The Nation is now focused on the Wage Gap and falling Incomes.

Republicans were wrong, and unfortunately for them, they're in charge. With high consumer confidence and a strong yearlong economic recovery, the argument for dramatic change is sounding extremely hollow.

The doom and gloom distractions? Gone. The fog has cleared. Republicans can no longer hide from the obvious expanding wage gap, a direct result of supply side economics. Lead by Paul Ryan, the GOP has simply resurfaced the crumbling road to prosperity with a new sell job.

Declining wages are killing us, and Republicans have been standing in the way of reversing that. The nation is waking up to the fact that the bottom 90% need a raise. This is now the major topic of discussion, finally, and we should be embarrassed to have let it get this bad:

A new report from the Center for American Progress finds that Australia and Canada "have experience continuing middle-class growth," while for the U.S. it has halted. Indeed, when I used the World Top Incomes Database to compare the income growth of the "bottom" 90 percent, I got this:

So, a bunch of squiggles followed by a great divergence around 2001, when the United States falls off a ledge, Canada takes a massive step up, and Australia takes one of those proverbial marsupial hops. Chronically, the bash brothers of globalization and technology have clobbered middle-class jobs, hacking away at manufacturing employment and hollowing out routine-based work that paid okay wages. (At the same time, low-skill immigration in the late 1980s and 1990s reduced the average income of the poorest American families.) More acutely, the Great Recession delivered the mother of all housing crunches, which has been terrible news for the lower and middle classes. Five years into the recovery, construction and manufacturing employment is still in a six-million-job hole (24 million in 2000; 18 million today).

The road out is not hopeless, and the CAP paper on how the U.S. can learn from the rest of the world offers fine solutions across education, infrastructure, and working with cities to develop talent clusters. But this sort of ambitious policy landscaping is purely fanciful with today's Congress. In this government, all big ideas are rain dances.

The American Dream lives on in the Top 10%!!!

I just did a post on the American Dreams that showed why Democrats, and not so many Republicans, see it disappearing or is no longer attainable.

Now we know why...from Voxdotcom:

"Wealth Redistribution" at the heart of Republican Health Care Plan.

Democrats are missing a golden opportunity to "Hulk smash" the only argument the right wing has left about ObamaCare.

Conservatives are angry that their hard earned money is getting "redistributed" to the sick and low income in the ObamaCare marketplaces.

They hate "wealth redistribution."

Showing their stupidity: Sorry to be blunt, but the right wing continues to prove they don't know how insurance works, and why health care in the U.S. is so bad.

Redistribution is how insurance works. Our "hard earned" monthly premium dollars get redistributed to the sick and the insurer. If conservative whiners stay healthy and never collect, where do they think their money is going, into a rainy day pot for them?

Shocking I know, but GOP Pushing for Wealth Redistribution: The Republican plan to bring costs down relies on corporate insurance welfare. States will take the sick and put them in high risk pools, known as Health Insurance Risk Sharing Plans (HIRSP), allowing insurers to profit off the healthy.

If Republican voters knew that about 40% of their monthly premiums were redistributed to a government run risk pool so insurers could make a hefty profit, they would squeal like pigs. Not only that, but the GOP flip flops on the evils of government paying doctors less. From Uppity Wisconsin:

The Health Insurance RiskSharing Plan (HIRSP). The state-managed HIRSP system was adopted in the early 1990s and was funded through a combination of patient premiums and a surcharge on "regular" health insurance plans in the state. HIRSP also mandated that health care providers treat HIRSP patients at discounted rates.

Generally speaking, HIRSP members loved the plan, because they were getting subsidized rates that were cheaper than what was available on the private market. This was because state statutes required that 40% of the HIRSP members’ premiums be paid by surcharges on the insurance programs of “regular” health plans, and by reduced charges from doctors. In other words, we were all paying 40% of ... premiums.

Health insurance companies and health providers didn't like the plan because they were paying for it through taxes/surcharges and mandated discounts.

Again, Republicans are touting a plan that would pick the pocket of those who buy insurance, and redistributed 40% of those premiums to the sick; use government power to lower doctor fees; so insurers can make higher profits. 

You gotta love how the free market works.