We can thank democrats for our debt

[Jhhnn]

You act as though holding excess cash is a bad thing (who defines "excess" anyway?) The US has one of the worst savings rate of any country, and our economy is based on consumerism (aka spending). I dont see this as a good thing. Our country as a whole from the late 80's until 2008 or so spent like drunken sailors on port in Thailand. Both consumers AND government.

There's two ways for those with excess cash to get rid of it. Either buy stuff or hire people. The problem is, after 2008 people werent buying stuff, therefore the demand for workers to either produce stuff or provide service dropped. Without people/government/businesses buying stuff, to hire more people is idiotic at best. You see the catch-22 here?

There are many reasons why businesses arent spending, but the main reasons banks arent lending can best be explained in this article:


Preceded by:


So banks are leery to lend. As they should be.



And this holding on to cash isnt just a business practice now. There are many articles such as this one that show personal savings rates are increasing.


So it seems now the only entity still spending like drunken sailors is the government. And its boggling people like you think they need to increase. It's lean times. Spending is soooo....10 years ago.

You just made my argument entirely. If nobody spends then money becomes scarce in the economy of goods & services & deflation ensues, rendering debt payment more difficult. That's what happened in the early 1930's, when the amount of money in circulation (including credit) fell precipitously and the value of a dollar increased by 75%. The more you pay, the more you owe, in terms of value.

Item 36, from Irving Fisher's seminal work-

http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/docs/meltzer/fisdeb33.pdf

 

[blackangst1]

You just made my argument entirely. If nobody spends then money becomes scarce in the economy of goods & services & deflation ensues, rendering debt payment more difficult. That's what happened in the early 1930's, when the amount of money in circulation (including credit) fell precipitously and the value of a dollar increased by 75%. The more you pay, the more you owe, in terms of value.

Item 36, from Irving Fisher's seminal work-

http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/docs/meltzer/fisdeb33.pdf

Well, very good then. The only thing we disagree on then is whether or not its a good idea. The fact is, everything goes in cycles. And when the pendulum swings the other way, someone's gonna hurt. If a period of deflation (which we havent really seen yet) happens at the expense of business being a bit more conservative financially and consumers not spending like drunken sailors, then thats a positive thing.

As I said in my post, if government would follow what business and consumers already know (that debt/deficit spending is a bad thing, and saving is a good thing) perhaps there's hope. But so far neither party seems interested.

 

[fskimospy]

Well, very good then. The only thing we disagree on then is whether or not its a good idea. The fact is, everything goes in cycles. And when the pendulum swings the other way, someone's gonna hurt. If a period of deflation (which we havent really seen yet) happens at the expense of business being a bit more conservative financially and consumers not spending like drunken sailors, then thats a positive thing.

As I said in my post, if government would follow what business and consumers already know (that debt/deficit spending is a bad thing, and saving is a good thing) perhaps there's hope. But so far neither party seems interested.

But why would governments want to follow what businesses and consumers think when government debt is nothing like business or consumer debt?

 

[blackangst1]

But why would governments want to follow what businesses and consumers think when government debt is nothing like business or consumer debt?

Fair point. Im speaking in generalities. Im not one of those balanced budget kooks.

 

[Jhhnn]

But why would governments want to follow what businesses and consumers think when government debt is nothing like business or consumer debt?

Careful now- the realization that all the money in existence has been created by govt & fractional reserve banking under govt license may be too much for them to bear...

All the money out there has literally been borrowed into existence by govt.

 

[Jhhnn]

Well, very good then. The only thing we disagree on then is whether or not its a good idea. The fact is, everything goes in cycles. And when the pendulum swings the other way, someone's gonna hurt. If a period of deflation (which we havent really seen yet) happens at the expense of business being a bit more conservative financially and consumers not spending like drunken sailors, then thats a positive thing.

As I said in my post, if government would follow what business and consumers already know (that debt/deficit spending is a bad thing, and saving is a good thing) perhaps there's hope. But so far neither party seems interested.

The only reasons we haven't seen deflation are massive quantitative easing by the FRB & deficit spending by the govt...

