Day: September 10, 2010

Economic Policy Institute gives us a simple chart:

38.7% of all of the income growth accrued to the upper 1% over the 1979-2007 period: a greater share than the 36.3% share received by the entire bottom 90% of the population.

Those in the top 10% of the income scale received 63.7% of all the income growth generated over the 1979-2007 period. In contrast, the bottom 20% of all earners saw such a small share of income growth – just 0.4% – that it barely shows up on the included pie chart.

Let’s repeat: over the last ~30 years, the top 10% got about 60% of all income growth. Everybody else: not so much.
There should be no speech, no appearance, no utterance, no anything involving any Democrat anywhere a camera, microphone, or goodly crowd may gather that does not include this chart. Every time, every day, every hour between now and November.

Don’t hold your breath.

Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”? In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

David Foster Wallace (via southpol)
Source: The Atlantic