Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin claims he has a “knack for numbers.” Not long ago, he unveiled his GOP budget proposal titled “Path to Prosperity.” Rachel Maddow criticized members of the media for their fawning coverage of Ryan and his
financial “magnum opus.” Said Maddow: “If the Beltway media could stop making out with Paul Ryan for long enough to look at what’s actually in his budget proposal, they might notice that some of the important numbers in it appear to be made up.” She added: “I doubt that actual numerically based fact based information will penetrate the smoochy smoochy love bubble surrounding Paul Ryan right now…there’s this cult of him being brave and bold and doing this difficult workout every morning. What he’s just introduced is not a feature on grit versus glamour in today’s GOP. It is not a pinup. It is not the brave story of a strong boy in a tough environment. It’s the official Republican Party budget for 2012, and the numbers in it are so wrong they are occasionally funny.”
Anne Lowrey summarizes Ryan’s proposal in an article in Slate titled Model Misbehavior: Why Paul Ryan’s budget numbers don’t add up: “Tax cuts to wealthy Americans foster prosperity that moves millions of (less wealthy) Americans back to work, with increasing wages. High earnings and employment bolster tax revenue. When combined with huge cuts in domestic spending and radical changes to Medicaid and Medicare, the budget balances out in about 20 years.” Lowrey goes on to explain, however, that Ryan’s plan relied on numbers provided by the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis—which have been exposed “as a bit fantastical.”
Harold Meyerson wrote the following about Ryan’s budget proposal: “The cover under which Ryan and other Republicans operate is their concern for the deficit and national debt. But Ryan blows that cover by proposing to reduce the top income tax rate to just 25 percent. He imposes the burden for reducing our debt not on the bankers who forced our government to spend trillions averting a collapse but on seniors and the poor. The reductions in aid to the poor, says the budget blueprint that Ryan released, will be made ‘to ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.’ That’s a pretty good description of America’s top bankers, but Ryan’s budget showers them with tax cuts.”
Ryan claims his budget proposal is a “compassionate” one—but Pat Garofalo begs to differ. Garofalo says that the “Path to Prosperity” would “double health care costs for seniors, endanger vital Medicaid services, and likely increase taxes on the middle-class to finance tax cuts for the rich.”
E. D. Kain thinks that Ryan’s budget is not serious one. He says that it’s ideological—and suspects “that its intention is to shift the debate and make the Ryan budget the leaping off point for further budgets.”
There are many who would agree that Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” is indeed based on ideology. One might ask what the ideological foundation of his thinking was when he prepared the 2012 GOP budget.
Jonathan Chait provides us with an explanation of why Ryan’s budget helps those at the very top while hurting the middle class and the less fortunate in his Newsweek article titled War on the Weak: How the GOP came to view the poor as parasites—and the rich as our rightful rulers. In the article, Chait wrote about what has motivated both Paul Ryan and the Tea Party:
“In fact, the two streams—the furious Tea Party rebels and Ryan the earnest budget geek—both spring from the same source. And it is to that source that you must look if you want to understand what Ryan is really after, and what makes these activists so angry.
“The Tea Party began early in 2009 after an improvised rant by Rick Santelli, a CNBC commentator who called for an uprising to protest the Obama administration’s subsidizing the “losers’ mortgages.” Video of his diatribe rocketed around the country, and protesters quickly adopted both his call for a tea party and his general abhorrence of government that took from the virtuous and the successful and gave to the poor, the uninsured, the bankrupt—in short, the losers. It sounded harsh, Santelli quickly conceded, but “at the end of the day I’m an Ayn Rander.”
“Ayn Rand, of course, was a kind of politicized L. Ron Hubbard—a novelist-philosopher who inspired a cult of acolytes who deem her the greatest human being who ever lived. The enduring heart of Rand’s totalistic philosophy was Marxism flipped upside down. Rand viewed the capitalists, not the workers, as the producers of all wealth, and the workers, not the capitalists, as useless parasites.”