The enormous contraction of lending has been extremely deflationary in the wake of the Ownership Society, which was the greatest credit bubble in the history of finance, surpassing even that of the late 1920's. It was a financial elite looting spree based on false high real estate valuations & deceptive EZ credit- false prosperity.

Back then, high taxes instituted on the wealthy under the New Deal helped pay for govt spending based on the principles I outlined above, put liquidity, money, back in the hands of ordinary citizens so that they could... spend it, to resume economic activity that had fallen to a dismal level.

Hell, when what had been a largely credit based economy collapsed, money, currency, was so scarce that people were reduced to barter, and the price of many things, particularly agricultural products, fell through the floor. Even as people went hungry, crops weren't harvested because it cost more to take them to market than they'd fetch when sold. Debtors took the high hard one, and creditors who had sufficient reserves made out like the bandits they've always been.

 

[blackangst1]

The only reasons we haven't seen deflation are massive quantitative easing by the FRB & deficit spending by the govt...

The enormous contraction of lending has been extremely deflationary in the wake of the Ownership Society, which was the greatest credit bubble in the history of finance, surpassing even that of the late 1920's. It was a financial elite looting spree based on false high real estate valuations & deceptive EZ credit- false prosperity.

Back then, high taxes instituted on the wealthy under the New Deal helped pay for govt spending based on the principles I outlined above, put liquidity, money, back in the hands of ordinary citizens so that they could... spend it, to resume economic activity that had fallen to a dismal level.

Hell, when what had been a largely credit based economy collapsed, money, currency, was so scarce that people were reduced to barter, and the price of many things, particularly agricultural products, fell through the floor. Even as people went hungry, crops weren't harvested because it cost more to take them to market than they'd fetch when sold. Debtors took the high hard one, and creditors who had sufficient reserves made out like the bandits they've always been.

Sorry, Jhhnn, but I think you're forgetting it wasnt just the rich who profitted in the last bubble. It goes FAR beyond "financial elite looting spree based on false high real estate valuations & deceptive EZ credit- false prosperity." You want to talk about how companies like Goldman, Deutshe Bank, Morgan Stanley, et al profitted on CDO's, and I counter with Joe Schmoe making $45,000/yr buying a $350,000 house...because he can. I frequently heard conversations amongst co-workers and friends about how easy it was to get a balloon mortgage or an ARM...and when asked what happens when the bill comes due the answers were always the same: I'll deal with it when it comes up.

You want to talk about people like Madoff and others like him who took advantage of the bubble, and I'll talk about how almost everyone in networking called themselves "network engineers". Or how people took a class on passing the CCNA, got it, then got an $80,000 engineering job and thought you could bring up a down interface by pinging it (I actually worked with a new CCNA who thought this). Everyone was taking advantage of the bubble. Everyone.

Ownership society? I dont think it means what you think it means. Are there negatives? Sure. But the premise of ownership society is sound. For example

The idea that the welfare of individuals is directly related to their ability to control their own lives and wealth, rather than relying on government transfer payments

or

the sale at affordable prices of public housing to tenants (right to buy program), and privatization.

I really dont see problems with this. Yet you throw around the term like its the root of all our troubles, when in fact its the premise of our country.

Look. In spite of our differences, I believe we agree the collapse of the financial sector was due to un and under-regulated markets. I agree with that. I also think we both agree that having a credit-based economy is bad as well for everyone except the creditor. I believe where our disagreements lie is that you're so fucking stuck on the 0.1%, concentration of wealth, etc you have lost focus that middle and low income America is just as responsible for the bubble burst. What the rich had in influence, the middle and poor had in numbers.

 

[Jhhnn]

Sorry, Jhhnn, but I think you're forgetting it wasnt just the rich who profitted in the last bubble. It goes FAR beyond "financial elite looting spree based on false high real estate valuations & deceptive EZ credit- false prosperity." You want to talk about how companies like Goldman, Deutshe Bank, Morgan Stanley, et al profitted on CDO's, and I counter with Joe Schmoe making $45,000/yr buying a $350,000 house...because he can. I frequently heard conversations amongst co-workers and friends about how easy it was to get a balloon mortgage or an ARM...and when asked what happens when the bill comes due the answers were always the same: I'll deal with it when it comes up.

