By Michael McCune
Washington is having a nasty debate over “taxing the wealthy” these days. By good fortune or bad more Americans than every before don’t have to worry about the ramifications of the debate because they don’t qualify as wealthy even by some Third World countries’ standards.
The real topic of the debate is not about how to tax the wealthy but how to scam the average voter again; a debate Washington excels at.
In its World Wealth Report for November, Credit Suisse confirmed a nasty suspicion about America “wealth.” It is merely a figment of the imagination for most Americans.
In its report, covering most of the world’s industrial nations, Credit Suisse shows that Britain, for example, has an average wealth per adult of $258,000. America comes in at $248,000, a mere $10,000 behind. But those are averages where total wealth is divided evenly among all adults. In the mean, where the average point is established where half of the participants are above the line and the other half below, Britain comes in at $121,000, slightly less than half of its overall average. America comes in at a pitiful $53,000, roughly 43.8% of the British figure.
This stunning revelation, shows that America’s wealth is indeed skewed heavily into the hands of a decreasing few while most subsist on little or nothing. Compared to the median wealth in Europe or Japan, the typical American is destitute. And if $53,000 is the mean, how thin is the margin between starving and freezing for the bottom 20%?
The grim figures from Credit Suisse explains why so many Americans are reliant on government handouts and why the “We are doing it for you” campaigns fare so well. America dresses poorly, eats poorly and lives poorly because its people are P-O-O-R!!! Government duplicity within the millions of regulations spewed from Washington has stripped the majority of even the dream of wealth. America is mostly alone in this predicament because of Washington. Washington manipulates the news it sends forth so it sounds better than actuality. Private asset values are taking a severe drop.
Take the housing market for example. Washington preyed on 40 years of home ownership dreams and rigged the system to gain favor with the bottom 20% voters. It forced credit when no credit should have been given. When the bubble popped, America lost nearly $8.4 trillion in private wealth. The assets still exist but they are owned by government agencies and its insider cronies.
What can be gleaned from the brutal Credit Suisse assessment is America has a huge, and rapidly-growing of very poor which will become increasingly desperate and angry as time passes.
Government will take advantage of this desperate anger to strengthen its position since government, at the core, is in a perpetual war with those on the inside pitted against the outsiders.
From fraudulent unemployment reports to overstated economic recovery releases to rigged “scientific” environmental research data, it is all done to substantiate the myth “Government Is Here For You.” Government insiders–who are the only people allowed to take wealth from others through regulations they initiated–will find scamming the public yet again a not-so-difficult challenge to diminished ethics. They are, after all, all Maoists at heart adhering strictly to the policy “Political power comes from the point of a gun.”
But America’s government is finding fewer and fewer outsiders to steal from. The feared, repressive central government the Founding Fathers dreaded is here. But it is finding itself reduced to a vulture-like existence; squabbling over the rotting remnants of the American economic carcass. Remnants so bitter nobody else wants it.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
This is cool!
Why does this have to be the ONLY reliable source? Oh well, gj!