The Right Wingers Will Disagree With Nobel Winner Robert Shiller

This year’s winner of the Nobel prize for economics, Robert Shiller stated, " ‘The most important problem that we are facing today...is rising [income] inequality in the United States and elsewhere in the world.' " Other experts in economics echoed this.

But, the posts by the conservatives and neoconservatives on these message boards show they believe the complete opposite is true.

Reaganomics, and the many anti-worker and anti-consumer Republican economic polices it spawned, led to this income inequality in the U.S. Policies that provided many opportunities for the one percent to quadruple their wealth during the past thirty years, but caused middle and lower income Americans earnings stagnate or shrink.

Documented evidence of the past three decades proves the economic appraisals of Shiller and the others are correct, and also prove the misguided and misinformed claims of the right-wingers are wrong.

Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich spoke in support of Shiller, listed his solutions to reduce income inequality:
-Invest in education and job training
-Upgrade the nation's infrastructure
-Reform the entire tax system, including sales & payroll taxes, to make it more progressive
-Constrain Wall Street's gambling behavior
-Increase the minimum wage and earned income tax credit to help move people out of poverty

Of course, the right-wingers will loudly disagree.

This last manufactured crisis by the GOP and the Tea Partiers was a tool to further this nation’s income inequality. But the U.S. majority realized the federal shutdown and threat of government default was part of the ongoing efforts of the Congressional Republicans and T’baggers to further redistribute the meager holdings of the bottom 150 million Americans into the pockets of the top 400 Americans.

The situation in this country would greatly improve if most conservatives and neoconservatives would see the truth, they are part of the bottom 150 million, not the top 400.

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/dail...y-economic-growth-robert-reich-142150436.html

 

Oh wow, haven't heard this one before.

-Invest in education and job training - so voucher schools? Or more money to the people already failing? How does that help in the long run?
-Upgrade the nation's infrastructure - How does that help in the short term? Obama has been running with a few extra hundreds of billions in the budget that really peaked with his ARA. What infrastructure have we gotten? Are you for building the Keystone XL?

-Reform the entire tax system, including sales & payroll taxes, to make it more progressive - progressive sales taxes? Are you kidding me? Sir, we nee a copy of your tax statement to calculate the sales tax on your big mac.

-Constrain Wall Street's gambling behavior - Meaningless, unless you mean stop the government's meddling in the economy, like what they did with the housing crisis. That was another disaster from the left that wipe out half of middle class wealth.

-Increase the minimum wage and earned income tax credit to help move people out of poverty - Only if you drop the other welfare programs will a larger EITC work. A negative income tax would be much better. This we can kind of agree on. The minimum wage idea is a loser though. It hurts poor kids more then any other group. Do you have a period before the minimum wage bump of the 1960s where black youth unemployment was higher then it has been consistently since? (other then during the depression) Why not pay everyone 100k a year? Why don't you hire everyone at the high wages you want, why do we nee to outlaw people working for less? Do you also lack a money tree? (Even a money tree isn't infinite)

 

Once again the conservatives prefer to believe rather than think. The OP economic principles are grounded in academic science and backed repeatedly by data and results from studies of economies all over the world. Since they aren't exclusively derived by unsubstantiated US trials that were never tried, therefore they must be invalid. So the US falls farther behind in quality of life, math, science, income inequality, class mobilization, health, and wonders why.

 

It takes a credible genius to reach many... who should be able to use good common sense and reach a similar conclusion.

Only certain GREEDY FOOLS on the Right have convinced themselves of something else.

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Yep. It's time to STOP listening to intransigent fools.

 

Too bad the article wasn't about what Shiller thought and was all about what Robert Reich thought with a Shiller quote at the top. Shiller is about finance, not taking from the rich and giving to the poor for no reason other than altering a data point.

 

Once the rich have it all, will you right-wingers be happy? That is the way things are heading as the middle income becomes lower income as wages decline.

Sadly, it is the conservatives and neoconservatives that have no true skills or marketable talents that believe the job creators are doing workers a favor by simply “giving” them a job. Unlike the mediocre and busy work done by conservative and neoconservative “place holders”, there are those of us employers seek out for our abilities because we are a profitable benefit to their business, not a liability like a non-thinking, right wing yes-man.

U.S. workers and U.S. companies that know neither can survive without the other are becoming an exception rather than the rule. With the Republicans’ assault on the public school system making our students unable to compete with those in other developed nations, their demand for further tax cuts for the rich, their calls to increase subsidies to enable more outsourcing, and their legislation bent on continuing to destroy opportunities for average Americans, productivity and prosperity declines.

