Larry, Garry, Jules, Missy, Miles, Fred, etc.

cat mom to 9 mostly rescues and drop ins. cat loving banker trying to make it thru the day. Cat Twitter helps a lot

[Larry, Garry, Jules, Missy, Miles, Fred, etc. @AmyLeitzell]

@jh336405 @highbrow_nobrow Excellent post. Should be required reading! @MSNOWNews
@CNN

[💯1%_Better_Every_Day💯 @jh336405]

Poverty is not personal failure. It is by design by Republicans.

Here is why:

The middle class isn’t struggling because of immigrants, globalization, or because they don’t work as hard. It was deliberately targeted by Republicans and their wealthy donors.

To understand what happened, you have to understand one thing: two-thirds of the American economy is ordinary people buying things. Groceries, cars, haircuts, houses.

When workers have money, the economy runs and thrives.

When the rich have money….the hoard it….and because there's only so much one person can spend — the economy stalls.

That's not a theory. We've seen it happen before and it caused the Great Depression.

Round one: the 1920s. In 1921 the top tax rate was 73%. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon — one of the richest men in America — cut it to 58%, then 50%, then down to 25% in 1928.

Two-thirds of the top rate, gone in eight years for the wealthy and corporations. Money flooded to the top. Then October 1929 happened. The economy came crashing down during the Great Depression because American workers were paid crap wages and the wealthy hoarded all the money.

So, after the Great Depression, the government rebuilt the middle class on purpose.
FDR helped pass two laws, both signed in 1935:

• The Wagner Act made it legal — for the first time — for workers to form a union and negotiate as a group without being fired for it. Before Wagner, organizing could cost you your job and the courts would side with the company. After Wagner, the law sat on the worker's side of the table and workers negotiated everything from better wages, to paid vacations, to weekends off.

• The Revenue Act — critics called it the "Wealth Tax" — took the top rate from Mellon's 24% back up to 79%. By World War II it hit 94%, and it stayed above 90% for almost twenty years.

Those two decades — the 1940s through the 1960s — are when the American middle class was built and thrived. Everyone thrived because a rising tide lifts all boats. When workers have money to spend…they spend it. We had GDP rates as high as 16%. Today we can barely muster 2%.

One in three workers belonged to a union. One factory paycheck bought a house, a car, and a retirement. That wasn't the free market being generous. That was the recipe: bargaining power for workers, plus tax rates that made hoarding by the rich and corporations pointless.
Here's the part you may not know — tax code used to force companies to take care of workers.

Wages, health insurance, and pensions are all used to be tax-deductible business expenses. When the corporate tax rate was 52%, every dollar a company paid its workers really only cost it about 48 cents. Paying your people was half price. And there was even a rule — the accumulated earnings tax — that penalized companies for just sitting on piles of profit.

So companies did the math and spent the money on workers, equipment, pensions, and health plans. That's where employer health insurance came from in the first place: a 1943 wartime ruling said benefits didn't count as taxable wages, and Congress locked it in 1954.

It’s was America’s hay-day. We had one-bread-winner households, thirty-year corporate careers with a gold watch and pension waiting at the end, healthcare and paid vacations. Bosses weren’t nicer back then. The tax code paid them to be nice. It’s was known as the American Dream.

Then it all got unwritten - on purpose. Bit by bit, year by year…Republicans re-wrote it all to favor the wealthy and corporations.

• 1947 — A Republican Congress passes Taft-Hartley over President Truman's veto, gutting the Wagner Act and opening the door to "right-to-work" laws. Truman called it dangerous. They overrode him anyway.

• 1978–1981 — The 401(k) slips into the tax code as a perk for executives; Reagan's IRS turns it into a pension replacement. Understand the trade: a pension was the company's promise and the company's risk. A 401(k) means the risk is all yours. Private pension coverage: about 38% of workers in 1980, roughly 15% now.

• 1981 — Reagan fires 11,000 striking air traffic controllers. Every employer in America hears the message: the government won't protect strikers anymore.

• 1981–1990 — The minimum wage freezes at $3.35 for nine straight years while prices climb. A pay cut for millions that nobody ever had to vote on.

• 1982 — Reagan's SEC legalizes large-scale stock buybacks. Money that used to go into wages and equipment now goes into pumping the share price.

• 1986 — Corporate rate cut to 34% (it's 21% today). Remember the math: a dollar paid to workers used to cost the company 48 cents. Now it costs 79. Paying people went from half price to full freight — so companies stopped. Not out of malice. Because the tax code stopped paying them to. Meanwhile a CEO today can take his money as capital gains at 23.8% — a lower rate than many of his own employees pay on their wages. This is what has exploded wealth inequality.

