The Dow Jones Industrial Average

[dcarrigg]

Re: The Dow Jones Industrial Average

I said tax cuts for the middle class and below only. The taking away of most deductions will mean at a 35% rate the top 3 million earners will see no tax cut.As for raising the rate at the lower level from 10% to 12%, the standard deduction will be doubled which means these individuals will likely get a small tax cut overall.As for the estate tax most of the real rich are giving most away. I could see a limit of $20 million but no more. How would you avoid the forced sale of small businesses?The federal budget is way too high. We need real pension reform at the federal and state levels and raising the retirement age gradually to 70 for younger generations. Longevity is increasing and new technologies may allow us to see much more of our citizens reach 100 with a high quality of life well into the 90s. No pension system can pay for more than 25 years and remain solvent, especially overly generous federal and some state pensions. Many of these also have 401K type programs.

I'm not terribly excited to spend 7 years of my social security money on buying Chelsea and Ivanka their new Gulfstreams...

[Thailandnotes]

Re: The Dow Jones Industrial Average

I said tax cuts for the middle class and below only. The taking away of most deductions will mean at a 35% rate the top 3 million earners will see no tax cut.

As for raising the rate at the lower level from 10% to 12%, the standard deduction will be doubled which means these individuals will likely get a small tax cut overall.

As for the estate tax most of the real rich are giving most away. I could see a limit of $20 million but no more. How would you avoid the forced sale of small businesses?

The federal budget is way too high. We need real pension reform at the federal and state levels and raising the retirement age gradually to 70 for younger generations. Longevity is increasing and new technologies may allow us to see much more of our citizens reach 100 with a high quality of life well into the 90s. No pension system can pay for more than 25 years and remain solvent, especially overly generous federal and some state pensions. Many of these also have 401K type programs.

Less than 20 farms or small businesses paid estate taxes last year. The first 11 million of an estate is not taxed at all. .25 million households out of 120 million have assets over 10 million dollars. You have to be well within the 1% to be paying estates taxes. The life expectancy of the American male declined to 76.3 years, so with a retirement age of 70, he would expect 6 years of not working. From lawyers to manual laborers, government workers earn far less than their private sector counterparts. Pensions are what retain federal/state workers, and draw people into the military.

[DSpencer]

Re: The Dow Jones Industrial Average

I'm not terribly excited to spend 7 years of my social security money on buying Chelsea and Ivanka their new Gulfstreams...

Can you explain how that happens?

It is one thing if you think our tax system is not progressive enough, but I don't see how that equates to you paying for rich kids' toys simply because they didn't have the money taken away by the government.

In any case, arguing about the tax code is mostly fruitless. Nobody here understands even half of the tax code. Until the tax code is simplified, the average person will have no understanding of what tax loopholes exist. Rates only matter if you're subject to the tax in the first place.

[Southernguy]

Re: The Dow Jones Industrial Average

I find this work an interesting read, respect the original subject: high stock valuations and the perspective.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-1...rns-calm-storm

[dcarrigg]

Re: The Dow Jones Industrial Average

Can you explain how that happens?

Assuming my choices are to maintain the status quo, or jack up the social security age to 70 to pay for eliminating the estate tax, I'll take the status quo.I think maybe the crux of it is that you assume the natural state of things is some world in which government and taxes (and presumably death itself) don't exist as a baseline. I assume the status quo as a baseline for the social contract (the contract is simple, we allow the wealthy to have substantial private property, they help support civilization through progressive taxes). Any change from the status quo that robs from the middle class to give to the wealthy is a bad change in my book. Whether it means 'more or less government' is irrelevant to me and my family. The material damage we will feel if we lose benefits to fund tax cuts for billionaires, on the other hand, is quite real.

[vt]

Re: The Dow Jones Industrial Average

You "allow the wealthy to have private property"??? The so called wealthy already pay the great majority of taxes. At some point government taxation gets so high it chokes off growth which leads to economic disaster like we now are witnessing in Venezuela.

It appears the 39.4% tax level will be retained so there goes your billionaire tax cut. Reasonable tax cuts worked under Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush. They can heelp increase economic growth and get the middle class back to work.

