Below is a graph of wealth disparity in the America.
Would a Bush tax cut supporter please explain to me how we can ever hope to have economic growth with wealth discrepancy approaching Great Depression levels:
An economy prospers when all are involved, it truly is that simple. We are dangerously flirting with the costs of continuing a policy in this country the benefits the rich at the expense of the middle and lower class.
1) Did you know the original name of the show was What’s the Question? After pitching it to the network brass, Merv Griffin decided to change the name to the catchier one we know today. The reason? One of the execs thought that the game was a great idea, but that the game needed more jeopardies. NBC ended up buying the show without even seeing a pilot.
2) The winner with the smallest amount of earnings at the end of the game managed to triumph over the other two contestants by keeping a mere dollar. On January 19, 1993, Air Force Lt. Col. Daryl Scott cleverly bid just enough to keep him afloat. The other contestants got the question wrong and lost everything.
3) The infamous Final Jeopardy music has a name – it’s called “Time for Tony” and it was written by Merv Griffin as a lullaby for his son.
4) The record for the largest one-day total ever belongs to Ken Jennings, of course. He’s the only contestant to surpass $52,000 in one day, and he surpassed it by a landslide with $75,000. Jennings actually holds 11 of the top 15 earnings spots.
5) In the show’s entire history, a three-way tie has only happened once. It happened fairly recently too – on March 16, 2007
I have heard the full version of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech twice.
The first time was during a public speaking class in college and the second time was on NPR in celebration of MLK day. If you have never heard the speech in its entirety, it is something that you must experience:
The Democrats, Obama included, lost their political courage last year due to having a 60 vote, filibuster busting majority.
They felt invincible, and no one is invincible in Washington.
They become complacent and let the Republicans win the PR struggle even though the country was demanding a shift away from Republican policies.
The Brown victory in Massachusetts could have been the best thing to happen to the Dems because quite literally they have had a fire lighted under their collective butts. It is time to get things done and Obama's State of the Union was a resounding call to arms.
The focus has shifted to jobs and Obama has the fight back.
My prediction is that this year we will see more of the fiery and passionate Obama our country stood behind in 2008, rather than the politician that was focused on the bi-partisanship that never was possible due to the Republicans "Just Say No" strategy.
When unemployment figures stayed high, and continued foreclosures clouded the future of millions of homeowners, did the stock market stumble? Nope.
But when President Obama showed up with Paul Volcker last week and called for an aggressive initiative aimed at fixing the excesses in the Finance business, curbing the size of the risks that institutions are capable of taking and trimming the size of the monster banks that engage in them, what happened? The market caught a huge cold, and fell in a fit of anxiety.
And that’s why in the end, Wall Street will win this particular struggle between regulatory sanity and outlandish license.
Yeah sure, we’d like all those greedy fatsos with their $100,000 cars to take it in the ear. But not if it means trimming the potential profit we can make on our investments.
We’d like our 401(k)s to be safer… but not if it endangers the value of our portfolio, however paltry and sorry that might be. People with ten grand invested in the market will fight to the death to protect the upside of billionaires who don’t know what to do with their excess cash.
When all is said and done, our dreams are tied up with the ability to make big, greasy profits on a tiny little ante.
So that’s how it’s going to work out now. People will yell and shout and jump around and have a blast trashing all the uglies who run the money machine… and then the moment Washington tries to do anything about it the Market will go into the tank, everybody will freak out from Main Street to Wall Street and call their Congressman and the big lobbyists, now freed of any constraint on how much money they can siphon into politics, will feed the hands that were supposed to bite them.
And that is why Wall Street will win. Because We the People want it to.
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I couldn't agree with this premise more. Americans want retribution against Wall Street, until the effects could have negative implications to their personal finances. The same came be said for global warming and health care. We desire positive change just not at our expense.
The American mentality has become that someone else surely can suffer (Wall Street Bankers), and problems most definitely should be solved (public option and carbon emission cuts), but we should not be inconvenienced in the process.
