...San Diego at 5:30 in the morning...

I am fortunate to be among the “older” American citizens with good personal health and retirement income good enough to afford what any reasonable person should consider “the good life,” so this RANT isn’t about me.  It’s about INCOME INEQUITY among those regular Americans who haven’t retired yet and are still going out to work for their living and are worrying that they aren’t getting ahead to an extent that will allow them to retire comfortably someday.

SO… WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE SYSTEM THAT MAKES POOR PEOPLE POORER AND RICH PEOPLE RICHER THAT THE TEA PARTY CELEBRATES?   Do those people actually know the statistics about incomes of people living in the real America…I’m wondering not so much what the LEADERS of the Tea Party movement know, but what the lower and middle income folks who voted them into positions of power don't know?  Ted Cruze and Mark Rubio certainly know about the income gap between the rich and ordinary, salaried working Americans.  Polls show most Americans are under the impression that the highest paid corporate leaders today make maybe 30 times what the average workers in their corporations make… but that was the situation in the 1960s.  As a matter of fact, the country’s highest-paid corporate leaders in 2014 are paid 350 (not 30) times the average worker wage. The L.A. Times reported earlier this month that “Microsoft shareholders approved an $84-million pay package for the company’s new chief executive, Satya Nadella,”  a man who has run the company for less than a year. 

According to a report from the Center for Effective Government and the Institute for Policy Studies, "Boeing, Ford, Chevron, Citigroup, Verizon Communications, JPMorgan Chase and General Motors each paid their CEOs more last year than they paid in income taxes to the U.S. and state governments."  That means those companies are not funneling their profits to the workers in their companies as wages that would make workers’ families lives easier… nor are those companies contributing their fair share of the cost of making America a country where ordinary people’s lives are enriched.   How can these CEOs not be at least a little bit embarrassed that the ordinary American people who buy the goods and services of the companies that make the rich richer are basically being shafted by a system that clearly favors the wealthiest citizens.  This year I bought an automobile made by General Motors Corporation.  The credit card I use to buy just about everything, including that automobile, is issued by Chase Bank.  Ted Cruze, Mark Rubio, and at least some of the Tea Party leaders elected to Congress know those facts, but the Tea Party people-on-the-street supporters who are average wage earners probably don’t know because apparently they get most of their information about government and the economy from Fox News.  The irony in this present system is that the sections of the country where most Tea Party representatives and senators are elected are among the poorest, least well-served places in America.  Boehner and McConnell are determined to lead the House and the Senate to repeal The Affordable Care Act.  It’s not going to happen as long at Barak Obama is President; but they’ve promised they are going to try to repeal it in spite of the fact that they know repealing it would snatch health care from approximately 10 million working-class Americans.  The Kaiser Family Foundation has paid for a study that determined the people who would be most affected by having health care snatched away from them live in 383 congressional districts, mostly represented by Republicans. 

Go figure!