Sounds peachy, except that the lootocracy got to keep their money, invest it far & wide in the global economy. If you think they bought the bunk CDO's they were selling, you're crazy. The guy who bought the house he couldn't afford ended up with nothing but bad credit, heartache, & money tossed down the porcelain bowl. Oh, yeh- they sold those CDO's to his pension fund or the mutual funds in his 401k, too, boning him twice.

See the difference?

Here's how one of the perps made out-

On Friday October 15, 2010, Mozilo reached a settlement with Securities and Exchange Commission, over securities fraud and insider trading charges. Mozilo agreed to pay $67.5 million in fines and accepted a lifetime ban from serving as an officer or director of any public company; it is the largest settlement by an individual or executive connected to the 2008 housing collapse. Robert Khuzami, director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, said in a statement that "Mozilo's record penalty is the fitting outcome for a corporate executive who deliberately disregarded his duties to investors by concealing what he saw from inside the executive suite." By settling the SEC charges, Mozilo will avoid a trial that could have provided fodder for future criminal charges. [20][21]

This fine represents a small fraction of Mozilo's estimated net worth of $600 million. Countrywide will pay $20 million of the $67.5 million penalty because of an indemnification agreement that was part of Mozillo's employment contract. The terms of the settlement allow Mr. Mozilo to avoid acknowledging any wrongdoing.

In February 2011, the U.S. dropped its criminal investigation into the facts behind that civil settlement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelo_Mozilo

He's one of a very few who had to put anything back at all...

 

[blackangst1]

Sounds peachy, except that the lootocracy got to keep their money, invest it far & wide in the global economy. If you think they bought the bunk CDO's they were selling, you're crazy. The guy who bought the house he couldn't afford ended up with nothing but bad credit, heartache, & money tossed down the porcelain bowl. Oh, yeh- they sold those CDO's to his pension fund or the mutual funds in his 401k, too, boning him twice.

See the difference?

Here's how one of the perps made out-



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelo_Mozilo

He's one of a very few who had to put anything back at all...

I cant really respond because Im not sure what a lootocracy is. But that guy SHOULD lose everything for intentionally getting a home he knew he couldnt afford.

 

[werepossum]

i read this sentence like 3 times and I dont understand what you are saying here.

Sadly, No Child Left Behind didn't work and reading comprehension still suffers. LOL

More false assumptions. First off, banks are beginning to charge large depositors to hold their money-

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...t-charge-on-clients-excess-cash-deposits.html

Yep- excess cash.

It's a symptom of low demand & existing excess capacity. Potential investors see no reason to take any chances in the face of low demand, so they save instead. Consumers are basically tapped out, unwilling to borrow in the face of economic uncertainty, and many are unable to do so because of unemployment & already high obligations. Those who can are also saving. Such funds become illiquid through the very act of saving them, because they're simply not being lent out on the other side.

Somebody needs to spend money to get things moving, and that leaves only govt. Govt can either borrow or tax to do that. Your point that investors can buy govt bonds to hold out foreign money is absurd, because we borrow in our own currency and because govt can rather painlessly get more from taxes from high earners, as I've offered.

The notion that govt does not create wealth is equally absurd. It just doesn't create private wealth except in the fact that it pays people to do things. Having been debunked many times, it's the same tired meme that Righties drag out when they have nothing left. The interstate highway system, flood control & irrigation projects, power generation, waterway maintenance, managed forests & grasslands, national parks & monuments, sewers, streets and even landfills are all wealth that we share as a nation, and there's a lot more if we think about it at all.

Your assertion wrt who can better allocate funds is the same gibberish. Of course the people at the top can better allocate funds to serve their own purposes and nobody else's- that's how we've come to where we are today. Right now, they're just stuffing money into their mattresses, which serves the rest of us not at all.

If hte stupid Job Creator meme had any substance at all, they'd be creating jobs, but they're not to any appreciable degree, even enjoying the lowest tax rates of the post WW2 period. That's because a liquidity trap turns classical and Austrian school mumbo jumbo upside down, neuters Monetarism against a zero lower bound of interest rates.

