A rigged recovery




I read a recent letter in The Acorn from someone I’ll call Ms. Smith. I usually laugh them off as people who have gotten all their information from Fox News, but do not peer out from under its bubble to learn the whole truth.

Ms. Smith seems like a nice person, the type of compassionate conservative that George Bush said he was going to represent, right before he declared war on and invaded the wrong country.

But instead of being honest with the American people, the Bush administration kept the cost of both wars off the books so they would not blow up the federal budget.

That chicken came home to roost when Obama took over the White House and instructed his economic advisors to add the war costs back into the budget, thus ballooning the deficit even more than it already was under Bush, who had inherited a surplus from his predecessor.

I hope Ms. Smith will read this and open her thinking. For example, she blames Obama for the lack of full employment but does not mention that he took over in 2009 with the U.S. economy in a free-fall collapse, losing an astounding 700,000 jobs each month. Whose fault was that, Ms. Smith?

She says you can ask around and people will tell you they do not feel the recovery. That’s right, but it’s because the money earned— and there’s been plenty of it earned since 2011—has all gone to the top two to three percent.

CEO paychecks have risen 400 percent in the last few decades, while the average worker’s wages stayed level or were reduced, their pensions eliminated and their expenses escalated.

That’s why the recovery stinks.

A 2006 U.N. study showed that half of all the wealth in the world is held by two percent of its people. A more recent study found that a mere 85 adults hold as much wealth in their estates as is owned by the next 3-billion people on the planet.

That’s why it doesn’t feel like prosperity for all. It isn’t just that the recovery is too slow—it’s rigged.

Who thinks those 85 people are using their massive wealth to create 700,000 new jobs per month? Heck, no. They are keeping the profits for themselves, or shipping it to overseas accounts so they don’t have to pay taxes on all their enormous wealth.

Is that Adam Smith’s capitalism or is that really a new aristocracy?

Elliot Blinder

Westlake Village



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