The Romney campaign remains in crisis mode with the release of a secretly recorded video shot in May of Mitt Romney dissing the 47 percent of Americans who pay no federal income and as people “who are dependent on government, who believe that they are victims.”
So yesterday, the Republican presidential nominee reached back a decade-and-a-half to 1998 to suggest that President Barack Obama’s principal goal, as The New York Times says, “is to soak the rich so that money will keep flowing for social program handouts to the lazy and undeserving.”
“A tape came out a couple of days ago with the president saying, yes, he believes in redistribution. I don’t,” said Romney. “I believe the way to lift people and to help people have higher incomes is not to take from some and give to others, but to create wealth for all of us.”
But things have gotten better for the rich under President Obama. Wall Street profits are soaring through the roof. Productivity has surged. Yet wages remain stagnant, as this chart from Mother Jones points out:
If the median household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.
Yesterday, Forbes reported that the net wealth of the richest Americans grew by 13 percent in the past year with Barack Obama in his third year as President of the United States. The gap between the very rich and the merely rich increased and helped drive up the average net worth of Forbes’ 400 members to an all-time record 4.2 billion dollars. The rich are getting richer and the middle class are getting left behind. Yet America`s wealthy, they just want more of the pie. And they’re all too willing to accuse President Obama of trying to take it away.
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