That's a lot of words to say "I want your money". Perhaps you can back that up with examples of societies creating wealth through government. Those societies with the most government control - i.e. the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, Red China before they embraced capitalism - should logically be the wealthiest if your paradigm has validity, since they best prevent people from "allocating funds to serve their own purposes and nobody else's". Instead we see a pattern of such nations in continual decline except where they can parasitically drain the assets from a capitalist nation, whether by conquest or by serving as a low wage vacation spot. Either way, too much government is a sure path to poverty. For your examples, government did not create the wealth you attribute. Instead, government confiscated the wealth created by the private sector and converted it (albeit with a lot of loss) into those forms of wealth. At its best, such conversion can help the private sector create even more wealth, but to confuse this with true wealth production leads inevitably to the Communist death spiral. We saw in the Great Depression that even heretofore unimaginable levels of government borrowing and spending can at best prop up today's economy at the expense of tomorrow's, as every time government spending was reduced, the economy dropped to match. We simply cannot tax and spend or borrow and spend our way to prosperity.

Custodian banks are not merely big banks, they serve a very different function in society. I'm not at all surprised to see such an institution as BNY Mellon charge for idle deposits as it makes its money through fees rather than by loaning money.

You act as though holding excess cash is a bad thing (who defines "excess" anyway?) The US has one of the worst savings rate of any country, and our economy is based on consumerism (aka spending). I dont see this as a good thing. Our country as a whole from the late 80's until 2008 or so spent like drunken sailors on port in Thailand. Both consumers AND government.

There's two ways for those with excess cash to get rid of it. Either buy stuff or hire people. The problem is, after 2008 people werent buying stuff, therefore the demand for workers to either produce stuff or provide service dropped. Without people/government/businesses buying stuff, to hire more people is idiotic at best. You see the catch-22 here?

There are many reasons why businesses arent spending, but the main reasons banks arent lending can best be explained in this article:


Preceded by:


So banks are leery to lend. As they should be.



And this holding on to cash isnt just a business practice now. There are many articles such as this one that show personal savings rates are increasing.


So it seems now the only entity still spending like drunken sailors is the government. And its boggling people like you think they need to increase. It's lean times. Spending is soooo....10 years ago.

Very well said. Our problem in a nutshell is that we consume far more than we produce. Unfortunately we have one party that thinks feels that if it is given control of all assets (by being given the power to decide what assets are "excess" and seize them) that they can create the world's first successful top-down command economy, and another party that thinks feels that if it can simply reduce government's stranglehold of taxes and regulations, rich people will fix our economy. Neither party is willing to address our true problem, mainly because we as voters would not reward them for doing so.

 

[cybrsage]

Sorry, Jhhnn, but I think you're forgetting it wasnt just the rich who profitted in the last bubble.

I think everyone who had a job then, but has since lost it profitted n the last bubble. But I know what you meant.

 

[fskimospy]

Sadly, No Child Left Behind didn't work and reading comprehension still suffers. LOL


That's a lot of words to say "I want your money". Perhaps you can back that up with examples of societies creating wealth through government. Those societies with the most government control - i.e. the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, Red China before they embraced capitalism - should logically be the wealthiest if your paradigm has validity, since they best prevent people from "allocating funds to serve their own purposes and nobody else's". Instead we see a pattern of such nations in continual decline except where they can parasitically drain the assets from a capitalist nation, whether by conquest or by serving as a low wage vacation spot. Either way, too much government is a sure path to poverty. For your examples, government did not create the wealth you attribute. Instead, government confiscated the wealth created by the private sector and converted it (albeit with a lot of loss) into those forms of wealth. At its best, such conversion can help the private sector create even more wealth, but to confuse this with true wealth production leads inevitably to the Communist death spiral. We saw in the Great Depression that even heretofore unimaginable levels of government borrowing and spending can at best prop up today's economy at the expense of tomorrow's, as every time government spending was reduced, the economy dropped to match. We simply cannot tax and spend or borrow and spend our way to prosperity.

