Welcome to IBM Employee News and Links

New on the Alliance@IBM Site

• Worldwide Day of Action: June 14, 2011. US IBM workers wear black and blue to call attention to job cuts and declining work conditions. Press Release-Day Of Action (PDF). Download Flyers:
  • GlobalDayofAction-p1.pdf
  • GlobalUnionDayofAction-p2.pdf
  • LeafletActionDayinIBM-English.pdf
• Job Cut Reports
  • Comment 6/07/11: All the teams I interface with from Argentina are being/have been replaced with teams from China. Is Argentina getting the shaft like the US now? -anonymous- Alliance reply: Yes.
  • Comment 6/07/11: Soon, IBMers in China will also get the shaft as IBM attempts to replace a large number of full time employees with freelancers and contractors via Liquid Portal. -Anonymous-
  • Comment 6/07/11: Re: Jobs in Columbia, MO. On the contrary, I think a vast majority of the US GDF staff are US citizens. The downside is they're primarily staffed with young pups with little to no experience so IBM can pay them low wages. If they can read a script and spell "IBM" they are a candidate for hire. -anonymous-
  • Comment 6/07/11: Re: "All the teams I interface with from Argentina are being/have been replaced with teams from China. Is Argentina getting the shaft like the US now? -anonymous-". Many of the folks in Argentina and Brazil have quit IBM for better paying jobs. One team I work with; half of them left in December. The remaining ones had a huge backlog of work for a few months. Eventually by April that mission was moved to China. You can look at this as Argentina getting the shaft, but it's a result of Argentina folks giving IBM the shaft, too. I've been told that companies in South America love hiring IBMers due to the training IBM gives them. I say good for those workers that they are looking out for themselves! -CJ-Roc-
  • Comment 6/09/11: I received my IBM 100th year anniversary book today. My house garbage was too good for it. It made a great addition to my fire pit. -Still Working - Waiting for the next ax-
  • Comment 6/09/11: Two weeks ago, 60 hard working people for Rogers account got fired at GDF Toronto Canada. US IBM auditors think we are pricey and want to move more jobs to India. Today, the customer CEO suddenly announced to replace CIO, and new CIO will bring IT back in-house 100%. What a shock to the big blue. Rogers-IBM had a 7-year-deal signed in 2009. Just less two years, Rogers decided to walk away. IBM let experienced FTEs go and is hiring fresh contractors in Toronto and India. The services delivered to the customer are so bad that GDF is the worst disaster IT place we ever worked. TD bank and Sunlife started to bring IT back in-house already. -LOL-
  • Comment 6/11/11: More than half of present IBMers have less than 5 years of employment in IBM. They get the anniversary book. IBMers RAed after 10-15-20-25-30 years of former employment or retired (some forced retired) don't get one? Did retirees get a book? Now what does this say about how IBM values former employees who significantly helped over many years of loyal, dedicated employment service to get IBM to their century anniversary? -NoThanks-
  • Comment 6/11/11: Hey -NoThanks-, you can have my stinkin book, it's not even good for toilet paper. -crappaper-
  • Comment 6/12/11: I got my book too and I'm equally offended that they could spend money on their propaganda but not their people. I'm trading mine in at amazon for $6 and some change. -Sellyourbookandlaugh-
  • Comment 6/12/11: IBM celebrates its centennial this week. Let all of us contribute to this celebration by writing reviews in glassdoor.com, commenting on online articles, etc. If many of us speak with one voice and tell their stories this might get some public attention that IBM fears so much. -HillBilly- Alliance reply: Be sure to go the the main page of this web site for news and flyers on the Day of Action. IBM is hoping that the 'positive' image comments in the Press, regarding their 100th, will convince the world to be happy for IBM and celebrate. If you want to adjust that image to reality, we're all for it. Any press articles or internet articles that 'spin' the celebration ALL positive; are your invitation too set the record straight, if they offer a comment section. Just 'keep it real'.
  • Comment 6/12/11: "More than half of present IBMers have less than 5 years of employment in IBM. They get the anniversary book. IBMers RAed after 10-15-20-25-30 years of former employment or retired (some forced retired) don't get one? Did retirees get a book? Now what does this say about how IBM values former employees who significantly helped over many years of loyal, dedicated employment service to get IBM to their century anniversary?" Wow, good point. I had 20 years with IBM and retired. I wasn't even aware of the 100th year anniversary book. You would think they could have sent out a mailing to all retirees and at least offered to let us buy one. I am proud of my contributions to the IBM company. The fact that they didn't even bother to notify me, makes me mad. It tells you a lot about the management there now. -Sammy Sucks-
  • Comment 6/12/11: So all you beamers that have come here for years about the latest rumor; will you be wearing black and blue Tuesday to show your disgust with Sam? -had it with Sam-
  • Comment 6/12/11: GFG planning meetings in Somers this week. This can only mean more cuts. -Still Working - Waiting for the next ax-
• IBM Global Union Alliance Comments:
  • Comment 6/11/11: Country = Brazil; Union Affiliate = Brazil; Job Title = GTS; IBM Division = GTS; Message = Do you think that only in the US the IBM employees are suffering, you have to take a look at the morale levels in IBM Brazil, it's rock bottom.

