My audio follows…. but here is the SAGE’Sofficial video:
President Joe Biden recently held a two-hour press conference in which he was asked if he would question the legitimacy of the 2022 midterm elections if new voting laws were not passed. “I think it could easily be illegitimate,” he answered, surprising many pundits who previously criticized Donald Trump for questioning the results of the 2020 election. But is it really that unusual or unreasonable for a U.S. president or presidential candidate to question certain aspects of an election?
This is one of the best Commentaries by “Clear Eyed” Larry Elder… The SAGE hits it out of the park. (Yes it’s long, but worth your time.)
This is definitely a “clean up on aisle ‘State Department’.” I include video where Elder uses audio, I also add some more “swerve” as well. Enjoy.
What follows are some strong arguments (I think) against the Democrats case against Donald J. Trump’s impeachment. However, FIRST and FOREMOST, here is the Trump Legal Team’s first day in the Senate defending Trump and responding to the House Managers for impeachment of a sitting President:
PJ-MEDIA has a must read for those interested, they explain each one succinctly… which I merely:
10.Ambassador Volker testified there was no effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens 9.Ambassador Taylor testified there was ‘no linkage’ between military aid and investigations 8.Ambassador Taylor testified Ukraine was unaware the lethal aid was being withheld 7.Ambassador Sondland testified Trump didn’t want anything from Ukraine, no quid pro quo 6.Ambassador Sondland testified he had no evidence of a quid pro quo other than his ‘own presumption’ 5.Lt. Col. Vindman admitted Hunter Biden wasn’t qualified to be on Burisma’s board 4.Lt. Col. Vindman and Jennifer Williams both agreed Hunter’s position at Burisma had the potential for the appearance of a conflict of interest 3.Ambassador Taylor basically admitted Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma ‘raises questions’ 2.Marie Yovanovitch confirmed that there was concern in the Obama State Department about Hunter Biden’s conflict of interest at Burisma 1.George Kent said there were legit concerns about Hunter Biden, and Burisma should be investigated
ARI MELBER
RIGHT SCOOP sets this clip with the followin: “This is pretty great. Ari Melber actually told the MSNBC panel and their audience that the Democrats did not prove their case that Trump committed obstruction of Congress, and everyone flipped out.” By “flipped out,” they mean Lefties responses to this commentary, which you should see on RS’s site:
JOHN BARRASSO
This, however, was great… via GATEWAY PUNDIT who said “Deputy White House Counsel Mike Purpura opened the White House defense of President Donald Trump with video of Adam Schiff’s fake call and transcript he read during the House impeachment proceedings. Mike Purpura played the video immediately after taking the podium on Saturday. And there Schiff was lying his face off for the whole world to see….”
LEGAL INSURRECTION discusses the first day of the Trump teams response to the House managers. In this first day they challenged the credibility of Schiff, which the above commentary shows as well. LI says this: “It seemed that almost every time I turned on the TV, he was talking and talking and talking. Schiff is the person most behind the impeachment push and the biased House proceedings. We all know that. But the Republican trial team, particularly Patrick Philbin, skewered Schiff today with Schiff’s own prior lies and deceptions. Philbin addressed Schiff’s prior claim to have knowledge of evidence of collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia, evidence that not even Mueller found, showing Schiff’s opinion’s and claims to have evidence to be unreliable…”
JONATHAN TURLEY
Professor Jonathan Turley notes WELL a major misstep by the House Managers accusing the Senate (among others) of a cover-up… bombastic presentations in the House may be the norm. But not in the Senate:
And HUGH HEWITT notes footnote 565 from Trump’s legal team’s legal briefing as evidence for Trump’s concern with Ukrainian interference with our 2016 election:
Video Description:
Hugh Hewitt reads footnote 565 from Trump’s legal team’s brief (PDF can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/rjh9dst). Hewitt then brings it up with Byron York when he was on to discuss his article: “As Trial Begins, the White House Strikes Back” (https://tinyurl.com/utv35mm). As an aside, here is the full extent of Russian interference with the 2016 election, and why (rightly or wrongly) Mueller indicted 13 Russians:
President Donald Trump rejects the narrative that Russia wanted him to win. USA Today examined each of the 3,517 Facebook ads bought by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, the company that employed 12 of the 13 Russians indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for interfering with the 2016 election. It turns out only about 100 of its ads explicitly endorsed Trump or opposed Hillary Clinton. Most of the fake ads focused on racial division, with many of the ads attempting to exploit what Russia perceives, or wants America to perceive, as severe racial tension between blacks and whites…. (must read the entire article at LARRY ELDER’s SITE | see my post as well: FIONA HILL’S FALSE DILEMMA)
(Click To Enlarge)
(Text with Links)
President Trump also raised concerns about corruption. He first raised these concerns in connection with reports of Ukrainian actions in the 2016 presidential election. Numerous media outlets have reported that Ukrainian officials took steps to influence and interfere in the 2016 election to undermine then-candidate Trump, and three Senate committee chairmen are currently investigating this interference.565
This alongside this audio where you can hear former Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (put in place by Obama/Hillary State Department), Artem Sytnyk, admitting that he “helped” Hillary during the 2016 U.S. presidential election (see more at WAYNE DUPREE) — is devastating to the House Managers case!
