The Republican Party vs The Rest of Us

There are two stories in today’s Arizona Daily Star that mesh nicely with yesterday’s “Loading Dock Manifesto” post.

The first was on the front page of the business section and headlined. “Recovery is most off-kiter since ’30s.”

Not surprisingly the rich have gotten richer and the rest of us have been done the dirty. There are still 9.1% of us unemployed, but none of the 9.1% happen to be the CEOs of major corporations. .

An associated Press analysis found that the typical CEO of a major company earned $9 million last year, up a fourth.

In the meantime worker’s wages have slipped from where they were in the mid 2000s (64% of the economy) to 57.5 percent and any new jobs being created pay less than the ones that have been lost.

As this wealth-shift has gone on Republican legislators have persisted in their refusal to include tax increases in a program of budget balancing; and at the Federal level they have fought controls on the financial industry whose rascality got us into the recession in the first place.

Have our masters kept an eye out for the welfare of their workers?

Au contraire, mon frere...they have pushed for more tax cuts (the Laugher Principle...they cut taxes and laugh all the way to the bank) and cut the services that constitute the workingman’s safety net.

Mark Dayton, the governor of Minnesota, has shown remarkable courage in digging in against his Republican legislature’s refusal to make tax increases a part of the state’s budget. Absent a new budget the state is now idle.Turn out the lights...for now the party’s over.

The soft-spoken Dayton refuses to cave to the GOP's stance that higher taxes are verboten. Since taking office, he has championed tax hikes on rich Minnesotans - or at least some form of new state revenue - as a necessary part of any solution to closing the state's $5 billion budget deficit.

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