    Our salaries are frozen, the management is clueless of what is really going on, the GDF implementation is a joke, and the we cant attract the brightest anymore since our salaries are way below market standards.

    It's very sad to see such a company with ever increasing EPS treat the people who deliver the results so badly. Every week we get a farewell note from a top performer colleague leaving for a competitor, sometimes I feel we are in a place that is about to implode, management and HR are a complete joke, and never saw so many short time decisions to make the quarter numbers for SAM and the GMU. signed -Sad Brick IBMER-

    Alliance reply: We realize conditions are bad in many countries. That is why we formed the IBM Global Union Alliance. We need IBM Brazil workers to organize as well. Join us!

News and Opinion Concerning Health Savings Accounts, Medical Costs and Health Care Reform

• New York Times op-ed: Vouchercare Is Not Medicare. By Paul Krugman. Excerpts: What's in a name? A lot, the National Republican Congressional Committee obviously believes. Last week, the committee sent a letter demanding that a TV station stop running an ad declaring that the House Republican budget plan would "end Medicare." This, the letter insisted, was a false claim: the plan would simply install a "new, sustainable version of Medicare."

  But Comcast, the station's owner, rejected the demand — and rightly so. For Republicans are indeed seeking to dismantle Medicare as we know it, replacing it with a much worse program. ...

  Medicare is a government-run insurance system that directly pays health-care providers. Vouchercare would cut checks to insurance companies instead. Specifically, the program would pay a fixed amount toward private health insurance — higher for the poor, lower for the rich, but not varying at all with the actual level of premiums. If you couldn't afford a policy adequate for your needs, even with the voucher, that would be your problem.

  And most seniors wouldn't be able to afford adequate coverage. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found that to get coverage equivalent to what they have now, older Americans would have to pay vastly more out of pocket under the Paul Ryan plan than they would if Medicare as we know it was preserved. Based on the budget office estimates, the typical senior would end up paying around $6,000 more out of pocket in the plan's first year of operation. ...

  So let me make two points. First, Obamacare was very much a second-best plan, conditioned by perceived political realities. Most of the health reformers I know would have greatly preferred simply expanding Medicare to cover all Americans. Second, the Affordable Care Act is all about making health care, well, affordable, offering subsidies whose size is determined by the need to limit the share of their income that families spend on medical costs. Vouchercare, by contrast, would simply hand out vouchers of a fixed size, regardless of the actual cost of insurance. And these vouchers would be grossly inadequate. ...

  Yes, Medicare has to get serious about cost control; it has to start saying no to expensive procedures with little or no medical benefits, it has to change the way it pays doctors and hospitals, and so on. And a number of reforms of that kind are, in fact, included in the Affordable Care Act. But with these changes it should be entirely possible to maintain a system that provides all older Americans with guaranteed essential health care.

