Perhaps when time permits I will feel sorry for them, but today I am just a bit too busy to do so and tomorrow it pretty booked up too.....

How we wept along with them:

I damn near spit out my water seeing it again.

The author calls bullshit and breaks down the spending of one family who seems to have more dollars than sense.

The article examines their hypothetical spending with the help of Northern Trust Wealth Management, a firm that supposedly knows this segment inside and out. The bank's figures show the sample family to be "$10,000 in the hole every year."

The sample couple lives in a home valued at more than $1 million. Northern Trust estimates their mortgage payments at $87,000 a year.

Stop right there. A $1-million 30-year mortgage would have to carry an interest rate of 7.875% to cost $87,000 a year. Is this plausible? Current figures from bankrate.com place the going rate for jumbo mortgages in the Chicago area at 4.14%.

Would this couple really not have refinanced? Plug the lower rate into the mortgage, and you've saved the family about $30,000 a year; suddenly, they're back in the black. And that's assuming that their mortgage is for the full $1 million, that they didn't buy the house years ago for much less. (Of course, the house could have cost much more than $1 million, but that's not what the article says.)

The article also doesn't emphasize that mortgage interest is tax-deductible; if the mortgage is 10 years old, it could produce a tax break of $15,000-$25,000 per year--a break not available, certainly not on that scale, to a "hypothetical" lower-income household without a million-dollar home. The article also estimates "home maintenance" at more than $2,000 a month, which sounds pretty high unless we're talking about a million-dollar fixer-upper.

And it glosses over much of the hypothetical couples' other expenses, which include club dues, about $400 a week in fine dining and entertainment, a $60,000 new car every four years. These are expenses, of course, that most American families can't shoulder at all and that even for a wealthy couple are frills that can be dispensed with. There's also $22,000 a year in savings for retirement and college, which the typical family can't manage unless it's wealthy.

I used to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. While the editorial page was conservative the news section was independent and it generally had good investment advice.

Then Rupert Murdoch's News Corp took over. The news department is just Fux Noise in print.

Of course they're wringing their hands...Business is people too! Money is speech and Romney can beat Hillary!

"Cocaine is gods way of telling you that you're making too much money" Richard Pryor

The Shocking Redistribution of Wealth in the Past Five Years

by Paul Buchheit
Published on Monday, December 30, 2013 by Common Dreams

Anyone reviewing the data is likely to conclude that there must be some mistake. It doesn't seem possible that one out of twenty American families could each have made a million dollars since Obama became President, while the average American family's net worth has barely recovered. But the evidence comes from numerous reputable sources.

Some conservatives continue to claim that President Obama is unfriendly to business, but the facts show that the richest Americans and the biggest businesses have been the main - perhaps only - beneficiaries of the massive wealth gain over the past five years.

1. $5 Million to Each of the 1%, and $1 Million to Each of the Next 4%

From the end of 2008 to the middle of 2013 total U.S. wealth increased from $47 trillion to $72 trillion. About $16 trillion of that is financial gain (stocks and other financial instruments).

The richest 1% own about 38 percent of stocks, and half of non-stock financial assets. So they've gained at least $6.1 trillion (38 percent of $16 trillion). That's over $5 million for each of 1.2 million households.

The next richest 4%, based on similar calculations, gained about $5.1 trillion. That's over a million dollars for each of their 4.8 million households.

The least wealthy 90% in our country own only 11 percent of all stocks excluding pensions (which are fast disappearing). The frantic recent surge in the stock market has largely bypassed these families.

2. Evidence of Our Growing Wealth Inequality

This first fact is nearly ungraspable: In 2009 the average wealth for almost half of American families was ZERO (their debt exceeded their assets).

In 1983 the families in America's poorer half owned an average of about $15,000. But from 1983 to 1989 median wealth fell from over $70,000 to about $60,000. From 1998 to 2009, fully 80% of American families LOST wealth. They had to borrow to stay afloat.

It seems the disparity couldn't get much worse, but after the recession it did. According to a Pew Research Center study, in the first two years of recovery the mean net worth of households in the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28%, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93% dropped by 4%. And then, from 2011 to 2013, the stock market grew by almost 50 percent, with again the great majority of that gain going to the richest 5%.

Today our wealth gap is worse than that of the third world. Out of all developed and undeveloped countries with at least a quarter-million adults, the U.S. has the 4th-highest degree of wealth inequality in the world, trailing only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon.

3. Congress' Solution: Take from the Poor

Congress has responded by cutting unemployment benefits and food stamps, along with other 'sequester' targets like Meals on Wheels for seniors and Head Start for preschoolers. The more the super-rich make, the more they seem to believe in the cruel fantasy that the poor are to blame for their own struggles.

President Obama recently proclaimed that inequality "drives everything I do in this office." Indeed it may, but in the wrong direction.

FORUM HOSTS, PLEASE NOTE: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.

Original Article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/12/30-0