The only solutions for social security and Medicare are raising taxes, cutting benefits, or raising the retirement age for the youngest generations. The first two are not possible.

I see no problem with raising the benefit age of those below 35 gradually over the next 20 years from 67 to 70 for full benefits. Longevity is improving rapidly a quality lifespan well into the 90's is looking potentially very possible. There is no other solution that can work with the increase in lifespans.

[Milton Kuo]

Re: The Dow Jones Industrial Average

The only solutions for social security and Medicare are raising taxes, cutting benefits, or raising the retirement age for the youngest generations. The first two are not possible.

How about this: Make the Social Security tax more progressive. Remove the cap altogether so that the extremely highly-paid people have to pay their 12.4% like almost everybody else (90+% of the population.) Also, get rid of the ridiculous carried interest giveaway to the FIRE economy so that those people have to pay earned income taxes (and FICA taxes) on those very large amounts of money.

I haven't dug into the actual numbers but that additional money could actually one day make the Social Security system truly solvent, assuming Congress doesn't go utterly bread and circuses and increases benefits payouts at a much higher rate than before or starts giving a lot more people who never put anything into the system benefits. Yes, I realize this is a wealth transfer but we already have that with Social Security where, currently, people at the high end of the cap are subsidizing people with lower wages. The original sin has already been committed so we might as well suck it up and fix it in a nice way. (The nasty way being to cut Social Security benefits and let people die.)

The ultra wealthy can whine all they want but when you make that much money, 12.4% additional, which practically every other working person pays, is not going to make a noticeable dent on their standards of living, their retirements, or the education of their children.

The incessant whining of taxes by some of the ultra wealthy is the same sickening behavior I see where executives who make millions of dollars per year insist on having a fully-funded pension program while the workers either don't get a pension, have their pensions underfunded, or get their pension funds stolen for being "overfunded." Really? Grossing $30MM a year or more and these guys might end up running out of savings in their retirement years if they don't get a pension?

[dcarrigg]

Re: The Dow Jones Industrial Average

You "allow the wealthy to have private property"??? The so called wealthy already pay the great majority of taxes.

Precisely, vt. Private property is not sacred.




My dearest friend owns a beautiful private island and a good chunk of New England coast-line. I don't know how many millions the homes and land under them are worth. Quite a few. What did he and his family do to 'earn' the exclusive right to enjoy this beautiful property and the several private beaches it comes with? Nothing. King Charles I of England granted it to his great great great great....great great grandpa along with a town charter and some exclusive fishing rights 400 years ago.




Now, we were born into a world where that deal had been made by dead men. And yet we, the living, are forced to never explore that part of God's green earth, on penalty of arrest and persecution, because a crusty old long dead king made a deal with a man back before the American revolution to give him and his decentness exclusive rights to it forever. The other 7 billion of us who were not party to that deal now must suffer the consequences. And for the 99% of us who aren't born with private property, it's a very, very bad deal we didn't sign up for. We were just born into it. The only thing forcing us to accept this bad contract is a handful of police. The only thing that helps the bad medicine go down is taxpayer-funded social welfare, social insurance, and infrastructure etc.


500 years ago, there was no private land and no public welfare. The welfare system was free land. You just went and found a spot nobody was farming and you could put up shelter and start farming it. You didn't need to go to the big government deed office and hire a big government surveyor and assessor to purchase a big government approved plot of land within a big government municipality that big government then gave you a real estate in, with which to exclude others, a right with big government enforced by making trespassing and loitering and other manners of existence on the earth criminal acts. Of course, this is all assuming that a big bank will give you a mortgage first. They get to be the real gatekeepers...


Just a bit over 150 years ago, human beings were private property in this country, if they were born the wrong color in the wrong state. Imagine being born a chattel slave. How would you feel about property rights then? Regardless, that was a terrible deal. Trash contract. So bad, in fact, that people it never would affect were happy to go martyr themselves to change it. And Yankee interlocutors like John Brown made their way from Massachusetts to Virginia via bloody Kansas. And thanks to their sacrifices, what once was private property now is not. John Brown's body lies a mouldering in its grave. But his Truth still marches marches on. Glory, glory Hallelujah!


