How Long Should the US Government Sustain an Economically Unsustainable Middle Class?

This is true. As a country develops, the middle class grows.

 

Envy???

I'm paying for it. How can I be jealous of someone I have to support with my tax dollars?

 

Is 10-14 bucks an hour the wages they are paying in Bangladesh these days?

No more $25 an hour widget counters.

A buddy of mine is a skilled welder and just joined the boilermaker's union and makes 14 bucks an hour. That is a perfectly acceptable wage for most of the country.

 

There's a certain amount of truth to this. "Social mobility" means the ability of people to move social classes. We generally think of it in terms of going up the ladder, but it also means going down the ladder.

However, the problem that the US is currently struggling with is that the rich people and corporations are hoovering up the money of the poor and middle classes. And the people who support the wide scale rape of the poor, working and middle classes, are the people who support lower taxes on the rich.

 

Why do you think these corporate titans and big bankers that use crony capitalism to unjustly transfer large amounts of wealth OUT of OUR economy and INTO THEIR HANDS, DESERVE SO MUCH MORE than ALL of US?

Right wing troll..

 

If government would get out of the way, the middle class would renew itself.

 

10 to 14 dollars an hour doesn't put you into the middle class. At $10 per hour, assuming a 40 hour work week and being paid for 52 weeks of work, brings before taxes (and you will have taxes, SS, Medicare, State and Local) you will make $20,800 for the year. At $14 you earn $29,000 for the year. Median income is about $50,000.

To give an example of what I am getting at, in 1972, when I began teaching, my salary was $7,240, on that I could make car payments, pay rent for a 2 bedroom apartment, pay insurance (auto and life), go to the movies with my non-employed wife once in a while. We could even save a little for a downpayment on a house. Today, to equal that standard of living, factoring in inflation, you would need an income of $38,306.88. Just for funsies I just checked the starting salary for teacher's in the school district I taught in back in 1972, it's $35,854. Interesting that adjusted for inflation, I made more back then as a starting teacher than they do today.

 

This is not about me? I said "how many times do you hear a political idiot or president utter the words 'lower-class'"

If your honest answer is never, then if we don't have a lower-class then we can't have a middle-class...

 

When we stop the entitlement spending of corporate forms of welfare for persons who are no where near the official poverty line and can afford entire departments to help them conform to rational choice theory.

In my opinion, we would need less public sector intervention in private sector markets, by merely solving for official poverty, at the rock bottom cost, of a form of minimum wage, that merely pays the least efficient to not provide labor input to the economy.

 

From my perspective, our priorities have more to do with that, than globalization has to do with that; we really have no need to engage in wars on abstractions while lowering taxes, other than that form of cognitive dissonance on the part of our elected representatives to government; since we could be embarking on infrastructure development and engender production runs as long as our current wars on abstractions.

 

I am the only one who finds SiliconMagician's indignation to be disingenuous, at best; how often has SiliconMagician complained about our exorbitantly expensive, War on Drugs, which does not provide for the general welfare, but merely denies and disparages individual liberty while functioning as a boondoggle and generational form of theft, for over thirty years.

 

wow... really?

 

the gov needs to force the hands of corps out of Pandora's box... better known as foreign outsourcing

corps are 'people', we have laws 'people' must follow, we need laws to keep these 'people' from hurting America

 

He's a rightwing troll (this is not a flame/insult; he admitting it outright and I can copy/paste the exact post) and besides, even if he weren't a troll, that's how rightwingers think and fundamentally, that's what causes rightwingers to BE rightwingers: a judgemental attitude.

That's the root of right-ism: social judgement. You can't use recreational drugs or have recreational sex out of marriage, you can't do anything fun that just might be a detriment to yourself and carries a slight risk, you can't refuse to pay for a violent aggressive military that "defends" us, you can't (or at least it's looked down on) reproduce or date someone of another race, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

They are willing to be taxed/regulated, as long as it goes towards violently destroying some civil right of others.

 

I'll ignore the asinine comments about taxation, which are irrelevent anyway, and go back to standard economics.

Folks, what we are interested in is prosperity - the best living standards for the maximum number of Americans. You can call it quality of life or any number of other things - Gross National Happiness, liveability, etc., but that is our ultimate objective - a less miserable human condition.

Now you can leave the room if you don't agree with this. We are not trying to create a theocracy. We are not engaged in some morality play where the virtuous get everything and the sinners go to hell. We are not trying to breed a race of supermen. We are not trying to take over the world. If you think any of that stuff you are not interested in democracy, you can go and study totalitarianism because each of those objectives involves creating misery for someone, somewhere. We are after a win/win situation here, not a win/lose outcome.

Now there are a number of things that we agree on that create this state of affairs:

- The Four Freedoms - freedom from want, a robust democratic debate, freedom of religion, etc. economists focus on freedom from want - which is what I want to discuss.