Custodian banks are not merely big banks, they serve a very different function in society. I'm not at all surprised to see such an institution as BNY Mellon charge for idle deposits as it makes its money through fees rather than by loaning money.


Very well said. Our problem in a nutshell is that we consume far more than we produce. Unfortunately we have one party that thinks feels that if it is given control of all assets (by being given the power to decide what assets are "excess" and seize them) that they can create the world's first successful top-down command economy, and another party that thinks feels that if it can simply reduce government's stranglehold of taxes and regulations, rich people will fix our economy. Neither party is willing to address our true problem, mainly because we as voters would not reward them for doing so.

Can you show us where in the Democratic Party's platform or in what statements or actions by its elected officials that cause you to believe it advocates being given control of all assets in the pursuit of creating a command economy?

Please be specific.

 

[werepossum]

Can you show us where in the Democratic Party's platform or in what statements or actions by its elected officials that cause you to believe it advocates being given control of all assets in the pursuit of creating a command economy?

Please be specific.

Even the Democrats aren't stupid enough to put that in their platform. However, the steady march in increasing government's control over every facet of our society is pretty darned hard to miss, and that is certainly led by the Democrats.

 

[blackangst1]

Can you show us where in the Democratic Party's platform or in what statements or actions by its elected officials that cause you to believe it advocates being given control of all assets in the pursuit of creating a command economy?

Please be specific.

Can you show us where in the Republican Party's platform or in what statements or actions by it's elected officials that cause those on the left (you maybe?) to believe they advocate stripping the middle class of its wealth and distributing it to the top of the private sector in the pursuit of protecting the wealthy? It seems to be a common assertion here.

Please be specific.

 

[Jhhnn]

Sadly, No Child Left Behind didn't work and reading comprehension still suffers. LOL


That's a lot of words to say "I want your money". Perhaps you can back that up with examples of societies creating wealth through government. Those societies with the most government control - i.e. the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, Red China before they embraced capitalism - should logically be the wealthiest if your paradigm has validity, since they best prevent people from "allocating funds to serve their own purposes and nobody else's". Instead we see a pattern of such nations in continual decline except where they can parasitically drain the assets from a capitalist nation, whether by conquest or by serving as a low wage vacation spot. Either way, too much government is a sure path to poverty. For your examples, government did not create the wealth you attribute. Instead, government confiscated the wealth created by the private sector and converted it (albeit with a lot of loss) into those forms of wealth. At its best, such conversion can help the private sector create even more wealth, but to confuse this with true wealth production leads inevitably to the Communist death spiral. We saw in the Great Depression that even heretofore unimaginable levels of government borrowing and spending can at best prop up today's economy at the expense of tomorrow's, as every time government spending was reduced, the economy dropped to match. We simply cannot tax and spend or borrow and spend our way to prosperity.

Custodian banks are not merely big banks, they serve a very different function in society. I'm not at all surprised to see such an institution as BNY Mellon charge for idle deposits as it makes its money through fees rather than by loaning money.

Straight to denial by false attribution & innuendo. Does that mean Eisenhower was a Commie when he proposed the interstate highway system? That TR was the same when he proposed national forests, parks & monuments?

Very well said. Our problem in a nutshell is that we consume far more than we produce. Unfortunately we have one party that thinks feels that if it is given control of all assets (by being given the power to decide what assets are "excess" and seize them) that they can create the world's first successful top-down command economy, and another party that thinks feels that if it can simply reduce government's stranglehold of taxes and regulations, rich people will fix our economy. Neither party is willing to address our true problem, mainly because we as voters would not reward them for doing so.

More lame attributions about Dems being Commies, intent on forming the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It's not os much that we consume more than we produce, it's just that we don't distribute the rewards of Capitalism nearly as well as we could. We exist in a mixed economy, with both capitalist & socialist elements, a balancing act of sorts where we try to get the best of both for the nation as a whole. We just haven't done a very good job of it over the last 30 years of Reaganomics, and it's starting to show. Nobody wants or advocates the "command economy" you rave against, making it a rather thin strawman at best.

