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The wealthy have gotten richer and richer each and every year for the last 25 years so the Conservatives were right.
Oh yeah, it should probably be mentioned that the income of 80 percent of Americans over the same period edged lower. Then declined. Then went down. Then dropped a bit. Then sagged a little. Then fell.
But most of those people weren't wealthy in the first place. So it doesn't matter.
2. Decreased regulation leads to greater innovation
Freed from the shackles of institutional segregation, these super banks got super, super creative. They got so super creative with options, forwards, futures, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and a bunch of relatives, that before you knew it they made more money than there was money. By 2007, there were $62.2 trillion worth of Credit Default Swaps alone. How much is that? Only five times the whole US GDP. In fact, it's more than the global GDP.
How amazing is this: Given just eight years, super banks got so creative that they "created" more money than there was on the whole planet. That's like discovering a whole new world. Imaginary money world.
Face it. You're not that creative. Probably because you're too regulated.
3. Government is incompetent
We have a Supreme Court that thinks racism is over and that money doesn't have a big enough role in elections. And we have a bureaucracy that can't work because the most important roles have been starved of both funding and support in favor of programs that actively impede the functions of the agencies in which they are lodged. Damn straight government is incompetent. By design.
Bonus points: the same people who assigned Congress a single digit approval rating just voted for even more of what they said they didn't like last time. Which pretty well proves that our version of democracy is also incompetent.
4. Unions hold companies back
Thanks to the fall in union membership, companies were able to hold down wages, offshore jobs, destroy the pension system in favor of 401Ks, greatly cut back on benefits, and put the money where it belonged—in the pockets of CEOs, major stockholders, and corporate bank vaults. In 1950, union-plagued GM was barely able to rake in ten percent profit on its way to being the largest, most successful company in the nation while being forced to shell out to its workers a wage equivalent to almost $50 an hour along with all those benefits. In 2013, blissfully de-unionated Walmart is able to pay less than $9 an hour, and to make sure that workers get so few hours that they don't qualify for any of those benefits at all. That lets them send almost all their money to a handful of people who happened to be related to the guy who started the company. As God intended.
Special bonus goodness: As America has learned to properly hate unions, even those companies where unions have been such pests have gotten better. Thanks to the decline in union power, a new autoworker at GM now makes just under what a starting janitor made at the company in 1980.
5. Voter fraud is shaping our elections
All of which is just the warm-up act to make things better for the people. Because corporations are people, my friend, and these people now have unlimited dollars that they can spend in absolutely secrecy. If that money gets spent telling you that a guy with three purple hearts is actually an America-hating coward, or that some other guy is in league with Muslim extremists to take away your guns, or that there's this woman who was too busy doing, I don't know, women stuff, to get up and save Americans when she had the chance. What are you going to do about it? Nothing, that's what, because you're not one of the people. You're just that other thing. A human being.
Yep, our elections are definitely shaping up.
Face it. Conservatives have this stuff down. And if you think reasonable regulation and moderate tax rates along with greater worker representation might restore decent middle-class incomes while reigning in the massive aggregation of wealth by a tiny elite standing on top of the wealthiest entities in human history ... well, just stop that. It's way too complicated. Aren't you Taxed Enough Already? Don't you believe the Government Is the Problem? That's good.
Now go back to bed.
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