Larry Elder exemplifies the current media bias that encapsulates President Trump supposedly “at odds” with his intelligence community. FIRST, this just is not the case. SECONDLY, “The Sage” adeptly points out that if we were to quantify a recent President being “at odds” with his advisers and intel “community,” President Obama fits the bill perfectly. However, you would never know it because the media was deathly silent. As always, there is information you can take right into real conversations. Enjoy. (See more at FOX NEWS SPECIAL REPORT)
Larry Elder takes on a tour de force of the Left’s proclivity to mainstream violence in political language/life. Lots of audio (and edited in video) of many of the examples that were presented in yesterdays show. I cannot count how many times conservatives (myself personally), and Republicans have been told they are going to bring the human race to extinction. Most recently in a conversation the children of the person discussing the issue and my own were mentioned as having their lives gambled with by pulling out of the Paris/Kyoto Agreement.
I also noted on my FB this:
➤ If Republicans are “worse than terrorists”… why wouldn’t Leftists shoot them [us]? Yes, the Democrats (Bernie Sanders intimated this as well as others) say we are worse than ISIS due to rejecting the idea that mankind is driving in a significant manner climate change. The shooter had many posts on climate. I mean Democrats are seriously considering jailing Republicans for denying AGW (anthropogenic global warming).
This is crazy, and Democrats need to stop it. Period.
When you do nothing but call your opponents racists, Nazis, homophobes, Islamaphobes, Uncle Toms, xenophobes, sexists, etc. as a matter of course, you have zero right to be surprised when violence is used against the same opponents by the fringe. Rhetoric like that can never relieve the shooter of ultimate responsibility, but it lays the foundation for violence like what we saw today. There is a lot of screwiness on the “right” side of politics, these days. But it has NOT become violent. — Josh Charles
A few excerpts from James Hodgkinson’s (the shooter) letters, in his own words, via TWITCHY:
“As for my loving President Obama, I say when people look at the other side, the choice is obvious. I don’t want a president who won’t even keep his money in American banks. I don’t want a president who will lower taxes on the rich and raise them on the other 99 percent.”
“These men are trying to buy our country. You know they expect something for all this money. That something is that Mitt Romney and a Republican Congress won’t raise their taxes. We all know that the rich don’t pay enough taxes.”
“If the rich paid their fair share of taxes today, we wouldn’t be in this predicament. We need to vote all Republicans out of Congress. We need to demand Congress add 10 or more brackets to the existing tax code. We need 20 brackets to $20 million, and a 60 percent top marginal rate.”
“We can get our country back if we all vote the right way.”
[….]
“Let’s vote all Republicans out of Congress, and get this country back on track. We need 10 more tax brackets for income over $1 million, $2 million, $3 million, $4 million and $10 million.”
‘These guys are cheating everyone in this country while telling us all the time that they are broke when it is the super rich with all the money.’
[….]
“A strong middle class is what a country needs to prosper. The only thing that has trickled down in the last 30 years came from Mitt Romney’s dog.”