When the English came to Ireland and claimed it their private property 800 years ago, or when they tried to extinct us by forcing us to pay outrageous rents and export the foods we ourselves grew and harvested and caught and slaughtered as they tried to genocide our people in the Great Hunger, did we just bow and respect rich men's property rights? Or did we take up arms, take that land back which was stolen from us, and renegotiate that social contract in blood? How many Algonquian peoples straight north up the east coast from your home to mine might feel similarly?


Louis XVI was the absolute and unquestioned supreme monarch of France. Until his head came off.


What's the point of this long rant...the one thing I want you to take away and focus on over all the rest?


The contract is negotiable. Always.


For 40 years not one penny of new GDP growth has trickled down to the bottom 80% of us. The top 20% have captured 100% of the economic growth of the past 2 generations. The top 1% have captured 80% of that. For everyone else, things either stayed pat or got worse.


And now you want to severely and brutally punish that bottom 80% by taking their retirement funds away in order to give a special tax cut to trust fund babies who did nothing to earn the over $11 million dollars they have to get to even begin to pay a dollar in taxes?


How poor can you force the bottom 80% to get? How brutally can you treat them? How far do you think you can really push them before they just void the contract and write a new one in blood? Think about America as it stands for a minute: You've got more people in the prison system than any country ever in the history of man. An additional 2 million + you stole voting rights away from in Florida alone because you can't let that state turn blue. You've got states like Louisiana with murder rates higher than Uganda and Niger. You've got 20% of Texas with no health insurance whatsoever, which is worse than Mexico or Chile. You've got 19 states where grown adults still beat children in public schools. You've got states where life expectancy is 10 years behind other states in every demographic category across the board. Mississippi got beat in education scores by Swaziland; Arkansa by Angola. And you want more pain and more punishment and deep cuts for the majority? To what end? To see if we can get children in Arkansas to be certifiably the least educated people on the planet? To see if we can make Texas a state with no healthcare? To see if we can incarcerate all of Louisiana?


Corporal punishment of children map


[image]https://imgur.com/l2Rx58J.png[/image]






Elementary test scores don’t look like they bear out the theory that the beatings are improving morale…


[image]https://imgur.com/YR3Kwg9.png[/image]





High school test scores compared with equivalent countries care of U Alabama’s geography dept.


[image]https://i.imgur.com/v8ugjBV.jpg[/image]




You're 700% more likely to die by a bullet in Louisiana than Massachusetts.


[image]https://imgur.com/VNVzzml.png[/image]





Which puts MA and NY about equal with France and Germany and Louisiana totally off the charts worldwide.


[image]https://imgur.com/TxsBnec.png[/image]




Speaking of totally off the charts, check out incarceration rates:


[image]https://imgur.com/7bRpPrd.png[/image]




Yet again, Louisiana’s leading the way in this field too…totally off the charts, where New England is “only as bad as” Russia and Brazil.


[image]https://imgur.com/s1mxMbr.png[/image]





What about life expectancy then? Surely US is good at that?


[image]https://imgur.com/NrMyx3L.png[/image]






Yet again, when we zoom in, Louisiana is as bad as Bolivia or Algeria.


[image]https://imgur.com/L88lSu5.png[/image]






Or to compare it in other terms, here’s Europe. Boston and NYC are keeping up with Switzerland…as good as anywhere in Europe if not better. Mississippi and Arkansas are more like Belarus or Azerbaijan.


[image]https://imgur.com/4XMYinr.png[/image]






But maybe it’s a sex/race thing, right? Nope. It’s across the board:


[image]https://imgur.com/CXCGJ6f.png[/image]






Compare it to the world again, and you can see it’s like the gap between UK and Ukraine.


[image]https://imgur.com/ZjyllGU.png[/image]





And what do you think the correlation between having no health insurance and life expectancy might be about?


[image]https://imgur.com/7e2Ugvh.png[/image]






Of course, it’s not always illness that gets you. Sometimes it’s murder...


[image]https://imgur.com/QagrWQr.png[/image]





Again, Louisiana’s in Russia’s range, New Hampshire’s more like Sweden’s.


