares them, says “I don’t owe anyone anything”,and they grasp onto that. One of the reasons they support the candidate they do, and let’s say not a candidate like one of the Democrats, is that they don’t believe there is any difference, that the politicians on all sides sold themselves out to the elites (and there is truth to that IMO), and that if they voted ‘the other side’ all they would get is the shaft once again.
There is a reason so many people want non establishment candidates. We have been divided into sub groups, pitted against each other. Instead of trying to pull everyone up, people are obsessed with punishing the top. My success has not been at the expense of anyone else.
We need normal, regular, non college graduate type jobs again. We do need to incentivize companies to bring manufacturing back here. We don’t need to increase minimum wage, we need opportunities for advancement in various industries. No one should think a fast food worker is the highest career level someone should achieve.
The best way to stay in power is to make the population dependent on free goodies and handouts and bring in foreign workers for jobs easily done here. Right now there are a lot of political elites on both sides in a tizzy over the notion of losing power.
Maybe what we all really start screaming about is term limits.
In education, it does not make sense to pull down the top to raise up the bottom. Better schools, better teachers, less poverty, would benefit all. There is not a finite amount of brain power or learning (although the cost to bring up the bottom performers is real). In the US economy, however, there is not an infinite source of money and in most companies, there is only a certain amount of profit. If the CEO is making 25 times when the lowest working is being paid, in order for the low wage workers to get more money, either the CEO and others at the top need to make less or the company has to reduce its profits. The ratio of top pay to bottom pay has risen in many sectors. This gap is greater than in the US than in most other countries.
What I don’t quite understand is how those that have the least seem to think that those that the most are interested in making their lives better. And the persistent myth that there is a clear path to wealth in the US and that if we deregulated that wealth, those in the middle and at the bottom would thrive.
This was the huge take away from the article, of which I am not surprised.
“and a black applicant with a clean criminal record did no better than a white applicant who was said to have just been released from 18 months in prison.”
It is mighty hard to live with those type of odds, build wealth??, forget about it.
“It is mighty hard to live with those type of odds, build wealth??, forget about it.”
Yeah, may as well just give up and not even try. Blow all your money, why bother with an education, pack it in.
Strangely, though, I know many highly educated, well paid professional black men and women. I guess their parents didn’t teach them to forget about it, but to go for it.
“The rise of the “1%” or whatever you want to call them is correlated to the decline of the working class and is responsible at least in part with the economic situation they are in. The gains in the top .5-1%, if you look at their income, is generally not in cash salaries, it is in the value of stock they are given in compensation. When you read about CEO’s making 30 million a year, their cash bonus and salary is likely only about 1 million of that, the rest is in stock. Likewise, among the top .5-1 %, a lot of their income is in investments (read stock)…and that stock based compensation has problems with it”
Am I misreading your numbers? You can’t possibly be talking about the top 0.5-1.0 percent of people being in this category. That group mostly consists of doctors, lawyers, dual income professionals, and small business owners, who don’t get paid in stock, and have not shared in the massive gains at the very top.
@busdriver11, please dispense with your snark. Faced with facts, you will stick to your guns. I am one of those “professional black women” that doesnt change the fact that many times we are still passed over.
We can go to school, raise great kids, etc, etc, and yet still get passed over because of a name on a our resume.
Partyof5, you are the one who said, “build wealth? Forget about it.”
I would rather be stubborn and snarky than just give up on anything. And I sure wouldn’t want to pass on a hopeless attitude to my kids. I’d much rather have them believe they can accomplish anything, no matter how hard it is.
@Cobra - Regarding redlining, about 30 years ago I visited a savings and loan. They had a census map of the MSA on the wall with the all of the poor/minority census tracts redlined. I asked them why, and the lady told us those were areas they were not supposed to make loans as the home values were too low and the risk of default was too high.
A few years ago, I visited a another financial institution and they had a similar census tract map on the wall with the same low income/minority areas blacklined. I asked the lady why they were blacklined, and she said that if the loan originators made loans in these areas, they got a bonus of $500. I asked her why, and she offered that the Federal regulators forced them to make loans in these high risk areas, and, if they did not, they would be restricted from making loans in other, more profitable areas.
Great post, @musicprnt .
@eyemamom , you are going to be my write in candidate on the ballot in November 
Some civics required here.
The flyover and smaller states are not overrepresented, as representation based on population was always only prescribed to the House.
However, it was obvious that population density changes would give some states more representatives in the House than others, thereby putting the less populous states (e.g., many flyover states) at the mercy of the more populous states. This was remedied by the Senate with each state having two senators.
Therefore, the Senate, opposite to what the quote above says, is not an overrepresentation, but is specifically designed to rebalance the representation so that states, such as the flyover states, are not underrepresented. The Senate actually makes the power more balanced, not overrepresented, because the flyover states have fewer representatives already and would be at a gross disadvantage without the Senate backstop.
Fundamentally, the purpose of the Senate is to preserve federalism by ensuring state sovereignty and make it so that one state cannot overrun or bully another; with equal votes in the Senate, small states need not listen to bigger states, which may be working against their (the smaller states) interests.
Very timely to this thread, I just ate at my favorite Italian restaurant in San Francisco. I was by myself, and they sat a young black woman right next to me, who was also by herself. We started chatting about how great the food was, and then we talked about our jobs. She was a software engineer, full of confidence, intelligence, and an amazingly positive attitude. Her brother was a mechanical engineer, well employed, as was her father. We talked about how interviewing was merely a game, how it was all about projecting confidence.
I can’t imagine her saying that she couldn’t do something because of her sex or skin color. Exuding confidence, she was ready to take on the world, brilliant, happy, kind. I wanted to set her up with my son, but that seemed a little forward, for someone she’d just met (and yes, I picked up her bill). I hope there are many more people out there like her. She believed in herself, so how could one not agree?
I’d bet that young woman will go far too. That doesn’t change the fact that discrimination exists. And it doesn’t change the fact that there aren’t enough good jobs to go around for all the bright capable people who need them.
“I’d bet that young woman will go far too. That doesn’t change the fact that discrimination exists. And it doesn’t change the fact that there aren’t enough good jobs to go around for all the bright capable people who need”
I’m not disagreeing with that at all. However, a positive attitude and tremendous self confidence will go a lot farther than deciding one has too many strikes against them to even try.
Someone very dear to me got an accounting degree at age 40. Applied for a few jobs, got turned down, and decided it would be impossible to get a good job because of age and weight. Told me she cleared 12K last year at the job she is grossly overqualified for, and hates. Not looking for anything else, because apparently it’s a lost cause. This person is extremely smart and personable, but the lack of self confidence had held her back.
A neighbor got her MD degree after her last kid finished school. She was a palliative care doc and is now a medical director for medical insurer.
I still recall being told by some nasty classmates in law school that OBVIOUSLY the only reason I was admitted was due to affirmative action, never mind my qualifications. It made me mad, but I chose to just excel and show the school it did well awarding me so much merit aid!