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Preview of the 2014 State of The Union Address plus News and Views on Income Inequality

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From the White House, an email from Dan Pfeiffer, Senior Advisor:

We’re now just [one day] out — and the President wanted you to get the first preview of what this speech is all about. As always, he’ll be working on it right up until game time, but three words sum up the President’s message on Tuesday night: opportunity, action, and optimism.

The core idea is as American as they come: If you work hard and play by the rules, you should have the opportunity to succeed. Your ability to get ahead should be based on your hard work and ambition and who you want to be, not just the raw circumstance of who you are when you’re born.

On Tuesday night, the President will lay out a set of real, concrete, practical proposals to grow the economy, strengthen the middle class, and empower all who hope to join it.

In this year of action, the President will seek out as many opportunities as possible to work with Congress in a bipartisan way. But when American jobs and livelihoods depend on getting something done, he will not wait for Congress.

President Obama has a pen and he has a phone, and he will use them to take executive action and enlist every American — business owners and workers, mayors and state legislators, young people, veterans, and folks in communities from across the country — in the project to restore opportunity for all.[…]

With some action on all our parts, we can help more jobseekers find work, and more working Americans find the economic security they deserve. That’s why, in the week following the speech, President Obama will travel to communities across the country — including Prince George’s County Maryland, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Nashville, before returning to the White House to outline new efforts to help the long-term unemployed.

White House: Get Ready for the Speech

   The State of the Union Address, January 28, 2014 at 9pm Eastern

Storify: A Day in the Life: Inside the State of the Union

On Tuesday, January 28th at 9pm ET, President Obama will deliver his State of the Union Address. Ahead of the speech, White House staff took to Instagram to give you a behind the scenes look at the process.

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Income Inequality News and Views, Found on The Internets:

Pew Poll on Inequality

The survey finds that more people think that circumstances beyond an individual’s control (50%) – rather than a lack of hard work (35%) – are generally to blame if a person is poor.

Similarly, more say that factors beyond an individual’s control have more to do with someone being rich. About half (51%) say having greater advantages than others generally has more to do with why a person is rich, while 38% say it is because they worked harder than others.

Moreover, by a 60% to 36% margin, most Americans feel the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, as opposed to being fair to all.

That survey also found that 73% supports raising the minimum wage from the current level of $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour. 71% of independents, 90% of Democrats, 71% of “independents” and 53% of Republicans.

The survey is interesting because Pew is now providing a breakdown of Republicans into non-teaparty and teaparty, recognizing, perhaps that the teaparty point of view is an outlier:

Among Republicans and those who lean toward the Republican Party, 70% who agree with the Tea Party oppose an extension of unemployment benefits and nearly as many oppose raising the minimum wage (65%). Yet 52% of non-Tea Party Republicans favor a one-year extension of unemployment benefits and an even higher percentage (65%) supports increasing the minimum wage.

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Paul Krugman: Paranoia of the Plutocrats

Extreme inequality, it turns out, creates a class of people who are alarmingly detached from reality – and simultaneously gives these people great power.

The example many are buzzing about right now is the billionaire investor Tom Perkins, a founding member of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Perkins lamented public criticism of the “one percent” – and compared such criticism to Nazi attacks on the Jews, suggesting that we are on the road to another Kristallnacht.

You may say that this is just one crazy guy and wonder why The Journal would publish such a thing. But Mr. Perkins isn’t that much of an outlier. […]

And there are a number of other plutocrats who manage to keep Hitler out of their remarks but who nonetheless hold, and loudly express, political and economic views that combine paranoia and megalomania in equal measure.

Krugman points out that the 1% are indeed “worse off” financially than they would be if Romney had won in 2012. Tax rates on the top earnings have risen. But he addresses their reaction to the being on the losing end of the last two presidential elections:

Normal people take it in stride; even if they’re angry and bitter over political setbacks, they don’t cry persecution, compare their critics to Nazis and insist that the world revolves around their hurt feelings. But the rich are different from you and me. […]

They’re accustomed to being treated with deference, not just by the people they hire but by politicians who want their campaign contributions. And so they are shocked to discover that money can’t buy everything, can’t insulate them from all adversity.

It is difficult for me to reconcile the word “adversity” with being a billionaire in America. I suspect that they would have less angst if they would focus on gratitude that they live in a free country instead of how much more wealth they would have accumulated if the 99% were not persecuting them.

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Feel free to leave links to other news and opinion pieces in the comments.


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/ 17 Comments

17 comments

  3. JanF

    Good stuff in it.

    FDR: Address at Madison Square Garden, New York City

    For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

    Yo, plutocrats!

    We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace-business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

    They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

    Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me-and I welcome their hatred.

    “I welcome their hatred” has been quoted many times, but read the rest of his speech.

    Tea Party, circa 1936

    The very employers and politicians and publishers who talk most loudly of class antagonism and the destruction of the American system now undermine that system by this attempt to coerce the votes of the wage earners of this country. It is the 1936 version of the old threat to close down the factory or the office if a particular candidate does not win. It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them.

    He talks about the pushback against the Social Security Act and Unemployment Compensation Insurance, the pushback that sounds like that against Medicare, in the 1980s, and the Affordable Care Act now. Trying to deceive and scare workers:

    They tell the worker his wage will be reduced by a contribution to some vague form of old-age insurance. They carefully conceal from him the fact that for every dollar of premium he pays for that insurance, the employer pays another dollar. That omission is deceit.