[image]https://imgur.com/7dxSigb.png[image]






And there could be environmental factors. This might be an aside, but the environmental gaps are huge. For instance, Wyoming puts out 1,200% more carbon per person than Massachusetts


[image]https://imgur.com/3E9xOcb.png[/image]





Here’s a world comparison for you, Rhode Island is much more like Belgium than Wyoming, which is totally off the charts anywhere in the world:


[image]https://imgur.com/hDbojhE.png[/image]






And do you think it might have anything to do with policy like this?


[image]https://imgur.com/WSHSK6x.png[/image]




Anyways, enough with the maps, you get my point. It would be relatively trivial to dramatically improve the US on all sorts of measures of human development and quality of life. We know how to do it. We’re simply not doing it in certain places for two major reasons, 1) refusal to invest, and 2) failure to recognize the problems. Cutting taxes at the top drastically exacerbates item 1 here…


The richest 400 families today are worth a combined $2.7 trillion. 35 years ago they were worth a combined $147 billion. The average family at the top is 1,850% wealthier than they were 35 years ago. The median family? The median family is down -3%. Yet you want to take retirement funds away from the family that got a -3% deal in order to let the kids of a family who got a +1,850% deal inherit everything tax free? Why? Odds are very good you're not personally among them...


See, the thing is, you might assume the deal as it stands is fair. But I'm pretty sure if real GDP tripled over the last 40 years, and precisely $0 went to the bottom 80% of us, then the deal is crooked and screwed up to begin with. Taxing the bottom 80% more to give tax cuts to the top 0.1% is not going to rectify that. Only move us another step closer to banana republic status. You want to talk about Venezuela? You really think you get a Chavez without the mass privatization, corruption, punishment of the poor, and open opulence of the wealthy who could buy government you saw under El Gocho? You think you get a Castro without a Batista? It's action-reaction.


And to be honest, I'd much, much, much rather not have a dictatorship, no matter which political wing.


But now look where we are? You've been one of the biggest promoters of bipartisan consensus on here. But you're willing to throw it all away to let a single party railroad through the most regressive and brutal tax cut in US history. I mean, it was Thomas Jefferson himself gave us the estate tax as governor of Virginia to prevent the rise of what he called the "Pseudo Aristocrats," meaning people arriving at great wealth through birthright who weren't that smart and generally didn't deserve it. It was one of the very few things Jefferson and Adams could agree upon, and implemented federally on a trial basis in 1797. A founding principle of the United States set forth by our founding fathers nearly 240 years ago. And now it's set to be undone by the single president who is most reminiscent of the 'pseudo-aristocrat' in American history. Fitting, I suppose.


But it's as un-American as entailed real estate and noble titles. And make no mistake, those are the next things the right will be arguing for. Think of it, government could sell them off in exchange for special privileges.


$1 million buys you a lordship, which gives you the right to commuted sentences in criminal trials and to vote in ‘job creator’s primaries’ that choose candidates for election. $10 million makes you a baron, which gives you the right to donate unlimited amounts of money to politicians and to run for political office up to Mayor and House of Representatives. $100 million makes you a count, which sets you immune from all criminal persecution and lets you run for political office up to Governor. $1 billion makes you a Duke and gives you the right to run for Senate or President. $10 billion makes you a Prince and gives you total immunity from rule of law and the power to ignore any law or regulation you do not like. $100 billion makes you King and sidelines the entire Republic.


Why not? If we’re just going to let wealth grow exponentially without ever taxing estates, this is the outcome over time. It’s mathematically all but certain.


Anyways, I don’t know that I have all the answers. But I do have a lot of easy ones. Lift the wage base, like M. Kuo said in this thread. Take the extreme outlier states and inject money into them marshall plan style and get them back on track. This benefits mostly red states. But it needs to be done. There has been severe lack of local investment in solving some easy problems for a long time for myriad reasons. But it’s easy stuff to fix. For a brief change of pace we could try bringing the bottom up instead. I bet it will work. But nobody has tried in over 40 years.

[jk]

Re: The Dow Jones Industrial Average

great post, dcarrigg. i appreciate the work that went into it, and agree wholeheartedly. it all boils down to what kind of country you want to live in, and especially what kind of country do you want your children to live in.

[vt]

Re: The Dow Jones Industrial Average

Great info DC! I do feel you are forgetting what I've said in the past.