You're sailing the uncharted seas of wingnutlandia w/o a compass, huh? Actually, it looks like you've run aground on some glaring false assumptions, the shoals of broken ideology. Maybe a rising tide will appear to lift your boat, huh?

 

[Jhhnn]

Even the Democrats aren't stupid enough to put that in their platform. However, the steady march in increasing government's control over every facet of our society is pretty darned hard to miss, and that is certainly led by the Democrats.

Yeh, it was Dems who rammed home the patriot act & refuse to modify it, who engaged in widespread illegal snooping, engaged in dubious military detention of terror suspects, founded the prison at Gitmo, rendered a Canadian citizen from a customs area for torture in Syria... Created the TSA and the Department of HHHHHHomeland Security...

Lay off the pipe, OK?

 

[Jhhnn]

Can you show us where in the Republican Party's platform or in what statements or actions by it's elected officials that cause those on the left (you maybe?) to believe they advocate stripping the middle class of its wealth and distributing it to the top of the private sector in the pursuit of protecting the wealthy? It seems to be a common assertion here.

Please be specific.

Sigh. What you fail to recognize is that the broad middle class of first world societies of today is an anomaly in terms of human history. It's the result of the policies of the New Deal in this country and similar in those whose results are similar, from Japan to Europe. It was quite deliberate in intent & action. Strong financial regulations. Labor Unions. High taxes on high earners so that they couldn't run away with the whole show. High estate taxes to continuously re-level the playing field on a generational basis. Income redistribution from the top back down to the bottom through a variety of mechanisms. Trade barriers that also served as capital controls. That's the way it was in this country from 1945 to the rise of the Right, of Reaganomics and all that it means.

To the extent that we deviate from those policies, revert to the same policies that failed us in 1929 is the extent to which we'll revert to a society that simply doesn't have much of a middle class at all. That's the ancient regime of the oligarchy of wealth, with a relatively few very wealthy & very powerful people & masses of people who have very little in comparison- wage slaves continuously in debt to the financial elite. It's the company store writ large. It's like sharecropping in a non-agrarian setting.

Republican leaders don't put it in the terms you use, but their policies have that effect. It's the world the way they think it should be, make no mistake about that.

 

[fskimospy]

Can you show us where in the Republican Party's platform or in what statements or actions by it's elected officials that cause those on the left (you maybe?) to believe they advocate stripping the middle class of its wealth and distributing it to the top of the private sector in the pursuit of protecting the wealthy? It seems to be a common assertion here.

Please be specific.

Can you show where I've made such an assertion?

Please be specific.

 

[fskimospy]

Even the Democrats aren't stupid enough to put that in their platform. However, the steady march in increasing government's control over every facet of our society is pretty darned hard to miss, and that is certainly led by the Democrats.

I'll take that as a no then.

 

[werepossum]

Straight to denial by false attribution & innuendo. Does that mean Eisenhower was a Commie when he proposed the interstate highway system? That TR was the same when he proposed national forests, parks & monuments?



More lame attributions about Dems being Commies, intent on forming the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It's not os much that we consume more than we produce, it's just that we don't distribute the rewards of Capitalism nearly as well as we could. We exist in a mixed economy, with both capitalist & socialist elements, a balancing act of sorts where we try to get the best of both for the nation as a whole. We just haven't done a very good job of it over the last 30 years of Reaganomics, and it's starting to show. Nobody wants or advocates the "command economy" you rave against, making it a rather thin strawman at best.

You're sailing the uncharted seas of wingnutlandia w/o a compass, huh? Actually, it looks like you've run aground on some glaring false assumptions, the shoals of broken ideology. Maybe a rising tide will appear to lift your boat, huh?

LOL You start out by mocking the link between the left and Marxism and finish by complaining that we "don't distribute the rewards of Capitalism nearly as well as we could." In a free capitalist nation, wealth is EARNED, not DISTRIBUTED. Only in a top-down, Marxist command economy is wealth distributed.

 

[sm625]

Not sure if serious???

If you want to blame someone, blame the people who elect the same two parties into office year after year.

