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  1. #76
    Veteran DarrinS's Avatar
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    My wife is very successful. She actually makes more money than me
    No one is shocked

  2. #77
    Veteran Th'Pusher's Avatar
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    No one is shocked
    Birds of a feather...

  3. #78
    W4A1 143 43CK? Nbadan's Avatar
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    Darrin has a job?

  4. #79
    W4A1 143 43CK? Nbadan's Avatar
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    That doesn't make any sense. Obama and McCain were both s for the Paulson bailout, and were the only two choices thanks to our cons ution (since a strong third candidate would mean congress picks the president).
    Just because the average joe hasn't done his part to make sure that his representative is really working for his best interest doesn't mean the system is broken...you don't want fringe parties and fringe candidates like Sarah Palin, Paul, Kucininch or Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones in the white house...reform the parties we have....take your party back.....

  5. #80
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    We just faced our own catastrophic moment, the solution was to feed the rich not eat the rich. Embraced by both parties and the American people.

    I don't see any political solution until once again it all crashes down for the rich and the so called middle class.
    Yep.

  6. #81
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    "so called middle class."

    ... has already been severely reduced, household income essentially flat since St Ronnie and the Repugs came to power in 1980.



  7. #82
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    hence the scare quotes, hence "so-called." you're not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

  8. #83
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    hence the scare quotes, hence "so-called." you're not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
    "so called" means what FOR YOU in that context?

  9. #84
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    that the middle class ain't what it used to be. what does it mean for you?

  10. #85
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    crashing down for the "so called middle class" is stupid joined to "the rich".

    The middle class has long ago crashed down, and it responded by doing nothing but bending over.

  11. #86
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    that's what SnakeBoy said

  12. #87
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    Plutocracy without end: Why the 1 percent always defeats the middle class

    There are more of us than them. But income inequality keeps getting worse -- and there is sadly no end in sight



    What hit me that day was the possibility that my happy, postwar middle-class world was the exception, and that the plutocracy we were gradually becoming was the norm. Maybe what was happening to us was a colossal reversion to a pre-Rooseveltian mean, and all the trappings of ordinary life that had seemed so solid and so permanent when I was young—the vast suburbs and the anchorman’s reassuring baritone and the nice appliances that filled the houses of the working class—were aberrations made possible by an unusual balance of political forces maintained only by the enormous political efforts of its beneficiaries.

    How much fatter can the fat cats get before they hit some kind of natural limit? Before the invisible thumb of history presses down on the other side of the scale and restores balance?


    That we are very close to such a limit—that the contradictions inherent in the system will automatically be its undoing—is an idea much in the air of late. Not many still subscribe to Marx’s dialectical vision of history, in which inevitable worker immiseration would be followed, also inevitably, by a revolutionary explosion, but there are other inevitabilities that seem equally persuasive today. We hear much, for example, about how inequality contributed to the housing bubble and the financial crisis, how it has brought us an imbalanced economy that cannot survive.

    It is an attractive fantasy, this
    faith that some kind of built-in restraint will stop all this from going too far.

    But the cosmic cavalry never shows up. No deus ex machina will arrive to rescue the middle-class society, either. The economic system is always in some sort of crisis or another; somehow it always manages to survive.


    According to an important recent paper by the sociologists Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza, the orthodox poli-sci theory of economic downturn holds that voters “turn away from unregulated markets and demand more government in times of economic downturn and rising unemployment.”

    But in the downturn of the last few years, people reacted differently: “Rather than the recession stimulating new public demands for governent, Americans gravitated toward lower support for government responsibility for social and economic problems.”

    A second irony, worth noting in passing, is that the right-wing offensive against public pensions, which began as soon as the Republican wave landed, has been carried on under the banner of historical determinism, with everyone agreeing that the rich are going to get their way with the unions and that no alternative exists.

    The ugly fact that we must face is that this thing can go much farther still. Plutocracy shocks us every day with its viciousness, but that doesn’t mean God will strike it down. The middle-class model worked much better for about ninety-nine percent of the population, but that doesn’t make it some kind of dialectic inevitability. You can build a plutocratic model that will stumble along just fine, like it did in the nineteenth century.

    http://www.salon.com/2014/03/30/plut..._middle_class/

    Last edited by boutons_deux; 03-30-2014 at 01:04 PM.

