The “recovery” continues to pick up steam, but it has not left Wall Street. The poor and middle classes still suffer all the effects of the Republican recession. That is likely to remain locked in for years, because the poor and middle classes have no ability to spend us out of the recession and the rich have no incentive to hire us out of it. The biggest part of the problem is that everything that was supposed to trickle down since 1980 has gushed up, and the bottom 40% of Americans have only 0.2% of the wealth. As long as income inequity continues at record pace, the Republican redistribution of wealth will continue.

After the killing of Osama Bin Laden at a compound in a suburb of Islamabad, Pakistan, much of the nation’s focus has turned to the men in our military who were responsible for the raid . The combat team that attacked Bin Laden’s compound was composed of an elite unit of Navy SEALS. As economist Dean Baker points out, ABC News did a feature story about the SEALs to highlight the sacrifices those enlisted in the unit make. ABC compared their base salaries of $54,000 a year to the average annual salary for teachers. Baker notes that perhaps their salaries should be compared to Wall Street CEOs who earn tens of millions of dollars: In the wake of their successful assault on Osama Bin Laden’s hideout, ABC News did a short feature on the Navy Seals. The report tells us that the people who hold this highly demanding and dangerous get paid about $54,000 a year. It then adds that: “The base salary level [of Navy Seals] is comparable to the average annual salary for teachers in the U.S., which was $55,350 for the 2009-2010 school year, according to the Digest of Education Statistics.’ That is one possible comparison. There are other possible reference points. For example, the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan both pocket around $20 million a year. Baker’s query poses an interesting question. What would the numbers look like if the base salary of a Navy SEAL — who risk their very lives in their day-to-day work — was compared to the compensation of the CEOs of some of America’s wealthiest corporations? Data from the AFL-CIO’s Executive Pay Watch finds that the average 2010 CEO compensation at an S&P 500 company was $11,358,445. ThinkProgress has demonstrated this gap in compensation visually… [emphasis original]

Inserted from <Think Progress>

I for one think a Navy Seal is worth more than a Bankster. Seals put their lives on the line for us. Banksters put our homes, our jobs, our retirement, and even our entire economy on the line to become even richer than obscenely rich.

Ed Schultz demonstrates just how extreme the inequity is.

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