The 7¢ Solution

Common Sense

On 12 September 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported that Procter & Gamble are giving up on the middle class and will now create products for two classes; the poor and the rich. The Journal sees our economy as an "hour glass", a heavy upper class that takes in more than half of all the increases in income each year (and thus can buy a lot), and the poor who buy based on costs. Two days later, the Census Bureau released a report that the median wage in the USA continues to decline, as jobs being created are almost always lower pay than ones people are losing, and this at time when corporate profits have been soaring.The middle class are not getting raises, they are getting laid off, and their kids are moving back in.

President Obama talks about spending cuts as though he is unaware that those cuts are layoffs and the loss of services valuable to the middle class. They are taxes no matter how you slice them. The president also talks about entitlements as though one works for 40 or 45 years, pays Social Security and Medicare taxes to provide services for the previous generation and an additional $2.5 trillion that congress spent on tax cuts for hedge fund managers, and when they retire, they somehow wrong to imagine they are owed the same services they provided, as though "entitled" is an inherited gift rather than a social contract. He realizes taxes on incomes ovedr $1.3 million, taxes that were normal when middle class doubled their standard of living in one generation would annoy billionaires, but does not see that cutting $500 billion in health care payments will "tax" millions of people, some beyond what they can stand.

Just 12% of Americans currently approve of Congress, so why aren't the president and congress busy finding solutions to the problems of the vast majority of Americans? Because that is not how they got their jobs.They need to raise $10,000 a day for their campaign and they do that by listening to lobbyists. Why aren't your arguments and the facts enough to convince them? As Upton Sinclair said, "You can't get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding." It is like going to court and finding that the judge only listens to the guy that takes him to lunch.

It is not like we haven't been warned, economists have been writing for years that working families have not got real increase in income since 1970, unless their wife wife went to work or they got a promotion or new job. While the productivity of the average worker more than doubled, middle class wages have been stagnant. In fact, all the middle class got were some rather inefficient services ("safety net") that reflected the lack of concern that the congress had about how those programs were managed. Now congress is planning on putting all the burden of banking industry failures and the resulting recession, on the backs of those who got thing from an economy that has produced hundreds of billionaires. Here are a few of the warnings we all ignored:

IN 1982, former senator Bob Dole, in an article in the Wall Street Journal said, "When these political action committees give money, they expect something in return other than good government. It is making it more difficult to legislate. We may reach a point where if everybody is buying something with PAC money, we can't get anything done. Poor people don't make campaign contributions. You might get a different result if there were a `Poor PAC'." (1)

IN Spring 2000, a major supporter of pending legislation which would increase the H-1B quota, Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), had the gall to say, "This is not a popular bill with the public. It's popular with the CEOs...This is a very important issue for the high-tech executives who give the money." (National Journal, May 5, 2000 and New York Daily News, May 3, 2000.) Rep. Davis was chair of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. (2)

IN 2011, when (compared to 1982) the number of lobbyists had quadrupled, Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz, in an article in in Vanity Fair, said "It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work." (3)


THE losses for the typical taxpayer are certainly more than $25,000 (the average home owner has lost 50% of their equity in their home, and millions have lost good paying jobs). We can keep up with the current systems of congress running on bribes, and keep forking over a trillion dollars every few years to bail out the banks again, or we can send congress the message that they have to stop taking bribes or leave town. We have had enough.

YOU can put an end to this mess for just 7¢ a day. This is all it will cost you to fully support publicly funded elections for congress and the white house for candidates who agree to forgo all private funding and coordination of campaign spending with any group or PAC. Does 7¢ a day ($25 a year) sound like too much? We had a law,Glass Steagall, that kept the type of bank we actually need separate from the ones that bet on securities and derivatives. That law was put in place after the same thing happened and caused the great depression. Then banks said we could trust them to the law was removed, letting banks that we must have grow too big to fail, and able to gamble with our economy without regulation. They made contributions to campaigns and then said that regulation was holding them back. We would have said being a millionaire was enough, but we are not looking for campaign contributions; congress always is.

Finally, why has your congressman not offered you an honest hearing of your needs? Why has he not been disgusted by campaign financing? Why has he not offered you a safer and lower cost way to have a better democracy? Why does he run government and say it does not provide you a good value, so we need to let unregulated private industry do the jobs? Why doesn't he admit that the economy can not come back to where it was until you have more money to spend? The latest New York Times/CBS News poll found that nearly three-quarters of Republicans said they thought Social Security and Medicare were worth their costs.Congress are saying "Cut them"; the time to push back is right now.

This article is one of a series, "Common Sense" by

Harrison Picot

Independent candidate for congress in Virginia's 10th district

and at http://standupvirginia.org/

1) "So Damn Much Money" Robert G. Kaiser p. 148
2)"Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" 2.3.1 Dr. Norman Matloff UC Davis
3) http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105