Reality Tea Party

Want your kids to be a top earner? Me too, but top $$ is no indicator of reaching self-actualization. And many of the factors that determine this upward mobility exist before our kids are born.

The numbers on intergenerational upward mobility are fascinating to me, and so when I read this report late into the night last night a couple of things struck me.

• Children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich who have about a 22 percent chance.
• Children born to the middle quintile of parental family income ($42,000 to $54,300) had about the same chance of ending up in a lower quintile than their parents (39.5 percent) as they did of moving to a higher quintile (36.5 percent). Their chances of attaining the top five percentiles of the income distribution were just 1.8 percent.

In regard to those recent tea parties, in the past 25 years top salaries have increased by 256% while low-income salaries increased by only 11%. Even though productivity per worker has skyrocketed, the plain fact of the matter is that we have been ripped off by the Huns running corporate America.

Tom Hartmann has it right about the original Boston Tea Party. It was an anti-corporate revolt, "against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation then in existence. "

Righties and the middle class, the reality is that you have been picking up the tax bill for large corps, while expanding salaries have been focused at the top 1%'ers.

-Prodigal Son