Why income inequality is America’s biggest (and most difficult) problem

[richard_daily]

LOL. nice straw man


Appreciate you explaining to everyone here that you have no clue what you're talking abut.

Really ken?
You don't know what a maker is, or what a taker is.. The people you listed are takers... they take what other people make. You're too slow to get it though.

 

[unregistered]

 

[toubab]

No, not at all. I agree that there's a need for virtue in governance, that the first duty of government is to the Constitution, regardless of how much money they garner, or from whom. There should never be an assumption of graft when donating to politicians, crooked politicians who take a bribe need to be prosecuted and never let out of jail. People who purposely bribe a politician with the intent of purchasing political favors should get the same treatment.

It's not just that. Let me see if I can succinctly explain the way I see it. Some poor guy has one vote, and that's all he's got. He can have some tiny, almost imperceptible impact on one House race with that one vote, and possibly the same impact on one Senate race with that one vote, but not always. The other 536 seats in Congress, perhaps even 537, he doesn't count. At all.

Some extremely wealthy guy has his one vote also, with the same restraints with that one vote. The difference is, with his ability to contribute vast sums of money all over the country, in as many races as he likes, he can have a huge impact on the outcome of the Congressional races, and other races as well. Soros, the Koch Brothers, are good examples.

 

[KingOrfeo]

No, not at all. I agree that there's a need for virtue in governance, that the first duty of government is to the Constitution, regardless of how much money they garner, or from whom. There should never be an assumption of graft when donating to politicians, crooked politicians who take a bribe need to be prosecuted and never let out of jail. People who purposely bribe a politician with the intent of purchasing political favors should get the same treatment.

But, don't you see that our present campaign-finance system is one of legal, institutionalized bribery? We don't prosecute it because the money does not go into the candidate's personal pocket -- shouldn't that loophole be closed?

 

[The_Trouvere]

Please he's only a KingOfAssPopTards

What have you done for a living? Have you ever had a job in your life?

 

[The_Trouvere]

It didn't.

Our economy accelerated after WWII.

Why don't you put as much effort into a post as I do.

Why don't you put form to your economics rather than spouting random "moments" that you think makes a sound argument.

http://www.ushistory.org/us/49g.asp

There was nearly as much economic growth during FDR's first term as during the terms of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. There was considerably more job creation.

 

[AllyRose]

What have you done for a living? Have you ever had a job in your life?

Taste tester for Kim Jong Un.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

It's not just that. Let me see if I can succinctly explain the way I see it. Some poor guy has one vote, and that's all he's got. He can have some tiny, almost imperceptible impact on one House race with that one vote, and possibly the same impact on one Senate race with that one vote, but not always. The other 536 seats in Congress, perhaps even 537, he doesn't count. At all.

Some extremely wealthy guy has his one vote also, with the same restraints with that one vote. The difference is, with his ability to contribute vast sums of money all over the country, in as many races as he likes, he can have a huge impact on the outcome of the Congressional races, and other races as well. Soros, the Koch Brothers, are good examples.

Ultimately, the press would hold them in check, but it has sold out and chosen sides.

~but~

There is a bigger picture problem here, one I've written about many times, so many that I have a set of shortcuts:

The more government seeks to do in our behalf, the less we are able to do on our own behalf because we finance government with our labor; government does not support us because it cannot supply any labor, it can only appropriate it.

The more distant and powerful your government, the more likely it is to be dominated and controlled by just a very small group of people.

When Government gets so powerful that its purchase price is cost effective, even imperative, to business, then business will purchase government indulgences.

The more government does on your behalf, the less you can do on your own behalf.

The more government is asked to do on your behalf, the less it can actually get accomplished.
A_J, the Stupid

Now, when the Federal Government is focused on the defense of the nation and the establishment of courts, law and contract, then it is very limited, without much power and of little use to the purchaser, save for a very few large armaments manufacturers. When the Federal Government becomes nothing more than a State Government and decides that its new purview is as a Social Safety net, then it reaches intrusively into each life and business and the cost of fighting it grows exponentially for with each new expansion of power it accrues to itself, the penalty for your faction losing elections becomes onerous, for you will be chosen to bear the cost of the benefits to be doled out to the winners of the election.

The money problem is directly proportional to the overreach problem.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

There was nearly as much economic growth during FDR's first term as during the terms of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. There was considerably more job creation.

