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 Originally Posted by BananaStand
Totally disagree. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/unit...tes/gdp-growth
Agreed. But they've been doing poorly because the producers are doing poorly. Fewer jobs, lower wages, and more under-employment are the results of a lack of capital investment.
So why do you support measures that would cause wealth to consolidate....like raising taxes?
Who told you that? Europe? Sounds like something they would say.
Agreed. Why do you think that is? What's causing millions of people to leave the workforce and sign up for entitlement programs?
That's exactly what happened!! Unemployment was over 10% when Reagan came in. When he left, it was under 5%. Take a look at the GDP growth chart I linked earlier. How'd those tax cuts work out?
Thats NOT a bad thing. Income inequality is fine, a good thing even, as long as you have income mobility. Those other "developed economies" that the paper refers to have low income mobility. We discussed this earlier when we were talking about Finland. Finland has much better income equality, but low income mobility. If you're bright and motivated, you prefer mobility to equality. If you're lazy and selfish, you prefer equality to mobility.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/...nequality.html
There were a couple more wars.
I give Reagan full credit for that. Economies don't turn on a dime. It was Ronnie's policies that fueled the "clinton boom years"
Disagree. Money is loaned for expansion and growth all the time, all over the world, in gov't and business. It has nothing to do with relative strength. If China is loaning us money, it's because they expect to be paid back. If they expect to be paid back, it's because they believe they are investing in a strong economy. If they don't think our economy is strong, and are loaning us money anyway, then that weakens China, not us.
I don't know how to Multi-Quote, I'd like to learn how.
#1 Producers are doing fine. Stock market is near all time high. Our wealthy haven't been this wealthy since the 1920's. Despite their drastic increase in wealth and income over the past 4 decades, there has been no correlated increase in wealth and income for the US worker. The idea has always been, when the wealthy get wealthier, everyone else is suppose to get wealthier. Instead it appears, that when the wealthy get wealthier, everyone gets poorer. This represents a fatal flaw in how Trickle Down economics has been implemented, it was never called "Consolidation Economics" it was always called "Trickle Down Economics". If the wealth never trickles down, then the whole economic theory is either a failure, or a lie.
At the same time our workers are hurting. 51% of US Workers, make $30,000 or less per year. 38% of US workers make $20,000 or less per year. This means over half of the US work force, is at, near, or below the poverty level. Not to mention we've had 4 decades, roughly, of stagnant wages for US workers.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/...rs-a-year.html
"You can find the report that the Social Security Administration just released right here. The following are some of the numbers that really stood out for me…
-38 percent of all American workers made less than $20,000 last year.
-51 percent of all American workers made less than $30,000 last year."
#2 Standard of living for the population as a whole, is often a way to measure how well off a country's population is. Afghanistan, has members of it's population with $multiple millions of dollars. It's still by and large considered an extremely poor country. I remember the Afghanistan Vice President being caught in an airport because he had $57 million in American money on him. Obviously money from US tax payers due to our war, and his government's corruption. Nothing we could do about it, he was Vice President of Afghanistan. His country is still considered extremely poor, even with a Vice President with $57 million in wealth in their midst.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank...d-for-decades/
#3 I argue that people are leaving the work force, because of 40 years of stagnant wages, and increased childcare costs. Stagnant wages are so bad, what's the point of working if you're still poverty stricken at the end of the day? Purchasing power of the US Median Household, has been roughly the same for the past 30 years. Trickle Economics dictates, that when the wealthy get "super wealthy" their wealth is supposed to improve the lives of the US Median Household. It hasn't worked though, their purchasing power today, is the same as 1987.
http://voxeu.org/article/long-term-d...ies-address-it
"This labour demand shock would result in firms paying lower wages to their workers, some of whom are unwilling to work at these wages and drop out of the labour force. CEA analysis finds that state-level labour force participation rates for prime-age men are associated with the absolute and relative levels of wages."
"What happened? Research by economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn at Cornell University finds that the United States’ lack of family friendly policies to support women in their prime childbearing and career years explains one-third of the decrease in women’s labor force participation. The U.S. political landscape contrasts with many European countries, which have enacted and expanded policies such as paid parental leave, childcare subsidies, and part-time work entitlements to encourage women’s employment."
Our country is economically unfriendly to the financial situation of expecting mothers. We do not provide them with paid maternal leave. Often times it is in the woman's best interest to not work at all, and cover her own childcare herself, than work and still not have enough money for childcare, or have very little money left over.
