Economic Recession, Consumer Depression

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Unemployment sky-rocking.
Foreclosures sky-rocking.
Cuts on federal/state/county/city infrastructure budgets sky-rocking.
Cuts on education sky-rocking.
Job Outsourcing sky-rocking.
Corporation PROFITS sky-rocking.
We all know/feel there is something really wrong with this picture. And we know that really bad consequences are lining-up for the future of this nation. But we the people still believe that our democratic system is intact. We believe that this game of liberals vs. conservatives is really going to change the above picture and make things better. Unfortunately the row true is still to be unveiled. Americans have not yet awaken to the harsh reality that our democratic-republic has been hijacked and turn into a corporate-republic. Therefore very few Americans are ready to demand what I call "The separation of corporate and state"
Here is a simple but clear bill that needs to be introduced/forced via a people referendum (because it is clear that neither the house and much less the senate will ever approve this bill):
"The separation of corporate and state" bill:
1) No person related directly or indirectly to a private company/sector within the last 10 years should be appointed to a government position. Most of all if that position can have some serious impacts either positive or negative to that private company or sector. No, this is not just a campaign contribution reform. We really need the members of our government to really "be of the people for the people and by the people."
2) 5% taxes to people's income up to $200,000 a year and 95% taxes to the income above $200,000 a year. (This was done before by President Roosevelt and had a tremendous positive impact on US economy after WWII) Let me explain this clearly so all of mathematically-slow people up there can understand it. If you make $210,000 a year, $200,000 of it will be taxed at 5% rate and $10,000 of it will be taxed at 95% rate. If you make less than $200,000 then all you pay is 5%. If you make $500,000 then $200,000 of it is taxed at 5% rate and $300,000 of it is taxed at 95% rate. Are we clear? Ok.
3) Get rid of this toxic,dirty and full-of-blood "federal reserve note" and bring back the "Unites State of America note". We need to stop paying interest on our deficit!!! For God sake!!! We are the only nation in the entire world that pays interest on their own currency!!! It is ridiculous!!!
I know this may seem very drastic for some of you. But don't forget drastic situations require drastic measures.

liberybell of CA 2:34PM March 25, 2010

Talk about American psych; we have not seen "nothing yet!" Imagine paying Russia, India, China, Spain, Cuba for oil they drill off our coastline. Because of Environmentalist and politicians and lobby groups, are you Kidding me? It is the American way, save the trees, burn down homes, save the birds take down the wind-turbon creating machine energy savers. And now save our coastlines so Russia, India, China, Spain can ruin them, are you kidding me! The American Psych is hurting and damaged, so true economy is in a recession and we the consumers are in a depression. God help America!

Kimo Sanchez of CA 7:20PM August 14, 2009

Yes I'd say so. Because there are too many of us that have lost our jobs and are not seeing much out there to replace it. Employers that are offering jobs are swapped with applicants which makes it an employers market. They pick the best applicant for the least pay they can give.

Rebecca Hamilton of KS 6:10PM June 30, 2009

Hey Mark of AK! Socialism all the way, baby! Marx and Castro in, Adam Smith and Greenspan, OUT! Get used to it!

HARDY CAMPBELL of TX 1:45PM June 09, 2009

If I work for the Government, This is good, Good pay expense account and no need to worry about a pension and drive a Nissan. Then Wall street, I have made my money Hid it off shore Drive a Toyota and have three kids in School looking at 2.5 million on retirement. Then work for a News-Net have a good Job drive a Honda looking at a small pension and as long as the Auto industry is in turmoil I have a job. Then the Auto industry is now in a place ,that Part time workers in job shops making parts for GM Ford Toyota Chrysler Honda Nissan in America are looking at their Jobs Pensions and life Going down the Drain drive American cars built by GM Ford and Chrysler but can't afford to spend ? How are you confused,this must be 2 million people plus dealerships another million. 21 million on Drugs in the USA wouldn't care much ,60 million working for the Government would not care. Then guess your right no depression here.