A couple of weeks ago, Tom Ashbrook moderated a discusson about Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan on his radio program On Point with Jonathan Chait, senior editor at The New Republic, Anne C. Heller, journalist and author of “Ayn Rand and the World She Made,” and Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks. The program was titled Ayn Rand’s Resurgence. In his summary of the program, Ashbrook wrote: “The American budget battle so far is really a battle of ideals. And at the back of a vocal chorus on the Republican/Tea Party right sits the philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand.” Ashbrook and his guests talked about “what it means to have “Atlas Shrugged” in the middle of the budget debate.”
Click here to listen to the program.
In an article for The New Republic, Jonathan Chait wrote more about Ryan, his budget, and Ayn Rand:
Ryan would retain some bare-bones subsidies for the poorest, but the overwhelming thrust in every way is to liberate the lucky and successful to enjoy their good fortune without burdening them with any responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens. This is the core of Ryan’s moral philosophy:
“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.” …
At the Rand celebration he spoke at in 2005, Ryan invoked the central theme of Rand’s writings when he told his audience that, “Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill … is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict–individualism versus collectivism.”
The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers.
There is no doubt that Ryan has been impressed by the words and works of novelist/philosopher Rand. He declared his admiration for her in Facebook videos that he posted in 2009.
Facebook Videos Posted by Paul Ryan
Ayn Rand’s Relevance in 2009
Ayn Rand & 2009 America, Part 2
The Truth about GOP Hero Ayn Rand (Think Progress)
So there you have it—a GOP budget proposal for 2012 brought to you by Rep. Paul Ryan, acolyte and admirer of Ayn Rand. It’s a “path to prosperity” for those who are already prosperous.
SOURCES
War on the Weak: How the GOP came to view the poor as parasites—and the rich as our rightful rulers. (Newsweek)
Paul Ryan And Ayn Rand (The New Republic)
Rachel Maddow Tears Into Beltway Media For Paul Ryan Budget Coverage (Huffington Post)
Who’s hurt by Paul Ryan’s budget proposal (Washington Post)
Model Misbehavior: Why Paul Ryan’s budget numbers don’t add up (Slate)
Paul Ryan’s ‘Compassionate’ Budget Would Gut The Food Safety Net (Think Progress)
Paul Ryan And The Republican Vision (The New Republic)
The Man Behind Paul Ryan’s Budget Plan Got the Tax Cuts Wrong, Too (The Atlantic)
Paul Ryan’s Budget Proposal Would Increase Public Debt Relative To Extending Current Law (Think Progress)
Paul Ryan’s Multiple Unicorns (New York Times)
What’s wrong with Paul Ryan’s budget? (Washington Examiner)
Tea Party Embraces Ayn Rand (Frum Forum)
fuguewriter:
Thanks for the info on Mary MacLane.
By Joshua Holland (1/29/2011)
Ayn Rand Railed Against Government Benefits, But Grabbed Social Security and Medicare When She Needed Them
At least she put up a fight before succumbing to the imperatives of the real world.
http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/149721/ayn_rand_railed_against_government_benefits,_but_grabbed_social_security_and_medicare_when_she_needed_them/
Ayn Rand was not only a schlock novelist, she was also the progenitor of a sweeping “moral philosophy” that justifies the privilege of the wealthy and demonizes not only the slothful, undeserving poor but the lackluster middle-classes as well.
Her books provided wide-ranging parables of “parasites,” “looters” and “moochers” using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes’ labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O’Connor (her husband was Frank O’Connor).
As Michael Ford of Xavier University’s Center for the Study of the American Dream wrote, “In the end, Miss Rand was a hypocrite but she could never be faulted for failing to act in her own self-interest.”
Her ideas about government intervention in some idealized pristine marketplace serve as the basis for so much of the conservative rhetoric we see today. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” said Paul Ryan, the GOP’s young budget star at a D.C. event honoring the author. On another occasion, he proclaimed, “Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism.”
“Morally and economically,” wrote Rand in a 1972 newsletter, “the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull.”
Journalist Patia Stephens wrote of Rand:
[She] called altruism a “basic evil” and referred to those who perpetuate the system of taxation and redistribution as “looters” and “moochers.” She wrote in her book “The Virtue of Selfishness” that accepting any government controls is “delivering oneself into gradual enslavement.”
