French economist Thomas Piketty is raising a ruckus

[KingOrfeo]

Not on purpose, not at all. But his new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (I haven't read it, but I've read a lot about it online in the past few days), apparently concludes that there is no economic force that drives capitalist societies towards shared prosperity, and that ever-greater stratification is the normal thing to be expected absent governmental intervention. That alone is enough to get him called a Marxist, which he emphatically and dismissively is not, by American RW pundits. See recent editorials/reviews by Ross Douthat and James Pethokoukis.

Jeff Faux reviews Piketty's book in The Nation.

The idea that capitalism naturally led to greater equality was codified in a 1955 landmark study by the American economist Simon Kuznets, whose data showed that after an initial period of rising inequality (e.g., our nineteenth-century gilded age) the wealth generated by market economies is distributed between labor and capital more evenly. When workers’ productivity rose, so do their wages. The “Kuznets Curve” quickly became conventional wisdom for both mainstream economists and the politicians they advised. As the nautical John F. Kennedy put it: “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

<snip>

Enter Thomas Piketty, whose impressively researched analysis (600 pages plus a detailed 165-page online technical appendix) concludes that Simon Kuznets was wrong. Not only does capitalist growth not reduce inequality; it increases it.

Using data and computer power unavailable to Kuznets, Piketty pored through 200–300 years of the economic history of the largest capitalist economies—principally the United States, Britain, France, Canada, Germany, Sweden and Japan. The numbers show that that since roughly 1700, with one exceptional period, the returns to capital (profits and interest) have exceeded the rate of overall economic growth. Since the rich own most of the re-investable capital, their wealth accumulates faster than the wealth of the vast majority of people whose income depends on wages and salaries.

The exceptions to the historical trend were the years 1914–75 in Europe and 1929–75 in the United States, in which inequality shrunk in almost all western nations. According to Piketty this era was unique: the consequences of two world wars, the Great Depression and the social democratic character of the postwar recovery in Europe, Japan and North America. Once those forces were spent, capitalism returned to its normal function as a machine for producing “inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.”

Moreover—and this is a key point—contrary to what we’re taught in Economics 101, markets appear to have no self-correcting mechanism that can halt the worsening misdistribution of wealth. If allowed to go unchecked, a tiny number of capitalists will own just about everything, with social consequences that Piketty sees as “potentially terrifying.”

Timothy Shenk incorporates it in his discussion of "Millennial Marxists."

 

[cjh]

“I belong to a generation that never had any temptation with the Communist Party; I was too young for that,” Mr. Piketty said, in a long interview in his small, airless office here at the Paris School of Economics. “So it’s easier in a way to reopen these big issues about capitalism and inequality with a fresh eye, because I was too young for that fight. I don’t have to justify myself as being pro-communist or pro-capitalist.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/b.../taking-on-adam-smith-and-karl-marx.html?_r=0

He's no Mises.

 

[KingOrfeo]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/b.../taking-on-adam-smith-and-karl-marx.html?_r=0

He's no Mises.

Why should he be? Von Mises was an Austrian-school economist; that's pure pseudoscience deserving zero respect. Even Marxism has a better claim to scientific status.

 

[cjh]

*shakes head

He doesn't, of course.

I'm just waiting for the "if only you'd studied Mises, Hayek, & Rothbard like I have" chorus to begin.

 

[KingOrfeo]

*shakes head

He doesn't, of course.

I'm just waiting for the "if only you'd studied Mises, Hayek, & Rothbard like I have" chorus to begin.

Funny you should mention that -- from Pethokoukis' review:

Second, Piketty and fellow French economist and University of California, Berkeley, inequality researcher Emmanuel Saez are arguably the most important public intellectuals in the world today. Their research is driving the economic agenda pushed by Washington Democrats and promoted by the mainstream media. The soft Marxism in Capital, if unchallenged, will spread among the clerisy and reshape the political economic landscape on which all future policy battles will be waged. We’ve seen this movie before.

John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek famously squared off in the 1930s, Left versus Right. But when Keynes published his revolutionary General Theory in 1936, Hayek went silent. It was a de facto retreat that helped give free rein to anti-market forces — even if that was not what Keynes intended — for decades until Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz wrote A Monetary History of the United States in 1963 and energized the intellectual fight against statism. Who will make the intellectual case for economic freedom today?

No one 'round here, at any rate; no Liticon has the brains for that project.

