Wanna know where a lot of the money "gained" over 32 years of Trickle Down economics -- including a buttload "lost" in the great Bankster Bailout -- went?

If it is posted in a separate thread then we can bookmark it and use it as a reference.

Thanks.

And if it isn't too much trouble, please send me a message so that I can recommend it again. Thanks.

Lies and propaganda and bread and circuses. I'm down here near the bottom, but I don't see a way out. Looks to me like the upper class got the whole thing sewed up.

Or the evil of whoring politicians who then lecture us that food stamp cuts are necessary.

Wait a minute!

I'm expected to live on less than that in a year with my Social Security.

Is there no social justice left?

Yet, we are to do with less so those with more can get more.

Mention this out loud and people look at me like I was channeling Trotsky.

Thanks Octafish!

by JEFFREY SOMMERS and MICHAEL HUDSON
CounterPunch, Dec. 12-14, 2014

The Koch Brothers are the closest thing the United States has to Russia’s oligarchs. They fuse ownership of the economy and state, using the latter to enrich themselves while making private gains through the public’s losses. Their idea of a “market economy” is to buy government officials and the assets they privatize at giveaway prices.

The top three butlers at the Koch’s nouveau riche ‘Downton Abbey’ are Governors Sam Brownback of Kansas, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, and Chris Christie of New Jersey. All three ran elections based on the anti-Keynesian oxymoron of promoting job creation by balancing budgets with regressive tax plans. All declared that cutting taxes (chiefly on their wealthy campaign contributors) was the way to achieve their goal (more campaign contributions). All have served at least one term in office and the results are in: Their rates of job creation and income growth are way below the national average. Rather than closing budget deficits, tax cuts create them – providing more excuse to privatize state assets, post-Soviet style.

Brownback simply hopes to stay on the job as governor of the state where the Kochs’ corporate headquarters are located. Despite flagging poll numbers, he remained in office thanks to a mildly tawdry incident involving his Democratic opponent’s youthful visit to a strip club (in the era of talk radio and Fox News, anything can be manufactured into a scandal). Christie and Walker, by contrast, have presidential aspirations and are raising funding as the two top prospects from the Kochs’ political farm team.

The looming public danger ahead is how these Koch governors will ‘repair’ the fiscal potholes their tax policies are creating. Chanting the GOP refrain of ‘lower tax rates good, higher taxes bad’ as their stage-magic abracadabra, they proselytize Arthur Laffer’s cocktail napkin ‘Laffer Curve’ depicting lower tax rates delivering higher tax revenues as a sacred scroll – its inevitable failure leading to privatization of rent-extracting opportunities in a Yeltsin-like post-Soviet policy under the banner of free markets.

All three Koch Governors are following this fiscal folly of widening budget deficits. The effect is to force more cutbacks in public services, with sermons exhorting voters to tighten their belts while the Kochs gorge themselves on the tax cuts enacted by their pet governors.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/12/the-koch-brothers-governors-butlers-selling-the-publics-silver/

Given the normal work year, 2080 hours, opposed to 8766 hours in a year, they would be 'earning" over 4 times as much per work minute...

They don't work nearly that hard.

Last edited Mon Dec 15, 2014, 01:01 AM - Edit history (1)

Let's covert each of those minutes into a year's wages per taxpayer… $25,694 from Buffett's amount let's say… Heck double that and you have over 50,000 dollars. But let's set a minimum wage as $25,694 just for an example.

That would mean that we'd have between 722 to 1,440 people paying individual income, property and other taxes, sales taxes on goods and services and contributing to the economy through purchases thereof. Local governments would have ready revenue for public services, schools and infrastructure improvements.

That circulation of currency would contribute to a more active and robust economy, local businesses would hire more workers and pay better wages from the increase in business. People with jobs that have living income would be less prone to suffer and it would also work to lower the over crime rate.

Basically, by allowing billionaires to hoard all of this money, we're starving the overall economy and everyone's quality of life.

Nice synopsis. Basically why the economy boomed in the mid-20th century, right? Broader distribution of the money, higher velocity of each individual dollar, goods and service acquired rather than dollars collecting mold.

I concur with you completely

Sleepin' is hard werk!

While many American children go hungry, roads and bridges need serious repair, student debt is astronomical, etc.

Republicans will only make the situation worse but that is apparently what many U.S. voters want judging by recent midterm results.

Absurd failure.

all they had to do was make it out of the birth canal.

It boggles my mind that this continues ...

It's hard to fathom anyone deserving that much money, even if they found a cure for cancer.

outside fixing the windows on a house down the street from me. On a Sunday. Not to mention it's 20 degrees and snowing.

But these billionaires, they "work" for their money.

Thanks to the unelected NAZI puppets on the Supreme Court making money into speech and corporations into people:

but the clincher is then they move it off shore. There ought to be a limit on how much money anyone can accumulate in one lifetime. Not a single one of these people would miss 9/10ths of their money if all of a sudden it was gone.

I'm sure there is one at home and making the social rounds to promote "he" and his realm, but wouldn't you think "they" would let one "she" enter their circle of wealthy warts on the world?

And the "he's" complain about the poor using so much welfare? What is tax dodging?

Open eyes are our last defense.