The Shooter of Rep. Steve Scalise is a radical Leftist. He was deeply involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He railed against the one-percent. Was a long-time fan of Bernie Sanders years before he ran for election. Mind you. the media has a role in egging people on that may have these radical tendencies. On my Facebook, I noted this:
If Republicans are “worse than terrorists”… why wouldn’t Leftists shoot them [us]? Yes, the Democrats (Bernie Sanders intimated this as well as others) say we are worse than ISIS due to rejecting the idea that mankind is driving in a significant manner climate change. The shooter had many posts on climate. I mean Democrats are seriously considering jailing Republicans for denying AGW (anthropogenic global warming).
This shooter was also egged on by Democrat politicians (the following is adapted a bit from FRONTPAGE MAGAZINE):
…What made James Hodgkinson believe that stopping the repeal of ObamaCare was a matter of life and death? Or, as he put it, “Republicans Want to Deny Most All Americans Health Care”?
It was Bernie Sanders who claimed that “thousands of Americans would die” if Republicans repealed ObamaCare. “Families will go bankrupt. People will die,” Elizabeth Warren had tweeted.
James Hodgkinson was a big Bernie supporter. And he was a fan of Elizabeth Warren.
Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe — “People are going to lose lives.” Instead of trying to push gun control, he might have revisited his own rhetoric.
Congressman John Lewis claimed that the repeal would kill.
Congressman Ruben Gallego insisted that he didn’t have to be civil to Republicans because their “policies that are going to kill people”.
It’s a short step from accusing Republicans of killing people to suspending civility to wishing them dead.
[….]
And Democrat politicians were downright restrained compared to some of their media allies.
Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald wanted to see every Congressional Republican who voted for ObamaCare have a family member perish. “It should be their loved ones who die,” he ranted. “The goprs in congress didn’t just send out a tweet wishing for me to face my own death. They actually voted to do it. If people don’t give a damn about the consequences of what they do, they should face those consequences,” Eichenwald wrote in a statement.
James Hodgkinson was a fan of the Rachel Maddow show. Eichenwald was an MSNBC contributor and his work had been touted by Rachel Maddow.
Calls for violence against Republicans had become normalized.
A few days before the attack, the Huffington Post ran a piece calling for executing Trump “and everyone assisting in his agenda”. It has since come down, but a similarly themed piece defending a “violent response” to President Trump is still up.
Julius Caesar reimagined as Trump and leftist activists as his heroic assassins made headlines. “Killing Republicans” in neighboring Brooklyn did not.
“They should be lined up and shot,” Professor John Griffin posted of Republicans over the ObamaCare repeal. Professor Lars Maischak at Frenso State proposed “the execution of two Republicans for each deported immigrant.”
And it didn’t end after the shooting.
“If the shooter has a serious health condition then is taking potshots at the GOP house leadership considered self defense?” Malcolm Harris, a regular at the New Republic, whose work has appeared at the Washington Post and Salon, inquired.
[….]
“Noam Chomsky calls the Republican Party the Most Dangerous Organization in Human History!” was one of the messages on his Facebook page. According to Chomsky, appearing on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, Republicans are committed “to the destruction of organized human life on Earth.” Forget health care. Republicans are actually trying to wipe out the species by denying Global Warming.
James Hodgkinson participated in the People’s Climate March. Its theme, like Chomsky’s, was that Trump and Republicans were a threat to the entire planet.
If that’s true, shouldn’t someone save the planet by doing something about those Republicans?
Hodgkinson was taught by the left that all problems were reducible to Republican evil. He quoted Robert Reich, a Sanders Institute fellow, claiming that the poor economy was due to tax cuts for the rich.
[….]
“Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co,” Hodgkinson ranted. Trump isn’t destroying our democracy. The leftists trying to bring him down are.
The left has whipped up an angry mob and promised them that if they scream and shout enough, President Trump will be forced out of office. They manufactured a crisis and now it’s exploding on them. If they can’t deliver a coup, there will be more shootings like this one.
The Democrats are sleepwalking into a civil war. They want power, but like leftists from Russia to Cuba, they haven’t seriously contemplated the price that will have to paid for their bloody utopia.
