Now I usually don't get all that excited over polls and stats but thought I'd share just a few that were compiled by the "Mother Jones" staff and published in their June,'06 issue...

*In 1985 the Forbes 400 were worth $221B combined. Today they're worth $1,13T- more that the GDP of Canada...

*Among the Forbes 400 who gave to the 2004 presidential campaign, 72% gave to Bush...

*In 2005 there were 9 million American millionares, a 62% increase since 2002...

*In 2005, 25.7M Ameericans reieved Food Stamps, a 49% increase since 2000...

*Only estates worth more than $1.5M are taxed. That's less than 1% of all estates. Still, repealing the estate tax will cost the governemnt at least $55B a year...

*Only 3% of students at the top 146 colleges come from families in the bottom income quartile; only 10% come from the bottom half...

*Bush's tax cuts give a 2-child family earning $1M an extra $86
,722- or Harvard tuition, room, board and an iMac G5 for both kids...

*A 2 child family earning $50,000 gets $2,050 or 1/5 the cost of public college for one kid...

*Adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum wage has fallen 43% since its peak in 1968...

*If the $5.15 hourly minumum wage had risen at the same rate as CEO compensation since 1990, it would now satnd at $23.03...

*A minumum wage employeee who works 40 hours a week for 51 weeks goes home with $10,506 before taxes...

*Such a worker would take 7,000 years to earn Oraccle CEO Larry Ellison's yearly compensation...

*Ellison recently posed in "Vanity Fair" with his $300M, 454 foot yacht, which he noted is "realyy only the size of a large house"...

*The $17,530 earned by the average Wal-Mart employeee last year was $1,820 below the poverty line for a family of four....

*5 of America's 10 richest people are Wal-Mart heirs...

*The US governemnt soends $500,00 on 8 security screeners who speed execs from Wall Street helipad to American's JFK terminal...

*Poor Americans spend 1/4 of their income on energy costs...

*Exxon's 20005 profit of $36.13B is more that the GNP of 2/3 of the world's nations...

*CEO pay among military contractors has tripled since 2001. For David Brooks, the CEO of bulletproff vest maker DHB, it's risen 13,233%...

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Okay, there were more than the ones I picked out but I thought that since the discussion has touched on just how the ruling class has never had it so good while the poor get poorer, I thought some might find some of these stats intersting...

Do they tell the entire story??? Well, not excatly but they do tell a good portion of it...

More later...

No, not more stats...

Bobert

p.s. Before one of the loyal Bushites jump down my throat and bring up the fact that I haven't been a stats kinda guy, please reread the intro of this post...