Obama signs debt bill after final Senate vote

I was one of about 1,000 people that showed up for a lunch time protest at a Repubican Rep's office today. People are pissed!

Next time I'll bring War Paint...

hopefully we can clean out some of those Tea Party Republicans from the House in the 2012 election and not have to go through this again.

not a chance sparky.....

if the teaparty is so stupid and weak,,,

how did they just force Obama and all liberals across the land to eat their peas?

what liberals fail to realize is the very vast majority of those in the center agree with tea-party ideals,,, balanced book, free-markets and such...

they just do not refer to themselves as tea-party people.

liberals only marginalize themselves when they try to marginalize the teaparty,,, by calling them "teabagger, terrorist... etc

{ this I hope they never understand will make 2012 a easy sweep}

in 2012 liberals are going to be forced to eat so many peas I honestly think they will explode after it is over

cheers

:)

Silliy silly Tea Bagger Terrorist setting on a fence, trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents.

Cheers back ; p

very child like.... nice....

thanks for making my point

TA "thanks alot"

:_

Oh yeah, the vast majority of Americans just loves the consolidation of wealth and power for the few at the expense of the many.

How Greed Destroys America

Exclusive: New studies show that America’s corporate chieftains are living like kings while the middle class stagnates and shrivels. Yet, the Tea Party and other anti-tax forces remain determined to protect the historically low tax rates of the rich and push the burden of reducing the federal debt onto the rest of society, a curious approach explored by Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

June 28, 2011

If the “free-market” theories of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman were correct, the United States of the last three decades should have experienced a golden age in which the lavish rewards flowing to the titans of industry would have transformed the society into a vibrant force for beneficial progress.

After all, it has been faith in “free-market economics” as a kind of secular religion that has driven U.S. government policies – from the emergence of Ronald Reagan through the neo-liberalism of Bill Clinton into the brave new world of House Republican budget chairman Paul Ryan.

By slashing income tax rates to historically low levels – and only slightly boosting them under President Clinton before dropping them again under George W. Bush – the U.S. government essentially incentivized greed or what Ayn Rand liked to call “the virtue of selfishness.”

Further, by encouraging global “free trade” and removing regulations like the New Deal’s Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banks, the government also got out of the way of “progress,” even if that “progress” has had crushing results for many middle-class Americans.

True, not all the extreme concepts of author/philosopher Ayn Rand and economist Milton Friedman have been implemented – there are still programs like Social Security and Medicare to get rid of – but their “magic of the market” should be glowing by now.

We should be able to assess whether laissez-faire capitalism is superior to the mixed public-private economy that dominated much of the 20th Century.

The old notion was that a relatively affluent middle class would contribute to the creation of profitable businesses because average people could afford to buy consumer goods, own their own homes and take an annual vacation with the kids. That “middle-class system,” however, required intervention by the government as the representative of the everyman.

Beyond building a strong infrastructure for growth – highways, airports, schools, research programs, a safe banking system, a common defense, etc. – the government imposed a progressive tax structure that helped pay for these priorities and also discouraged the accumulation of massive wealth.

After all, the threat to a healthy democracy from concentrated wealth had been known to American leaders for generations.

A century ago, it was Republican President Theodore Roosevelt who advocated for a progressive income tax and an estate tax. In the 1930s, it was Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt, who dealt with the economic and societal carnage that under-regulated financial markets inflicted on the nation during the Great Depression.

With those hard lessons learned, the federal government acted on behalf of the common citizen to limit Wall Street’s freewheeling ways and to impose high tax rates on excessive wealth.

So, during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency of the 1950s, the marginal tax rate on the top tranche of earnings for the richest Americans was about 90 percent. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the top rate was still around 70 percent.

Discouraging Greed

Greed was not simply frowned upon; it was discouraged.

The Tea Baggers have dug their own grave and America will bury them for good.

Long live the generation gap, old fart!

Americans just loves the consolidation of wealth and power for the few at the expense of the many.

this rhetoric does not fly with the majority

only a liberal thinks of capitalism like that....

I know this site gives you a false sense of majority,,, but ummm your not.

hell... even the teaparty has more pull than the liberals....

eat yer peas... all of them....

• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
• 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
• 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
• Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
• As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
• The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation's wealth.
• Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
• In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
• The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
• More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
• or the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
• This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
• Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
• The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income

Yuck fou, eat your own damn peas.

ummmm sorry to bust your bubble but most of that lingers due to Obamas policy of killing american business......

wealth runs from confiscation... nothing new there.

but hey think what ya wish...

and um

i like peas and other things good for me,,,

peas and fiscal responsibility go together like peas and carrots

Yuck fou,

there goes that child talk we talked about again...

:)

I know, I took the troll bait again... I might as well be talking to dirt clod.

I might as well be talking to dirt clod.

you have the IQ for it...

and you might actually win some of your argument's with a dirt clod

Boulder boulder on the ground, tell something something real profound...

Captainobviousays "if the tea party is so stupid and weak, how did they just force Obama and all liberals to eat their peas."

Very simply - because they are corrupt and devious. The only thing that is marginalized was the tea parties last rally that had all of about 15 people there. It is a ineffective debt plan that republicans, democrats and independents alike don't agree with. It was a very STUPID thing to do.

The tea party is not governing or legislating, they are sabatoging. The majority of americans are sickened by it. By the way, those peas we ate may really payoff at election time.

Rainbow Warrior thanks for the the laugh. I haven't heard the "sitting on the fence" jingle since 1953. The TP has done its damage and there are plenty of ex-supports to prove this.