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The bottom 50 percent of American households hold just 1.1 percent of the nation’s wealth, after its share declined steadily following the financial crisis, a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service found. The richest one percent, meanwhile, hold 34.5 percent of the wealth, as the chart below shows. The top 10 percent’s share of wealth has risen over the last two decades, the report found, but it has fallen for households in every group below that.
Of course not. They always find a to get around restrictions on their corruption. It’s all a charade. Congress will do whatever it pleases while pretending to do the people’s work:
It was a rare show of bipartisanship — President Barack Obama, flanked by Democrats and Republicans in April, signing into law a bill that would ban insider trading on Capitol Hill. The measure, known as the STOCK Act, had passed the House and Senate at warp speed.
“The powerful shouldn’t get to create one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for everybody else,” the president said at the time.
Lawmakers proclaimed that the bill, officially called the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, would restore trust in government. It also applied new rules to some employees of the executive branch.
But CNN uncovered that the law that members of Congress thought they voted for earlier this year isn’t exactly as advertised. A loophole could still allow family members of some lawmakers to profit from inside information.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) approved flight training for 25 illegal aliens at a Boston-area flight school that was owned by yet another illegal alien, according to the Government Accountability Office.
The illegal-alien flight-school attendees included eight who had entered the country illegally and 17 who had overstayed their allowed period of admission into the United States, according to an audit by the GAO.
Six of the illegal aliens were actually able to get pilot’s licenses.
The economy is now going backwards. But you won’t hear that from the sycophantic press. They don’t want to hurt Obama’s chances of getting re-elected. Stories about Romney’s tax/Bain problems will drown out everything else:
Americans bought fewer homes in June than May, indicating the weak economy could make a modest housing recovery choppy.
The National Association of Realtors said Thursday that sales of previously occupied homes fell 5.4 percent in June to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.37 million homes. That’s the fewest since October.
Sales are up 4.5 percent from a year ago, evidence that the market is still recovering. But the annual sales pace is below the 6 million that economists consider healthy.
Then there is this regional report:
Factory activity in the U.S. mid-Atlantic region contracted for a third month in July while a separate gauge of future U.S. economic activity declined in June.
The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank said its business activity index rose to minus 12.9 from minus 16.6 in June, though it missed economists’ expectations for minus 8.0.
The forward-looking new orders index gained to minus 6.9 from minus 18.8.
Any reading below zero indicates contraction in the region’s manufacturing. The survey covers factories in eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware.
It is seen as one of the first monthly indicators of the health of U.S. manufacturing leading up to the national report by the Institute for Supply Management.
A separate economic index showed that future U.S. economic activity declined in June, the latest signal that the economic recovery is sputtering.
The Conference Board says that its index of leading economic indicators declined 0.3 percent in June after rising 0.4 percent in May. The index fell 0.1 percent in April, its first drop in seven months.
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