What tax cut for the rich are you talking about? The Republican house bill wants to keep the top rate at the same 39.4% it is now. Trump has said the rich will not get an income tax cut.

As for eliminating the estate tax, I never called for that. The 11 million it's at now is fair. Practically no one pays any now anyway. Only the one tenth of the top 1% pay now. What I don't see as fair is the reduce the amount that is exempt. There is a good reason for this. Since practically no one but government workers and a few corporate executives and Congress have pensions, the rest of us poor private workers have to save enough to produce income when we retire.

Let's examine government pensions for skilled, long term government employees. At the federal level $100,000 pensions are possible. How much would you and I have to invest at a safe 4% return to achieve $100K in income annually? The answer is $2,500,000 million. So your highly paid federal worker has the equivalent of $2.5 million in potential assets guaranteeing a lifetime $100K indexed to inflation income. Plus that government worker may have a 401K like TSP plan.

Your hard working middle class private worker with luck may be able to save $2.5 million to get the same income as the federal pension worker. Both may be able to pay off a house before they retire.

Why am I pointing this out? Because I'm seeing talk that even these low millions of saving are unfair to the poor. Many on the left have no idea how much hard work and saving ethic is takes to accumulate the equivalent of what a government pension worker gets. This money envy that ignores the compounding effect and a good saving ethic is dangerous to the nation.

Why demonize the rich? What most don't understand is that wealth flows both ways in America. There a quite a few increasing wealth and a good number losing their high position. Many of the most wealthy are pledging to give away almost all their wealth; this is a great trend that should be expanded.

The Chinese now feel it is good for their nation for more wealthy Chinese to be created. Don't you want to see more wealthy created here to pay the large amounts of taxes they do?

I am not calling for taking away money from retirees. I am pointing out that longevity is increasing and the current program won't be able to support retirees in about 20 years. There was a basic failure to create a real balanced stock and bond portfolio for the Social Security trust fund. Instead it's like a Ponzi scheme of pay as you go. Oh, but some say tax the rich more. Well the top 400 have the $2.7 trillion you point out. Hey lets just confiscate it! You will the able to run the federal government for all of 9 months!

We are spending many billions on education and we are behind many nations that spend far less. We have spent over a trillion on the war on poverty and seem to have just as much as before. I was part of the anti poverty program for a brief period, subsisting on a poverty wage and we did more for the poor than any program I've seen since.

You can tax and spend more and more but you are not going to help most of the poor until they develop better habits, make better health decisions, begin to value education more, and emulate working and middle class families that are successful.

One party? Yes the Republicans have many faults and I don't see them as a solution. However the Democrats are worse a they have no coherent plan. In shock liberals think the Democrats are saints. Well look at Chuckie Schumer preserving the carried interest 15% tax bracket for his hedge fund donor buddies. Or Pelosi, Boxer, and retiree Harry Reid with massive giveaways to the real estate lobby donors; and don't forget the sweetheart deals they got. And don't forget Democrat donors that have gotten special zoning deals in Democrat controlled cities. Republicans are just as bad with their donor buddies across the spectrum.

Do you remember that I have called on this forum to get ALL money out of politics. No donors allowed and all elections government financed with a small amount to campaign on the issues only. The end of negative campaigning.

Don't forget that I have called both parties corrupt and have called for them to be replaced.

You are not going to get out of the output gap by increasing taxes that have only given us diminishing returns. We need to streamline government, rebuild the infrastructure, end corruption, and let private ingenuity and entrepreneurship create millions in new jobs and much more sustainable tax revenue.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: The Dow Jones Industrial Average

Let's examine government pensions for skilled, long term government employees. At the federal level $100,000 pensions are possible. How much would you and I have to invest at a safe 4% return to achieve $100K in income annually? The answer is $2,500,000 million. So your highly paid federal worker has the equivalent of $2.5 million in potential assets guaranteeing a lifetime $100K indexed to inflation income. Plus that government worker may have a 401K like TSP plan.

I'd love to read a good long article or a short book about pensions. Many teachers contribute to retirement pensions, but never received a dime, because it takes so long to become “vested,” 10 years in many states. 25 – 40% of teachers do not contribute to social security and thus receive no SS benefits. The whole thing is messy...state by state, county by county.