 

[Scotsman69]

It is notable

That the period in which Picketty notes inequality shrank, was the period in which Keynesian economics guided the policies of most major western economies.

And the period since, in which huge inequalities grew again, was the period in which Keynesian economic thought was usurped by the Chicago school as the prevailing wisdom.

To the enormous disbenefit of hundreds of millions of people. And the great benefit of maybe, at best, a few million.

Opening Amazon; I think I want to have a look at what this guy is saying...

Not on purpose, not at all. But his new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (I haven't read it, but I've read a lot about it online in the past few days), apparently concludes that there is no economic force that drives capitalist societies towards shared prosperity, and that ever-greater stratification is the normal thing to be expected absent governmental intervention. That alone is enough to get him called a Marxist, which he emphatically and dismissively is not, by American RW pundits. See recent editorials/reviews by Ross Douthat and James Pethokoukis.

Jeff Faux reviews Piketty's book in The Nation.



Timothy Shenk incorporates it in his discussion of "Millennial Marxists."

 

[KingOrfeo]

That the period in which Picketty notes inequality shrank, was the period in which Keynesian economics guided the policies of most major western economies.

And the period since, in which huge inequalities grew again, was the period in which Keynesian economic thought was usurped by the Chicago school as the prevailing wisdom.

To the enormous disbenefit of hundreds of millions of people. And the great benefit of maybe, at best, a few million.

No coincidence, either.

 

[BotanyBoy]

Of course it's Marxism, it's not "all hail Reagan!!"....and that means it's communist Marixm liberals just like Californya.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Of course it's Marxism, it's not "all hail Reagan!!"....and that means it's communist Marixm liberals just like Californya.

They'd call Reagan a Commie in today's GOP.

 

[BotanyBoy]

They'd call Reagan a Commie in today's GOP.

Fuck yea they would....vette wouldn't stand that fucking commie!!

http://www.newscorpse.com/Pix/Misc/reagan-hitler.jpg

Clearly Reagan is liberal scum.....

But then again the RW DOES live in fantasy land....they always forget everything else St.Ronnie did...

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VIgMJko4-4c/UeQHVCRyP_I/AAAAAAAALwY/Vru4yPjbwoI/s1600/reagan9.jpg

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I read something about him just the other day...


Let me see...


Piketty Gets It Wrong
Instead of berating capitalists, we need to make it easier for workers to join their ranks.
Michael Tanner, NRO
APRIL 23, 2014

For those who believe in the redistribution of wealth, the hero of the hour is Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose book Capital in the Twenty-First Century provides a serious critique of inequality in modern capitalist economies and warns that market economies “are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.” To remedy this, he argues for a globally imposed wealth tax and a U.S. tax rate of 80 percent on incomes over $500,000 per year.

The Left has been rapturous. In the last two months, Piketty’s book has been cited more than a half-dozen times by the New York Times, something that has happened with no other book in recent memory. Paul Krugman hails it as “the most important economics book of the year.” Martin Wolff, in the Financial Times, lauded it as “an extraordinarily important book.”

Capital in the Twenty-First Century is well researched and contains much useful information and some important insights. But it is not unflawed. Some of the problems are technical — Piketty tends to underestimate the elasticity of returns on capital — but more are deeply philosophical. Piketty takes the evilness of inequality as a given, ignoring the broader question of whether the same conditions that lead to growing wealth at the top of the pyramid also improve material well-being for those at the bottom. In other words, does it matter if some people become super-rich as long as we reduce poverty along the way? Which matters more, equality or prosperity?

To cite just one example, Piketty devotes considerable effort to criticizing the rise of inequality in China over the past three decades as it has adopted market-oriented policies. But he largely glosses over the way those policies have lifted millions and millions of people out of poverty.

Piketty’s proposed “solutions” are equally problematic. He seems to believe that “confiscatory taxes” (his term) can be imposed without changing incentives or discouraging innovation and wealth creation. Piketty’s solutions would undoubtedly yield a more equal society, but also one that was remarkably poorer.

Still, Piketty makes some important points. In particular, he notes correctly that returns on capital nearly always exceed the return on labor. With capital held by a relatively narrow group, therefore, rising inequality is inevitable. Moreover, with the wealthy able to pass capital on to their heirs, that inequality will be perpetuated and even extended over generations.

