Harry Guerrilla
DP Veteran
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- Dec 18, 2008
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- Libertarian
Your data was already refuted by Lawrence Katz, economics professor at Harvard. (See above)
A libertarian economist???
"A conservative vote for Sen. McCain is a wasted vote. It is wasted because even if he is elected, he does not stand for conservative values and will not promote conservative values. Government will grow, spending will rise, and liberty will diminish.
But it looks increasingly likely that he won’t be elected, and no one will care about his vote totals if he loses. In contrast, a vote for Bob Barr and the Libertarian Party will be noticed and will have a lasting, positive impact. A vote for Bob Barr and the Libertarian Party will be a vote for liberty and for America’s future."
CARPE DIEM: Libertarian Candidate Bob Barr Makes His Case
Where do you find these people?
this is known as the "ad hominem" fallacy; used when the debater is either unwilling or unable to refute the material presented. just sayin.
You must have a good wife.It is definitely not irrelevant. Debt is the single most reliable destroyer of individual wealth and vacuum of income. Fully half of Americans say they couldn't scrape up $2,000 in cash in 30 days. I could write you a check today for five times that. Give me 36 hours and I could write you a check for twenty times that (without touching retirement or the kids education) with a few extra thousand left over, just in case. All of it on a "lower" income while raising a family - because I live debt free, and we save.
So what you did here was make up ****. Got it, I knew it was a bogus poll.for me, there is. if you assume an average COL, say midwest, i believe between 50 - 125k is middle class. why? 50 - 125 allows for the purchase of a home, a decent car (s), and the ability to feed your family well. it's irrelevant if you've put yourself in deep debt, your income should cover all the necessities plus maybe a vacation.
Just to point out this.
Incomes are earned per person, households change.
CARPE DIEM: Income PER EARNER Has Actually Risen For All Groups, And Rose Fastest For The Lowest Quintile
Lots of flaws in those charts:
1. Per capita is not typically used by economists to compare income growth because unlike median house household income's per-capita income comparisons are highly distorted by extremes in income on the high end.
2. The chart only includes lower income brackets.
3. The chart is intellectually dishonest because it starts at the beginning of an income boom - 1994, and ends just before a deep recession - 2007. The years from 1994 thru 2000 just happen to be the only years of real median income growth in the last 30 years.
4. It doesn't look to be inflation adjusted.
Both 1 And 2 include people making 30k, 40k, 50k.25k - 50k
25k - 75k
40k - 100k
50k - 100k
50k - 125k
500k +
I consider this poll so badly designed/conceived as to be meaningless.
The options all Overlap. So heavily overlap as to make the indistinguishable from one another.
Options 3, 4, 5,
40k - 100k
50k - 100k
50k - 125k
Are virtually the Same. All 3 include people making 50k, 60k, 70k, 80k, 90k, 100k!
Much Better/Meaningful would have been.
25k-50k
50k-75k
75k-100k
100k-150k
150k-250k
You must have a good wife.
Shows how out of touch you are with how bad it has been for the majority of the country
the redistribution of wealth over the last 30 years
combined with consumer costs inflated beyond income gains resulted in less savings and more debt.
As the facts showed "the income of the median American family, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than in 1998."
You are indeed expressing the conservative perspective, that the middle class needs to learn to live on less
to enable the rich to get richer
American society is bifurcating, squeezing the middle class out of existence.
The ranks of the poor and low-income earners are growing and the rich are doing just fine – and no one is talking about it, much less doing anything about it."
Because you didn't read it, doesn't mean the logical lines of causality were not provided.
The CEOs and high school teachers who got roughly the same number of years of formal education haven't exactly had the same growth in income over the past 30 years.
So we've got skill bias and technological change, which is shifting demand towards highly educated workers.
We've got growing international trade with increased imports of labor-intensive products further reducing demand for less educated workers.
We have immigration, possibly similar in its effect to trade
I am sure this plays a small part, but there is no evidence to back up the claim made above.
