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Forgot to tel but:

In 2011 the global market for mobile phone accessories will rake in an estimated $34 billion in revenue. Apple-approved products—accessories made by Apple or branded by Apple—make up about $2 to $3 billion of that.

from fiscal times

They can't ignore that.

And in case you hadn't noticed, there is constant talk about raising taxes on the rich.

But there's a difference between talk and reality. While poor people get more and more subsidization (Obama lamented the fact that more Americans receive food stamps than ever before... after expanding food stamp program eligibility), the middle class loses stuff with no subsidization to make up for it. Look at Social Security. The SS formulas long ago were changed to provide a higher return to the poor (your first SS dollar buys more payout than your 5000th). The rich are also shielded by a cap on income that applies to SS.

Now Congress is debating eliminating the mortgage deduction, which will affect middle class people more than the poor (who presumably don't have large mortgage balances) and the rich (who can decide to pay off their mortgage if the new rate makes their investments less lucrative in comparison).

Turns out the EPA in their zeal to discredit tracking, drilled way past normal well depth and actually into the same gas layer the oil companies are targeting!

AND the chemicals they found, they also found in control samples...

The EPA at this point has gone way beyond the mandate they are supposed to have, they are no longer protecting public health based on science but on feeling alone.

Have a look here:

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2011/06/06/School-Budgets-The-Worst-Education-Money-Can-Buy.aspx#page1

Which public school district spends the most taxpayer money per student? One in Beverly Hills, perhaps? Or one in the swanky Park Avenue area of Manhattan?

Actually, it's a district in Camden, N.J., according to new Census data on public school spending. Best known for urban blight and local corruption, Camden has an unemployment rate of 17 percent and 35 percent of its 80,000 inhabitants live below the poverty line. Fifty percent of residents are black, 15.5 percent white, 2.6 percent Asian; 10,000 people are crammed into each square mile. In 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ranked it as the most dangerous city in America.

Camden High School, with an enrollment of 1,200 students, has less than a 40 percent graduation rate, and the former district chief of security Thomas Hewes-Eddinger has called it a âoemini-jail.â Yet the district spends $23,356 per student, more than twice the national average.

Nearly 2,200 miles away lies the opposite example: the lowest-cost school district . Alpine school district is located in American Fork, Utah, a town of 27,000 people at the foot of Mount Timpanogos. The racial makeup is 95 percent white, 0.16 percent black and 0.65 percent Asian. The town's median household income is $52,000; 4 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. The district spends a mere $5,658 per student, nearly half the national average, and has a 78 percent graduation rate.

Although they represent the extremes, these very different districts illustrate a troubling pattern that emerges in the school-spending data: The 10 most expensive schools have some of the lowest graduations rates, and the 10 schools that spend the least per student have some of the highest.

Your questions (and those from others) bothered me. With as much business education and capabilities, I should be able to answer your questions better. However I type a reply and realize, I haven't really addressed the underlying fundamental question, "Where is that money going?" If the owners are pulling it out, then it has to go SOMEWHERE and usually there's taxable income. So at least the government benefits somewhat, however, their tax income isn't. One could say, "Loopholes", but given I'm only one step from the highest tax bracket and paying every penny, I'd love to know what those are. I'm a "3%"er and unlike Google, I'm getting hammered. I digress.

Then I hit, this article, "Labor's Share of Non-Farm Business Income," with this graph(it's below in the comments, which are all very insightful. I wish every on-line comment section was this civilized), and you can quantify clearly what is happening now, versus previous recoveries. To date, I've seen no explanations other than those who sound a lot like the politicians. "Blame Wall Street." "Blame the 1% Rich," etc. To me that's not meaningful because it's too close to false logic. This article shows that the difference is that clearly corporations are holding onto the profit more than at any other time in history. Now again, I don't agree capitalism has failed. If it was a failure, then why did it rebound EVERY other time. You can't define the majority by the minority in my opinion. So the meaningful dialogue is, "What changed?" You can't say people all of a sudden got greedy. Well maybe you can. But WHY did they get greedy when EVERY other time they didn't? We didn't invent greed in 2006. As I articulated in a different reply, you hand a company a $1 so that you can get $1.07 or more back (assuming 10 Yr T-Bills are paying 6%). Likewise, companies that have retained earnings (read: profits) should want to take the $1.07 THEY brought in to make ANOTHER $1.07 (or more). Holding onto it get's you $1.06 OR LESS (again assuming Tbills 6%) unless you start speculating, which no CFO worth a lick wants to do. I'll stop here but here is another article along the same lines, Income Redistribution: The Key to Economic Growth?.

What's the solution? NOT the government. If we rely on the government to be the watchkeeper of income distribution, than we will all suffer. To give an example, I read the Obama Stimulus Package being pushed through the Senate. It's been a few years so I won't have the numbers exact in spending, but I will have the percentages. For $30B in increased Food Stamps, they carved off $10.5B for "overhead." I'll let you define what that means to you, but apply it to income redistribution. If we're trying to take $15B from retained earnings sitting on the side (not investing or distributed to workers), do you want $5B spent by the government on "overhead"? No. You can regulate the behavior, but don't dictate it. For example, the government doesn't force you to buy a house, or have kids, but they do make your tax burden insanely easier (until you earn a magic number around $200k combined household) when you A) Get married w/ kids B) Buy a house. These are just ideas. Keep in mind during there are other contrary that might work as well. Under Reagan or Bush (can't remember) we lost deductions for credit card interest, and yet consumer borrowing skyrocketed.

So in summary, you're right. Although, your phantom corps sounds more like tin foil hat fodder, since the IRS or someone would love to catch someone being stupid with switching money around.

Causing the market to crash (most economic gurus Ive heard plant the blame squarely on housing loan requirements instituted under Clinton)

By "most economic gurus" I think you mean "complete morons". Subprime lending by Fannie/Freddie (the organizations whose policies Clinton could modify) was not even close to what was being done by the private sector. If you want to go further back, you could also say that Bush is the reason we even have the TSA, and one of those wars (Iraq) was based on complete fiction. There's also good evidence that Obama is really just a moderate Republican, which helps to really explain why he's continuing so many terrible policies.

Excluding single-payer advocates has the effect of pushing the set of options considered "mainstream" to the right. If I was advocating for single-payer, I wouldn't exclude advocates of (British style) nationalized health care, since they would help serve to make my views appear more moderate. As for the Obama plan, it's based on the reforms implemented in Massachusetts under Mitt Romney, and (at the time) promoted by the Heritage Foundation, which to me qualifies as at least moderately conservative.

As for Alan Simpson, he isn't just a token conservative; he's one of the co-chairs. And the earlier quote indicates that he has total disdain for Social Security. He has also repeated the old zombie lie, "It's a bunch of IOUs".

If Obama was centrist, he would have balanced the commission by appointing an ardent defender of entitlement programs as the other co-chair; someone who is in favor of taxing the rich. Let's look at what the Democrat co-chair has said:

We’re going to mess with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security because if you take those off the table, you can’t get there. If we don’t make those choices, America is going to be a second-rate power, and I don’t mean in fifty years. I mean in my lifetime.