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U.S. Economy Is Increasingly Tied to the Rich

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Phokus said:
You have to be smoking crack to actually believe this drivel. The middle class is shrinking because, thanks to our laws and technology, it's incredibly easy to shift capital away from the US to countries where labor can be done cheaply. A near infinite supply of cheap labor far outstripping demand has been a boon to the rich and a calamity for the poor and middle class.
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It's kind of funny how they don't realize something like, "we who would love to impoverish the American people to enrich ourselves can't pass laws changing their situation to match that of the third world, but by making Americans compete on the same playing ground with the third world, we can force the same changes to get made in the name of 'free trade capitalism', and we can get the public to fund the change themselves with the carrot of cheap imported goods." Progressives built up the middle class, the rich are reversing that.
 
You have seen nothing yet. Wait until totally free trade reigns with every country, every country MFN, and illegal children grow up competing for domestic middle class jobs that can't be farmed out.

We will have a leisure class of .01%, 5% who protect and service them in a paramilitary state, and 95% in misery and destitution outside the walls and compounds like so many countries. Idiots not having eye on the ball will blame "blacks", "Mexicans" or "whites" and racial/ethnic strife will explode. Other conspiracy theories like "the Fed" will abound - when simple fact is tax structure, SBA/Farm opportunity and labor policy are dramatically from America's nadir 1945~1970's
 
Craig234 said:
Wow. It doesn't get much more wrong than that, even most of the right will agree I suspect.

I guess I get to pull out the water metaphor.

Money for the poor is like a river, it comes in an pretty much all goes right out. Money for the rich is like a lake - it accumulates.

Shorty doesn't get that the rich spending far more per person is still a far, far lower percentage of their income spent on consumerism than the ~100% of the poor's income.

So the skyrocketing share of consumer spending from the rich isn't because they're 'better at spending', it's because the concentration is so extreme, the poor have less to spend.
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Then you should probably tell it to my two high school and three college economics professors, because even though they all didnt say the same thing, they all did agree on that.

And I dont live in metaphors, I live in the real world.
 
shortylickens said:
Then you should probably tell it to my two high school and three college economics professors, because even though they all didnt say the same thing, they all did agree on that.

And I dont live in metaphors, I live in the real world.
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In the real world, the poor, by their very nature, are forced to spend a higher percentage of their meager incomes
 
Craig234 said:
Oh, that's right, the economy had huge booms and bursts regularly before the Fed, and the biggest crashes appear more from concentration of wealth and finance deregulation.
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The current central bank is our 3rd central bank. You have to understand, it isn't the Fed, it's what it does. I imagine governments have been playing with the money ever since the two first coexisted.
 
Kappo said:
I already did 🙁 He can't refute it because it is what it is. You can candy coat it all you like, but that is what it boils down to.
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I don't think it's that he can't, it's just if he did he would have to admit the truth.
 
xj0hnx said:
So if someone has the ability to build a guitar, they should be paid more even if the market doesn't need any more guitars, or is full of guitar makers?
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The problem is the guy/girl in the US can't compete with the guy/girl in Asia, Mexico, etc.

The rich are taking advantage of cheaper labor in lower priced markets, then selling the goods in a higher priced market like the US. This is how they are making so much money. At the same time the workers in these higher priced markets are being forced to compete with people in the lower priced markets and many of them just can't do it.

It's very simple really. We have exchange rates on different currencies to avoid a very similar problem, but we refuse to do anything about it for the labor force.
 
jackace said:
The problem is the guy/girl in the US can't compete with the guy/girl in Asia, Mexico, etc.

The rich are taking advantage of cheaper labor in lower priced markets, then selling the goods in a higher priced market like the US. This is how they are making so much money. At the same time the workers in these higher priced markets are being forced to compete with people in the lower priced markets and many of them just can't do it.

It's very simple really. We have exchange rates on different currencies to avoid a very similar problem, but we refuse to do anything about it for the labor force.
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Ah, finally someone gets it

What in the hell took so long?
 
Zebo said:
You have seen nothing yet. Wait until totally free trade reigns with every country, every country MFN, and illegal children grow up competing for domestic middle class jobs that can't be farmed out.

We will have a leisure class of .01%, 5% who protect and service them in a paramilitary state, and 95% in misery and destitution outside the walls and compounds like so many countries. Idiots not having eye on the ball will blame "blacks", "Mexicans" or "whites" and racial/ethnic strife will explode. Other conspiracy theories like "the Fed" will abound - when simple fact is tax structure, SBA/Farm opportunity and labor policy are dramatically from America's nadir 1945~1970's
Click to expand...

A brief history of the human society is that groups organize into a few and a many, such that the many is widely spread out and unable to resist the power of the organized few.

You work in the field and hand over most of the grain, or you get killed. You serve in the military or you get killed. You stand up and say 'let's revolt' to a few people, you get killed.

This is sort of how it worked within a society; then societies would clash with each trying to get more for itself. Didn't change much.

Occasionally, a ruler would have enough security that the 'good of the people', larger goals than providing food and soldiers to serve the few, came up. Progress occurred.

This is in part where the thinking was 'revolutionary' for the people to get more political power - but the few still tended to trump them. Much of America a century after its founding was still filled with the few and the serfs. If you were a worker, you could get paid maybe enough to eat, a very small sum. It was take that or starve. The average salary (inflation adjusted) in 1900 was $10,000 per year.

There were theories of 'laossez-faire', of 'contract negotiations' for workers - except they weren't real negotiations, one side had all the power. It didn't need to eat, workers did.

It was *illegal* for workers to organize, to give them any more power in these wage negotiations. US troops shot US citizens protesting for the right to organize.