One wonders why, then, Piketty’s fans ignore the obvious answer to this problem. Instead of attacking capital and capitalism, why not expand the number of people who participate in the benefits of having capital? In other words, let’s make more capitalists.

Yet, the Left is unremittingly hostile to exactly those policies that would give workers more access to capital.

Take, for example, 401(k) plans, which allow some 52 million American workers to own stocks and bonds as part of their retirement portfolios. Teresa Ghilarducci, director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School in New York, has argued before Congress that 401(k) plans should be abolished, and replaced by an expanded social-insurance system. Representative Jim McDermott (D., Wash.), who sits on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, has pronounced himself “intrigued” by Ghilarducci’s ideas. And retiring congressman George Miller (D., Calif.) has called for eliminating or reducing the tax break for 401(k) contributions. The Obama administration has also sought to limit tax breaks for 401(k)s, although primarily for wealthier participants. In a speech calling for the expansion of Social Security, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) criticized private retirement accounts like 401(k) plans “that leave the retiree at the mercy of a market that rises and falls, and, sometimes, at the mercy of dangerous investment products.”

No policy proposed in recent years would have done more to expand capital ownership than allowing younger workers to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes through personal accounts. One of the unsung benefits of such Social Security reform is that it would enable even the lowest-paid American worker to benefit from capital investment. Indeed, since the wealthy presumably already invest as much as they wish to, lower-income workers would be the primary beneficiaries of this new investment opportunity.

In Chile, for example, workers, through their pension accounts, own assets equal to approximately 60 percent of the country’s GDP. As José Piñera, the architect of Chile’s successful pension reform, points out, personal accounts “transform every worker into an owner of capital.”

Moreover, my Cato colleague Jagadeesh Gokhale has demonstrated that, because personal accounts would be inheritable, privatizing Social Security would significantly reduce inequality across generations.

It is this “democratization of capital” that attracted honest liberals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the idea. Yet, Democrats in Congress today would sooner sell their first-born to the Koch brothers than even consider it.

In the end, there are two ways to address inequality. You can bring the top down, or you can lift the bottom up. It is free-market capitalism that gives us a chance to do the latter. And if there is a problem today, it is more likely a result of too little capitalism, not too much.

That’s something that Piketty’s fans should think about.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Piketty and Capital
Peter G. Klein, Mises.org
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2014

Further to Hunter’s remarks: Piketty understands “capital” as a homogeneous, liquid pool of funds, not a heterogeneous stock of capital assets. This is not merely a terminological issue, as those familiar with the debates on capital theory from the 1930s and 1940s are well aware. Piketty’s approach focuses on the quantity of capital and, more importantly, the rate of return on capital. But these concepts make little sense from the perspective of Austrian capital theory, which emphasizes the complexity, variety, and quality of the economy’s capital structure. There is no way to measure the quantity of capital, nor would such a number be meaningful. The value of heterogeneous capital goods depends on their place in an entrepreneur’s subjective production plan. Production is fraught with uncertainty. Entrepreneurs acquire, deploy, combine, and recombine capital goods in anticipation of profit, but there is no such thing as a “rate of return on invested capital.”

Profits are amounts, not rates. The old notion of capital as a pool of funds that generates a rate of return automatically, just by existing, is incomprehensible from the perspective of modern production theory. Robert Solow, in a glowing review of Piketty’s book, states: “The key thing about wealth in a capitalist economy is that it reproduces itself and usually earns a positive net return.” But this is nonsense from the point of view of microeconomics, entrepreneurship, uncertainty, innovation, strategy, etc.

Much of the excitement around Piketty’s work deals with his estimate of the long-term rate of return on capital, and how this compares to the long-term rate of economic growth. I hear from third parties that Piketty’s calculations (the early work was done with Emmanuel Saez) are thorough and careful, and I have no reason to doubt the empirical part of the book. But it seems like a pointless exercise to me — I don’t know what the underlying constructs even mean.

Of course, there are many other issues related to the interpretation of these data and what they mean for social mobility, fairness, etc. For example, there may be much more vertical movement than Piketty’s admirers admit — few people remain in one part of the income distribution all their lives. And most Americans are capitalists, with some of their financial wealth invested in equities through their retirement portfolios. So the link between (say) stock-market performance, rents on land and natural resources, and interest returns and the distribution of financial wealth among individuals is complicated.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Why should he be? Von Mises was an Austrian-school economist; that's pure pseudoscience deserving zero respect. Even Marxism has a better claim to scientific status.

