Take Back America!

There was a national “Take Back America” conference held in D.C. a couple of weeks ago put on by the Campaign for America’s Future. One of its major goals was to bring up proposals to reverse extreme inequality and broaden prosperity. It has been difficult to find out exactly what those proposals were, or anything specific about the conference due to a lack of media coverage and it being such a recent ecent. However, it seems that one positive step to come from the conference will be a campaign to mobalize youth, liberal, and minority voters for the comming 2008 election. It’s good to see positive steps like this being taken in an effort to unite people to fight inequality, and to push real solutions into the public arena. Hopefully more information will come out in the near future as to the details of this conference. If you want to take a look at it visit http://www.ourfuture.org/tba-live or http://www.ips-dc.org/events/145.

Economic Inequality and the Recession

I was recently browsing around to see if the current economic problem our country has been moving towards has been linked at all to the problems we also have with economic inequality.  I found this video that does a little bit of that, and also discusses the implications of the housing crisis for the “forgotten class.”  There has been a big push by the government to introduce a stimulus package into our economic market to try and boost the economy.  Basically, the commentators in the video believe that the economic stimulus package will turn out to give a sense of false hope to people of the lower class.  They will benefit from a little extra money in their pockets, but in the long run, if the stimulus does not fix the economy, many of the these people will actually have more problems as the industries they are most heavily employed by experience job loss and unemployment.  The video continues on with just who the “forgotten class” is, and how many of the recent positive strides they’ve made may be erased by the housing crisis. 

Trickling Down The Risk

The trickle down effect has long been the defense of conservative policies and tax plans. Giving tax relief to the upper-income level in assumption that their wealth will somehow raise up the people below them in lower-income levels puts a lot of faith in the goodwill of the wealthy. Looking at the period of “Reaganomics” when this idea was put to full power shows us the actual results of the trickle down ideal. Rather than raising the income of all Americans as the ideal suggests, during the period of 1980 through 1993 it was the wealthiest 25 percent of the country who benefited, while the middle-class remained unaffected, and the bottom fifth actually saw an income decline of 10 percent (Democracy: A Journal of Ideas). Despite these figures people on the supply side of the economic system glorify this period as the “golden age.” It is this blind attitude towards the average person that has led to economic policies which are increasingly leaving people on their own and under high risk in the market.