Rand also believed that the scientific consensus on the dangers of tobacco was a hoax. By 1974, the two-pack-a-day smoker, then 69, required surgery for lung cancer. And it was at that moment of vulnerability that she succumbed to the lure of collectivism.
Evva Joan Pryor, who had been a social worker in New York in the 1970s, was interviewed in 1998 by Scott McConnell, who was then the director of communications for the Ayn Rand Institute. In his book, 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, McConnell basically portrays Rand as first standing on principle, but then being mugged by reality. Stephens points to this exchange between McConnell and Pryor.
“She was coming to a point in her life where she was going to receive the very thing she didn’t like, which was Medicare and Social Security,” Pryor told McConnell. “I remember telling her that this was going to be difficult. For me to do my job she had to recognize that there were exceptions to her theory. So that started our political discussions. From there on – with gusto – we argued all the time.
The initial argument was on greed,” Pryor continued. “She had to see that there was such a thing as greed in this world. Doctors could cost an awful lot more money than books earn, and she could be totally wiped out by medical bills if she didn’t watch it. Since she had worked her entire life, and had paid into Social Security, she had a right to it. She didn’t feel that an individual should take help.”
Rand had paid into the system, so why not take the benefits? It’s true, but according to Stephens, some of Rand’s fellow travelers remained true to their principles.
Rand is one of three women the Cato Institute calls founders of American libertarianism. The other two, Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel “Pat” Paterson, both rejected Social Security benefits on principle. Lane, with whom Rand corresponded for several years, once quit an editorial job in order to avoid paying Social Security taxes. The Cato Institute says Lane considered Social Security a “Ponzi fraud” and “told friends that it would be immoral of her to take part in a system that would predictably collapse so catastrophically.” Lane died in 1968.
Paterson would end up dying a pauper. Rand went a different way.
But at least she put up a fight before succumbing to the imperatives of the real world – one in which people get sick, and old, and many who are perfectly decent and hardworking don’t end up being independently wealthy.
The degree to which Ayn Rand has become a touchstone for the modern conservative movement is striking. She was a sexual libertine, and, according to writer Mark Ames, she modeled her heroic characters on one of the most despicable sociopaths of her time. Ames’ conclusion is important for understanding today’s political economy. “Whenever you hear politicians or Tea Partiers dividing up the world between ‘producers’ and ‘collectivism,’” he wrote, “just know that those ideas and words more likely than not are derived from the deranged mind of a serial-killer groupie….And when you see them taking their razor blades to the last remaining programs protecting the middle class from total abject destitution—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—and bragging about how they are slashing these programs for ‘moral’ reasons, just remember Rand’s morality and who inspired her.”
Now we know that Rand was also just as hypocritical as the Tea Party freshman who railed against “government health care” to get elected and then whined that he had to wait a month before getting his own Cadillac plan courtesy of the taxpayers.
But, as I note in my book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy, that’s par for the course. A central rule of the U.S. political economy is that people are attracted to the idea of “limited government” in the abstract—and certainly don’t want the government intruding in their homes—but they really, really like living in a society with adequately funded public services.
That’s just as true for an icon of modern conservatism as it is for a poor mother getting public health care for her kids.
That should have been UNaware – teen boys, the Pauls & Ryan are unaware self-absorbed morons
A couple of points:
Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum was born in Tzarist Russia and her well-off family was a victim of the Soviet Revolution. She changed her name in the 50’s to Ayn Rand. (given her last name & the work of American Christianists to tie Communism to Jews I always wondered how much eliminating the Rosenbaum was a motivator). But her experience led to a psychosis that flooded out into some very poorly written novels, the basic premise of which are a “law of the jungle” mindset that marks anything even hinting at collective effort or shared sacrifice a crime. Its easy to see how she got that but also easy to see how it is so wrong in its extremism.
There is an entire organization, The Rand Society, funded by the same people that built the John Birch Society & other rabid anti-communist groups that gives her books away, usually to teen boys. Thats how I came to read that dreadfully written, wooden, cartoon, Atlas Shrugged. I doubt its an accident they target teen boys, the most self-absorbed and aware group. Its sad that so many of them have grown into self-absorbed and aware adults.
