Here is a sobering article (follow the link to read the whole thing) that essentially states the case as objectively from an outside perspective: in short, that the U.S. is becoming a North American Brazil - a land where the elite have rigged the game against the rest of us.
Wake up: the American Dream is over by Paul Harris of The Observer:
Over the past few decades there has been a fundamental shift in the structure of the American economy. The gap between rich and poor has widened and widened. As it does so, the ability to cross that gap gets smaller and smaller. This is far from business as usual but there seems little chance of it stopping, not least because it appears to be government policy....
And still the American government is set on tax breaks for the rich. Bush's first-term tax cuts notoriously benefited the upper strata of American taxpayers. So much so that even Warren Buffet, the second richest man in the world who benefited to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, has said the tax cuts 'scream of injustice'. As head of a hugely successful investment firm, it is hard to paint Buffet as a lefty liberal who hates Wall Street (though, bizarrely, some conservatives do try).
Dems need to be addressing the long-term perspective when they discuss economics - not just facts and figures but what kind of nation we want in the future. The options are out there: a land of opportunity or a country characterized by elitism and dashed dreams.
Still the tax cuts go on. This week one of the main political debates in Washington has been about scrapping the 'estate tax' whereby those who inherit large amounts from their relatives will be taxed on it. This overwhelmingly affects the wealthy. The estate tax is already set so high ($400m) that only one in 200 estates pay any tax at all when they are inherited....
Yet the White House and many politicians, overwhelmingly Republican, want to get rid of it. The lobbying campaign against it has been financed mostly by 18 business dynasties, including the family that owns WalMart. At the same time the Bush administration has sanctioned millions of dollars of cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and the education budget as part of a measure aimed at reducing the spiraling deficit. This is, frankly, obscene.
Race and immigration feed into this debate too, of course. Many Americans could care less about the working poor because they are seen as 'different': brown-skinned 'foreigners.' Racial and cultural divides are typically the point where elites seek to drive wedges between people who otherwise share similar interests. That is why the Dems need a realistic policy on immigration. While criminalization is not an option, rigorous enforcement - particularly of corporate violators - should precede the attempt to grant political rights in order to integrate the existing 'illegal' population. A 'guest-worker' solution is no solution at all, since it will only perpetuate an underclass of disenfranchised workers. We need to integrate - with full political rights - the entire American workforce, but politically this is only realistic if the laws on illegal immigration are meaningfully enforced.
The effect of all this has been to scotch that long-cherished notion of the American Dream: that honest toil is enough to reap the rewards and let even the poorest join the middle class, or maybe even strike it rich. A survey last year showed that such economic mobility (a measure of those people trying to make the Dream come true) was lower in America than Canada, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. In fact, the only country doing as bad as America was Britain....
Now this is not some argument against capitalism. Inequality is inevitable. It is a good thing. People need incentives. People need competition. People need markets. Some people will always be poor. Others deserve to be rich. But at the moment it looks like the rules of the game are being fixed in America in favour of the wealthy....