You should actually read some Mises. I would read Wicksteed first though, just so you have a firm grasp of the fundamentals.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

"Enter Thomas Piketty, whose impressively researched analysis (600 pages plus a detailed 165-page online technical appendix) concludes that Simon Kuznets was wrong. Not only does capitalist growth not reduce inequality; it increases it."

I assume that there is a point to Interventionists here once they have mad a subjective value judgement. The problem being that Capitalism sans Interventionism tends to be that rising tide that lifts all boats. While this is gold to the Economics of Envy crowd, it forces them quickly into the Interventionism of the Broken Window Fallacy (Bastiat).

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Thomas Piketty’s Sensational New Book
Hunter Lewis, Mises.org
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2014

This 42 year economist from French academe has written a hot new book: Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The US edition has been published by Harvard University Press and, remarkably, is leading the best seller list, the first time that a Harvard book has done so. A recent review describes Piketty as the man “who exposed capitalism’s fatal flaw.”

So what is this flaw? Supposedly under capitalism the rich get steadily richer in relation to everyone else; inequality gets worse and worse. It is all baked into the cake, unavoidable.

To support this, Piketty offers some dubious and unsupported financial logic, but also what he calls “a spectacular graph” of historical data. What does the graph actually show?

The amount of U.S. income controlled by the top 10% of earners starts at about 40% in 1910, rises to about 50% before the Crash of 1929, falls thereafter, returns to about 40% in 1995, and thereafter again rises to about 50% before falling somewhat after the Crash of 2008.

Let’s think about what this really means. Relative income of the top 10% did not rise inexorably over this period. Instead it peaked at two times: just before the great crashes of 1929 and 2008. In other words, inequality rose during the great economic bubble eras and fell thereafter.

And what caused and characterized these bubble eras? They were principally caused by the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks creating far too much new money and debt. They were characterized by an explosion of crony capitalism as some rich people exploited all the new money, both on Wall Street and through connections with the government in Washington.

We can learn a great deal about crony capitalism by studying the period between the end of WWI and the Great Depression and also the last twenty years, but we won’t learn much about capitalism. Crony capitalism is the opposite of capitalism. It is a perversion of markets, not the result of free prices and free markets.

One can see why the White House likes Piketty. He supports their narrative that government is the cure for inequality when in reality government has been the principal cause of growing inequality.

The White House and IMF also love Piketty’s proposal, not only for high income taxes, but also for substantial wealth taxes. The IMF in particular has been beating a drum for wealth taxes as a way to restore government finances around the world and also reduce economic inequality.

Expect to hear more and more about wealth taxes. Expect to hear that they will be a “one time” event that won’t be repeated, but that will actually help economic growth by reducing economic inequality.

This is all complete nonsense. Economic growth is produced when a society saves money and invests the savings wisely. It is not quantity of investment that matters most, but quality. Government is capable neither of saving nor investing, much less investing wisely.

Nor should anyone imagine that a wealth tax program would be a “one time” event. No tax is ever a one time event. Once established, it would not only persist; it would steadily grow over the years.

Piketty should also ask himself a question. What will happen when investors have to liquidate their stocks, bonds, real estate, or other assets in order to pay the wealth tax? How will markets absorb all the selling? Who will be the buyers? And how will it help economic growth for markets and asset values to collapse under the selling pressure?

In 1936, a dense, difficult-to-read academic book appeared that seemed to tell politicians they could do exactly what they wanted to do. This was Keynes’s General Theory. Piketty’s book serves the same purpose in 2014, and serves the same short-sighted, destructive policies.

If the Obama White House, the IMF, and people like Piketty would just let the economy alone, it could recover. As it is, they keep inventing new ways to destroy it.

 

[jeninflorida]

those that believe in socialism have a mental illness.


its just that simple. you slobs want to do the bar min, if any work at all, and suck down entitlements.

pathetic

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

those that believe in socialism have a mental illness.


its just that simple. you slobs want to do the bar min, if any work at all, and suck down entitlements.

pathetic

It cannot be that they just have the good intentions of a glass half-empty philosophy?


Everyone should be able to have at least a glass half full.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Few members of the politically active left will be too troubled by Piketty’s Cambridge-Cambridge gaffes or the many other inside-economics flaws Mr. Galbraith and others have identified in Capital — although Mr. Galbraith’s summary is worth noting: “Despite its great ambitions, [Piketty’s] book is not the accomplished work of high theory that it’s title, length, and reception (so far) suggest.”