Alyn Greenspan was one of her acolytes as a college student & she is rumored to have had an affair with him.
“There can be no compromise on basic principles . . . ” sayeth the Ayn-ster.
If you’re a moral absolutist like Rand was?
Yeah, sorry, fugue, but there is hypocrisy there in her taking government aid. “No compromises on basic principles” means that there can be no valid caveats to deviate from said basic principles.
hypocrisy \hi-ˈpä-krə-sē also hī-\, n.,
1: a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion
2: an act or instance of hypocrisy
Do as I say, not as I do? That’s giant neon colored hypocrisy. She should have put her money where her mouth was and not taken a dime. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard about how the money was “stolen” and she had a “right” to it, but we also know that’s bullshit too. Taxation is not theft and promoting the general welfare of society is one of the specific roles of government as outlined in our Constitution. She could talk the talk, but she didn’t walk the walk. If she didn’t like taxation and a state the works for the common good via social programs like Social Security and Medicare, she should have stopped paying taxes. Or carried her sorry selfish hack novelist ass back to Russia or to some third country that lived up to her dystopian ideal. At a minimum, she shouldn’t have taken the money. Based on, oh . . . what are those things she claimed to have but in the end didn’t practice as she preached . . . principles of virtue.
“I” and “mine” are a myopic basis for a philosophy at best and a childish sociopathic basis for a philosophy at worst.
All of this defense of failed programs wouldn’t be so surreal if there were not an entitlement bomb hurtling down upon our economy in deadly slow motion. How does $100trillion+ in unfunded liabilities sound? Consider what several trillions did when it evaporated in the late 2000s.
Even the CBO calls our course unsustainable.
And taxing the rich ain’t gonna keep the game going, folks. Wouldn’t even pay all the government’s bills.
Time for reality to return.
Mike Appleton –
1. Those factors have always been part of human history. So they are not causally explanatory.
2. You can’t get the spectacular explosion that happened in America in the 19th century out of them. The coupling of the scientific method, the industrial revolution, and the free market mechanism made it possible. Note that it started in England, where those factors began to come into play.
Rich –
> a failed screenwriter as its oracle
What on earth, or elsewhere, are you talking about?
“the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers.” This is not true. The central struggle is to institute a government that protects individual rights. Property rights are, in Rand’s view, absolute and universal. They do not favor the “successful” – they are equal for all men in that sense. Remember also that Rand held that the great innovators benefit all men and must be left free. Chaining them doesn’t make much sense, does it?
Of course Rand recouped [some of] her Social Security contributions. She’d said, publicly, she would before she reached age 65. She never said she wouldn’t, nor did she say anyone else shouldn’t get back money forcibly taken from them so long as they opposed those programs. She was in favor of their being phased out over a period of some years. So, much as some folks would like to believe it, there’s no gotcha moment, and no hypocrisy.
Mike Appleton – Her three books are all public domain. Search for her on Google Books – start with “The Story of Mary MacLane” – topknotch, by a 19-year old girl in 1902 – almost inconceivable. Her other books are less fiery and clear, but her last book, in 1917, is amazing, a sort of hallucinatory journey deep into the complex introvert that was herself.
Colorado Voices: The AynRandPaulRyan effect
By Mark Moe
The Denver Post
5/8/2011
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_18009594
Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” has many devotees and defenders, among them Paul Ryan, architect of the Republican budget plan. Ryan is so taken with Rand’s philosophy that he requires all who work for him to read her novels, a task that will consume many weekends, for though Rand’s monomaniacal philosophy of Objectivism can be boiled down into a few simple axioms, her style is a study in verbose bloviation by characters who are little more than cartoonish megaphones for her stunted worldview. “Atlas” weighs in at roughly 1,300 pages, mostly a long day’s journey into naught. Why not just say “Free enterprise rules!” and stop with all the tree-killing?
