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The GOP Must Explain How Fortune 500 Tax Cuts Help The Middle Class
Republicans keep saying it and there disciples continue to blindly follow them, that tax breaks are needed to spur the economy. With all due respect YOU ARE LYING! The purpose of tax breaks, according to Republicans is it would increase investment and spur hiring.
Many Americans are struggling to put food the table. We have many people on food stamps, WIC and other programs that support needy families. But as America’s middle class is thinning, those at the top are getting awfully fat.
In a recent report by the AP, CEOs at the nation’s largest companies were paid better last year than they were in 2007, when the economy was booming, the stock market set a record high and unemployment was roughly half what it is today. The typical pay package for the head of a company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 was $9 million in 2010, according to an analysis by The Associated Press using data provided by Equilar, an executive compensation research firm. That was 24 percent higher than a year earlier, reversing two years of declines.
Apart from CEO salaries, Corporate profits continue to rise. The 2011 Fortune 500 list was unveiled, analyzing the growth and profits of the nation’s largest 500 corporations. The magazine found that the profits of these companies “soared 81″ percent over the past year, causing the editors of Fortune to say that “we’ve rarely seen such a stark gulf between the fortunes of the 500 and those of ordinary Americans”:
All told, the Fortune 500 generated nearly $10.8 trillion in total revenues last year, up 10.5%. Total profits soared 81%. But guess who didn’t benefit much from this giant wave of cash? Millions of U.S. workers stuck mired in a stagnant job market.
The corporations are sitting on trillions in revenue, but the are NOT hiring!!!! All the Bush tax cuts did was increase profits and the size of the hedge fund managers’ dividend checks.
I will tell you what didn’t increase that much, YOUR CHECKS, pay for workers grew 3 percent in 2010, to an average of about $40,500. The percentage increase was twice the rate of inflation, but the average wage was less than one-half of one percent of what the typical CEO in the AP analysis made.
Your pay increased at twice the rate of core inflation according to the AP, but that doesn’t take into consideration health insurance and gas, so really once again, regular Americans are screwed!
Democrats need to start addressing the fact Republicans do not care about the disparity of income and wages for middle class families.
We rarely here a Republican talk about wages, they ALWAYS talk about profits and prosperity. Well the Republicans got their profits, now it’s time for workers to get their wages!
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10 Responses to The GOP Must Explain How Fortune 500 Tax Cuts Help The Middle Class
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cathy
May. 6th, 2011 at 6:14 pm
Every American should read this article, think about it, and then ask the hard question–who do we believe–the facts?? or the words coming from the GOP??
Realist
May. 6th, 2011 at 6:22 pm
It would be up to the Democrats to force this explanation. I don’t expect that they will, however. It might cost them their campaign contributions.
Reynardine
May. 6th, 2011 at 6:27 pm
What they really mean is that they’ll keep jettisoning employees and offshoring tax base until we agree to give them anything they want.
Shiva (Moderator)
May. 6th, 2011 at 8:11 pm
Im not sure the Dems get it. Or else they are waiting till its closer to xmas or elections whatever comes first. It seems to me that they should be waving a flag all over tinseltown.
But we have short memorys. we do remember that the people voted the republicans in in 2010 for some god forsaken unknown reason. Maybe the Dems have to wait till the week before elections
But it sure seems to me the people need to know how badly these guys are lying someday
TruckerMark
May. 6th, 2011 at 11:49 pm
Another study recently says that the average bottom 80% majority type worker these days is earning 1/3rd less in buying power than they were in 1979, despite massive increases in profits and productivity for corporations since then. I’ll bet this most recent study doesn’t include the wholesale inflation rate in February and March either, as food and fuel prices rose at an annual rate of 14% during just those two months, the result of quantitative easing, or what might be otherwise better known as Dollar printing and devaluation.
It is long past time for those of us who are members of the 80% majority to quit pointing our fingers at each other and start affixing blame on the real culprits, the wealthy industrialist and bankster class that have stolen from us a great deal of their current wealth and earnings. I hate to say it, but nobody is worth 100 times as much to a company as their average worker is, and our average CEO is now earning more than 200 times what the average 80% type does.
Did you know that Brazil is socialist and enjoying a 7.5% GDP growth rate at present? Did you know that Brazil had the same kind of economic system that we have currently until 2002, and that massive layoffs and huge amounts of debt while the rich just kept getting richer was the general rule there before 2002 too? Did you know that Brazil has completely paid off what had been a multi-trillion Dollar debt since 2002 also? I could really see an economic system where the best wage after taxes was only 25 times the lowest wage myself, which would be a whole lot fairer, and which would still richly reward hard work, taking risk, and academic achievement as well.
sheila mickelson
May. 7th, 2011 at 4:23 am
Plain and simple – The GOP can fool some of the PEOPLE, some of the time, but they can’t fool ALL of the PEOPLE!
Anne
May. 7th, 2011 at 7:00 am
The GOP is still trying to sell Americans on the repeatedly discredited trickle-down theory. The Democrats need to be all over this up to November 6, 2012, because so many Americans are adversely affected by this nonsense. What I have noticed about a lot of Republican voters is that they have this inexplicable reverence for the wealthy. It doesn’t seem to matter that in many cases the wealth was either inherited or gained by unethical practices, as opposed to actual hard work. They also don’t seem to get that these same folks don’t care about them any more than they do about Democrats, the poor and middle classes, or minorities. Some of them actually rejoice when they see other Americans being screwed over, like unionized employees, when what affects others affects them sooner or later. The chances that the GOP could ever give a rational or even humane explanation as to why Fortune 500 tax cuts help the rest of us are null and void.
Realist
May. 7th, 2011 at 8:19 am
If the purpose of tax breaks is to increase investment and spur hiring, why have the number of people employed as a percentage of the whole working age population dropped since 1980?
It’s been 31 years, people. How much longer are we going to allow this BS to dominate the conversation? We only currently have the Democrats to take up our cause, and we’ve allowed the corporations to take them from us with their contributions. We either take them back, find someone else to represent us (as the Canadians just did), or we figure out how we are going to survive in the Dickensian dystopia that the GOP seeks.
Shiva (Moderator)
May. 7th, 2011 at 9:41 am
If you compare the taxes on corporations and the rich to employment figures since the 1980′s, you will find both have went down together