The 53% is really part of the 99%

There has been a meme floating around the Internet in reaction to the 99% movement, called “We are the 53%”, based on the factoid floating around that only 53% of Americans pay income taxes. This backlash plays upon the the idea that people supporting the Occupy movements are leeches on society looking for more handouts.

The problem of course, is that none of this makes any sense.

So who are the 47%? There’s an excellent article on Slate that goes into greater detail than I ever could. The bottom line is, some people are too poor, while others claim enough deductions to wipe out their taxes (almost half are elderly), and yet others benefited enough from the Bush tax cuts that their deductions erased their income tax obligations.

But even deeper than that, this movement tries to pretend that income taxes equals all taxes, which is ludicrous. Every single person in America (whether a citizen or not), pays into the system. Every. Single. One. There are taxes for Social Security, Medicare, roads, payroll, the list goes on and on. Some people may get more from the system than they pay into it, but everybody pays (just like with any kind of insurance, when you think about it).

One of the core ideas of this movement is that the 53% are the hard-working ones pulling themselves up by their own hard work, and are now being expected to subsidize everyone else. And yet the statistics are quite clear (see this NY Mag article with the pretty graphs) — the middle class that these people identify themselves with are slowly being squeezed to death by the 1% who are continuing to use the system to further their own goals at the expense of everyone else. The anger from these “53 percenters” is misguided — maybe they should be asking why so many people can’t find jobs, or why they’re paying a mortage worth more than their house.

I can appreciate conservatives not wanting to jump on what is largely seen as a left-wing movement. But we are fighting for a level playing field. We are fighting for the American Dream, where hard work is rewarded. We expect our government to respond to the people who elect them, not to the people who pay them the most money to do their bidding.

This is not about being a liberal or a conservative. This is about common sense, and about restoring the balance to this country.

Support H.R. 1489: Return to Prudent Banking Act of 2011

As the Occupy movement has taken hold, we have been searching for concrete changes we can stand up for. Despite what many in the MSM (mainstream media) would have you believe, it is not the job of Occupy protesters to come forward with solutions to problems. THAT job belongs to politicians (who have been hired to write laws on our behalf). One of the goals of this movement is to get those in power to stop listening to lobbyists and talk radio hosts, and start listening to the 99%.

However, there is one, simple demand many of us have: a return to the regulations that kept commercial banking and investing banking separate – ie, return many of the Glass-Steagall provisions that were repealed in 1999 (and which lead to this unregulated mess we found ourselves in less than 10 years later). Fortunately, a little googling, and lo and behold, there is a bill floating around to do just that. As the title of this post suggests, it’s called The Return to Prudent Banking Act of 2011, and one of its goals is to get Glass-Steagall protections back on the books.

You can read the text of the bill here: H.R. 1489 (thomas.loc.gov)
Here is a page listing its status:  H.R. 1489: Return to Prudent Banking Act of 2011 (govtrack.us)

As of May 2nd it was going through the Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government Sponsored Enterprises.

This bill is vitally needed to help put a stop to insanity that financial deregulation has caused, and everyone reading this should do something to help persuade our members of Congress that they need to listen to the 99% and support this.

I will begin compiling action items here we can all do to help push this bill through Congress. And of course, if you have any resources you have found (petitions, etc) please post them in the comments below. And please get the word out!

Restoring Balance to Free Enterprise

There is absolutely nothing wrong with capitalism – it is the greatest tool for spreading wealth amongst the greatest number of people our recorded history has known.

BUT, every system needs to exist in balance. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It’s what makes the world go round.

The founding fathers of the USA recognized this, and built in a number of checks and balances in the government they developed with the US Constitution. There are two houses of government, an executive branch, and a judicial branch, all working together to ensure that no one body accrues too much power and upsets the balance of government.

Why wouldn’t it be different in the free market? As we’ve witnessed over the past thirty years, without regulation corporations will only grow larger and larger, and gain power until they swallow up everything in their path. It lead to the worst recession since the 1930’s. And yet still, there are voices calling for LESS regulation. Regulation is the safety valve that keeps the system running!

The system is completely out of balance. With the Occupy movement we are trying to restore balance, and really help save the system from itself.  Again, this doesn’t mean everything has to have 10 levels of bureaucracy attached to it (that’s just an imbalance of a different kind), but we HAVE to start re-regulating in our economy if we want to save it, and if we want the American Dream to actually start meaning something again.

Occupy Los Angeles

I thought I’d write about our own experiences taking part in the Occupy LA protests. I’m in my early 40’s, at a well-paying job as a web developer for a large hospital in Los Angeles. My wife and I have no children. We’re very fortunate – we actually have a steady income and good health insurance. Yet, we live in a house that we share with another college-educated friend of ours because we couldn’t afford our own place. The house is deep underwater, and we’re drowning in debt (and shame on us for not reading the fine print when some of the credit card issuers arbitrarily raised our interest rates to 30% on cards that had never had a late payment EVER). We’re barely making it check-to-check, but somehow we are still making all of our payments.

It would be so much easier to walk away from it all, but we have a sense of responsibility to these debts that we voluntarily took on.

What we’re demanding — what people in the Occupy movement are demanding — is the same responsibility from these large institutions, and the so-called 1%. It’s really that simple.

When the financial industry came to the brink of collapse because of the reckless behavior of these “too big to fail” corporations, we saw an amazing ability for our government to come together to bail them out. In return, they’ve repaid the favor by working night and day to lift the already watered-down provisions of the Dodd-Frank reforms so they can continue with their same insanity, and to basically act like spoiled, entitled brats towards those of us who saved their butts in the first place.

Contrast this with any legislation in Congress that might actually help out rank and file Americans, and suddenly everything becomes gridlocked and impossible to achieve. From out here, it appears that when you have a lobby on your side, government works, and if you don’t, well tough luck.

We march for three simple things: tighter regulation of the financial industry (a return to Glass-Steagall would be a big step), a demand for shared sacrifice amongst *100%* of this country, and to wake up those in Congress who have been listening only to the lobbyists and the media chattering classes, and losing sight of the fact that this country is a DEMOCRACY, of the people, by the people, and for the people.

These are not radical notions, and they’re not even strictly left-wing (personal responsibility seems like a classic conservative belief to me). This is the no-longer silent majority in this country, across the spectrum, who have finally had enough.