Vote Democratic Part 2

I found out about that chart in the first post from Rachel Maddow, who got it from Ezra Klein's blog. One of her fans sent her a new chart. This shows the same thing, that when the dems are in charge our incomes rise a lot more than when pubs are in charge. But in this chart he lays it out when the dems are in charge of the House, or the Senate, or the Presidency, or have it all. Ezra's chart dealt only with the Presidency.

You see, the Republicans are lying to you, when they say the Democrats are tax and spend they mean the dems tax rich people and spend it on the other 95% of us. The taxes for us 95% don't change a whole lot, not a lot of room for change, but the top tax rate can change dramatically. All through the 40's and 50's the top tax rate was around 90% for all income over $400,000 - and what happened in the 50's? We had a strong growth that created a strong middle class for the first time, in fact, most of the country moved up from poverty to the middle class.

In 1980 Reagan dropped the rate down to around 25%, which made the rich very, very happy. Of course, the deficit and our debt grew faster than ever before in American history and he had to raise taxes. He's known for lowering taxes but a lot of people are surprised when they hear he then raised taxes 4 times during his 2 terms. His voodoo economics simply didn't work.

The big lie from the Republicans is that they got the middle class to think the raising or lowering of taxes was about them and not the rich. There are 2 ways a modern economy can function, the rich can be taxed at a high rate in order to supply the 95% of us with a variety of services, like roads, schools, police, military, welfare, medical care, etc. Or all the tax breaks can be for the rich which funnels all our money from us 95% upward to the rich, so they can get richer and richer. Since Reagan took office until today the top 1% saw their incomes increase by 250%, while the bottom 95% of us saw our income drop by 6%. Productivity increased quite a bit as well but the workers who are working harder and better don't get to reap the rewards, it all gets funneled up to the rich.

The end results of Republican economic policy is a total collapse. It happened once back in the 1930's and we had the Great Depression as a result, and happened again at the end of Bush's watch but we were saved from another depression by Obama's economic policies. So that instead of the Second Great Depression we got the first Great Recession. Semantics? No, it really does make a difference. When Bush left office and Obama took over we were losing 700,000 jobs per month - yes, PER MONTH!! Now, we have a net gain of jobs being added by about 40,000 per month.

Unfortunately people are still feeling it because we need to be adding 300,000 jobs every month just to keep pace with the population growth. In other words, 300,000 new workers enter the job market every month. Still, moving from a falling economy to one that is gaining is quite a grand feat and worth giving Obama much credit for.