    They carefully conceal from him the fact that under the federal law, he receives another insurance policy to help him if he loses his job, and that the premium of that policy is paid 100 percent by the employer and not one cent by the worker. They do not tell him that the insurance policy that is bought for him is far more favorable to him than any policy that any private insurance company could afford to issue. That omission is deceit.

    Fighting for working people, just as Democrats like Barack Obama and others are doing now:

    Of course we will continue to seek to improve working conditions for the workers of America-to reduce hours over-long, to increase wages that spell starvation, to end the labor of children, to wipe out sweatshops. Of course we will continue every effort to end monopoly in business, to support collective bargaining, to stop unfair competition, to abolish dishonorable trade practices. For all these we have only just begun to fight.

    And doesn’t this sound like the tea party Republicans of 2014?

    Here and now I want to make myself clear about those who disparage their fellow citizens on the relief rolls. They say that those on relief are not merely jobless-that they are worthless. Their solution for the relief problem is to end relief-to purge the rolls by starvation.

    The teaparty view of America, the view of the plutocrats and Bush’s and Romney’s Have Mores, is essentially unchanged since the 1930s, the last time they crashed our economy and then wanted government to step aside after it got the economy righted again. But FDR prevailed and built a social safety net to catch those who have fallen on hard times. We can’t let the minions of the Tom Perkins’ of the world shred that safety net in 2014.

     

  4. JanF

    I call President Obama “the guy who won a majority of the votes in presidential elections in 2008 and 2012”. To stand up for those people who voted for him is not arrogance … it is what he believes he was hired to do.  

    Congressional Republicans can complain all they want. The president has offered time and time again to listen to bipartisan ideas to help our economy and get people working. Instead Congress voted 40+ times to repeal the ACA and 20+ times to repeal a woman’s right to choose … and a family’s right to decide how many children they can afford to raise.

    Bottom line: President Obama won’t give in to extortion or give up on trying to make our lives suck less.

  5. JanF

    This article in The Atlantic digs a little deeper into that study. For one thing having the same economic mobility as 50 years ago is not exactly a ringing endorsement given that the gap between the richest and the poorest is much wider now. It also turns out that a lot depends on where you live:

    “The American Dream is alive in Denmark and Finland and Sweden. And in San Jose and Salt Lake City and Pittsburgh. But it’s dead in Atlanta and Raleigh and Charlotte. And in Indianapolis and Detroit and Jacksonville. ”

    The Atlantic: Why is the American dream dead in the South?

    Look at this graphic:

    People in the south voting for the protectors of the plutocracy are, quite literally, voting against their economic self-interest. How long they let god-guns-gays … and hatred of Democrats … outweigh the chance for their children to get ahead is anyone’s guess.  

  6. JanF

    Obama’s State Of The Union Theme: Time To Move Past Reagan’s Vision

    The American economy remains in a slump, middle class incomes have stagnated, social mobility is in decline and income inequality has soared to unprecedented heights. Democrats’ prescriptions to heal these wounds were again thwarted by Republicans in Congress last year despite their defeat in the 2012 election. If Democrats can’t make a compelling case for government to play a larger role in solving these problems now, then when?

    It’ll be a crucial subtext of President Barack Obama’s sixth State of the Union speech Tuesday night. A desire to fight back against the Reagan-era mentality, which is alive and thriving in the modern tea party movement […]

    Broadly, Democrats want to aggressively make the case for government as a force for good after decades of accommodating the conservative premise — if not outright embracing it, as Bill Clinton did in 1996 when he famously declared that “the era of big government is over.” Eighteen years later, the ghost of Reagan continues to haunt Democrats, even as it stymies their goals, and party leaders are increasingly eager to exorcise those demons.

  7. JanF

    GOP’s just-say-no agenda on gun safety laws and more must end

    A year ago, President Barack Obama delivered the annual State of the Union address in the shadow of the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

    With friends and families of the slain 20 students and six staff still deep in their grief, the president asked the men and women who make the laws of the land to adopt several modest gun safety measures such as strengthening background checks for would-be gun buyers and limiting the capacity of ammunition magazines.[…]

    Three months later, the bipartisan bills supported by a whopping majority of Americans were smothered in the Senate when opponents exploited Senate rules and demanded the measures only advance with a super-majority of 60 votes. And 60 votes there were not.

    When the effort crashed, Obama noted, it was a “shameful day for Washington.”

    The president has been holding back in the hopes to forge bipartisan deals, as Corn says, because Obama sees himself as the “president of all Americans”:

    Obama has not mounted a sustained effort to portray Republican sabotage as a chief problem in Washington. No minimum wage hike? No extension of assistance for the long-term unemployed? No closing of special interest corporate loopholes? No budget stability? No jobs bill? No immigration reform? No new gun safety laws? It’s all due to the same thing: the Republican just-say-no agenda.

    Corn concludes:

    This year, Obama has to call out this GOP strategy of sabotage and forcefully present the counter-argument, and yet doing so will only have an impact if conducted in a consistent manner. (Read: over and over.) At this point in his presidency, it appears as if the prospects for bipartisan legislative achievement are particularly low.  If that’s the case, the president risks little if he wages a more powerful endeavor to win this narrative battle.

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