Taxes won't raise on the poor and middle class, congress and Obama will come to some kind of agreement...Worse case they will add 6 months to the Bush tax cuts to give themselves time to work on it... All sides agree on this, the issue is that the republicans want to keep Bush tax cuts for the rich too ( people making over 250k/year) and Obama doesn't and the republicans are saying we want to handle all the tax issues at the same time . Basically they are taking the middle class tax hostage to solve the tax for the rich, although you have to understand them, there doesn't need a vote to raise taxes on the rich, it will happen automatically on January 1st so if they don't tie what they want as part of a deal on taxes for poor/middle class ( which would need a vote and that's where Obama needs them) they will get screwed in the end...

I do agree with Obama though, there is no historic evidence that cutting taxes on rich boost heavilly the economy. Cutting taxes on poor/middle class does however as it boosts consumers purchases...

96% of business with more than 50 employees currently offer healthcare so the impact of Obamacare on business will not be that huge...

Talk to a well-informed person for a few minutes and you will be saying you wish you voted for Obama.

Everything that he has done has been good for the working class. Anyone who honestly believes otherwise has been brainwashed by the right-wing media.

Before anyone responds that I've been brainwashed by the left-wing media, I don't have to be told any of this from the media. I can see it in my bills each month.

I'd suggest looking at other working class people's bills... because the numbers don't add up.

"The 1.2 million households whose incomes put them in the top 1 percent of the U.S. saw their earnings increase 5.5 percent last year, according to estimates released last month by the U.S. Census Bureau. Earnings fell 1.7 percent for the 96 million households in the bottom 80 percent -- those that made less than $101,583."

The recovery that officially began in mid-2009 hasn’t arrived in most Americans’ paychecks. In 2010, the top 1 percent of U.S. families captured as much as 93 percent of the nation’s income growth, according to a March paper by Emmanuel Saez, a University of California at Berkeley economist who studied Internal Revenue Service data."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-02/top-1-got-93-of-income-growth-as-rich-poor-gap-widened.html

It's great your an exception to the rule... but that's all you are.

^ My income hasn't gone up. (Actually I wasn't making income in '08, but I have been since... I think '10?). My healthcare costs, however, have gone down. Among other benefits.

My family's overall income has probably dropped. My mom quit her decently-paying job because she hated it, and found a minimum-wage job she hates slightly less. My dad's pay has risen, but he's been working less because he's getting older and he's moving toward retirement. So my parents' combined income has dropped in ways that have nothing to do with any part of the government.

^Kaz, you also need to mention when those trends started and whose policies were being implemented at the time.

Ok.

Those trends started under Obama.

Under Bush it was something like... 65% instead of 93%  when they economy was good... and when Obama inherited the economy, half of all wealth that was lost was lost at the top 1%.

Bush had a deal with senate democrats to force banks who take bailouts to write down a percentage of bad home loans for poor people, just as long Obama agreed he wanted it.   Obama refused.

Were it not for Obama... that percentage would of been much lower.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/barney-frank-obama-rejected-bush-administration-concession-to-write-down-mortgages.html

The mortgage crisis was worsened this past time because critical decisions were made during the transition between Bush and Obama. We voted the TARP out. The TARP was basically being administered by Hank Paulson as the last man home in a lame duck, and I was disappointed. I tried to get them to use the TARP to put some leverage on the banks to do more about mortgages, and Paulson at first resisted that, he just wanted to get the money out. And after he got the first chunk of money out, he would have had to ask for a second chunk, he said, all right, I’ll tell you what, I’ll ask for that second chunk and I’ll use some of that as leverage on mortgages, but I’m not going to do that unless Obama asks for it.  This is now December, so we tried to get the Obama people to ask him and they wouldn’t do it

This is consistent with other accounts.  There were policy debates within Obama’s economic team about what to do about the mortgage crisis.  The choices were to create some sort of legal entity to write down mortgage debt or to allow the write-down of mortgage debt through a massive wave of foreclosures over the next four to six years.  He choice the latter.  That choice was part of what led to roughly $7 trillion of middle class wealth gone, with financial assets for the elites re-inflated.

Since I pointed out that the growth of income inequality under Obama is worse than that under Bush, many people have responded by saying that somehow this is not Obama’s responsibility, that it was an inherited crisis and structural problems that caused a widening of inequality.  They simply do not want to accept that policy matters, or, if it does, that Obama had any choice in the policy choices he made.

In fact, crisis response is the single most significant policymaking time imaginable, because all structural barriers are swept away.  Think about it – this was literally a deal offered by Hank Paulson – one guy – to Barack Obama, with a multi-trillion dollar impact.  No 60 votes in the Senate.  No hearings.  No confirmations.  Just a handshake, basically.  In other words, policy does matter, and Obama had a variety of choices and leverage, and he did what he thought was best.  He did not want to write down mortgages, even though he was offered that choice by the Bush administration and Barney Frank.  So he didn’t.

So yes, Barack Obama is worse than George Bush on economic inequality.  While Paulson didn’t want to write down mortgages, the single biggest factor in determining whether the American middle class has any stored wealth, Paulson was willing to do so in response to pressure.  Barack Obama was not.

Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/barney-frank-obama-rejected-bush-administration-concession-to-write-down-mortgages.html#88aGa5RzjBTYrBYG.99

Salon has a good but different graphic on the matter... though it will be a little blurry since for some reason they decided to make it tiny.

That trend doesn't happen until Obama either... and it starts when he was first in office and had broad legislative support.

Don't listen to him, he can't tell you what to do. People vote for whoever they want.

1. You assume a deal will be reached. I only stated what is slated to happen without a change in the system. Even then, the Obamacare taxes will kick in.

2. If most businesses with >50 employees offer health care, then why were so many companies granted waivers and exceptions?

Fair enough.

What do the axes in the graph represent? The axis labels have too many avbrevations that I'm not familiar with.

"I'm well informed because I look at my bills each month, and everyone's situation is just like mine, so if you think Obama sucks you're just brainwashed by Faux News."