Crumble

May 17: “[T]he first signs of decay are starting. … Subtle things, that no one else seems to notice, as they happen ever so slowly. The schools and the library and other public buildings aren’t quite as clean, quite as kept-up, as they used to be. The streets aren’t quite as clean. The potholes and the cracked sidewalks don’t get fixed as quickly, or at all. There are more houses around town that need fresh paint, more vacant retail spaces. Little things. Little degrees of difference. But they’re everywhere, when you really look. They’re the little things that indicate that salaries aren’t keeping up with inflation, that local and state governments don’t have the funds they used to. Belt-tightening everywhere. The house can go another year without paint. The City Hall can go another year, or two, without tuckpointing. We can get rid of a couple of sanitation trucks, give up a couple of salt trucks in the winter. We don’t need two toll booths onto the interstate open; one is fine. Little things that no one really notices, to stave off the rot for as long as we can. Little things that happen in communities like mine before crime starts to go up in communities that aren’t as fortunate, communities that don’t have any give in their belts to begin with. … [We] need someone to care about putting money—and attention—back into America again.”

Today: “You know how to tell when a nation is in decline? Just look at its infrastructure. A society on the rise is marked by trains that run on time and well, highways that are a pleasure to drive upon, and basic services that work well. That's not happening in the U.S. anymore. Our pal RJ Eskow details: ‘The American Society of Civil Engineers last year graded the nation "D" for its overall infrastructure conditions, estimating that it would take $1.6 trillion over five years to fix the problem.’ The U.S. is in decline, ladies and germs, and that decline has been hastened by the people in power for the past six years.”

Hastened by the war in Iraq, which was supposed to pay for itself. My governor, Mitch Daniels, who was the White House Budget Director during the run-up to the war, asserted the war would be an “affordable endeavor,” and rejected as “very, very high” the chief White House economic adviser’s estimate that the war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion. The war has already cost us well over $200 billion.

Hasted by out-of-control wasteful government spending, with Congress having approved a record $29 billion in earmarks for 2006, including crap like $591,017,000 for eight additional C-130J aircraft, even though a “2004 report from the office of the inspector general of the Department of Defense rated the J model unsatisfactory and cited deficiencies in, among other things, its defensive systems,” and $1,300,000 for berry research in Alaska.

Hastened by tax cuts, 70% of the savings generated by which benefit the top 2% (those making $200,000 or more) of taxpayers. Bush’s tax cuts cost the government over $75 billion in revenue from those making $100,000 or more. (See chart below.)


(Click on image for larger view.)
Hasted by the increasing disparity in wealth between individuals and corporations. (See chart below, via Eric Hopp.)


“[W]ages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation's gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as ‘the golden era of profitability’.”

Additionally, corporations share significantly less of the tax revenue burden than they used to. “In 1965, individual taxpayers paid 66% of all US income taxes, and corporations paid about a third. But by 2000, the corporate share had dropped to 18%, just about half what it used to be.”


And it has fallen since. TomPaine: “The treasury department reports the federal government collected $184 billion in corporate income taxes in 2004 (up from $ 132 billion in 2003)—or just 9.6 percent of total taxes collected.”

In less than 40 years, corporations’ tax share fell from 31% to less than 10%. Meanwhile, the minimum wage hasn’t been raised since 1998, and “the median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation,” even though productivity (and corporate profits) continued to rise steadily over the same period.

The average American worker is being robbed blind by a massive redistribution of wealth orchestrated by a government that leaves itself wallowing in deficits and unable to sustain the infrastructure on which those Americans depend. The nation is crumbling. If we continue down this path, forget drowning the government in a bathtub; we won’t even be able to afford the tub.