While the Tea Party and the army of misinformed Americans are trying to “GET THEIR COUNTRY BACK” they should try to figure out what many of us here already know. It is the top 2%, mainly the investment bankers, the corporate raiders, the corporate titans, and those that produce no products and services but mainly manipulate capital that have stolen the country.
They have supported low tax on the wealthy with policies that effected deficit spending. The government uses deficit spending to purchase from the titans of finance’s businesses, The interest on the government debt is paid by all taxpayers to the titans of finance in the form interest on bonds they purchase. They further maximize their profits by tax breaks that encourages the outsourcing of our jobs to overseas slave labor. We maintain a large expensive military all taxpayers pay for to keep the lanes of commerce open and to remove governments that may attempt to inhibit perceived exploitation.
This President in a limited and too timid a fashion has tried to somewhat mitigate these with new policies only to have a vociferous misinform pack accuse him of socialism. Little do they know he is the only thing between them and outright indentured servitude or poverty.
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Wall Street is on track to pay its employees $144 billion this year, breaking a record for the second year in a row, the Wall Street Journal reports. Despite financial reform intended to curb compensation, and a steep decline in trading volume, pay in the financial services industry has shown few signs of fading.
Pay is expected to rise at 26 out of the 35 firms according to the WSJ. According to it’s analysis, the $144 billion overall figure is a 4 percent increase over last year’s $139 billion. Revenue on Wall Street grew only 3 percent this year, the WSJ says, but, unlike at some businesses outside the financial sector, employee compensation remains a high priority.
The Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, passed in July, gives regulators the power to write rules governing executive pay. But it remains to be seen how effective — or restrictive — those rules will be. Last month, regulators from the SEC, the FDIC and the Federal Reserve testified before the House Financial Services Committee, to explain how they intended to curb executive compensation. But as the rule-making is still in progress, the conversation included few specific strategies or numbers.
When asked to name a threshold for an "inordinately large" payout, Federal Reserve general counsel Scott Alvarez declined. "It’s very nuanced," he said. "There is no number." His peers had similar answers.
As the WSJ reported last week, banks are gradually returning to their traditional practices. After banks’ excessive risk-taking helped fuel the financial crisis, the Dodd-Frank reform placed soon-to-be-implemented limits on trading, and some banks are winding down the divisions that trade on their own account. The global Basel III agreement has also upped the amount of capital that banks must retain.