Temporary jobs that did not end the Depression exactly like the Bush-Obama stimulus efforts. Instead of creating jobs we needed, government created jobs that made it look good, thus the effect was temporary, fleeting and actually destroyed Capital by creating machinery that no one was demanding, creating jobs that were not worth their creation and engaging in projects designed to keep people voting for the Party of FDR.

Unlike market-driven demand, as soon as the Federal spigot was turned off, all of the imaginary gains were gone. We would not come back until actual demand created the incentive to risk that is required to truly grow and create permanent, needed jobs and wealth. Government employment, in short, does not increase Capital improvement, it steals from it by adding inefficiency to the means of production for it pays no price for failure; only the people pay the price in additional taxation.

 

[Saint Peter]

The Hoover Dam was a big waste of money?

You are a spoiled child. You enjoy the benefits of things you cry most about.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The Hoover damn was not an efficient use of Capital.

Money <> Capital



You need to brush up on your economics and put down the populism.

 

[Saint Peter]

The Hoover damn was not an efficient use of Capital.

Money <> Capital



You need to brush up on your economics and put down the populism.

You need to stop being the Boot Licking Boy of corporations that think you are a flea.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

You need to stop being the Boot Licking Boy of corporations that think you are a flea.

You need to stop resorting to childish temper tantrums.

Your grand dam in the middle of nowhere siphoned off Capital from the very limited pool of availability at the time and who knows how long it actually retarded the economy improving for everyone instead of just a few?

You do not know, you do not seem to care.

All you see is a job gained, but you never see the jobs lost. (Fallacy of the Broken Window, Bastiat)

I am discussing this in a purely Scientific manner and you are discussing this in a perfectly Socialist manner eschewing the actual Science.

Why do you hate Science? Why do you prefer Socialist Sophisms which have not only been disproved in theory, but failed when fully enacted as they did in the thoroughly modern DDR of the last century, not much more than half a century ago. Most of us remember when it collapsed.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The Party of Income Inequality

Aside from the fact that Barack Obama and Joe Biden raised more cash from Wall Street than any other presidential ticket in history — they were once Goldman Sachs’s largest recipients — the Biden family is knee-deep in corporate and hedge-fund lucre. Biden’s son Hunter was a top official for a hedge fund — which was co-founded by the senior Biden’s brother James. Biden’s other son, Beau, has been a corporate lawyer in between political stints. The populist Biden family is a synonym for elite crony capitalism and “guys running hedge funds in New York.”

Why do so many self-interested plutocrats indulge in populist rhetoric that is completely at odds with the way they live?

Could not Barack Obama blast billionaires somewhere else than at the homes of billionaires? If Hillary Clinton is going to deplore high college costs, could she not settle for $25,000 an hour rather than ten times that? Could not Mark Zuckerberg live among those he champions rather than driving up housing prices by buying a multimillion-dollar housing moat around his tony enclave? If Joe Biden swears that hedge funds and Wall Street are toxic, mightn’t he at least first advise his brother and son to steer clear of such tainted cash?

How to explain the hypocrisy?

Zero interest rates have caused the stock market to spike. Along with globalization, sky-high stock prices have created staggering sums of money that translate into influence and power simply unimagined even in the late 20th century. The Obama administration has ushered in the greatest surge in inequality in the last half-century. The result is that a select few have struck it rich in the stock market as never before, as trillions of dollars have been transferred from zero-interest passbook accounts belonging to the middle class to fabulous speculative stock profits for the top few.

Such vast sums allow a select elite to be completely exempt from the worries of most Americans about bad neighborhoods, high taxes, poor schools, and joblessness. It is easy to be utopian when one is never subject to the consequences of one’s own ideology. If Hillary Clinton had had to borrow thousands of dollars for her daughter’s tuition, she might resent huge college speaking fees like her own. (Imagine Stanford co-ed Chelsea Clinton with a $100,000 student loan, as a Stanford foundation paid Sarah Palin $225,000 for a brief talk on campus about the problems of crushing tuition and student debt creating inequality). If Mark Zuckerberg’s kids were to enroll in first grade with mostly non-English-speakers two hours away in Mendota, he might question the value of illegal immigration, or at least its toll on the public-school system.