Plano of FL 12:06PM May 28, 2009

Sure the feds are cutting taxes on some Americans. What about the self employed? We pay taxes at the end of the year and a tax cut now won’t help until later if at all. The new sin taxes implemented by states in excess of 200% or more on smoking, alcohol and soon caffeine. Don't smoke or drink these liquids? Well over 50% of all consumers do and we spend less on goods and the states get more. In the end this is horrible for the economy because a $20-$50 dollar tax on a carton of smokes a week could have been spent at your non smoking establishment or business.
Ok let’s have an example shall we! I used to go out to eat with the wife every Friday but since the new taxes we stopped. We went in on a special day and the owner came to us and asked why we weren’t coming around any more? We explained about the tax hikes and how the Friday night out had to be cut and a little more. He replied that he supports the tax hike because smoking is bad for you. I said back that the tax is even worse for you because the additional tax cost you about 100 dollars a week and me nothing but a few dirty dishes at home and a walk in the park on Friday instead of a bar stool. I also said if it is so bad make it illegal not tax the HE!! Out of it (I support this because the states would offer free help to quite or reduced). They wont illegalize it because of the $$$$ they make and YOU not me loose. Next tax hike we are going to cut out the satellite bill and local video rental ((NETFLIX)) will be the new source.
Increases in alcohol taxes are on the way or are already in place. I now drink 6 beers a month and will cut out all soon. Fuel tax is also about 50 cents to the gallon before sales tax and has been so for years and for years now we have cut out our vacation outside our area.
I don’t know why idiot economists can't figure this out and recommend to cut taxes. You raise taxes either we move or we cut spending and the only ones hurt are the people. Don't like smoking? Neither do I! Then quite? Ok I am trying but just so you know how hard it is hold your breath for 60 seconds - EXHALE - Now repeat every time you want air. This is what it is like. Now let’s chuck a tax on that action and see if you quite or just cut bills. No matter what the tax benefits it will only hurt. Why not increase state speeding fines? I will tell you why it won’t work - in most cases speeding isn't an addiction but smoking is. People will just drive better/safer but smokers will change living style.
A lesson in simple economics is unless you make more you can’t spend more (unless you haven't learned loans and credit cards are BAD). If you tax me more I spend less and who benefits? The poor and I don't mind this but if you aren't receiving state aid in any way you GET NOTHING! Actually less than nothing because I won’t spend the money I paid in taxes because the state took it. A bill or a luxury have to be cut. So far we cut driving, took 1 car off the road to cut insurance, Cut our night out

Tim Olejar of MI 8:17AM April 24, 2009

And to think that college graduates cannot find work! Perhaps it is because of all of the useless, socialistic, esteem-enhancing, victim studies pap that has passed for higher education for the last couple of decades. Blake's "We the People" are going to witness firsthand how ineffective the policies they have long been advocating really are. Go see a Penn or Sarandon movie, won't you? Or a Boss concert? Hey, travel to Cuba will be allowed soon - you can bask amongst their perfect system and then tell us everything we've done wrong.

Mark of AK 5:58PM February 11, 2009

I get a cost of living raise for my SSDI and then my food stamps get cut. The electric bill is high, so is the gas,and where do I cut corners. I have to pay rent,and all the utilites. So the way I figure "we the people need help or we will starve".
With the cost of food and the $217 food stamps don't even make it through the month. I don't have any extra money, so that leaves the food pantries---and they bearly have any food to hand out....so of it is expired or rotten.
So I hope Bush gets infested with fleas, cuz he's the one who started this whole mess.And Obama is trying his best to fix it.
But I hope they don't for the hungry right here in the USA.

Janine Cone of IL 3:26AM February 10, 2009

Here is an article about the fed chairman during the time of the Great Depression and what he thought caused it. The same thing is happening again for the same reasons. Please read:
In Review: America's Most Egalitarian Banker
Marriner S. Eccles, Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal Recollections. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951.
At the start of the Great Depression, Marriner Eccles hardly seemed someone who might lead a charge against the economic orthodoxies that justified grand hoards of private fortune. By the early 1930s, after all, the Utah-born Eccles had become the top banker in the Mountain West, the organizer of the first multibank holding company in the United States.
But Eccles had also come to understand, after watching the great speculative bubbles of the 1920s pop into massive misery, that prosperity — to endure — needs to be shared. Eccles began speaking out on that theme, shortly after the Great Depression began, and soon caught the attention of the early New Dealers.
In 1933, Eccles would become an assistant secretary of the treasury. A year later, Franklin Roosevelt would appoint him to the Federal Reserve Board. He would become Board chair in 1935 and remain in that central position for the next 13 years. No one individual, over those years, had more of an impact on economic policy in the United States.
Looking back on those years, in his 1951 memoir Beckoning Frontiers, Eccles would do his best to explain the impact he set out to make. Mass production, he noted at the outset, demands mass consumption, but people can’t afford to consume if the wealth an economy generates is concentrating at the top.
In the years leading up to the Great Depression, that concentrating was accelerating. A “giant suction pump,” charged Eccles, “had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth.”
“In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands,” Eccles observed, “the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.”
Sound familiar? The decade of the 1920s that Eccles describes in his 1951 memoir comes across today as eerily familiar. Then as now, the U.S. economy was floating on a sea of debt.
Then as now, inequality was hollowing out the nation. Eccles put the matter bluntly: “Had there been a better distribution of the current income from the national product — in other words, had there been less savings by business and the higher-income groups and more income in the lower groups — we should have had far greater stability in our economy.”
How would Eccles have reacted to our current debt-ridden, war-torn economy? We can’t, of course, know for sure what Eccles would do. But we do know what he did. In 1942, during World War II, a high-powered team of New Deal officials that included Eccles proposed to President Roosevelt that “a ceiling of fifty thousand dollars after taxes should be placed on individual incomes.”
In our current dollars, this $50,000 ceiling would equal about $700,000. What did FDR do with the Eccles proposal? He turned around and asked Congress to place a 100 percent tax on all individual income over $25,000.
Congress would eventually set the nation’s top tax rate at 94 percent on all income over $200,000, and that top tax rate would hover around 90 percent for the next two decades, years that would see the greatest period of middle class prosperity in U.S. economic history.
In 2005, the latest year with statistics available, America’s leading hedge fund managers and the rest of the nation’s top 400 income-earners faced a top tax rate of 35 percent. They actually paid, after loopholes, just 18.2 percent of their incomes in tax.
Marriner Eccles would not approve.
Stat of the Week
In the two decades between 1986 and 2005, America’s top 1 percent of taxpayers saw their share of the nation’s income jump from 11.3 to 21.2 percent. Over those same years, the federal income taxes the top 1 percent paid dropped by an equally stunning margin, from 33.13 percent of total personal income in 1986 to 23.13 percent in 2005, the most current year with IRS stats available. Taxpayers needed to report at least $364,657 in 2005 to enter the top 1 percent.
About Too Much
Too Much is published by the Council on International and Public Affairs, a nonprofit research and education group founded in 1954. Office: Suite 3C, 777 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017. E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org