No article I read demanding social security or medicare “reform” ever coughs up stuff like this...

“An average-earning male will receive $1.05 in Medicare Part A benefits for every dollar paid in Medicare taxes, and a high-wage earning male will only receive 77 cents for every dollar he paid in Medicare taxes. When assuming an earlier workforce starting age of 22, even an average-earning worker would have paid more taxes than expected benefits from Medicare Part A over a lifetime.

“For the cohort reaching age 65 in 2030, expected total benefits are roughly equal to taxes paid toward Medicare and Social Security.”

It's fine to mention public employees earning 6-figure state pensions, but it helps to keep it in context. 50 percent of former Virginia teachers don't collect anything. The average pension is about 20,000 a year.

PS: I was going to post a link to a relevant Chris Hedges interview, but if you go to Goolge.com and click on “news” and type in “Chris Hedges” you see 3 stories. On Saturday, there were pages of “Chris Hedges” stories. It seems he really is being blacklisted by Google. Wow!

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/201.../goog-o20.html

[Techdread]

Re: The Dow Jones Industrial Average

Brilliant Post, Can't see the United States fixing the problem though until your country hits a major crises.

Americans spend a higher percentage of GDP then any developed country yet does not have Universal coverage!



That should be an easy fix, but the American individualism always darkens the debate.

Why would anyone mention Venezuela as if a country that the USA is actively trying to destabilize is any comparison.

[dcarrigg]

Re: The Dow Jones Industrial Average

I'd love to read a good long article or a short book about pensions. Many teachers contribute to retirement pensions, but never received a dime, because it takes so long to become “vested,” 10 years in many states. 25 – 40% of teachers do not contribute to social security and thus receive no SS benefits. The whole thing is messy...state by state, county by county.

No article I read demanding social security or medicare “reform” ever coughs up stuff like this...

“An average-earning male will receive $1.05 in Medicare Part A benefits for every dollar paid in Medicare taxes, and a high-wage earning male will only receive 77 cents for every dollar he paid in Medicare taxes. When assuming an earlier workforce starting age of 22, even an average-earning worker would have paid more taxes than expected benefits from Medicare Part A over a lifetime.

“For the cohort reaching age 65 in 2030, expected total benefits are roughly equal to taxes paid toward Medicare and Social Security.”

It's fine to mention public employees earning 6-figure state pensions, but it helps to keep it in context. 50 percent of former Virginia teachers don't collect anything. The average pension is about 20,000 a year.

PS: I was going to post a link to a relevant Chris Hedges interview, but if you go to Goolge.com and click on “news” and type in “Chris Hedges” you see 3 stories. On Saturday, there were pages of “Chris Hedges” stories. It seems he really is being blacklisted by Google. Wow!

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/201.../goog-o20.html

Pensions are super-complicated. Many people who earn pensions in the public sector do not get social security. So it sounds like they're living fat on the land with $50k per year, until you realize that they lose the $25k per year they would have gotten in Social Security in exchange for it. There are lots of other tricks too. Like the fact pensions can be revoked at any time for no reason...they are the only contract that you can change ex post facto willy-nilly with no consequences regardless of the constitution. Like I said in a previous post, look at Rhode Island if you really hate pensions. It was a Democrat there working for Enron billionaire John Arnold who burned them to the ground. They ended it for everyone, made sure nobody would get one again, and slashed what those already retired get. People who paid in up to 10 years just lost all their investment and got a goose egg in return. Then they slashed corporate taxes to the lowest in the region and slashed the estate tax. They promised an economic miracle if it happened. Guess what? The miracle never came. It's still the worst-off state in New England. No big companies moved in. If anything, sapping all the old people's money away just hurt casino and restaurant and healthcare revenue, so hospitals are shutting down now. Meanwhile, the projected revenue gains from slashing everything never materialized. So they were left with a giant budget deficit. Know what they did? Fired a bunch of state workers when they already had the lowest number of state workers per capita in the union and screwed up so bad they can't even get basic checks out on time. When that didn't work, they cranked up excise taxes on cars (shifted the burden to the middle class) to the highest in the nation. They still have a giant gap. And it's going to get wider every year. But what about the state pension fund you ask? Surely that must be better capitalized now, right? Well, no. Every dollar they 'saved' they lost in the market and gave away to hedge funds in fees. Somehow they got a negative return from 2012 to 2016 when any blind monkey picking stocks could have doubled his money. There you have it. The "miracle" of slashing corporate and estate taxes and instituting a flat income tax and taking all the pensions away...for what it is...can be seen first hand. Taxachusetts meanwhile didn't do any of that right over the border and is doing great in comparison...