Mind you, Loretta Lynch was not calling for people to be violent… but if Sarah Palin was the reason (according to Democrat politicians and the media) for Gabby Giffords being shot because of rhetoric… here is Paul Krugman’s viewpoint:
When you heard the terrible news from Arizona, were you completely surprised? Or were you, at some level, expecting something like this atrocity to happen?
Put me in the latter category.
It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event …
There isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.
And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.
Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right …
So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual and go on as before?”
…then why not in this case? IN other words, the Left (politicians, the media, the culture, entertainment) has an extreme amount and acts of violence against conservatives, Trump supporters, as well as violent language (rhetoric). Jared Loughner was not a “Righty,” but James T. Hodgkinson was a “Leftist.” Many of the recent violent acts in fact are by person’s from the Left:
Elliot Rodger (“UCSB” shooter): Fan of the left-wing political talk show, The Young Turks.
James von Brunn (Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter): von Brunn hated Rupert Murdoch, Fox News, George W. Bush and John McCain.
Nidal Hasan (Ft Hood Shooter): Registered Democrat and Muslim.
Aaron Alexis (Navy Yard shooter): black liberal/Obama voter.
Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech shooter): Wrote hate mail to President Bush and to his staff, registered Democrat.
James Holmes: the “Dark Knight”/Colorado shooter: Registered Democrat, staff worker on the Obama campaign, #Occu¬py guy, progressive liberal, hated Christians.
Amy Bishop: the rabid leftist, killed her colleagues in Alabama, Obama supporter.
Andrew J. Stack (IRS bomber, flew plane into IRS building in Texas): Leftist Democrat, hated Bush and capitalism.
James J. Lee (who was the “green activist”): leftist took hostages at Discovery Channel – progressive liberal Democrat.
John Patrick Bedell: (Pentagon Shooter) registered Democrat, talked about economic justice.
Nkosi Thandiwe (Shooting spree targeting white ppl): Accepted “white priveledge.”
Floyd Corkins (LGBT Chic-Fil-A shooter): hated conservative and Christians.
Karl Pierson (school shooter): loved communism, self-avowed Keynesian, hated Adam Smith and supported gun-control.
(For a list of LEFT-WING murderers/killers, see this article.)
THANKFULLY, the shooter will be added to the “Failed assassins (whose politics we know)” column:
…Even I initially thought that whoever did it was either a Republican or some backwoods, tinfoil-hat-wearing pseudo-Libertarian. Now that it’s come out he is a Democrat/Independent, it’s no surprise; virtually every assassin or would-be assassin of American presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have been leftists (to the extent that their political views are known).
Successful assassins (whose politics we know):
John Wilkes Booth, a Democrat, shot and killed President Lincoln
Charles Guiteau, a member of the communist Oneida Community, shot and killed President Garfield
Leon Czolgosz, a leftist anarchist (similar to the useful idiots in the Occupy movement) shot and killed President McKinley
Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist, shot and killed President Kennedy.
Failed assassins (whose politics we know):
Severino Di Giovanni, a leftist anarchist, tried to bomb President-elect Hoover’s train
Giuseppe Zangara, a professed anti-capitalist, tried shooting President-elect Franklin Roosevelt
Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, two Marxists, tried killing President Truman at the Blair House
Samuel Byck, who tried joining the leftist Black Panther group, attempted to kill President Nixon
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, member of the Manson Family and also a hippie environmentalist, shot at President Ford
Sara Jane Moore tried to kill President Ford as well because, as she said, “the government had declared war on the Left.”
Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, a leftist connected to the Occupy movement, tried getting a one-in-a-billion shot at President Obama by firing a gun at the White House
The only individual whose political motivations can be deduced as coming from the right side of the political spectrum is Francisco Martin Duran, who claims he was “incited” by conservative talk-show host Chuck Baker, but also claimed that he was trying to save the world from an alien mist which was connected by an umbilical cord to another alien in the Colorado mountains. So there’s that….