John Petty of MD 7:26PM October 24, 2008

Here is an article about the fed chairman during the time of the Great Depression and what he thought caused it. The same thing is happening again for the same reasons. Please read:
In Review: America's Most Egalitarian Banker
Marriner S. Eccles, Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal Recollections. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951.
At the start of the Great Depression, Marriner Eccles hardly seemed someone who might lead a charge against the economic orthodoxies that justified grand hoards of private fortune. By the early 1930s, after all, the Utah-born Eccles had become the top banker in the Mountain West, the organizer of the first multibank holding company in the United States.
But Eccles had also come to understand, after watching the great speculative bubbles of the 1920s pop into massive misery, that prosperity — to endure — needs to be shared. Eccles began speaking out on that theme, shortly after the Great Depression began, and soon caught the attention of the early New Dealers.
In 1933, Eccles would become an assistant secretary of the treasury. A year later, Franklin Roosevelt would appoint him to the Federal Reserve Board. He would become Board chair in 1935 and remain in that central position for the next 13 years. No one individual, over those years, had more of an impact on economic policy in the United States.
Looking back on those years, in his 1951 memoir Beckoning Frontiers, Eccles would do his best to explain the impact he set out to make. Mass production, he noted at the outset, demands mass consumption, but people can’t afford to consume if the wealth an economy generates is concentrating at the top.
In the years leading up to the Great Depression, that concentrating was accelerating. A “giant suction pump,” charged Eccles, “had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth.”
“In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands,” Eccles observed, “the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.”
Sound familiar? The decade of the 1920s that Eccles describes in his 1951 memoir comes across today as eerily familiar. Then as now, the U.S. economy was floating on a sea of debt.
Then as now, inequality was hollowing out the nation. Eccles put the matter bluntly: “Had there been a better distribution of the current income from the national product — in other words, had there been less savings by business and the higher-income groups and more income in the lower groups — we should have had far greater stability in our economy.”
How would Eccles have reacted to our current debt-ridden, war-torn economy? We can’t, of course, know for sure what Eccles would do. But we do know what he did. In 1942, during World War II, a high-powered team of New Deal officials that included Eccles proposed to President Roosevelt that “a ceiling of fifty thousand dollars after taxes should be placed on individual incomes.”
In our current dollars, this $50,000 ceiling would equal about $700,000. What did FDR do with the Eccles proposal? He turned around and asked Congress to place a 100 percent tax on all individual income over $25,000.
Congress would eventually set the nation’s top tax rate at 94 percent on all income over $200,000, and that top tax rate would hover around 90 percent for the next two decades, years that would see the greatest period of middle class prosperity in U.S. economic history.
In 2005, the latest year with statistics available, America’s leading hedge fund managers and the rest of the nation’s top 400 income-earners faced a top tax rate of 35 percent. They actually paid, after loopholes, just 18.2 percent of their incomes in tax.
Marriner Eccles would not approve.
Stat of the Week
In the two decades between 1986 and 2005, America’s top 1 percent of taxpayers saw their share of the nation’s income jump from 11.3 to 21.2 percent. Over those same years, the federal income taxes the top 1 percent paid dropped by an equally stunning margin, from 33.13 percent of total personal income in 1986 to 23.13 percent in 2005, the most current year with IRS stats available. Taxpayers needed to report at least $364,657 in 2005 to enter the top 1 percent.
About Too Much
Too Much is published by the Council on International and Public Affairs, a nonprofit research and education group founded in 1954. Office: Suite 3C, 777 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017. E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org