#4 Reagan, #'s of $'s wise, increased the national debt by 200% to do as well as he did. In 1981, the national debt was $900 billion. In 1989, it was $2.8 trillion. That would appear advocate for borrowing massive amounts of money, in order to jump start the economy. In some ways you could argue, he was a Keynesian in that sense. Unfortunately his political party, ever since he's left, has eternally put balancing the budget on the nation's back burner of priorities. We have had a very bad track record of balancing the budget between 1981-2017 (We've only balanced the budget 4x in the last 36 years) vs the nearly annual paying down of the debt between 1945-1981. Not to mention, Supply-Side Economics weren't even implemented between 1945-1981, and we had some of our greatest economic years in this country's history during that time period, vs the 1981-2017 years.
#5 SOME Income inequality is fine. Too much, is bad. If you want to be Middle Class and have a decent standard of living, you look to nations that have strong middle classes, not Plutocracy's like El Salvador.
"The picture that emerged was startling to those who still clung to the notion of America as a middle-class society, or who thought of rising inequality as mainly a tale of divergence between blue-collar workers and a fairly broad elite, like college-educated workers. Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez showed that the actual story of rising inequality since 1980 or so was dominated not by the modestly rising salaries of skilled workers but by gigantic gains at the very top — a doubling of inflation-adjusted income for the top 1 percent, a quadrupling for the top 0.1 percent, and so on. They also showed that these surging top incomes had more or less reversed earlier movements toward equality, that the concentration of income in the hands of a small minority was back to “Great Gatsby” levels."
To support the status quo, or even a more extreme version of the status quo such as Trump's tax cuts for the wealthy very well could exacerbate, is to be fundamentally and morally opposed to the idea that America should have a middle class at all. It would be in support of having a super 0.1% wealthy elite, and a continually more poverty stricken, bottom 90% of Americans or so, or to put that in numbers, 320,000 Americans will get continually wealthier, while 288,000,000 Americans continually get poorer and poorer.
#6 If you support Economic Mobility, instead of Equality, America is not the country look to, most of Western Europe is.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact...-dream-europe/
"The United States is "behind many countries in Europe in terms of the ability of every kid in America to get ahead."
"Families at all earning levels were growing together after World War II but have been growing apart since in the decades since, Krueger wrote. The country’s top earners have pulled a lot further ahead than the middle and lower class, he said, and the trend line suggests the future earnings of today’s children will be tied more and more to the income level of their parents.
"Not since the Roaring 20s has the share of income going to the very top reached such high levels," Krueger said, according to prepared remarks.
Krueger compared income inequality of 10 developed countries with the correlation between a parent’s income and their children’s (it’s more complicated than we described, check out the details in Krueger’s presentation or this Bloomberg infographic). The "Gatsby Curve" showed economic possibilities for children in European countries such as Finland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and France were much less connected to their parents’ income than in the United States and United Kingdom."
#7 "Disagree. Money is loaned for expansion and growth all the time, all over the world, in gov't and business. It has nothing to do with relative strength. If China is loaning us money, it's because they expect to be paid back. If they expect to be paid back, it's because they believe they are investing in a strong economy. If they don't think our economy is strong, and are loaning us money anyway, then that weakens China, not us."
And this is what I'm worried about with Trump's tax cuts. We've already gone from a Triple AAA credit rating, to Double AA. Trump has implied in the past that he's willing to default on the US Government's national debt. We've also had the Republican Congress threaten Obama in budgetary showdowns with defaults on the national debt as well. If Trump passes massive tax cuts, and if the Bond market gets the opinion, that the US Treasury no longer has any intention of honoring it's debt, the bond market's will freak out, and I can't imagine that can be good for the US Economy.
We saw this play out in Kansas over the past 6 years. They passed huge tax cuts, on the business owners, but have consistently ran up large debts every year since.
http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-...e91961917.html
"A major rating agency on Tuesday downgraded Kansas’ credit rating for the second time in two years because of the state’s budget problems.
S&P Global Ratings dropped its rating for Kansas to AA-, from AA, three months after putting the state on a negative credit watch. S&P also dropped the state’s credit rating in August 2014.
Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article91961917.html#storylink=cpy"
And the same economics, which has lead to the S&P downgrading Kansas's credit rating 2 times in 2 years, is the same economic plan that Trump has for the United States. And I don't think I'm out of line to be very concerned about this.
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