• 2001 — China joins the WTO, and companies that had already run out of ways to squeeze wages at home find cheaper labor abroad. The bottom falls out.

• 2017 and beyond — The Trump tax bill, and its extension in the "One Big Beautiful Bill," hand the wealthy and corporations even more. The deficit explodes — and it's not spending doing it. It's the tax cuts.

Where that leaves us. The richest one-in-ten-thousand Americans paid an average total federal tax rate of 71.4% in 1960.

By 2004 it was 34.7% — Trump cut it to 21%. Republicans promised tax cuts for the “makers” would “Trickle Down.” They didn’t.

Nothing remotely like the tax breaks the wealthy and corporations happened for regular families. And no one was fighting for workers anymore.

Private-sector union membership: 35% in 1954, is now under 6%. Workers' slice of everything this economy produces is at or near the lowest level ever recorded — while American workers produce more per hour than any workers in history. Working more. Making less. That is what Republicans did to the American dream.

American workers are now producing the most and keeping the least. That's not the free market. That’s not globalization. That’s not immigrants stealing your job. That's a rigged tax code — rewritten step by step, mostly by Republicans, for the donors who fund their campaigns.

So when the ultra rich like Elon Musk pledge $200 million for the midterms. That's not charity. That's an investment compliments of a rigged tax code , and the return of not having to pay workers what they deserve and favorable regulations.

Trickle-down was never an economic theory. It's a sales pitch — the excuse for handing the money up to corporations and the wealthy, election after election.

The middle class was built with the tax code. And it has been dismantled and targeted on purpose so that Republicans can maintain power by pushing tax breaks and less regulation for the wealthy and corporations.

If we do not reverse these policies, we all are facing a Great Depression. And the wealthy and corporations won’t lift a finger to save us.

[Save Standard Time @SaveStandard]

Permanent Daylight Saving Time is not better for health, safety, economy, or lasting public acceptance—permanent Standard Time is! https://t.co/SKPUFWxyFv

[Wilson and friends @Preciousways825]

@OdieOrville Happy #whiskerWednesday i’m new here! I’m Charlie! I’m a female! I showed up under the bunny house in January. My new mom took me in and I love her! I’m not sure if I’m doing this social media thing right

[Katie ⸆⸉ | 🦋 @ktfromthevault]

@JamieBonkiewicz Here's the bingo card I made for the State of the Union:

[Larry, Garry, Jules, Missy, Miles, Fred, etc. @AmyLeitzell]

@JoMacIntosh1 You have a smart mommy!

[Four Seasons Total Landscaping @TotalSeasons]

Fun Fact: the etymology of the word ‘Venezuela’ is that that it is a portmanteau of the native ‘Venez’ meaning ‘Epstein’ and ‘Uela’ which translates as ‘Distraction’

[Larry, Garry, Jules, Missy, Miles, Fred, etc. @AmyLeitzell]

@washingtonweek @JeffreyGoldberg @tomfriedman Favorite political show!

[Xenta @Xenta777]

Stand with Ukraine in 2026
💙🇺🇦💙

[Don Salmon @dijoni]

He witness Lynching along with his father.

[Larry, Garry, Jules, Missy, Miles, Fred, etc. @AmyLeitzell]

@theasscat Miss him!

[Larry, Garry, Jules, Missy, Miles, Fred, etc. @AmyLeitzell]

@RobynAnderson So happy they are together!

[Larry, Garry, Jules, Missy, Miles, Fred, etc. @AmyLeitzell]

@RobynAnderson I am really going to miss this cat family. Your daily videos really bring me joy. Thank you.

[Moe Davis (U.S. Air Force, Retired) @ColMoeDavis]

As everyone knows, the most critically important post at each of our major institutions of higher learning is the football coach. And if your coach can’t lead your institution’s dedicated team of student athletes to a national championship, then the only way . . .

[Larry, Garry, Jules, Missy, Miles, Fred, etc. @AmyLeitzell]

@Wisdom_HQ Liar

[Larry, Garry, Jules, Missy, Miles, Fred, etc. @AmyLeitzell]

@RobynAnderson So cute

[Robyn Anderson @RobynAnderson]

https://t.co/3KSjYY1z14

The Love & Hisses blog post for Friday, November 21st. 🙂

[Keith Edwards @keithedwards]

BREAKING: Prince Andrew’s biographer says in leaked video that Epstein and Melania were lovers.

[julie k. brown @jkbjournalist]

This guy is doing great work on Epstein's emails. Highly recommend following him.

[Adam Parkhomenko @AdamParkhomenko]

WHO DID THIS