Additionally, it is the GOP that has been opposed to family planning and abortion rights.
Yeah its kind of obvious that you didn't look at the Pew study:
"The study focused on people who were middle-class teenagers in 1979 and who were between 39 and 44 years old in 2004 and 2006. It defines people as middle-class if they fall between the 30th and 70th percentiles in income distribution, which for a family of four is between $32,900 and $64,000 a year in 2010 dollars.
Let's see, the richest 20% own 85% of the wealth now, what do you claim the ration was 30 years ago?
well, I'm a federal employee, so that is a possibility that I shouldn't discount. When you're a government worker, economic reality rarely bothers you.
has been overwhelmingly from the wealthy to the poor.
this is incorrect. I've lived debt free for years now.................
.at the tail end of a deep recession, yes; however, that's only one factor - compensation is not lower, but higher. Compensation, you see, tends to be taxed less than income, which gives employers and employees an incentive to prefer advances in compensation over advances in pay over time
the savings rate for a while there went to negative. you are absolutely correct that the middle class (America as a whole) needs to learn to consume less and save more. If I can save 10% while raising a family on $2,500 a month; I'm pretty sure most others can as well.
to enable us all to get richer. living debt free and saving and investing your money is the simple-stupid-no-kidding way to wealth that anyone can follow.
not really. to the extent we are bifurcating it is largely to a permanent underclass who fail to form productive two-parent families, and successful society made up of those who do.
perhaps you can explain to me how my proposal to alter Social Security in order to give low-income workers financial independence upon retirement was met with universal rejection by the left? it seems that everyone is talking about those who are suffering - but whereas liberals want to ease their poverty, conservatives want to get them out of poverty
actually I did read it. It looked like the kind of thing a particularly bright liberal would write... for his college newspaper.
that is correct. this is due not a little to the fact that whereas corporate leadership is a brutal world of competition marked by high pay for performers, teaching has been a unionized protected workforce which has rejected higher pay for performance.
in particular fields. It is worth noting that even in our highly credentialed age and even with 9% "official" unemployment, we are still suffering a shortage of Science and Technology workers.
and yet we continue to educate our own workers poorly.
I am more than willing to acknowledge that massive illegal immigration has severely harmed our lowest-income low-skilled workers.
and you say I don't read your sources? that information came from the US Census.
well it is true that we don't think killing children is a good option. that's why instead we support family-friendly tax code alterations, and teaching people not to hump like rabbits until you are married.
Did you read the article you cited?
Downward mobility is most common among middle-class people who are divorced or separated from their spouses, did not attend college, scored poorly on standardized tests, or used hard drugs, the report says.
so tell me, how are the evil rich forcing people to divorce or use heroin?
oh look, it continues on:
The report found that being married helps people avoid the worst economic outcomes. Women who are divorced, widowed or separated are much more likely to fall down the economic ladder than their married counterparts. For men, the differences are not as dramatic, although married men are more likely than single men to retain their middle- class status as adults...
you evidently also only read the article rather than the actual study. May I suggest, for example, that you take a look at Page 9.
Among the factors deemed most likely to cause someone to fall from the middle class (combining the scores for men and women), according to this study:
1. Divorce.
2. Never got Married.
3. Has used Crack.
4. High School or Less Education (v college grad).
5. High School or Less Education (v some college).
well huh. would you look at that. somehow "mugged by a guy wearing a Brooks Brothers Suit" doesn't seem to have made it onto the list...
Most of that wealth is illiquid, meaning that it's not in cash form.
If they tried to sell those "things" for cash, they would get a fraction of the illiquid worth.
That definition has not changed in 30 years, what has changed is the number of examples of illiquid wealth (houses, cars, antiques, private company interests) owned by the most wealthy.
Are you saying these items of wealth are a burden rather than a blessing? We will have to see what we can do to relieve the wealthy of this terrible burden you speak of.
They, nor you, nor the government, could possibly do anything to "rid" them of it and retain their full value.
