Entitlement Programs for Who?

CEO pay, executive pay and corporate profits are soaring —to 110 times the average, -- at the same time the pay of the typical worker in the United States has been stuck, with real earnings growing less than half as fast as productivity.

According to the Forbes business magazine’s annual executive pay survey, the top eight CEOs on the Forbes list each pocketed over $100 million last year. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, nine out of ten American families -- all but the top 10% of American wage earners -- saw their income fall by 11% after being adjusted for inflation over the last three decades, according to an analysis by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.

The people at the top siphoning off most of the profits for themselves do not care about health care, Social Security, Medicare or any of the social programs we have now that are supposed to ensure American citizens are provided the basic necessities of life, including food, clothing, shelter, education, safety and medical care at the very least.

Obviously something is not working when we have 45 million uninsured Americans in the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world. This ever increasing concentration of wealth distributed to an increasingly smaller and smaller part of the population can only serve to make these programs even less effective over time.

"We had a society 25 years ago in which there were some constraints imposed by public opinion, by strong unions, by a general sense that there were things that you don't do.

And maybe that led firms to make a decision to think of there being a sort of tradeoff between a "let's have a happy high morale" workforce, or let's have a super star CEO and squeeze the workers for all we can." -- Paul Krugman

The American middle class will cease to exist if this trend continues. There is no way stagnant wages can compete with rapidly increasing costs for health care, prescription drugs, energy, housing, etc especially when our lawmakers are in bed with giant corporations and powerful lobbyists to find more and more ways to rob the average American citizen blind.