• Wall Street Journal: Senators Request Probe of Surgeons. By John Carreyrou. Excerpts: Five U.S. senators asked the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services to open an investigation into physician-owned distributorships, middleman entities that allow surgeons to profit from the medical devices they use on their patients, to determine whether they are legal. The senators' request was accompanied by the release of a Senate Finance Committee report compiled by the office of Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the committee, on the proliferation of such entities in spine and orthopedic surgery.

  Physician-owned distributorships, or PODs, now exist in at least 20 states, with more than 40 operating in California alone, according to the report. By creating "financial incentives for physician investors to use those devices that give them the greatest financial return," they may violate an anti-kickback statute and other federal fraud and abuse laws, the report warns. ...

  Dr. Makker's case illustrates a major concern cited by the Senate report—that "physician investors in PODs may perform more procedures than are medically necessary" because they can earn extra income each time they implant a device in a patient. Dr. Makker, who operated on some of his patients' spines as many as seven times, denied performing unnecessary surgeries and said he acted in the best interests of his patients.

• Forbes: The Coming Crash Of The American Health Care System. By Rick Ungar. Excerpts: The American health care system, as we currently know it, is well into its final days. Don't get too excited, conservatives. It's not Obama's fault. Likewise, the final death throes of the status quo will not be the doing of Paul Ryan Medicare plan. ...

  It's about the end of a business model that really hasn't worked very well for at least a decade coupled with government's responsibility-for better or for worse- to step in and provide essential services when nobody else can do so.

  With all the complaining about Obamacare, social entitlements, etc., the truth is that government and private health insurers have played a cooperative role in how health care has been delivered to most Americans for nearly half a century.

  In the process, they have learned how to regulate one another.

  Private health insurers have kept government in check by spreading around huge sums of cash to fund political campaigns in order to get elected officials to do their bidding. When, from time to time, the public outcry against private health insurance's abuses overwhelmed a politician's ability to turn a blind eye, government imposed the occasional regulation to keep insurers from their most offensive practices.

  But let's not kid ourselves. The insurance companies have always been in the driver's seat.

  That's about to end – not because public sentiment is deeply in favor of turning all health care over to the government, but because the private insurance companies no longer really care. ...

  With the requirement that insurers be required to take on customers with previous medical problems – and the higher risk that comes from the same – plus the requirement that insurers spend 80% of every dollar they take in from their customers on actual health care benefits- the insurers are now freaked out over how they will earn enough profit to support their share prices – – and they are right to worry. ...

  If you follow health care insurance as closely as some of us do, you are all too aware of what the insurers were forced to get into in order to maintain profitability in the face of dramatically rising costs.

  They found themselves having to play a very dirty game of hard ball. They would take a customer's money, with pleasure, right up until the moment the customer had to call upon the insurer to pay off when the customer fell seriously ill. At that point in time, the health insurer would shift its focus to finding ways not to pay for the care the customer had always believed she would get each and every time she sent in a large premium check.

  It was ugly – but the only way the health insurers figured they could keep their profits where they needed to be. ...

  hat brings us to pre-existing conditions. Should the government have continued to turn it's back on the growing number of people who cannot get insurance at any price because the insurers business model cannot handle the risk in their business models?

  Again, if you don't think you're ever going to be sick, maybe you aren't concerned. If you are on a corporate policy, you can't be denied your coverage so it's all good. But, as noted, jobs disappear and if you believe that nobody in your family can ever fall seriously and expensively ill and lose the opportunity to be insured in the future, I have some junk real estate I'd like to discuss with you.

  Further, that whole meme that suggests that if people don't take care of themselves they should be forced to suffer the consequences, is complete nonsense. Serious and expensive illness is every bit as likely to be the result of genetic pre-disposition as it is likely to result from poor eating and exercising habits. ...

  The government had to impose this requirement on the health insurers to forestall a genuine crisis. The end result is that these items will prove to be the final straw in a failing private health insurance model that can no longer afford to be in the business – and it isn't going to be long until the insurers bail out entirely leaving us all exposed and in trouble.

