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This thread has been both educational and depressing. It seems that a lot of Dems and Repubs agree that it is the middle class that keeps the wealth flowing.
So why are we not kinder to our middle class? Our wages have not kept up with costs for the past 15 years.
I see no answer.
There are notable exceptions being the wealthy apologists on the right and the identity political hustlers on the left. They seem to have no use for the middle class.
As soon you see a person talk about how the wealthy support the economy by what they consume, you know you have a wealthy apologist. Yet they are the same people who would think printing money and passing it out is bad. Otherwise why not just print money and make more billionaires? They are the same people who speak of the value of the dollar which what they really mean is they want their low risk dollar monopoly maintained in Wall Street. If you can't point to a tangible product or service and define your role in society as buying luxuries to support the middle class, then you know you are dealing with a slug of privilege.
To the extent a wealthy person has a positive effect on society is how they earned it. I am not grateful to have a job with the exception of the income I derive form it. So I have no idea why they keep up this stupid argument that buying yachts benefits the middle class. I'd be happy to build a yacht for the one who cures cancer or invents a fusion reactor.
The other sort on the left is the identity politics which is just another privilege of government which creates a victim class. This superficially targets the white middle class and men in particular but does include Asians whose academic achievements tend no to be looked upon favorably for various reasons. What they are after is the middle class and upper middle class jobs. However the black middle class does not escape either. When they succeed they are supposed to identify with blacks and "share" their success. So the black middle class is as ruthlessly pursued by identity politics and often are hated as "sell outs" etc.
Both of these people benefit from one thing, government enforced privilege. They however would tell you the government is just defending their god given right.
The real issue is the middle class is really the producer class. Everyone wants a piece of what they produce.
Our government is like one big guild system for labor and small business and it operates and taxes itself while the new 1st and 2nd estates have been reconstituted as the money and land owner economy which has been untaxing itself increasingly . Making money from leasing land never went away. Someone always makes money from land and now it happens to be monopoly finance which already makes money renting money. They hide by calling themselves "capital" as if they are somehow associated with industry. They operate like a pawn shop and rarely if ever fund industry. The 3rd estate is right back where it started.
There is no good answer. The only real answer is wait it out. Over the next 15 - 20 years there will be another billion people added to the labor market and it will all be low-skilled labor for the most part. That's going to drive cost of living up and wages down.
Tomorrow the DNI will be releasing 'Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds' and it should open your eyes to what's occurring and the possible alternatives. I can tell you that there is no scenario where things get utopian like.
When I try to go to the DNI website my server won't let me.....oooh conspiracy. Can anyone else link to it, or is it just me? !!! (I'm using google chrome)
There is no good answer. The only real answer is wait it out. Over the next 15 - 20 years there will be another billion people added to the labor market and it will all be low-skilled labor for the most part. That's going to drive cost of living up and wages down.
Tomorrow the DNI will be releasing 'Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds' and it should open your eyes to what's occurring and the possible alternatives. I can tell you that there is no scenario where things get utopian like.
When I try to go to the DNI website my server won't let me.....oooh conspiracy. Can anyone else link to it, or is it just me? !!! (I'm using google chrome)
Nope, I can't link to it either. This morning I assumed the server was overloaded, but the page still won't load so it's time to consider conspiracy theories.
Nope, I can't link to it either. This morning I assumed the server was overloaded, but the page still won't load so it's time to consider conspiracy theories.
I've been trying to download the Global Trends 2030 document for 3 hours now. very frustrating.
Now I'm thinking so many users are downloading it all over the world that it is their servers. Which is also scary. The National Intelligence Council should not have servers that collapse like this.
I've been trying to download the Global Trends 2030 document for 3 hours now. very frustrating.
Now I'm thinking so many users are downloading it all over the world that it is their servers. Which is also scary. The National Intelligence Council should not have servers that collapse like this.
I discovered that if you wait long enough, it loads enough to your browser that you can start reading. (I had multiple windows open and switched to another window after waiting unsuccessfully for a couple minites for it to load - and went back to it later to find it on my screen. The file claims to be 20 MB and 160 pages; it looks like I had all the pages although it said I had downloaded only 2MB. It was downloading painfully slowly and I just bailed out because it looked like I would have to wait hours for the entire 20MB. I just skipped through it without really reading it.
I thought it was interesting that they expect increased inequality and class warfare.
I discovered that if you wait long enough, it loads enough to your browser that you can start reading. (I had multiple windows open and switched to another window after waiting unsuccessfully for a couple minites for it to load - and went back to it later to find it on my screen. The file claims to be 20 MB and 160 pages; it looks like I had all the pages although it said I had downloaded only 2MB. It was downloading painfully slowly and I just bailed out because it looked like I would have to wait hours for the entire 20MB. I just skipped through it without really reading it.
I thought it was interesting that they expect increased inequality and class warfare.
Yes it downloads painfully slowly and even if I stay on that page, it seems like on my computer the download times out or something, because it always stops at around a few MB. oh well.
I enjoyed Greenspan's ( Oz behind the curtain) remarks given he orchastrated the repeal of parts of Glass-Steagall that would have otherwise prevented or as least mitigated the melt down in 2008.
Wall Street owns the FRB and government, regardless of who is sitting in the oval or house majorities.
The partial repeal of Glass-Stagall did not cause the "mortgage meltdown." This is a myth.
The growth of government intervention over the last century was built on the back of a handful of myths. A generation ago, the dominant myth was that free markets had caused the Great Depression, a falsehood ultimately debunked by economists like Milton Friedman.
Today, the key myth is that financial deregulation caused the 2008 financial crisis. What deregulation? There aren’t many possibilities. Despite what we hear, regulation of the financial industry substantially increased over the last thirty years. Government spending on financial regulations, to take one measure, ballooned from $725 million in 1980 to $2.07 billion in 2007 (in 2000dollars). Anyone looking to blame deregulation for the crisis faces slim pickings.
By far, the single most cited example of this financial “deregulation” is the Gramm-Leach- Bliley Act (GLB), which partially repealed the Glass-Steagall Act thirteen years ago today. Regulatory evangelists including Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz and recent senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren, not to mention the Occupy Wall Street protesters, have named the overthrow of Glass-Steagall as public enemy
number one. [snip]
There is zero evidence this change unleashed the financial crisis. If you tally
the institutions that ran into severe problems in 2008-09, the list includes
Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, and Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac, none of which would have come under Glass-Steagall’s
restrictions. Even President Obama has recently acknowledged that “there is
not evidence that having Glass-Steagall in place would somehow change the dynamic.” [snip]
Warren ... confessed to New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin that Glass-Steagall would probably not have stopped the financial crisis, but that she was pushing to reinstate it because, in Sorkin’s words, “it is an easy issue for the public to understand and ‘you can build public attention behind.’”
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