Populist rants against billionaires or high tuition or hedge funds also buy the very rich and powerful psychological penance. That freedom from guilt and criticism allows a Barack Obama to schmooze thousands of dollars in contributions from billionaires, or a Hillary Clinton to take nearly a quarter-million dollars an hour from universities that hike tuition rates far above the rate of inflation. Joe Biden will forever be good ol’ populist Joe, given that for each populist rant he delivers, someone in his family is free to indulge in exactly the behavior that he has damned.

Our plutocrats also feel that they deserve certain exemptions to allow them the proper landscapes from which to help the less-well-off.

Victor Davis Hanson

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/391269/print

 

[The_Trouvere]

Temporary jobs that did not end the Depression exactly like the Bush-Obama stimulus efforts. Instead of creating jobs we needed, government created jobs that made it look good, thus the effect was temporary, fleeting and actually destroyed Capital by creating machinery that no one was demanding, creating jobs that were not worth their creation and engaging in projects designed to keep people voting for the Party of FDR.

Unlike market-driven demand, as soon as the Federal spigot was turned off, all of the imaginary gains were gone. We would not come back until actual demand created the incentive to risk that is required to truly grow and create permanent, needed jobs and wealth. Government employment, in short, does not increase Capital improvement, it steals from it by adding inefficiency to the means of production for it pays no price for failure; only the people pay the price in additional taxation.

Under FDR the percapita gross domestic product grew, the unemployment rate declined, and FDR was reelected three times.

Republicans have never been able to repeal the reforms of the New Deal, although a lot of them wish they could. This is because the gains were not imaginary. They were real and durable.

 

[RobDownSouth]

The Hoover Dam was a big waste of money?

You are a spoiled child. You enjoy the benefits of things you cry most about.

Liberals use the public infrastructure and are willing to pay for it.
Conservatives use the public infrastructure but don't want to pay for it.
Glibertarians use the public infrastructure but criticize it and work to actively dismantle parts they themselves do not use.

The Hoover damn was not an efficient use of Capital.

Oh by all means, tell us why!!

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

There was nearly as much economic growth during FDR's first term as during the terms of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. There was considerably more job creation.

From 1931 to 1933 Democrats obstructed Hoovers plans to fix the economy. In 1933 Roosevelt put most of Hoovers plans to work and took credit for their success.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Under FDR the percapita gross domestic product grew, the unemployment rate declined, and FDR was reelected three times.

Republicans have never been able to repeal the reforms of the New Deal, although a lot of them wish they could. This is because the gains were not imaginary. They were real and durable.

War spending accounted for the rise in GDP which measures government spending along with actual industry and as outlined before, economic output that is not created by demand is a tax on future economic gains and growth as was, as pointed out, the Bush-Obama stimulus spending packages which truly did not lift us up out of anything any more than did FDR's spending. What actually lifted us up was real demand, world-wide demand for American Goods which we were able to provide while everyone else was crawling from the wreckage and trying to rebuild their industrial bases, most of which were destroyed by the war.

The gains you crow about were in Social Spending for votes and yes, they are very real, but they do not create the jobs and industry which creates wealth. They are a tax on wealth creation which we pay for by increasingly retarding growth in order to pay for them.

Again, your Utopia was called the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik). Its economy rose from the ashes of the Economic School known as "The Socialists of the Chair" and was heavily based on Redistributive policy, central economic planning and ruthless usage of the Historical School Economic models (as do you) and it took it about 50 years to crash and burn, mainly because it ran out of Soviet Subsidy when a man who actually understood economics took them to the brink and crashed them too.

 

[NeverEndingMe]

There was nearly as much economic growth during FDR's first term as during the terms of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. There was considerably more job creation.

I find it so nice that you watch life from the sidelines

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Hey, Touab...



More Politics Means More Conflict
Mises Daily: Tuesday, October 28, Ryan McMaken

NPR recently reported on a June 2014 journal article in which political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood conclude that one’s political affiliation is now the primary source of group polarization in America, outpacing even race as a major source of conflict.

Iyengar and Westwood write, according to NPR:

Research shows: More and more residential neighborhoods are politically homogenous. Partisan politics has become a key indicator in interpersonal relations. There is a greater tendency by parents these days to raise objections to a son or daughter marrying someone who supports the opposing political party. "Actual marriage across party lines is rare," the report points out. "In a 2009 survey of married couples, only nine percent consisted of Democrat-Republican pairs."