• Washington Post: The hard truth about health care: Government works. By Ezra Klien. Excerpts: Everyone in Washington claims to want the same thing lately: a "serious conversation" about health-care costs. So let's have one.

  Republicans have a plan that has been tried repeatedly but that has never worked. Democrats have a plan that might work in theory, but it is untested at the scale they'll need for it to work in practice. And both parties are too scared to talk about the only plan that has worked.

  But before we get to that plan, I want to tell you about a graph.

  I found it buried inside a Kaiser Family Foundation brief entitled "Health Care Spending in the United States and Selected OECD Countries." Inauspicious, maybe. But it should change the way we think about health-care costs. Because what it shows is that we've failed. Failed to control costs. Failed to restrain the growth of government.

  And it shows something else, too: Where we've failed, others have succeeded.

  Everyone knows — or should know — that the United States spends much more than any other country on health care. But the Kaiser Family Foundation broke that spending down into two parts, the government's share and the private sector's share (both measured as a percentage of total gross domestic product), then compared the results with figures from 12 other countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And here's the shocker: Our government spends more on health care than the governments of Japan, Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Canada or Switzerland.

  Think about that for a minute. Canada has a single-payer health-care system. The government is the only insurer of any note. The United Kingdom has a socialized system, in which the government is not only the sole insurer of note but also employs most of the doctors and nurses and runs most of the hospitals. And yet, measured as a share of the economy, our government health-care system is the largest of the bunch.

  And it's worse than that: Atop our giant government health-care sector, we have an even more giant private health-care sector. Altogether, we're spending about 16 percent of the GDP on health care. No other country even tops 12 percent. Which means we've got the worst of both worlds: huge government and high costs. ...

  ...this isn't the first time we've tried to let private insurers into Medicare to work their magic. The Medicare Advantage program, which invited private insurers to offer managed-care options to Medicare beneficiaries, was expected to save money, but it ended up costing about 120 percent of what Medicare costs.

News and Opinion Concerning the "War on the Middle Class"

"But dependency on government has never been bad for the rich. The pretense of the laissez-faire people is that only the poor are dependent on government, while the rich take care of themselves. This argument manages to ignore all of modern history, which shows a consistent record of laissez-faire for the poor, but enormous government intervention for the rich." From Economic Justice: The American Class System, from the book Declarations of Independence by Howard Zinn.

• Investment News Daily: Wealthy Americans in line for $1.4M average tax cut under Pawlenty plan. Independent analysis shows bulk of tax savings to go to wealthiest Americans; 'much less progressive'. Excerpts: The top 0.1 percent of U.S. taxpayers would save an average of $1.4 million in taxes under the economic plan of Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, according to an independent analysis. Pawlenty's $11.6 trillion tax-cut plan, which reduces rates on income, capital gains, interest, estates and dividends, is almost three times larger than the proposals endorsed by House Republicans.
• AlterNet: Why Americans Have to Work Longer Hours and Borrow to the Hilt Just to Keep Afloat. The fundamental economic challenge ahead is to restore the vast American middle class. By Robert Reich. Excerpts: How did we go from the Great Depression to 30 years of Great Prosperity? And from there, to 30 years of stagnant incomes and widening inequality, culminating in the Great Recession? And from the Great Recession into such an anemic recovery? ...

  During three decades from 1947 to 1977, the nation implemented what might be called a basic bargain with American workers. Employers paid them enough to buy what they produced. Mass production and mass consumption proved perfect complements. Almost everyone who wanted a job could find one with good wages, or at least wages that were trending upward. During these three decades everyone's wages grew — not just those at or near the top.

  Government enforced the basic bargain in several ways. It used Keynesian policy to achieve nearly full employment. It gave ordinary workers more bargaining power. It provided social insurance. And it expanded public investment. Consequently, the portion of total income that went to the middle class grew while the portion going to the top declined. But this was no zero-sum game. As the economy grew almost everyone came out ahead, including those at the top.