Freedom from want is about maximising the availability of resources to the entire population. Remember, this is not a morality play. Resources don't grow on trees, we either grow them or mine them and make them. It follows from that that, all other things being equal, the best state of affairs is reached when we are all productive little elves, working hard and smart to produce the best we can and as much as we can.

Now this is where the rubber meets the road - "Working hard and smart". We know a number fo things about how to do that:

- We know that free market capitalism is currently the best way to organise the allocation of resources for the highest efficiency thanks to price signals, etc.

- We know how to regulate free market capitalism to keep it free and steer it in the directions that we democratically decide we need to go.

- We know that some markets are "not free" (for example health care - you can't "shop around" during a heart attack) and we know how to manage these markets if we want to. We know about natural monopolies, etc.

But, coming back to the subject of the middle class, we know that, in pure economic terms, output is maximised when income is pretty evenly distributed across the population. Again, this is not a morality play, it's to do with the velocity of money. Simply put, your spending is my salary and vice versa. You don't spend, I don't have a job and pretty soon neither do you. Never mind about borrowing, deficits, etc. that is another subject.

Now if all the money is concentrated in the hands of a few people it doesn't get spent - by definition if I have Three million in the bank, then its staying there, my actual living expenses are the same as yours pretty much. I can only eat one meal at a time and drive one car. My savings of Three million, no matter how virtuous, are dead money.

To put that another way, if my Three million were doled out equally to Thirty families, there would be a heck of a lot more of economic activity - fields being planted, homes being built, etc. etc. Again, this is not a morality play, so spare me the talk about borrowing money and paying it back, etc.

It should now be obvious what happens when you don't have a middle class - you don't have anyone to buy what you produce because they have no disposable income. All you have instead are a bunch of very poor people who have to spend every dollar they have just to survive and a small bunch of rich cats with all the money and power.

To put that another way; I'd love to be "Lord Frodo" with three million in the bank and to be able to buy your beautiful young daughter for $2.50. I like that pre French Revolution scene in Mel Brookes "History of the World" - I'd like to be "Count De Monnai". However I know that abject poverty for most and a small rich ruling class is not the way to maximise economic production.

I suggest to you that there are plenty of people that like the idea of being "Lord Frodo" - intergenerational income inequality in America now tops Britain - you are watching a ruling class being formed. They have the money and the political power and they are bent on increasing both - that is why they try and sell you the economic rubbish that Silicon Magician has bought.

You need much higher taxation on the rich 1% and your corporations - not for any moral reason, but to speed up the velocity of money and get the country moving again by making sure that the poor and the middle class have disposable income to spend. Yes, I know you object, but I say again, this is not a morality play.

 

The honest answer isn't never, and as I said. The fact that different terms are used to describe the same phenomenon, does not mean that phenomenon does not exist. I think you can make a case that the terms are problematic, but your logic simply doesn't hold up to examination.

 

So have my wife and I, we both turned 40 this year and after some really rough patches we're not doing to bad. Not rich by any means, but we're comfortable.

And we feel that if we can find a way to help our fellow man to avoid the pitfalls of poverty, why shouldn't we?

You have this self serving philosophy that everyone should get kicked in the balls just because you did. I think just the opposite, that mankind should work towards something better than survival of the fittest. That's how animals think, and I personally believe we have evolved beyond the apes and should reflect that.

Grow up dude, life's to short to be that angry all the time.

 

I don't think Silicon knows what middle class really is.

 

My position is that 'middle-class' is nothing but a political term. The same politicians who pander to the so-called 'middle-class', won't ever mention the term 'lower-class'. If there is no 'lower-class' then there can't be a 'middle-class'.

How about the novel idea of no political labels? What is the need to label some people 'lower and middle and upper' classes other than BS politics?

You are never going to identify or solve any problems when guided by labeling.

Fact is, the economy requires all people to participate! And all types of people participate based on their skills, and interests, and other factors and these same people will be rewarded based on their level of participation in the economy.

When the government intervenes, or in this case the president, the debate turns to BS politics.

Make a list of five things that ALL Americans need in life, for example shelter, nutrition, transportation, education, and health care. Makes no difference which items are on 'your' list. Once you have this list, which BTW is void of labeling, then the government can decide what steps they might take to improve these American needs.

Until then, political pandering to the middle-class is meaningless except to the brainless sheep...

 

I agree...He seems to think only rich people should have freedom and that everyone else is to be (*)(*)(*)(*)ed for because they are laborers.

 

The US has never had a socialist revolution. The usual result is that the landowners get shot in order to clear the way for land reform. The owners of capital have it seized in order to clear the way for capital reform, etc.

 

No middle class has ever survived without government support. The government getting out of the way is the reason our middle class is eroding today.

 

I agree with geoism, but not socialism. Geoist-capitalism, or maybe just flat out geoism, is the best way to have an economy thrive.

 

If we allow the middle class to fail, America will fail as well.

 

If you agree with geoism, you agree with the basics of socialism. It's a fundamentally socialist perspective on taxation--that those who receive the benefits pay for them.