But it is this very philosophy that has captivated the Ryan Republicans. In a nutshell, Rand believes that all facets of free enterprise and its practicioners are heroic, that those who attempt to control or regulate free enterprise are “looters,” and selfishness is the highest and best response to the material world. If this sounds like 4th grade tantrumspeak, well, conservative columnist Michael Gerson agrees. Recently he called “Atlas” a product of “adult onset adolescence.” Conversely, Rand’s fans will have none of it. One of the more rabid variety recently blogged that “her (Rand’s) novels are so good that most people shouldn’t be allowed to read them.” Alas, her warning came too late for many of us.
So when “Atlas” ubermensch John Galt finally materializes from his hideout in Galt’s Gulch to philosophically reclaim America from the “looters,” with his strong jaw (his speech is 70 pages long) and boyish shock of hair, a younger Paul Ryan (with similar jaw and shock) must have felt the thrill of destiny, now manifested in his “Path to Prosperity” which also claims a salvific purpose that one can only call, well, Rand-y.
This is the AynRandPaulRyan effect: that America must be saved, and all those (Republicans/Tea Partyers/Libertarians) dedicated to doing so by slashing anything tainted with liberalism and/or governmental control are heroic. Taxes are anathema; the rich must be unshackled from the looters, and the titans of industry must be left to their own devices. What could possibly go wrong?
Ryan’s plan is indeed Randy in its dismantling of government programs that the sick, poor and aged insist on looting. But it’s his sense of his own infallibility, this “I know what’s best, and I’m here to save you from yourselves” tone that worries as well. Rand herself was famously intolerant of any who would challenge her views, and surrounded herself with a cult of true believers. One hopes Mr. Ryan isn’t doing the same, but when President Obama put forth his own vision on the budget, Ryan seemed shocked, angrily calling it a “partisan broadside,” as if his Prosperity plan (bereft, of course, of any partisanship) was written on stone tablets and Obama’s response was blasphemy. To too many true believers, compromise is seen not only as defeat, but also a violation of “sacred” principles.
Like many people, I often find myself stuck in a no-man’s-land between the Republicans and Democrats. A social liberal, I am also a fiscal conservative. I dislike debt, welfare, and waste as much as anyone. But I also know the the essential necessity of government and social safety nets if we aren’t to devolve into the social chaos depicted in another famous novel of the 1950s, “Lord of the Flies.” It would help if the Ryan Republicans (and Rand Paul) would lose the messianic tone, realize that in many cases government is the solution, and back off the RandThink. The effect might surprise them in seeing the opposition not as infidels or looters, but as serious counterparts in the business of sensible compromise.
rafflaw,
I guess she’d spell it the same way that Republican politicians like Paul Ryan would.
MICHAEL GERSON: Ayn Rand’s adult-onset adolescence
http://www.heraldnews.com/opinions/columnists/x1146471628/MICHAEL-GERSON-Ayn-Rand-s-adult-onset-adolescence
Excerpt:
Rand’s novels are vehicles for a system of thought known as Objectivism. Rand developed this philosophy at the length of Tolstoy, with the intellectual pretensions of Hegel, but it can be summarized on a napkin. Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud.
Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible. “The Objectivist ethics, in essence,” said Rand, “hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.”
If Objectivism seems familiar, it is because most people know it under another name: adolescence. Many of us experienced a few unfortunate years of invincible self-involvement, testing moral boundaries and prone to stormy egotism and hero worship. Usually one grows out of it, eventually discovering that the quality of our lives is tied to the benefit of others.
Rand’s achievement was to turn a phase into a philosophy, as attractive as an outbreak of acne.
The appeal of Ayn Rand to conservatives is both considerable and inexplicable. Modern conservatism was largely defined by Ronald
Reagan’s faith in the people instead of elites. Rand regarded the people as “looters” and “parasites.” She was a strenuous advocate for class warfare, except that she took the side of a mythical class of capitalist supermen. Rand, in fact, pronounced herself “profoundly opposed” to Reagan’s presidential candidacy, since he did not meet her exacting ideological standards.
Elaine,
How does Ayn spell Hypocrisy?