  13. #88
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    Piketty's clear concern is that we're on the cusp of a reversion to the patrimonial, rentier capitalism of the 19th century:

    Among many things I learned reading Piketty’s book was how to understand the class dynamics of 19th century literature. The characters are always talking about their incomes, but never seem to be doing any work. Turns out that “in the novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac, the fact that land (like government bonds) yields roughly 5 percent of the amount of capital invested is so taken for granted that it often goes unmentioned. Contemporary readers were well aware that it took capital on the order of 1 million francs to produce an annual rent of 50,000 francs.”






    One reason that they could be so certain about these numbers is because inflation wasn’t really part of the picture. Monetary stability lasted from the 18th century through World War I, when massive government borrowing combined with massive physical destruction to upend economic affairs. That’s the reason, Piketty says, that novelists aren’t specific about money any more: He cites the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, whose novelist protagonist in Snow says “there is nothing more tiresome for a novelist than to speak about money or discuss last year’s prices and incomes.”





    Piketty’s fear is that this about to change.

    Le Père Goriot


    The Balzac novel that Piketty draws on most is the tale of an entrepreneur who makes a fortune in the lucrative pasta business in revolutionary France, before cashing out—”much in the manner of a twenty-first-century startup founder exercising his stock options”—to invest his wealth and give his daughters a substantial enough inheritance that they can marry well.






    Was this obsession with inherited wealth just a byproduct of writerly envy from from Balzac, who was perpetually in debt from failed business ventures? Not necessarily—Piketty’s data shows that inherited wealth was about 20% of national income in the France of that time. This created a nasty situation where it was impossible to work enough to match what one could earn with inheritance. In Le Père Goriot, this is made explicit through an ambitious young man, Rastignac, who comes to understand that no matter how long he works as a lawyer, he will never have the fortune he could gain by marrying a wealthy heiress.






    What does that mean in practice? A society where the main standard of success is earning 20, 50, or even 100 times the average annual income. Similar standards are found in the pages of Britain’s Jane Austen, but also in the US: In Henry James’s 1880 novel Washington Square, a key plot point revolves around an engagement broken off when the dowry is only 20 times the average income, rather than 60. “It was perfectly obvious,” Piketty writes, “that without a fortune it was impossible to live a dignified life.”
    http://qz.com/193098/everything-wron...he-aristocats/

  14. #89
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    "on the cusp of a reversion to the patrimonial, rentier capitalism of the 19th century"

    he's late. USA is already there, 100% rentier capitalism.

    Look at how the shadow banking sector created the housing bubble, then swept in when the prices crashed to buy up 100Ks homes to be RENTED.

    We don't own our MS software, it's rented.

    etc, etc, etc.

    Look at how TWC and other network operators BLOCKED states from allowing municipalities to build their own broadband networks, to force us to RENT access to Internet through them.




  15. #90
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    100%? you exaggerate. maximalist claims tend to be self-undermining.

  16. #91
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    100%. you exaggerate.
    effectively 100%, and getting worse.

  17. #92
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    well then it can't get much worse, can it?

  18. #93
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    “The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” and follow that statement with a call for “a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes ... increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.”

    In 1919, the great economist Irving Fisher — whose theory of “debt deflation,” by the way, is essential in understanding our current economic troubles — devoted his presidential address to the American Economic Association largely to warning against the effects of “an undemocratic distribution of wealth.” And he spoke favorably of proposals to limit inherited wealth through heavy taxation of estates.

    Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the economist Thomas Piketty points out that America, which introduced an income tax in 1913 and an inheritance tax in 1916, led the way in the rise of progressive taxation, that it was “far out in front” of Europe. Mr. Piketty goes so far as to say that “confiscatory taxation of excessive incomes” — that is, taxation whose goal was to reduce income and wealth disparities, rather than to raise money — was an “American invention.”

    America was in danger of turning into a society dominated by hereditary wealth — that the New World was at risk of turning into Old Europe. And they were forthright in arguing that public policy should seek to limit inequality for political as well as economic reasons, that great wealth posed a danger to democracy.

    the share of wealth held at the very top — the richest 0.1 percent of the population — has doubled since the 1980s, and is now as high as it was when Teddy Roosevelt and Irving Fisher issued their warnings.

    We don’t know how much of that wealth is inherited. But it’s interesting to look at the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans.

    By my rough count, about a third of the top 50 inherited large fortunes.

    Another third are 65 or older, so they will probably be leaving large fortunes to their heirs.