In the report itself, we also find that the reasons for such strong segregation between the two groups is not based on “favoritism” of one’s own group, but on “animus” toward the other group. In other words, while ethnic favoritism can often be explained by familiarity with the culture of one’s own co-ethnics, the political division is driven primarily by outward-looking hostility. One could reasonably conclude then, that in such cases, fear is a major consideration in regarding the members of the “other” political group.

Past Ideological Divides

While partisan divides have always been non-trivial in American society, fifty years ago, they were regarded as generally weak. In addition, during the nineteenth century, partisan divides were important, but were less important than other issues such as the North-South or urban-rural divide, ethnic origin, and religion.

Such non-political variables have long been recognized as a determinant of one’s political affiliation, and rightly so. But now one’s political affiliation may be working in reverse, determining what states people live in, what neighborhoods they choose, and who they associate with in general. In other words, one’s politics was once determined by non-political realities, but politics now determine one’s non-political life too, determining potential spouses, friends, neighbors, and even business associates.

Politics now rivals, or has even replaced, family group, ethnicity, or community of origin as a determinant of one’s behavior and everyday preferences.

The More Powerful the State, The Higher the Stakes

Iyengar and Westwood attribute this growth in partisan animosity to the rise of negative campaigning and “news sources with a clear partisan preference.” The rise of overtly partisan major news channels may be relatively novel, although anyone familiar with Nixon’s 1950 campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas might be skeptical of the proposition that negative campaigning is something new.

It appears more likely that the rise of politics to a position of prominence in the daily lives of an ever-greater number of people is the fact that the political stakes are, in fact, very high.

In a society where a government is weak, decentralized, and unable to enact the more radical wishes of any majority group, a losing side is less likely to regard the winning side as a genuine threat to one’s daily life. Winning or losing elections remains important, but is not considered to be determinant of the losing side’s ability to keep one’s property, livelihood, and way of life relatively safe from the winners. On the other hand, if a state is very powerful, and the winning side is able to regulate, tax, and coerce in an ever more heavy-handed fashion, the stakes of each election are very high indeed.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that while Americans vigorously debated proposed laws and new candidates, the losing side invariably and immediately accepted the outcome of the election. This is often interpreted as some kind of devotion to the wonderfulness of democracy, but it more likely reflects the fact that the losers (assuming they’re whites who enjoyed full citizenship) knew that it was unlikely that they would face any real reprisals from the winning side. Unlike many regimes at the time in Europe and Latin America (such as Revolutionary France), losing a political contest in America did not entail exile, executions, or separation from one’s property. The American state (at that time and place) was simply too weak to do such things.

Consequently, one could ignore politics (for the most part), and daily life was governed more by economic, religious, and familial interests.

In modern America, however, this is not the case at all. With pervasive government spying, police statism, a bureaucracy that can shut down your business at any time it likes, and a health care system that forces one group of people to pay for the sexual activities of another group, the political stakes are very high indeed.

It is no wonder that partisan group now regard the other side with fear and loathing. Who can say what misfortunes await us in case the other side wins?

http://mises.org/daily/6939/More-Politics-Means-More-Conflict


How nice to run across this this morning.

 

[toubab]

Hey, Touab...



More Politics Means More Conflict
Mises Daily: Tuesday, October 28, Ryan McMaken


http://mises.org/daily/6939/More-Politics-Means-More-Conflict


How nice to run across this this morning.

Makes sense. And yes, the more power a centralized government has, the more dangerous it is. Intelligent people realize this.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Makes sense. And yes, the more power a centralized government has, the more dangerous it is. Intelligent people realize this.

Unfortunately elections are won on emotions...



But do you see how it echoes my previous post. Hang on. Give me some time to pat myself on the back.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Makes sense. And yes, the more power a centralized government has, the more dangerous it is. Intelligent people realize this.

Bullshit. France has a unitary system, Germany has a federal system -- the French government is no more "dangerous" than the German.

 

[toubab]

Bullshit. France has a unitary system, Germany has a federal system -- the French government is no more "dangerous" than the German.

That's ridiculous, and you chose a poor example in France, anyway. The national government is expressly prohibited from intruding into the normal operations of its administrative subdivisions.

Anyone who doesn't realize the stronger a centralized government is, the more dangerous it is, is hopelessly naive, at best.

 

[NeverEndingMe]

Bullshit. France has a unitary system, Germany has a federal system -- the French government is no more "dangerous" than the German.

comparing a shit to a turn ... dude its still a turd/shit