Yo, Paul Ryan! Atlas Didn’t Shrug, She Put Her Hand Out
By Nicole Belle
http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/yo-paul-ryan-atlas-didnt-shrug-she-pu
Excerpt:
Ryan is reported enthralled by Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism. Apparently so enthralled that he requires staffers to read “Atlas Shrugged” and gives the novel out as gifts. I’ve said before, I come from the generation that inhaled the notion that “greed is good”, but all “Atlas Shrugged” serves to do is offer a massive rationalization for being a selfish prick. It inherently is not good for a civilized society, because the very definition of a society is a group of people living as a community, not individuals living only for their own benefit.
Not that Paul Ryan cares. But I wonder if Ryan’s world would be rocked to know that even his hero couldn’t live up to the standards of the philosophy she espoused:
Critics of Social Security and Medicare frequently invoke the words and ideals of author and philosopher Ayn Rand, one of the fiercest critics of federal insurance programs. But a little-known fact is that Ayn Rand herself collected Social Security. She may also have received Medicare benefits.
An interview recently surfaced that was conducted in 1998 by the Ayn Rand Institute with a social worker who says she helped Rand and her husband, Frank O’Connor, sign up for Social Security and Medicare in 1974.
Federal records obtained through a Freedom of Information act request confirm the Social Security benefits. A similar FOI request was unable to either prove or disprove the Medicare claim.
Between December 1974 and her death in March 1982, Rand collected a total of $11,002 in monthly Social Security payments. O’Connor received $2,943 between December 1974 and his death in November 1979.[..]
The couple registered for benefits shortly after Rand, a two-pack-a-day smoker, had surgery for lung cancer in the summer of 1974. Medicare had been enacted nine years earlier in the Social Security Act of 1965 to provide health insurance to those age 65 and older. [..]
Rand herself called altruism a “basic evil” and referred to those who perpetuate the system of taxation and redistribution as “looters” and “moochers.” She wrote in her book “The Virtue of Selfishness” that accepting any government controls is “delivering oneself into gradual enslavement.” In a 1972 edition of her newsletter, she said:
“Morally and economically, the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull. Morally, the chance to satisfy demands by force spreads the demands wider and wider, with less and less pretense at justification. Economically, the forced demands of one group create hardships for all others, thus producing an inextricable mixture of actual victims and plain parasites. Since need, not achievement, is held as the criterion of rewards, the government necessarily keeps sacrificing the more productive groups to the less productive, gradually chaining the top level of the economy, then the next level, then the next.[..]”
Rand often spoke of moral absolutism, saying “There can be no compromise on basic principles,” but the realities of aging and illness seem to have softened her stance. Social Security, and perhaps Medicare, allowed Rand and her husband to maintain their quality of life, remain in their apartment and live out their final years with dignity.
And yet it is that dignity that Paul Ryan wants to deny most Americans.
fuguewriter:
LOL. Is any of her work still in print, or can it be found on the web in the public domain? I love transgressive women.
Mike Appleton – I’ve read every word she ever wrote. I’ll be bringing them back before too long. You might enjoy her – she was very transgressive. : )
FactCheck.Org Concludes Paul Ryan’s Budget Claims Don’t Check Out
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2011/05/09/paul-ryan-fact-check/
The richest among us really need a tax reduction! Time to take away Medicare from us moochers and parasites.
*****
CEO Bonuses Rose By Nearly 20% In 2010, While Average Worker Saw Income Stagnate
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/05/09/ceo-pay-350-companies/
As most American families continue to struggle with high unemployment and stagnant wages, CEOs at the country’s 350 biggest companies saw their pay jump 11% last year to a median of $9.3 million, according to a study conducted for the Wall Street Journal. The survey looked at direct compensation — salary, bonuses, and long-term incentive awards — and did not include assets like stock options:
For the surveyed CEOs, the sharpest pay gains came via bonuses, which soared 19.7% as profits recovered, especially in some hard-hit industries. … Net income rose by a median of 17%; shareholders at those companies enjoyed a median return, including dividends, of 18%.
Corporate profits may be at sky-high levels, but they are not translating into shared prosperity for all. Median household income has fallen nearly 5% over the past decade and in 2010 was $50,221. The lack of wage growth has made it difficult for average Americans to keep up with rising prices on everything from gas to food.
This latest report is further evidence that the gap between the rich and everyone else is widening, with economic inequality in the U.S. at its highest levels since the Great Depression.