  The pay of workers in the bottom fifth grew 116 percent over these years — faster than the pay of those in the top fifth (which rose 99 percent), and in the top 5 percent (86 percent). Productivity also grew quickly. Labor productivity — average output per hour worked — doubled. So did median incomes. Expressed in 2007 dollars, the typical family's income rose from about $25,000 to $55,000. The basic bargain was cinched. The middle class had the means to buy, and their buying created new jobs. As the economy grew, the national debt shrank as a percentage of it. ...

  Government paid for all of this with tax revenues from an expanding middle class with rising incomes. Revenues were also boosted by those at the top of the income ladder whose marginal taxes were far higher. The top marginal income tax rate during World War II was over 68 percent. In the 1950s, under Dwight Eisenhower, whom few would call a radical, it rose to 91 percent. In the 1960s and 1970s the highest marginal rate was around 70 percent. Even after exploiting all possible deductions and credits, the typical high-income taxpayer paid a marginal federal tax of over 50 percent. But contrary to what conservative commentators had predicted, the high tax rates did not reduce economic growth. To the contrary, they enabled the nation to expand middle-class prosperity and fuel growth. ...

  Coping mechanism No. 2: Everyone works longer hours. By the mid 2000s it was not uncommon for men to work more than 60 hours a week and women to work more than 50. A growing number of people took on two or three jobs. All told, by the 2000s, the typical American worker worked more than 2,200 hours a year — 350 hours more than the average European worked, more hours even than the typically industrious Japanese put in. It was many more hours than the typical American middle-class family had worked in 1979 — 500 hours longer, a full 12 weeks more.

• New York Times op-ed: When a Nobel Prize Isn't Enough. By Peter A. Diamond. Excerpts: Last October, I won the Nobel Prize in economics for my work on unemployment and the labor market. But I am unqualified to serve on the board of the Federal Reserve — at least according to the Republican senators who have blocked my nomination. How can this be?

  The easy answer is to point to shortcomings in our confirmation process and to partisan polarization in Washington. The more troubling answer, though, points to a fundamental misunderstanding: a failure to recognize that analysis of unemployment is crucial to conducting monetary policy.

  In April 2010, President Obama nominated me to be one of the seven governors of the Fed. He renominated me in September, and again in January, after Senate Republicans blocked a floor vote on my confirmation. When the Senate Banking Committee took up my nomination in July and again in November, three Republican senators voted for me each time. But the third time around, the Republicans on the committee voted in lockstep against my appointment, making it extremely unlikely that the opposition to a full Senate vote can be overcome. It is time for me to withdraw, as I plan to inform the White House. ...

  But we should all worry about how distorted the confirmation process has become, and how little understanding of monetary policy there is among some of those responsible for its Congressional oversight. We need to preserve the independence of the Fed from efforts to politicize monetary policy and to limit the Fed's ability to regulate financial firms.

  Concern about the (seemingly low) current risk of future inflation should not erase concern about the large costs of continuing high unemployment. Concern about the distant risk of a genuine inability to handle our national debt should not erase concern about the risk to the economy from too much short-run fiscal tightening.

  To the public, the Washington debate is often about more versus less — in both spending and regulation. There is too little public awareness of the real consequences of some of these decisions. In reality, we need more spending on some programs and less spending on others, and we need more good regulations and fewer bad ones.

  Analytical expertise is needed to accomplish this, to make government more effective and efficient. Skilled analytical thinking should not be drowned out by mistaken, ideologically driven views that more is always better or less is always better. I had hoped to bring some of my own expertise and experience to the Fed. Now I hope someone else can.

• The Washington Post with Bloomberg: Running in the red: Among GOP, anti-tax orthodoxy runs deep. By Lori Montgomery. Excerpts: The Republican Party once had a home for the thinking of Tom Coburn, Mike Crapo and Saxby Chambliss. But that party is long gone. The three U.S. senators banded together a few months ago in support of higher tax revenue as a means of balancing the federal budget. Even with drastic spending cuts, they concluded, Washington could not vanquish its soaring $14.3 trillion debt without additional income.

