No average income gain during Bush years

[Ted King]

Dakota wrote:
TK,it didn't take too long to make you run away from your own post. The message coming out loud and clear from your post is that the top whatever do not deserve what they have. Then you say you are one of them. When I ask you how much of your earnings last year you consider to be undeserving of you head for tall grass.

You are another self-hating rich who, incidentally, refuses to give up a cent of all that undeserved income.

Essentially all of the gains in total societal income that came about from productivity increases that happened in 1980's till today have gone to the top 10%. Do you really think that the increased productivity that led to increased income was brought into being exclusively by the efforts of the top 10% income earners and therefore they deserved to get all of the gains in wealth due to that increase in productivity?

[Mac1337]

Until you come up with a better system to decide who gets what share of the pie I stick with we have. You are not the first who wants to attempt this. Heck, wasn't "just" redistribution of wealth the primary mover behind Marx's writings? He too believed that workers, not owners, of factories deserved the fruits of their labor. What did they do other than sit behind desks and smoke cigars?At least he was bold enough to suggest a way to do this. Modern day liberals, like you, know what they want but are to meek to actually say it.

[swampy]

I found this article interesting

The federal government adopted the poverty guidelines in the 1960s and set them at roughly three times basic food costs. They now represent about five times food costs, Edelman said, but don’t factor in any direct way the costs of child care, commuting, energy, housing or health care. The poverty line, currently $22,050 for a family of four in the continental U.S., takes into account wages and welfare benefits paid in cash, but excludes housing vouchers, food stamps, child care subsidies and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

“We’re using a benchmark done in the sixties by one person who went to the grocery store,” said Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) “Things have changed dramatically since that….We’re still using a measure that came on the scene about the same time as Bob Dylan.”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27097.html

[Ted King]

Dakota wrote:
Until you come up with a better system to decide who gets what share of the pie I stick with we have. You are not the first who wants to attempt this. Heck, wasn't "just" redistribution of wealth the primary mover behind Marx's writings? He too believed that workers, not owners, of factories deserved the fruits of their labor. What did they do other than sit behind desks and smoke cigars?At least he was bold enough to suggest a way to do this. Modern day liberals, like you, know what they want but are to meek to actually say it.

You know, I've asked the same question four times and every time you have never even attempted to answer it. Maybe it's because you don't understand the question that you look for some convenient oversimplified counterpoint with which to erect a strawman that you say represents what I think.

There are zillions of alternatives between the way things are and the strawman Marxism as you present as though they are the only alternatives. I would prefer it if shareholders in corporations had the will and the clout to reign in the good ol' boy network of CEOs and Boards of Directors but the system doesn't seem to have a self-correcting mechanism - a larger and larger percentage of the revenues of corporations are going to a small number of people at the top. So the only practical mechanism left is to have a real graduated income tax. We had much more of an effective graduated tax schedule in the fifties and sixties and the American economy did better than any time since. I don't mean that to imply that an effective graduated tax schedule was the only factor that produced the strong economic growth during that time, but it didn't seem to have had a detrimental affect even though the wealthiest Americans during that time had much less percent of the total wealth of the country. In fact, almost every time taxes have been raised on the wealthiest people in the last several decades, the economy has actually performed better - an empirical fact completely ignored by the ideologues who don't want to believe it because it doesn't fit with their fantasy Ayn Randish view of the world.

[$tevie]

Ted King wrote:
[quote=Dakota]
Until you come up with a better system to decide who gets what share of the pie I stick with we have. You are not the first who wants to attempt this. Heck, wasn't "just" redistribution of wealth the primary mover behind Marx's writings? He too believed that workers, not owners, of factories deserved the fruits of their labor. What did they do other than sit behind desks and smoke cigars?At least he was bold enough to suggest a way to do this. Modern day liberals, like you, know what they want but are to meek to actually say it.

You know, I've asked the same question four times and every time you have never even attempted to answer it. Maybe it's because you don't understand the question that you look for some convenient oversimplified counterpoint with which to erect a strawman that you say represents what I think.

There are zillions of alternatives between the way things are and the strawman Marxism as you present as though they are the only alternatives. I would prefer it if shareholders in corporations had the will and the clout to reign in the good ol' boy network of CEOs and Boards of Directors but the system doesn't seem to have a self-correcting mechanism - a larger and larger percentage of the revenues of corporations are going to a small number of people at the top. So the only practical mechanism left is to have a real graduated income tax. We had much more of an effective graduated tax schedule in the fifties and sixties and the American economy did better than any time since. I don't mean that to imply that an effective graduated tax schedule was the only factor that produced the strong economic growth during that time, but it didn't seem to have had a detrimental affect even though the wealthiest Americans during that time had much less percent of the total wealth of the country. In fact, almost every time taxes have been raised on the wealthiest people in the last several decades, the economy has actually performed better - an empirical fact completely ignored by the ideologues who don't want to believe it because it doesn't fit with their fantasy Ayn Randish view of the world.
Agreed.