I stated in a past post my thoughts on the Tea Party as “…bigoted, xenophobic, and often hypocritical bluster.” I was taken to task for this statement and rightfully so as it was overly general and I am sure by no means speaks to the true and structural frustration many in this country on the right and left have with government. My foot-in-mouth moment was pointed out by an author on this blog and I looked to clarify what I meant in a reply to his comment…….WHICH brings me to the Tea Party’s latest black eye Read the rest of this entry »
Below I have plotted the average annual income here in the US back to 1815 for the US Senate and 1967 for us little people. I mean that in all seriousness, because if ever there was a graph that said it all it is this one. The inset simply shows the same data for the period between 1967 and 2009, which is the timeframe where data is available for all percentiles. You will note the inset also has a number followed by the letter x, which if you remember back to any statistics or math courses you may have taken is simply the slope of a given trend (i.e., in this case it is a linear regression). The # that proceeds each x corresponds to the annual increase in each percentile’s average annual income.
There are two extremely disquieting trends in this data: 1) the “haves” (i.e, Top 5th percentile) and “have nots” spread is widening at an ever great clip, with annual income increases for the former 2.3 to 22× that of the latter percentiles and 2) the DC fat cats are gaining on this nation’s net-worth “elite” at a pace that one would hope would cause them a mild case of opprobrium. Fat Cat Fat Chance! Read the rest of this entry »
