Chronically Pissed

I'm Not Dead

Yet.

I think it's about time to get back to the business of purging my soul of the countless angry, brilliant, vulgar, insightful, cynical, and/or completely useless thoughts I have on a daily basis. I shall attempt to bestow these gems upon you in a more consistent manner than has been the case for some time. Please don't go to any trouble planning a "Welcome Back, CP!" party or parade. I should prefer that you simply send money, food, and or ticker tape directly to my residence, whereupon I will spend it, eat it, or incorporate it into a bizarre and possibly violent (but always consensual) sexual ritual - not necessarily respectively.

So...where to start? Let's start with a chart:

The above chart, from The Nation, gives a nice historical view of income inequality in the U.S. over the last hundred years. Now let's cross-reference it with another chart, showing the top marginal tax rates over roughly the same period of time:

Okay...so what are a few cheap and easy conclusions that can be reached with those charts and a third grade education? Well, I suppose we could conclude that allowing the gap between the rich and poor to get too wide doesn't seem to be sound economic policy. The argument invariably centers on whether government should "redistribute" that wealth by way of tax policy, but let's throw it back into the hands of the free-market capitalists for a moment. It needn't come to governement intervention in your precious markets. If the über-rich would simply use the skyrocketing wealth created by lower tax rates and rising profits to create more jobs and pay better wages and benefits, that gap wouldn't get so out of control so quickly and to such devastating ends. I, for one, am happy to keep your tax rates much lower than, say 90%, where they stood through much of the 1950's, if only you'll "mind the gap."

See, what happens when you sit your fat fucking asses on all of that cash is that cash gets scarce out here in the the world outside your fat fucking asses. If we don't have cash to buy the shit you're selling, things start to get kind of ugly for everyone. You start laying people off, closing factories, and foreclosing on homes so that you won't have to pull any of that cash out of your fat fucking asses. You then proceed to bitch about how the American consumer isn't spending any money on the shit you're selling which is why you can't hire people. In reality, it's not that you don't have the money to hire people. You don't have the money to hire people while continuing to grow your bottom line, by which I mean "continuing to stick cash up your ass." So while you're worried about the slowing rate of cash being shoved up your ass, most of us are worried about having any cash at all.

So you've really left us with no choice. You've simply got too much cash up your fat fucking ass. It's not that anyone really wants to reach in there and take it from you, it's just that you're not minding the gap. You've either got to start hiring, paying better wages, and providing better benfits or we will put on our rubber gloves and come get some of that cash. It won't be pleasant, but we'll do what we have to do.

Days of Whine and Roses

Allow me to agree with Phil Gramm for a moment. We are a nation of whiners. Always whining about having our capital gains taxed, about having our multi-million dollar estates taxed when we die, about not being allowed to drill for oil in the arctic wilderness, about not wanting to be prosecuted for conspiring with the Bush administration to illegally tap the phones of Americans, about Americans' inability to understand why gas costs so much while the oil industry racks up record profits, or their failure to comprehend why compensation for corporate executives needs to skyrocket while everyone else watches their wages fall, about the debilitating burdens that would be placed on corporations by greenhouse gas emission standards, about the need to rescue giant financial institutions that have sunk themselves by getting too greedy and too deceptive, about the "myth" of global warming, about liberal bias in the media, and on and on and on...

We are, indeed, a nation of whiners. Oh sure, these whiners may only represent 5% of the population, but they also represent 95% of the nation's wealth. Naturally their whining should be considered in proporation to their status as the financial majority. It's too bad they have chosen to make America look like a land of whimpering pantywaists, with their endless complaints about the ways in which their endless fortunes are being purloined by the fiscal minority.

I salute Phil Gramm for speaking truth to power, for standing up to the top 95% in defense of the bottom 5%. I hope his words will be a catalyst for change and that the whiners among us will stop their snot-nosed sniveling.