Indeed not. Instead of high theory, Capital is a tour-de-force combination of deep economic jargon, pop-culture analysis (how many other serious economic texts drop references to Dirty Sexy Money and other American TV shows) wrapped around a neo-Marxist class-warfare view of the world economy.

While Capital was translated from the 2013 French edition and Piketty is now a professor at the Paris School of Economics, he isn’t new to North America. He taught at M.I.T. and co-authored a 2010 study on the rise of inequality in America with Emmanuel Saez, the Berkeley economist who is the leading intellectual guru of the U.S. inequality movement. Piketty and Saez are guiding lights to scores of politicians, from President Obama to Canadian Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland, Justin Trudeau’s chief economic advisor. The 2010 Piketty/Saez study and the whole inequality myth were subject of three commentaries on this site here, here and here.

There’s a lot in Capital, but the book has three basic foundations. There’s the Marxist Set Up, the Capitalist Straw Dog and the Utopian Tax Plan. All the rest is elaborate if sometimes fascinating filler.

Terrence Corcoran

http://business.financialpost.com/2...the-straw-dogs-of-thomas-pikettys-capitalism/

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Piketty’s statistics are superficially impressive, but they can’t be taken at face value. His gross income figures, for instance, exclude redistribution and social programs. The inequality figures he cites would be much less striking if he computed them—as is commonly done—based on net income after redistribution. Not doing so seriously distorts economic conditions. Piketty seems unwilling to concede that income alone, however calculated, does not account for all social reality: we all benefit from progress in multiple areas—health, transportation, consumer technologies—regardless of income.

Piketty’s book is less interested in economic efficiency than in social justice. “Building a just society,” he writes, “is the purpose of democracy.” For Piketty, “just” is the equivalent of “egalitarian.” He doesn’t explain why this should be so, though his equation of the two surely explains why Capital in the Twenty-First Century has political appeal among American academics, the media, and liberal politicians on both sides of the Atlantic—from President Obama to French president François Hollande. Offering no alternatives to the free market, the Left now fights for income equality, and Piketty’s book is thus an intellectual boon.

Piketty does not believe that free markets can spontaneously generate greater equality: government intervention is therefore needed, mostly through taxation. His market pessimism contradicts the findings of most classical economists, who see the rise of a huge middle class as an outgrowth of capitalism. Piketty rejects what he considers an optimistic illusion about markets born in the 1960s. From the end of the World War II until the late 1970s, a middle class expanded in the West, and incomes from wages and capital converged. But this convergence, Piketty argues, was a historical accident. In the long run, he says, capital owners always prevail over employees. In his insistence, Piketty sometimes contradicts himself. At one point, he argues that income divergence occurs independent of political influence. But he also writes that the current divergence was initiated by the policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who “scrapped taxes on the wealthy.” The inadequacy of his framework is powerfully illustrated by the example of France, where the gap between the so-called 99 percent and the 1 percent became wider under a socialist government during the 1980s. Was François Mitterrand a hidden Reaganite?

This contradiction between ideological judgments and objective data is the book’s fundamental flaw. The emergence of a super-wealthy minority (closer to 0.001 percent than to 1 percent, as Piketty himself admits) has likely occurred for different reasons in different countries. For instance, the new oligarchies in Russia, Nigeria, or China can’t be explained as a consequence of the free market. Inequality in these nations results from corruption, a one-party system, and kleptocracy. In the United States, a super-wealthy minority—“superstars and supermanagers,” as Piketty calls them—has attained financial preeminence predominantly through globalization: entrepreneurs like Bill Gates or large hedge fund managers operate in a worldwide market, gaining unprecedented profits. Their riches may be considered excessive or unfair—but that would be a moral judgment, not an economic one.

Guy Sorman

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/bc0422gs.html



See my post above (#14)...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

One final thought from a solid economics professor...

The Left’s ‘Income Inequality’ Canard
There is no incentive to get people off their dependency on government programs.
Thomas Sowell, NRO
APRIL 24, 2014

Income inequality has long been one of the liberals’ favorite issues. So there is nothing surprising about its being pushed hard this election year.

If nothing else, it is a much-needed distraction from the disasters of Obamacare and the various IRS, Benghazi, and other Obama-administration scandals.