[dcarrigg]

Re: The Dow Jones Industrial Average

Why demonize the rich?

Pointing out the raw fact that the average wealthy family earns 1,850% more than 35 years ago, while the median American family has lost 3% since then is not demonizing the rich. It is pointing out a simple fact. Not one penny ever trickled down. In fact, a rising tide didn't lift all boats. It rocketed a couple boats a half-mile in the air and dumped 3 feet of water on deck in the rest. That's the equivalent analogy.

The rest of us have been so fundamentally screwed over it's unreal. Total wealth in this country tripled over that time. Middle class families didn't see a dime. All of it was 'captured' at the top.

Now we can bicker and go back and forth as to why. But in the end of the day it is undeniable. The wealthy of 1977 were nowhere near as wealthy as today. The middle class of 1977 had more access to secure jobs requiring far less investment in education than today. All we got in exchange was this stinking iPhone. It has been a terrible deal.

And along the way we've tried it. We tried the Reagan tax cuts and de-regulation. We tried the Clinton de-regulation and welfare slashing. We tried the Bush tax cuts and deregulation. We even tried the Obama tax cuts--despite the fact people fail to recognize that they exist. It never seems to trickle down.

I mean, you can't doubt that the wealthy have "won" big time in this contract agreement, right? We get our wages and benefits slashed and our jobs offshored, they get 20 times more money and 40 years of tax cuts. Doesn't quite seem like a reasonable deal to me.

Yet if I ever say, "Why not change it around a bit and try a bottom-up approach and see if we can't get it so that the middle class earns something rather than nothing...or better yet, so that the middle class gets the same percentage raise as the wealthy or maybe even more!" Then people accuse me of demonizing the rich.

Notice I'm not saying the middle class should get even the same raise they do. Just the same percentage raise. I mean, they got a $1,850% raise. Everyone else lost 3%. The economy tripled. That's like having a company that tripled its revenues and profits and deciding on bumping the $5 million CEO to $90 million, while taking all the $50,000 workers under him and cutting them to $48,500. Why does it have to be that mean and brutal and cruel?

Why not angle for a better deal? An even deal would be everyone sharing that 300%. Mr. $5 million goes to $15 million. Mr. $50,000 goes to $150,000. But that didn't happen. And that will never happen without getting money out of politics and changing the tax laws drastically. But what if the split changed just a little bit. Say Mr. $5 million gets $50 million, and Mr. $50,000 goes to $75,000. Well, at least then the little people on the ground would see forward progress year over year and their lives would actually improve. And the CEO still gets a 1,000% pay raise if not an 1,850% one.

But proposing we angle for a deal like that--one where the rich still win big time and the rest of us still lose big time--makes me out to be some radical communist demonizing the rich in your eyes, doesn't it?

I mean, I can count dozens of tax cuts for the rich in my lifetime and not a single tax increase on them (one top rate sunset would be the only argument). Don't you think at some point the pendulum has to swing the other way, at least a little bit?

I say at least it's worth trying. Nothing else has worked for 40 years. And the idea that if we just gulp down a little more of the same old Thatcher/Reagan medicine everything will be great grows less and less convincing with each passing day. Why not give a bottom-up approach a shot for a change when we know trickle-down's not working?

[vt]

Re: The Dow Jones Industrial Average

DC, after the savings and loan crisis over 1,000 were convicted.

After the 2008 crash one loan person went to prison. Why not many more?

Why were the banksters bailed out? The money was supposed to go to infrastructure to provide middle class jobs. The infrastructure is continuing to collapse around us.

If we don't replace these two corrupt parties and their radical wings conditions will get worse. There is not public service anymore, just feeding off the public trough by the corrupt plotiticians (yes plot) and their donors.