Who Is The Smallest Government Spender Since Eisenhower? Would You Believe It's Barack Obama? Budget Process | The Concord Coalition. Untitled. Littile mentioned on campaign trail, poverty widening in US - News. WASHINGTON — For all the talk by the presidential candidates about producing jobs, fixing the economy, and bolstering the country’s middle class, a dispiriting prospect looms ahead of November’s election: The nation’s poverty rate is poised to rise to its highest level since President Lyndon B.
Johnson launched his war against it. New Census Bureau estimates are expected to be released this week, and even a small two-tenths tick upward would push the 2011 rate to its highest level since 1965. With nearly one in every six Americans now living in poverty, advocates for the poor say little attention is being paid to the issue and express concern over how this fall’s elections could influence government programs meant to aid the poor. “The political visibility and influence of the poor is now about where it was in the early 1960s, before the war on poverty. Much of the rhetoric and promises of both Mitt Romney and President Obama have centered on rescuing the middle class.
Visualizing Where Your Taxes Go. —Dave Gilson on Wed. April 13, 2011 1:19 PM PDT With DC embroiled in budget battles and April 18 fast approaching, a lot of Americans are thinking about where their federal tax dollars go. Most of us have no clue, as shown by the recent CNN survey in which respodents guessed that NPR accounts for 5 percent of goverment spending (wrong—it's more like 0.01 percent) and foreign aid gets 10 percent (try 0.6 percent). Where Did My Tax Dollars Go? For an informative and visually interesting look at how your taxes really break down, check out the six finalists from the recent Data Viz Challenge sponsored by What We Pay For.
The most creative is Budget Climb, an interactive game that uses a Microsoft Kinect motion controller so you run around a virtual world made of 26 years of budget data. Can I Get a Receipt With That? Sweden's Socialist-Based Society Can Be a Model For America. "A rising tide lifts all boats" is particularly germane for Sweden. You can physically witness the daily occurrence walking around Stockholm’s famed archipelago, but it is socially that President John F.
Kennedy’s idiom rings most true in the capital of Scandinavia. Over the past several decades, Sweden has laid a strong economic foundation by committing to economic fairness and has positioned itself as one of the world’s strongest economies. Today, Sweden, along with the rest of Scandinavia, is among the leaders in terms of quality of life, enjoys one of the world’s highest GDPs, and not surprisingly, continually ranks as having the happiest people on the planet. By contrast, American exceptionalism is declining as fast are our rapidly deteriorating middle class, in large part because of policies that are geared towards benefitting solely the wealthiest in our society. Socialism has become almost synonymous with evil. Already most Americans are familiar with numerous Swedish companies. It's the Inequality, Stupid. Want more charts like these? See our charts on the secrets of the jobless recovery, the richest 1 percent of Americans, and how the superwealthy beat the IRS.
How Rich Are the Superrich? A huge share of the nation's economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? Note: The 2007 data (the most current) doesn't reflect the impact of the housing market crash. Winners Take All The superrich have grabbed the bulk of the past three decades' gains. Download: PDF chart 1 (large) PDF chart 2 (large) | JPG chart 1 (smaller) JPG chart 2 (smaller) Out of Balance A Harvard business prof and a behavioral economist recently asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth is distributed in the United States.
Download: PDF (large) | JPG (smaller) Capitol Gain Why Washington is closer to Wall Street than Main Street. Congressional data from 2009. Sources. Charts: Mitt Romney's Tax Plan Cuts Taxes For Rich. Speeding Ticket in Sweden. The U.S. Government Is One of the Best Bargains Around. If you could buy a Toyota Camry or an Apple iPad for 20 percent off the regular price, you'd probably consider it a great deal. Savvy buyers haggle for much smaller discounts on quality merchandise. Few consumers have noticed, but the federal government has essentially been on sale, with taxpayers paying about 20 percent less than they used to for what Washington does. Yet unlike satisfied customers, taxpayers are increasingly fed up with the government they finance. This could make them downright surly when the price of government goes back up, which is a near certainty over the next few years.
[Slideshow: Obama's crackdown on corporate America] The price we pay for government, of course, is taxes, and despite what inflammatory political rhetoric might suggest, they are at modern lows. That's the lowest tax burden on record. [See what will happen to your taxes in 2013.] The CBO report and others like it provide lots of fodder for activists all along the political spectrum.