{"id":2208,"date":"2010-07-11T03:08:04","date_gmt":"2010-07-11T10:08:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=2208"},"modified":"2010-07-11T07:36:47","modified_gmt":"2010-07-11T14:36:47","slug":"theres-no-recession-for-the-rich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2010\/07\/11\/theres-no-recession-for-the-rich\/","title":{"rendered":"There’s No Recession for the Rich"},"content":{"rendered":"

In spite of nearly destroying our economy, costing millions their jobs and homes,\u00a0and making us the first generation not to leave our kids a better standard of living than we had, America\u2019s super rich are still fat and sassy.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"11rich\"<\/a> Times are tough for workers in the U.S. where a recession has a stranglehold on much of the economy, but life is perfectly rosy for those at the top.<\/p>\n

The riches of the wealthiest North Americans grew by double digits in 2009<\/strong>, primarily from interest their money earned when it was invested in the stock market and elsewhere, according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group.<\/p>\n

Millionaires in the U.S. and Canada saw their wealth increase 15 percent in 2009, to a total of 4.6 trillion dollars, the report found.<\/p>\n

Worldwide, 11 million – or less than 1 percent of all households – were millionaires in 2009. They owned about 38 percent of the world’s wealth or 111 trillion dollars, up from about 36 percent in 2008, according to Boston Consulting Group.<\/p>\n

About 4.7 million millionaires live in the U.S., four percent of the population and more than anywhere else in the world. Japan, China, Britain and Germany followed the U.S. in the number of millionaires.<\/p>\n

\"richpoor\"<\/a> Their fortune is a stark contrast to the lives of more than 15 million people in the U.S. who are unemployed and searching for work, and the eight million more who are just getting by with a part-time job, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics<\/strong>. More than two million more people were working prior to the recession but have now dropped out of the labour force.<\/p>\n

Apart from the newly unemployed, about 39 million people in the U.S. are chronically poor and do not have enough food to eat<\/strong>, according to the U.S. Census and U.S. Department of Agriculture.<\/p>\n

“The nation’s jobs crisis is so catastrophic that, unless Congress acts on the scale of the New Deal, millions of Americans will experience extremely long periods of unemployment for many years ahead,” Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, told a panel of the Committee on Ways and Means recently.<\/p>\n

Not so for millionaires and the uber-rich.<\/p>\n

The uber-rich, those with more than 30 million dollars, are on the rebound. They spent more money in 2009 on fancy cars, yachts and jets compared to 2008, according to a study by Merrill Lynch-Capgemini. They bought fine art, expensive jewelry, gems and antiques, items that are likely to increase in value over time, so they can sell them later and make more money<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The recession isn’t hitting those at the top as it has workers. In fact, many wealthy people benefited from the stock market’s ups and downs<\/strong>, said Mike Lapham, director of the Responsible Wealth Project at United for a Fair Economy, an NGO in Boston… [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <Alternet<\/a>><\/p>\n

Since the Reagan Revolution, supply side economics have been our economic paradigm, coming to fruition in the failed Presidency of GW \u201cPotomac Pinocchio\u201d Bush.\u00a0 The damage from decades of malfeasance cannot be undone with simple fixes.\u00a0 The system is too broken to be fine tuned.\u00a0 To recover this economy we will need public works on a scale not seen since FDR.\u00a0 To protect it we need the kind of financial reform we will not get as long as Geithner, Bernanke and Summers are in the driver\u2019s seat, including a return to Glass-Steagall and the breakup of the TBTF Banksters.\u00a0 To fund it, we need to remember that during the 1950s, a time when our economy was most prosperous, the top tax bracket was 92%, and even then, the rich did not want for luxury.\u00a0 To ensure the survival of the American way of life we must do whatever it takes to ensure that Bush will have been the last Republican President in US history.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Every Republican in office is one Republican too many!<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In spite of nearly destroying our economy, costing millions their jobs and homes,\u00a0and making us the first generation not to leave our kids a better standard of living than we had, America\u2019s super rich are still fat and sassy. Times are tough for workers in the U.S. where a recession has a stranglehold on much […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}