    We aren’t yet a society with a hereditary aristocracy of wealth, but, if nothing changes, we’ll become that kind of society over the next couple of decades.


    In short, the demonization of anyone who talks about the dangers of concentrated wealth is based on a misreading of both the past and the present.

    Such talk isn’t un-American; it’s very much in the American tradition. And it’s not at all irrelevant to the modern world. So who will be this generation’s Teddy Roosevelt?

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/op...tion.html?_r=1

    The US govt created the middle class and a broad, comfortable level of wealth, but the VRWC got organized in the 1970s and destroyed it all, while demonizing FDR and Teddy R R and all the did to help America prosper broadly.







  19. #94
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    you're repeating the foregoing. you obviously don't read through.

  20. #95
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    One reason the U.S. economy is still weak is that big American companies are "maximizing profits" instead of investing in their people and future projects.

    This behavior is contributing to record income inequality in the country and starving the primary engine of U.S. economic growth — the vast American middle class — of purchasing power. (See charts below).


    If average Americans don't get paid living wages, they can't spend much money buying products and services. And when average Americans can't buy products and services, companies that sell products and services can't grow. So the profit obsession of America's big companies is, ironically, hurting their ability to grow.


    One solution is for big companies to pay their people more — to share more of the vast wealth that they create with the people who create it.


    Business Insider, St. Louis Fed
    Profits as a percent of the economy.




    Big American companies have record profit margins, so they can certainly afford to do this.

    But, unfortunately, over the past three decades, what began as a healthy and necessary effort to make our companies more efficient has evolved into a warped consensus that the only purpose of a corporation is to "maximize earnings."


    This view is an insult to anyone who has ever dreamed of having a job or company that is about more than money. And it is a short-sighted and destructive view of capitalism, an economic system that sustains not just this country but most countries in the world.
    Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/compa...#ixzz2xYtp3WiL

  21. #96
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    "a warped consensus that the only purpose of a corporation is to "maximize earnings."

    This view is an insult to anyone who has ever dreamed of having a job or company that is about more than money. And it is a short-sighted and destructive view of capitalism, an economic system that sustains not just this country but most countries in the world."

    under-regulated, under-taxed capitalism/financialism IS destructive, and the capitalists don't give a .



  22. #97
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    7 Things You Need to Know About America’s Coming Inheritance Explosion

    But according to French economist Thomas Piketty, a leading expert on inequality, there is every reason to expect we’re going to see an explosion in inherited wealth rather soon in the industrialized world, and it’s certainly not going to be equal.

    In the U.S., most people will not see a windfall as the Baby Boomers retire, but the children of the rich will enjoy an enormous transfer of wealth. America may soon look a lot more like Downton Abbey than the Land of Opportunity. Here are seven things you need to know about the coming inheritance boom.

    According to Accenture’s research, once the Baby Boomer transfer gets going, we can expect 10 percent of America’s wealth to change hands every five years through inheritances, gifts and so on. The transfer will be highly unbalanced:

    Those households with less than $500,000 in net worth will transfer about $3 trillion to their heirs, while those with more than $500,000 will transfer $12 trillion.

    “Whenever the rate of return on capital is significantly and durably higher than the growth rate of the economy, it is all but inevitable that inheritance (of fortunes ac ulated in the past) predominates over saving (wealth ac ulated in the present).... Wealth originating in the past automatically grows more rapidly, even without labour, than wealth stemming from work, which can be saved.”

    http://www.alternet.org/economy/7-th...age=1#bookmark



  23. #98
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    8 Things Mainstream Media Doesn't Have the Courage to Tell You


    The following are all relevant, fact-based issues, the "hard news" stories that the media has a responsibility to report. But the business-oriented press generally avoids them.

    1. U.S. Wealth Up $34 Trillion Since Recession. 93% of You Got Almost None of It.

    That's an average of $100,000 for every American. But the people who already own most of the stocks took almost all of it. For them, the average gain was well over a million dollars -- tax-free as long as they don't cash it in. Details available here [3].

    2. Eight Rich Americans Made More Than 3.6 Million Minimum Wage Workers

    A recent report [4] stated that no full-time minimum wage worker in the U.S. can afford a one-bedroom or two-bedroom rental at fair market rent. There are 3.6 million [5] such workers, and their total (combined) 2013 earnings is less than the 2013 stock market gains of just eight Americans [6], all of whom take [7] more than their share from society: the four Waltons, the two Kochs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett.