The following comes from a discussion elsewhere on the Web, and should serve as a great reminder to the deleterious effects of larger (more regulatory) government vs. a smaller form of it:
The main point is that one party has people in it that are for small government — people like Ron Paul, Larry Elder, and the late Milton Friedman (a libertarian “god” of sorts). In the other you have people who want to grow government larger, and larger, and larger. California is a microcosm of the effect this has on businesses and regulating people’s lives. However, this drive to regulate people and their lives and to grow government, has, in every case, increased the possibility of government intrusion by force into the lives of ordinary people, which increase the risk (again, this is provable in history) of detention and death.
Which is why most libertarians vote Republican, they want smaller government. A great example is the housing market crisis. Some people are under the impression this was caused due to an easing of regulation. Not true. In fact, it was government-regulating banks to loan to people it would previously not. Why is this? Because the left wants [material] equality, the right wants people to prosper. One offers the most freedom, the other forces one person to pay for another. Here is an a small sampling of 2012 regulations from California that is helping businesses make the choice in moving to other states:
============
In addition to mandatory insurance coverage, eligible female employees can take four months pregnancy disability leave, under provisions of SB 299.
The independent contractor law, SB 459, is worth discussing with a legal or h/r expert, because the rules are so tough and potentially expensive. That $5,000 to $25,000 fine is PER INCIDENT.
Employees can take up to 30 business days in a year for donating organs or bone marrow. SB 272 clarifies the law a bit.
Company dress codes must accommodate transvestites and cross dressers under AB 887.
Companies operating in multiple states must offer the same insurance coverage for same-sec couples and domestic partners as they do married couples in California.
Five new laws change workers compensation insurance. Check with your insurance carrier.
Everything the growth in government touches (which is typically from the left… or, the right embracing the foundational thinking of the left [like Bush working with Kennedy to increase the size and focus of the Dept of Education]). This regulation causes friction between government and regular people. As more and more regulations are added, the increase in the possibility of armed persons coming to your door increases — like this example of natural foods markets being raided: REASON TV Rawesome Foods Raided… Again!
So persons that *REALLY* want to effect the political spectrum and possibly decrease the size of the government the most would want to vote Republican (like Milton Friedman, Larry Elder, and Rand Paul [Ron Paul’s son]). And this decreases the abrasive aspect of government and the regular Joe meeting. Congress — for instance – should meet for 3-months during the year, and do less of this:
“Federal agencies publish an average of over 200 pages of new rulings, regulations, and proposals in the Federal Register each business day. That growth of the federal statute book is one of the clearest measures of the increase of the government control of the citizenry…” James Bovard, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (St. Martins Griffen; 1994), 1.
“All forms of the liberal agenda interfere with the rational relationship between human action and the conditions of life by disconnecting outcomes from adaptive behavior. Government welfare programs of all kinds disconnect the receipt of material benefits from productive behavior and voluntary exchange, and from those normal developmental processes that lead to adult competence. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all other federal and state welfare programs divorce an individual’s material security and emotional well being from his economic and social connections to his community, and replace them with a marriage to government officials. In particular, welfare programs disconnect the individual’s security and well being from two of his most reliable resources: his own initiative in producing and exchanging with others, and his social bonds to members of his family, church, neighborhood or village. The liberal agenda’s takeover of countless individual and community functions, from early education to care of the elderly, has had the effect of alienating the individual from his community and robbing both of their essential mutuality. In the economic sphere, especially, the liberal agenda’s rules have become strikingly irrational. Countless restrictions dictate what the ordinary businessman and professional may or may not do regarding hiring procedures, sales and purchasing, health insurance plans, retirement plans, safety precautions, transportation policies, racial and ethnic quotas, immigration matters, liability rules, and provisions for the handicapped. Endless paperwork adds to the already crushing burden of confiscatory taxation. Licensure requirements needlessly prevent workers from entering new fields in which they are willing to work hard and risk much in order to make life better for themselves and their families. Unnecessary and unjust restrictions in the freedom with which individuals can run their economic lives are the hallmarks of the liberal agenda. But the social pathology of collectivism extends well beyond the economic realm. While children can be happy in dependent relationships with parents, adults cannot be happy in any mature sense in dependent relationships with government welfare programs, no matter how well intentioned or administered. The reasons for this are developed more thoroughly below and occupy a major portion of this book. Stated briefly, however, the large-scale dependency of the adult citizen on governments is always inherently pathological and always profoundly detrimental to…” Lyle H. Rossiter, The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness, p. 71.
