Perhaps this war:
Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans — those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 — receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows.
The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression.
While total reported income in the United States increased almost 9 percent in 2005, the most recent year for which such data is available, average incomes for those in the bottom 90 percent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent.
The gains went largely to the top 1 percent, whose incomes rose to an average of more than $1.1 million each, an increase of more than $139,000, or about 14 percent.
(Emphasis mine)
So the rich gets richer while the poor gets poorer. This is the “great economy” that Bush and Republicans love to talk about. Of course all of Congress is considered in the top 10 percent, with a large number in the top 1 percent. So why should they change anything? You ask wingnuts and they say this is perfectly acceptable.
The problems are evident in things such as increases in crime. People are becoming more desperate. The moral of the country is low and we have leaders who are too blind to see that a big cause can be found within these numbers. Were people out partying and having a great time during the Great Depression? No – they were out stealing, killing and breaking the law anyway they can.
Of course this comes out while the war in Washington is going on over the $100 billion for Iraq. In the larger picture, these two go hand in hand as Markos points out:
The reason there is a fight over Iraq funding is because Bush decided not to include such funding in the regular budget.
Why not?
Who knows? Perhaps because his election-year budget presented fictional progress toward a “balanced budget”. If he included his war funding in that budget, he couldn’t pretend a balanced budget was within reach. (A trillion dollar war makes that difficult.)
But let’s not forget, the only reason this fight is being waged, is because Bush chose to underfund our troops in his regular budget.
And now he’s threatening to veto the funding Congress is allocating for the war. In other words — Bush refused to fund the troops in his budget, Congress is providing that funding, and Bush is threatening to veto that funding
Bush acts like his budgets are a work of art, when in fact they are a disaster. He didn’t want to fund Iraq war in this year’s budget so that it could look more balanced. Even worse – the Republicans didn’t look at that last year when they still controlled Congress.
So we have a nation that is going bankrupt full of people with dwindling wallets. How much you want to bet if this continues we start seeing a lot of the upper 5% move to other countries? True that would help relieve the widening gap, but then we would be closer to a third world nation than ever before. Hell we already got the city in ruins, why not make the transformation complete. Thanks George!