    3. News Sources Speak for the 5%

    It would be refreshing to read an honest editorial: "We dearly value the 5 to 7 percent of our readers who make a lot of money and believe that their growing riches are helping everyone else."

    Instead, the business media seems unable to differentiate between the top 5 percent and the rest of society. The Wall Street Journal [8]exclaimed, "Middle-class Americans have more buying power than ever before," and then went on to sputter [9]: "What Recession?...The economy has bounced back from recession, unemployment has declined.."

    The Chicago Tribune [10] may be even further out of touch with its less privileged readers, asking them: "What's so terrible about the infusion of so much money into the presidential campaign?"

    4. TV News Dumbed Down for American Viewers

    A 2009 survey by the European Journal of Communication [11] compared the U.S. to Denmark, Finland, and the UK in the awareness and reporting of domestic vs. international news, and of 'hard' news (politics, public administration, the economy, science, technology) vs. 'soft' news (celebrities, human interest, sport and entertainment). The results:

    -- Americans [are] especially uninformed about international public affairs.

    -- American respondents also underperformed in relation to domestic-related hard news stories.

    -- American television reports much less international news than Finnish, Danish and British television;

    -- American television network newscasts also report much less hard news than Finnish and Danish television.

    Surprisingly, the report states that "our sample of American newspapers was more oriented towards hard news than their counterparts in the European countries." Too bad Americans are reading less newspapers.

    5. News Execs among White Male Boomers Who Owe Trillions to Society

    The hype about the "self-made man" is fantasy. In the early 1970s, we privileged white males were spirited out of college to waiting jobs in management and finance, technology was inventing new ways for us to make money, tax rates were about to tumble, and visions of bonuses and capital gains danced in our heads.

    While we were in school the Defense Department had been preparing the Internet for Microsoft and Apple, the National Science Foundation was funding the Digital Library Initiative [12] research that would be adopted as the Google model, and the National Ins ute of Health [13] was doing the early laboratory testing for companies like Merck and Pfizer. Government research labs and public universities trained thousands of chemists, physicists, chip designers, programmers, engineers, production line workers, market analysts, testers, troubleshooters, etc., etc.

    All we created on our own was a disdainful at ude, like that of Steve Jobs [14]: "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

    6. Funding Plummets for Schools and Pensions as Corporations Stop Paying Taxes

    Three [15] separate [16] studies [17] have shown that corporations pay less than half of their required state taxes, which are the main source of K-12 educational funding and a significant part of pension funding. Most recently, the report [17] "The Disappearing Corporate Tax Base" found that the percentage of corporate profits paid as state income taxes has dropped from 7 percent in 1980 to about 3 percent today.

    7. Companies Based in the U.S. Paying Most of their Taxes Overseas

    Citigroup [18] had 42% of its 2011-13 revenue in North America (almost all U.S.) and made $32 billion in profits, but received a U.S. current income tax benefit all three years.

    Pfizer [19] had 40% of its 2011-13 revenues and nearly half of its physical assets in the U.S., but declared almost $10 billion in U.S. losses to go along with nearly $50 billion in foreign profits.

    In 2013 Exxon [20] had about 43% of management [21], 36% of sales, 40% of long-lived assets, and 70-90% of its productive oil and gas wells in the U.S., yet only paid about 2 percent of its total income in U.S. income taxes, and most of that was something called a "theoretical" tax.

    8. Restaurant Servers Go Without Raise for 30 Years

    An evaluation by Mic e Chen [22] showed that the minimum wage for tipped workers has been approximately $2 an hour since the 1980s. She also notes that about 40 percent of these workers are people of color, and about two-thirds are women.



    http://www.alternet.org/media/8-thin...age=1#bookmark



  24. #99
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    The Richest Rich Are in a Class by Themselves


    The richest 0.1 percent of the American population has rebuilt its share of wealth back to where it was in the Roaring Twenties. And the richest 0.01 percent’s share has grown even more rapidly, quadrupling since the eve of the Reagan Revolution.

    The message for strivers is that if you want to be very, very rich, start out very rich.

    The threshold for being in the top 0.1 percent of tax filers in 2012 was wealth of about $20 million. To be in the top 0.01 percent—that’s the 1 Percent club’s 1 Percent club—required net worth of $100 million.



    http://www.businessweek.com/printer/...-by-themselves

  25. #100
    Veteran Th'Pusher's Avatar
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