  Such reasoning was common in the GOP circa 1963, when Republicans denounced tax cuts proposed by President John F. Kennedy as a road to red ink and rampant inflation. But today's GOP adheres to a "no new taxes" orthodoxy that has proved far more powerful than the desire to balance the budget. As House Speaker John A. Boehner has said: Raising taxes is "unacceptable and a non-starter."

  This orthodoxy is now woven so deeply into the party's identity that all but 13 of 288 GOP lawmakers in Congress have signed a formal pledge not to raise taxes. The strategist who invented the pledge, Grover G. Norquist, compares it to a brand, like Coca-Cola, built on "quality control" so that Republican voters know they will get "the same thing every time."

  Loyalty to the brand is so strong that no Republican has voted for a major federal tax increase since 1991, Norquist says. It is so widespread that more than a dozen governors and hundreds of state legislators now count themselves as adherents. And it is so well defended that its followers are constantly patrolling at both the state and federal levels for new forms of trespass. ...

  The GOP's three-decade-old campaign against taxes has clearly had a significant impact. Neither major party would advocate a return to the 1970s, when people earning more than $200,000 a year faced a top rate of 70 percent. But the top rate is now half that and, partly because of the recent recession, tax collections have fallen to their lowest level as a share of the economy in 60 years. Major tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 also contributed to the decline in revenue — and helped drive up budget deficits. Today, the spiraling debt ranks well ahead of too-high taxes on the list of economic concerns. And the GOP's hard line on the issue stands, alongside Democratic resistance to cutting federal retirement benefits, as the biggest obstacle to a bipartisan agreement to tackle that problem. ...

  In recent weeks, prominent Republicans have urged a more flexible approach to taxes. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan joined the chorus Friday, dropping his support for the 2001 George W. Bush tax cuts. Greenspan told CNBC he's so "scared" by the debt that he now favors a return to the higher rates of the Clinton administration.

  Martin Feldstein, a Harvard economist who served as chief economic adviser in the Reagan White House, supports the commission's approach to raising money by ending tax breaks. ...

  At the time, Richard M. Nixon had just been elected president, and Republicans had a reputation as the party of fiscal responsibility: Dwight Eisenhower maintained wartime tax rates throughout his eight-year presidency, dramatically reducing the national debt. Congressional Republicans objected to Kennedy's tax cut, arguing that any reduction in revenue should be pared with spending cuts to avoid ballooning deficits. Nixon supported extending a surtax to pay for the Vietnam War. And his successor, Gerald R. Ford, opposed a permanent tax cut in 1974, fearing budget deficits, according to historian Bruce Bartlett, a "lapsed Republican" who has written extensively about GOP fiscal policy. ...

  In his race to succeed Reagan, George H.W. Bush famously embraced the pledge, saying "read my lips, no new taxes." But as president, he raised tax rates as part of a balanced-budget deal with Democrats. Bush's loss to Bill Clinton in 1992 "proved for all time, that even though tax increases may be justified economically, they are never justified politically if you're a Republican," Bartlett said.

  "Since then it's been Republican dogma that deficits don't matter and the only thing that matters for the economy is cutting taxes," he said. "And Grover Norquist has become the enforcer of this dogma."

• New Deal 2.0: Some Millionaires Who Want to be Taxed! by Bryce Covert. Excerpts: A group of millionaires have gotten together to create a video about a "mistake" made ten years ago: the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. While they got more money (which has gone to dance floors and yachts), local, state, and federal budgets are facing shortfalls that mean cuts to vital investments. Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Rob Johnson and ND20 contributor Dan Berger joined other wealthy Americans with one simple call: "Tax me."

  "You decided our country needed less money," Berger points out. This has lead to less money for "science research, education," as Johnson says, among other things. But "rich people are the cause of a robust economy, they're the result of a robust economy," says David Watson, a Google Software Engineer. So they should be taxed their fair share to ensure we have the revenues to keep the country strong.