That's the thing, you don't understand any of the underlying principles about what wealth is and how illiquid assets don't translate directly to cash.
Make any attempt at a massive confiscation of these resources and they will be sold, causing an economic cataclysm, you've never seen before.
I understand wealth enough to know that we had much higher tax rates for the wealthy and we had no economic cataclysm. If fact, we had the strongest middle class in history! It seems to be you that does not understand that if too much wealth is concentrated at the top, a consumer economy cannot prosper. We had our first lesson on this in the Great Depression, and we are experiencing another lesson currently.
"Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it."
No one is talking about a massive confiscation of those resources. We are simply talking about reducing the "temporary" tax breaks enjoyed by rich, while the majority of our citizens, and the economy, suffer.
I understand wealth enough to know that we had much higher tax rates for the wealthy and we had no economic cataclysm. If fact, we had the strongest middle class in history! It seems to be you that does not understand that if too much wealth is concentrated at the top, a consumer economy cannot prosper. We had our first lesson on this in the Great Depression, and we are experiencing another lesson currently.
It obvious that you don't.
You're not going to reduce "the wealth concentrated at the top" by implementing different tax rates.
Did you miss those bouts of high inflation during the 70's?
Was that not hurtful to the middle and lower classes?
What made the wealthy have more wealth?
How did they get it?
Like the lesson that, scapegoating groups of people has turned out to be disastrously wrong?
You mean like the tax breaks in the 50's, 60's and 70's?
I hope you know that the tax rates in that by gone era were statutory tax rates and not effective tax rates.
The majority of citizens are not suffering.
You totally exaggerate nearly everything.
Nothing but red herring, after red herring from you.
LOL! You mean to tell me you are an employee of the federal government, and bitching about one of the most stable employers today, your own no less?
Let's see, the richest 20% own 85% of the wealth now, what do you claim the ration was 30 years ago?
I'm so happy for you, unfortunately for the conservatives, the majority of the country has been forced into higher debt through lowered income relative to inflation and taxes.
It already was in 2007. Are you talking about the compensations that are being taken away such as the teacher's compensation's for ****ty pay?
All the middle class has to do is to learn to lower our standard of living, right?
Where is this binge spending problem by the middle class that I missed?
I was sort of under the impression that manufactures were not producing because there is no demand.
Sounds to me like you are going to have a hard time selling that case to the middle class voters.
You see that "all" part is what ain't been happening over the last 30 years. Very key that "all" is!
Again, total BS, but a great campaign slogan for your side
Because it is a dip**** idea that even the GOP wouldn't dare suggest. Social Security doesn't have a financial problem, the general fund has a financial problem.
Actually, it looked like it was written by a Nobel prize winning economist that wrote it.
Right out of Fascism 101 that one is.
If you can't afford education it is of little benefit.
Agreed, there is a greater need for more affordable education. It should be a priority.
And so easily solvable, just crack down on the employer's of illegal immigrants.
It came from a misinterpretation of the Census data.
No, GOP submitted bills to cut family planning, and they wish to cut funding for the support of children after they are born.
Another good reason not to cut funding for family planning as the GOP has proposed.
You have no clue about the socio-economic reasons for the above list, do you? You see it simply as someone being too lazy to pull himself up by his bootstrap with his own little white hand, right?
While I agree with raising taxes and am against such a high concentration of wealth, let's not forget, during the 1940s and 1950s we had just spent HUGE amounts of money on defense.
Not sure how that is different than the last decade?
I couldn't care less as it is immaterial to the discussion at hand.
Who would consider $500K+ middle class?
Inflation in the 70's had nothing to do with the tax rates. Please try again.
30 years of tax policies and cutting regulations, and all favored the wealthy ~ better known as trickle down economics.
You mean that crap about the working class needs to stop being lazy and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
I hope you know the effective rates were still almost twice what they are today for the most wealthy.
That's probably why they are also not protesting across the country...........oh, scratch that, they are protesting across the country.
What am I exaggerating?
Seemingly, anything you cannot respond to is a red herring.
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