Cal Watchdog adds to the idea with the most recent businesses leaving:
Waste Connections, a Folsom-based garbage hauling and landfill company, said last week it is busting a move for Texas. Santa Barbara-based Superconductor Technologies Inc., which develops advanced superconducting wire, also confirmed this week it is leaving for the Lone Star State.
After California’s ongoing budget imbroglio, there is arguably no greater crisis facing our once Golden State than the continuing exodus of homegrown companies like Waste Connections and Superconductor Technologies. Yet, lawmakers in Sacramento are doing next to nothing about it.
In fact, Waste Connections CEO Ron Mittlestaedt actually warned state officials back in August that his company was thinking about relocating to another state. Those officials failed to step up and dissuade the Sacramento region’s largest publicly traded company from leaving. Higher Taxes
Mittlestaedt echoed the lament of all too many California CEO’s that the state is inhospitable for business. It “has the highest tax rates in the nation,” he told the Sacramento Bee this week, “and they’re going higher.” And California is not only fiscally broke, he said, but also “structurally.”
By that, he was referring to the state’s hostile regulatory environment. As when the Legislature this year neglected to pass a measure that would have made it easier for Waste Connections and other landfill operators to move trash around the state, while doing no harm to the environment.
Superconductor Technologies CEO Jeff Quiram said in a statement that the company’s goal of becoming “a leader in the superconducting wire industry recently reached the inflection point where it was time to make a move.”
Translation: The cost, the hassle of doing business in California has risen to such a level that aspiring companies like STI cannot grow their businesses the way they can in competing states….
…But it turns out that the rich actually got poorer under President Bush, and the income gap has been climbing under Obama.
What’s more, the biggest increase in income inequality over the past three decades took place when Democrat Bill Clinton was in the White House.
The wealthiest 5% of U.S. households saw incomes fall 7% after inflation in Bush’s eight years in office, according to an IBD analysis of Census Bureau data. A widely used household income inequality measure, the Gini index, was essentially flat over that span. Another inequality gauge, the Theil index, showed a decline.
In contrast, the Gini index rose — slightly — in Obama’s first two years. Another Census measure of inequality shows it’s climbed 5.7% since he took office.
Meanwhile, during Clinton’s eight years, the wealthiest 5% of American households saw their incomes jump 45% vs. 26% under Reagan. The Gini index shot up 6.7% under Clinton, more than any other president since 1980…
[….]
As University of Michigan economist Mark Perry notes, while the income gap has grown since 1979, almost the entire increase occurred before the mid-1990s: “There is absolutely no statistical support for the commonly held view that income inequality has been rising recently.”
A similar analysis found that income inequality has fallen among individuals since the early 1990s, but risen among households due to factors such as more marriages of people with similar education levels and earnings potential.
Others argue that income mobility matters more than equality.
One study found that more than half of the families who started in the lowest income bracket in 1996 had moved to a higher one by 2005. At the other end of the spectrum, more than 57% of families fell out of the top 1%.
…The left says current levels of income inequality echo the late 1920s and the Gilded Age. They’ve zeroed in on the richest 1%, citing Census Bureau data showing these top earners “grabbing” more income than the bottom 90%.
But the census stats are misleading.
For one, they are a snapshot of income distribution at a single point in time. Yet income is not static. It changes over time. Low-paying jobs from early adulthood give way to better-paying jobs later in life.
And income groups in America are not fixed. There’s no caste system here, really no such thing even as a middle “class.” The poor aren’t stuck in poverty. And the rich don’t enjoy lifetime membership in an exclusive club.
A 2007 Treasury Department study bears this out. Nearly 58% of U.S. households in the lowest-income quintile in 1996 moved to a higher level by 2005. The reverse also held true. Of those households that were in the top 1% in income in 1996, more than 57% dropped to a lower-income group by 2005.
Every day in America, the poor join the ranks of the rich, and the rich fall out of comfort.
So even if income equality is increasing, it does not mean income mobility is decreasing. There is still a great deal of movement in and out of the richest and poorest groups in America.