I'm not sure how much of any of this is serious, vs how much is just paid crap designed to keep people fighting and pretending there is something different between these two corporate sponsored parties. There are books from 50 years ago explaining how this works in great detail. Even elected presidents refer to these works. But still people dont see it. Professor Carroll Quigley from Tragedy and Hope: "the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy."

 

[blackangst1]

Sigh. What you fail to recognize is that the broad middle class of first world societies of today is an anomaly in terms of human history. It's the result of the policies of the New Deal in this country and similar in those whose results are similar, from Japan to Europe. It was quite deliberate in intent & action. Strong financial regulations. Labor Unions. High taxes on high earners so that they couldn't run away with the whole show. High estate taxes to continuously re-level the playing field on a generational basis. Income redistribution from the top back down to the bottom through a variety of mechanisms. Trade barriers that also served as capital controls. That's the way it was in this country from 1945 to the rise of the Right, of Reaganomics and all that it means.

To the extent that we deviate from those policies, revert to the same policies that failed us in 1929 is the extent to which we'll revert to a society that simply doesn't have much of a middle class at all. That's the ancient regime of the oligarchy of wealth, with a relatively few very wealthy & very powerful people & masses of people who have very little in comparison- wage slaves continuously in debt to the financial elite. It's the company store writ large. It's like sharecropping in a non-agrarian setting.

Republican leaders don't put it in the terms you use, but their policies have that effect. It's the world the way they think it should be, make no mistake about that.

WHOOSH! Right over your head 😀

 

[werepossum]

I'll take that as a no then.

That is the whole point of the progressive movement, that denied a revolution you can still progressively implement the "benefits" of Marxism as long as you studiously avoid admitting you are doing so. Sometimes there's a misstep - as when Obama appointed an avowed Marxist as "green jobs czar" - but for the most part the progressives are fairly good at denying what they are doing.

 

[blackangst1]

Can you show where I've made such an assertion?

Please be specific.

Can you show where I said you did?

Please be specific.

(oh and nice attempt at dodging the question 😉 )

Your move.

 

[werepossum]

Sigh. What you fail to recognize is that the broad middle class of first world societies of today is an anomaly in terms of human history. It's the result of the policies of the New Deal in this country and similar in those whose results are similar, from Japan to Europe. It was quite deliberate in intent & action. Strong financial regulations. Labor Unions. High taxes on high earners so that they couldn't run away with the whole show. High estate taxes to continuously re-level the playing field on a generational basis. Income redistribution from the top back down to the bottom through a variety of mechanisms. Trade barriers that also served as capital controls. That's the way it was in this country from 1945 to the rise of the Right, of Reaganomics and all that it means.

To the extent that we deviate from those policies, revert to the same policies that failed us in 1929 is the extent to which we'll revert to a society that simply doesn't have much of a middle class at all. That's the ancient regime of the oligarchy of wealth, with a relatively few very wealthy & very powerful people & masses of people who have very little in comparison- wage slaves continuously in debt to the financial elite. It's the company store writ large. It's like sharecropping in a non-agrarian setting.

Republican leaders don't put it in the terms you use, but their policies have that effect. It's the world the way they think it should be, make no mistake about that.

Wow. You are simply breathtakingly wrong. Our broad middle class is a direct result of innovation, capitalism and trade. As humanity discovered better and more efficient forms of agriculture, fewer workers were needed to feed the population. Those excess workers were gradually freed to create other forms of wealth, principally through the rise of self-regulating towns in medieval Europe. When tied to a power leader/government only what he can imagine wanting gets workers, but under the towns anyone with a better idea could try it out. This loosening of the aristocracy's grip led to the first demonstration that all of us are smarter than some of us. The middle class has been steadily growing ever since, but at a markedly faster rate since the industrial revolution because again, workers became more productive, fewer workers were needed to produce the accustomed level of societal wealth, and the excess workers were freed to imagine and produce new methods of creating wealth.

The shrinking of the middle class is certainly a valid fear, but the same effect comes from too much government. Any time a relatively small group exercises too much control, innovation stagnates and wealth concentration increases even as overall societal wealth plateaus. Too powerful a government is far worse than most forms of power concentration because there are few brakes on government's power.