Winners and Losers

It is not as if some folks aren't winning.  Politicians are winning.  They are well paid, have juicy retirement benefits and if, perchance, they lose an election, there are more than enough PACs around who will hire them as consultants to live out life in luxury.  Look at Newt Gingrich for example.  He made himself millions of dollars after 'retiring' from public office by consulting, not only for PACs, but for beta noires like FNMA.

Who else is winning?  Academics with tenure are winning.  They have protected jobs with high income and rich benefits.  Public employees and teachers, who haven't lost their jobs.  They are winning.  Upper income folks collecting social security and medicare.  They are winning.  Middle income Americans on food stamps -- they are winning.  Rich folks.  They are winning.  They know that the coming tax increases won't effect them, because they don't have to show income.  Warren Buffett, if he wishes, can reduce his taxable income to zero and pay no taxes.  So, what does he care what the tax rates are?  Raise them, he says.  Why not?  He won't be paying them.

So there are winners!  That helps explain how in an economy with no job creation, the current Administration still commands the support of half of the electorate.  The losers are ordinary citizens -- mostly middle and lower income -- who hope to provide education and a future for their children.  They and future generations are the losers.  Opportunities for ordinary citizens without political connections or who don't fall into a politically connected or protected class are disappearing in the Obama USA.  The losers are the poor who are denied a leg-up in the economy by minimum wage laws, litigation threats built into law and employer mandates on employees.  The war on poor people engaged in by the Obama Administration has born fruit.  Poor and minorities in the US are in the worst economic condition in three decades.

So while the rich, the movie stars, the public employees, the tenure-protected world, and the politicians comfortably enjoy the fruits of the Obama economy, everyone else better find some way to survive.  It certainly won't happen in the job market as long as the Obama folks are in office.