• Slate: Happy 10th Birthday, Bush Tax Cuts! You've been a failure in every conceivable way. By Annie Lowrey. Excerpts: The massive Bush tax cuts mark their 10th birthday this week. Sadly, despite my best efforts to find something redeeming about them—honest!—there is little to celebrate. By nearly all of the metrics set out by President Bush himself, the cuts were a colossal failure.

  In 2001, the Bush administration inherited a few years' worth of budget surpluses, so it decided to cut income tax rates, double the child-care credit, and sharply reduce the levies on investment income. The economy then slowed, even entering a brief recession. As a form of stimulus, the administration doubled down, expanding and hastening the 2001 changes. Bush promised that the tax cuts would do a whole lot more than put money in people's pockets—which, in fact, they did. He said they would "starve the beast," forcing Congress to reduce the size and scope of government. He promised they would increase the prosperity of all Americans. He also vowed: "Tax relief will create new jobs. Tax relief will generate new wealth. And tax relief will open new opportunities."

  OK, a pitter-patter of applause for what the tax cuts did do effectively: Cut taxes and reduce overall payments to Uncle Sam. Low-income families benefited from the child-care credit jumping from $500 to $1,000. High-income families benefited from the top marginal rate falling. Billionaires benefited from lightly taxed dividend income. And government receipts, in turn, dropped.

  The think tank reports that between 2001 and 2008, the bottom 80 percent of filers received about 35 percent of the cuts. The top 20 percent received about 65 percent—and the top 1 percent alone claimed 38 percent.

  What about the president's claims? Take his pledge that the cuts would spur job growth. To be fair, we'll ignore employment changes during 2008, the year the Great Recession seized the economy. During the 2001 to 2007 business cycle, America's economy enjoyed 52 straight months of job growth. But it was sluggish—in fact, the slowest rate of jobs growth on record since World War II, and just one-fifth the pace of the 1990s.

  Then there's wealth. Put simply, the aughts were a decade of income stagnation: The tax cuts failed to bolster most taxpayers' earnings, even before the recession hit. Median real wages actually dropped from 2003 to 2007. Household income from business-cycle peak to business-cycle peak declined for the first time since tracking started in 1967. As documented by my colleague Timothy Noah in his series "The United States of Inequality," this did not hold true for the nation's billionaires and millionaires. Garden-variety high-wage earners saw their income go up. And incomes for the top 1 percent skyrocketed. For some people, obviously, the cuts "generated new wealth," in the president's phrase. But overall, inequality got worse. ...

  Unfortunately, the tax cuts never translated into robust economic growth, either. Indeed, the aughts saw the worst growth since World War II. From 2001 to 2007, annual GDP growth averaged just 2.4 percent per year, lower than in any other postwar business cycle. The contrast is starker still when judging against the previous decade. In real terms, GDP grew half as much from 2001 to 2010 as from 1991 to 2000.

• New York Times: For the Executive With Everything, a $230,000 Dog to Protect It. By John Tierney. Excerpts: Don't call her a guard dog. When she costs $230,000, as Julia did, the preferred title is "executive protection dog." This 3-year-old German shepherd, who commutes by private jet between a Minnesota estate and a home in Arizona, belongs to a canine caste that combines exalted pedigree, child-friendly cuddliness and arm-lacerating ferocity. ...

  He and others in the high-end dog training business say prices have shot up thanks to the growing number of wealthy people around the world who like the security — and status — provided by a dog with the right credentials. Moguls and celebrities now routinely pay $40,000 to $60,000 for a well-bred German shepherd that is certified as an expert in the sport of Schutzhund, which means "protection dog." The price can go much higher if a dog does well at an international championship, as Julia did. ...

  To clients who can afford the $50,000 price for a typical well-credentialed dog, there are lots of ways to rationalize the price.

  "When you compare the costs of a full-time bodyguard versus a dog, the dog makes a lot of sense," Mr. Curry said. "And the dog, unlike the bodyguard, can't be bought off."