Like so many other favorite liberal issues, income inequality is seldom discussed in terms of the actual consequences of liberal policies. When you turn from eloquent rhetoric to hard facts, the hardest of those facts is that income inequality has actually increased during five years of Barack Obama’s leftist policies.

This is not as surprising as some might think. When you make it unnecessary for many people to work, fewer people work. Unprecedented numbers of Americans are on the food-stamp program. Unprecedented numbers are also living off government “disability” payments.

There is a sweeping array of other government subsidies, whether in money or in kind, that together allow many people to receive greater benefits than they could earn by working at low-skilled jobs. Is it surprising that the labor-force participation rate is lower than it has been in decades?

In short, when people don’t have to earn incomes, they are less likely to earn incomes — or, at least, to earn incomes in legal and visible ways that could threaten their government benefits.

Most of the households in the bottom 20 percent of income earners have nobody working. There are more heads of household working full-time and year-round in the top 5 percent than in the bottom 20 percent.

What this means statistically is that liberals can throw around numbers on how many people are living in “poverty” — defined in terms of income received, not in terms of goods and services provided by the government.

Most Americans living in “poverty” have air conditioning, a motor vehicle, and other amenities, including more living space than the average person in Europe — not the average poor person in Europe, the average person.

“Poverty” is in the eye of the statisticians — more specifically, the government statisticians who define what constitutes “poverty,” and who are unlikely to define it in ways that might jeopardize the massive welfare state that they are part of.

In terms of income statistics that produce liberal outcries about “disparities” and “inequities,” millions of people who don’t have to earn incomes typically don’t.

The more people who are in a non-income-earning mode, the greater the disparities with the incomes of those of us who have to work for a living, and who have to earn more to offset high tax rates. Yet liberals often act as if this is an injustice to those who don’t work rather than an injustice to those who do work, and whose taxes support those who don’t.

Actually, the liberal welfare state is an injustice to both, though in different ways.

Despite whatever good intentions some liberals may have had in creating the ever-growing welfare state, practical politicians know that more dependency means more votes for supporters of bigger government.

There are no incentives for either politicians or the bureaucrats who run the welfare-state agencies to get people off their dependency on government programs. Moreover, the eligibility rules create a very high cost to individuals who try to rise by getting a job and earning their own money.

It is not uncommon for someone who is receiving multiple government-provided benefits — housing subsidies, food subsidies, etc. — to lose more in benefits than they gain in income, if they decide to take a legitimate and visible job.

If increasing your income by $10,000 a year would cause you to lose $15,000 worth of government benefits, would you do it? That is more than the equivalent of a 100 percent tax rate on income. Even millionaires and billionaires don’t pay that high a tax rate.

Liberals don’t talk — or perhaps even think — in terms of the actual consequences of their policies, when it is so much more pleasant to think in terms of wonderful goals and lofty rhetoric.

 

[eyer]

Battle of the Dependent C&Pers

statistKing0 vs. neoGump...

...inevitable.

 

[jeninflorida]

the end result is simple those like Sean (the froggy meth junkie), SeahR, UD, Merc, Rob, kingofAssTards ... are slackers.

you assmuchers want to put in the bare min of effort. you failed in life, and now want socialism so that your lazy asses can live like successful people

its just that simple

 

[jeninflorida]

It cannot be that they just have the good intentions of a glass half-empty philosophy?


Everyone should be able to have at least a glass half full.

but those like Merc, Sean, KingofAssTards, UD ... they see a glass, don't even bother to look at how much liquid its holding, they just bitch that its not enough...they are unwilling to walk to the refrigerator and pour water into the glass, they want uncle obama to do it while giving them $100,000 for pain and suffering

am I wrong?

I think not!

 

[jeninflorida]

Jesus, I guess you are offering proof that pot does fuck up one mind .... sad watching you slowly slip into the septic tank for a swim...

Fuck yea they would....vette wouldn't stand that fucking commie!!

http://www.newscorpse.com/Pix/Misc/reagan-hitler.jpg

Clearly Reagan is liberal scum.....

But then again the RW DOES live in fantasy land....they always forget everything else St.Ronnie did...

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VIgMJko4-4c/UeQHVCRyP_I/AAAAAAAALwY/Vru4yPjbwoI/s1600/reagan9.jpg

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

"...live like successful people."

Now that's the thing see - what does a successful person live like?

And what exactly is, 'a successful person?'