This is where the progressive movement came in, and much was done 'for the good of the people'. Labor rights led to the middle class, child labor laws, more schools for the public.

Policies were designed - first those in the early progressive era at the turn of the century, and expanded under FDR and again under JFK/LBJ - to benefit the middle class. Big finance was prohibited from practiced that drained the nation's wealth to be used for speculation to profit the few. We still had rich - they were just a bit less rich, and others did better.

The rich have always looked around for more wealth, and after these progressive decades, they see it - in the middle class, and the political organization is built to win the battle against the progressives and the middle class. Think tanks, media, is all built up to sell the public - since the vote can't be taken away - on an ideology to help the rich without realizing it, with things like demonizing any social programs. Racism still present? Use it, link it with the programs. People like bedtime stories of small government myths? Use that too.
People vote for whoever gives them stuff, but hate deficits? Say you are against deficits too, then use them - spend the money from the next generations to buy political power today, used for enriching the rich.

Can't get people to vote to give up the hard-won middle class labor standard for Americans? Trick them into allowing unlimited direct competition with the poor labor forces of the world, which will forced the American standards not to be affordable and to plummet in ways the people would never vote for. All the while, cash the checks, as 'cheap labor' has always enriched the rich, and the middle class wealth is drained.

It's all about a return to the traditional power structure - not the one weighted for the public, with democracy, votes, a government representing the public.

And it's working, many in this forum battle against their own interests daily, trained to hate the poor, indoctrinated in bogus economic myths.

There isn't going to be another 'revolution'. Just an indefinite shift to the third-world model, back to the few and the serfs again.

And as the few need fewer and fewer people, it's terrible to think what policies will be supported.

The counter-force to this is already too small to be effective, and is under the gun more and more with increasing corporate control of the elections.

Save234
 
Cogman said:
So do tell where "progressives" and "liberals" stand. I've yet to see someone on this forum truly defend or define the liberal or progressive ideology. I've only seen stupid posts like this one "Hur Hur! You don't understand what being a progressive means, Hur hur!".
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Maybe when Republicans stop think of ways to kill brown people they can find a book and read up it.
 
WhipperSnapper said:
We accomplish it by correcting problems in the market. A real free market will always have numerous inefficiencies because perfect competition is an ideal that cannot be actualized. A progressive income tax is one way to try to correct for that. Another way is to discourage the formation of monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels.
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We have a very progressive tax system right now, in fact it is probably too progressive because it has tilted too far towards the rich while the poor are getting a free ride.

A properly balanced system would require everyone to give at least a little bit. Instead we have a few rich people pulling the cart and a ton of people sitting in that cart complaining about how much money the rich have.

The whole thing is a mess.
 
ProfJohn said:
We have a very progressive tax system right now, in fact it is probably too progressive because it has tilted too far towards the rich while the poor are getting a free ride.
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It's not enough for them, they want to tax the rich out of existence, of course they will be in for a real surprise when there's no one left to pay the bills.
 
ProfJohn said:
We have a very progressive tax system right now, in fact it is probably too progressive because it has tilted too far towards the rich while the poor are getting a free ride.

A properly balanced system would require everyone to give at least a little bit. Instead we have a few rich people pulling the cart and a ton of people sitting in that cart complaining about how much money the rich have.

The whole thing is a mess.
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If you look at just taxes paid as a percentage of income the middle class are holding the biggest burden, not the rich. Sure the rich are paying more total dollars, but their actual burden is less. We have had this discussion already on this forum.

Now if you factor in basic economic principles like Marginal Utility you start to see that the rich and ultra-rich have a much lower actual burden than the middle class and lower middle class.
 
sandorski said:
rofl, you are clueless. Fail.
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Hey everybody look, it's sandorski! Glad to see you figured out how to put more than two words together, now all we gotta do is get you to learn a few more words and then you can even pretend you have more than half a brain :awe: won't it be awesome!?!
 
Yet another "demonize-people-with-more-money-than-me" thread.

Sigh.

Go on, keep envying and trying to bring down those better off than you, instead of working on pulling yourselves up a level.

And I say this as someone who is making under 35k gross, so don't try and lump me with the "evil rich people" as I'm far from being rich.
 
SparkyJJO said:
Yet another "demonize-people-with-more-money-than-me" thread.

Sigh.

Go on, keep envying and trying to bring down those better off than you, instead of working on pulling yourselves up a level.

And I say this as someone who is making under 35k gross, so don't try and lump me with the "evil rich people" as I'm far from being rich.
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Really? All I see is Data on what's going on. Troubling Data that shows a major Economic and Social problem in the making.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by dmcowen674
Ah, finally someone gets it

What in the hell took so long?


5150Joker said:
One of the worst recessions in recent memory?
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Oh that's right, I forgot because I was saying during Bush's regime he was leading the country to this situation and no one believed me.

Sometimes I hate being right most the time because I then lose track of time. Eventually, may take years, the masses catch up to me like now.

Welcome to my world 8 years ago folks.
 
ProfJohn said:
We have a very progressive tax system right now, in fact it is probably too progressive because it has tilted too far towards the rich while the poor are getting a free ride.

A properly balanced system would require everyone to give at least a little bit. Instead we have a few rich people pulling the cart and a ton of people sitting in that cart complaining about how much money the rich have.

The whole thing is a mess.
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Too progressive, are you kidding me ?

Warren Buffett has had a standing bet for years now. If anyone on the Forbes 400 can prove that they pay a higher tax rate than his secretary, he will give them $1 million. Noone has ever been able to do so.
 
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