This was the course set by Reagan and the Republicans, and there are mountains of evidence to prove this, if one is willing to see the truth. But the obtuse mind set of the right-wingers forces them to avoid the truth at all costs.

 

So rather than take exception to my assertion that Shiller is about finance and not a liberal agenda, the best you can counter with is a generic rant about right-wingers? Wages and incomes are declining because William "Come sit on Daddy's Lap, Monica" Clinton chose to enact better than three hundred trade agreements that sent jobs overseas on purpose without doing anything to replace said jobs. Even beyond that "Middle-Class" is a relative term. The "Middle-Class" is the Middle-Class whether they make $27K a year or $250K a year because it is a descriptor in relation to the whole.

 

You do understand this message board is about political opinions, don't you?

The article has agreement between Shiller and Reich, and is in the same vein as most reliable economists.

The fact that right-wingers believe the country will be a better place as the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer has been proven wrong. But the the right cannot accept the truth that thirty years of Reagan's grand economic experiment was a devastating failure.

Those rapidly increasing numbers of Americans who now must rely on government safety net programs are proof of this failure. But because the one percent is flourishing the conservatives and neoconservatives still tout the many nonexistent benefits Reaganomics provides average Americans.

 

Hardly. It is a generalized quote from Shiller that has all the insight of a prediction from Nostradamus and then a bunch of BS from a Clinton yes man whose boss is responsible for most of the ills being suffered by the middle class that you are trying to blame on the "right wing". While I suspect that you are so far to the left, everybody is to your right, you ignore some of the basic fundamentals of economics. The middle class bought houses they could not afford and cars they could not afford and maxed out their credit cards, and now they have to live in the problems they created for themselves. I don't share your sense that people are somehow entitled to that which they cannot afford. The economy is growing based on stock market performance only. If people spend $5 a day at Starbucks instead of buying a share of stock every couple weeks with that money, then they are going to continue to fall behind. Taking from the rich does not make people make better decisions--it just enables them to continue to make (*)(*)(*)(*) poor decisions..

 

Do you REALLY believe we should continue with Reaganomics?

 

Income inequality declined under Reagan. The only effective way to decrease income inequality is to increase the number of jobs created thereby, through the natural mechanism of supply and demand, increasing wages. The only thing that has consistently increased over the last 60 years is the size of government. At the same time so has income desparity.

 

Income inequality during the Reagan years only declined in the alternate universe populated by the right-wingers. Reliable evidence and statistics, which do not include those fabricated by FOX News or the Reagan myth writers, prove this. The number of middle income workers has been shrinking ever since King Ronny sold the country his snake oil.

The only way to increase the number of jobs is to stop the government subsides and tax cuts that reward U. S. companies for sending jobs overseas.

While the minimum wage openings now offered by the job creators impress the he11 out of the right-wingers, the majority of Americans realize this pi$$ poor pay cannot sustain the economy.

 

We have months with 300,000 new poor and desperate Americans signing up for Food Stamps, tens of thousands signing up for SSDI, the average length of time for a newly unemployed worker is at an all time high, and we have a fifty year high in the US poverty rate - YOU'RE DAMNED RIGHT WE HAVE INCOME INEQUALITY! So whose fault is this, do we blame Bush again?

None of Reich's ideas will work until 0bama gets his tax and regulatory boot off the neck of our economic engine.

 

Nah, let's stick with 0bamanomics, where we flat out blow $7 trillion in five years with not Jack diddly squat to show for it, except a level of political and corporate cronyism this country has never seen before.

 

I'm sure 0bama's new global warming EPA and ACA regs will have more US companies fleeing overseas.

How's 0bama's version of trickle down working? We pump $85 billion a month into the coffers of the Wall Street fat cats, and hope it trickles down to the masses, except the masses are getting poorer.

SNAP participation rate Oct 2009 37,672,818
SNAP participation rate Jul 2013 47,637,407

0bama's version of trickle down is EBT cards

 

In a word bluboy baloney.

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In a word bluboy baloney.

 

You right-wingers stupidly believe the income inequality, the rise in food stamp recipients, unemployment, and all of the other economic disasters of the last three decade are all recent occurrences. Heaven forbid you right-wingers open your myopic eyes and see the truth.

This country has been screwed up due to the corruption generated by the decades of influence Big Business and the super rich have had over our government. The heroes you worship for their massive wealth and power are the very causes of the poverty you righties condemn.

When you overcome your conservative and neoconservative naivete and face reality, you will realize your beloved Republicans and T’baggers are every bit as crooked as the Democrats you despise, perhaps more.

 

From the OP...

Yeah, I'll agree that income inequality between the U.S. and large portions of Africa is rather dramatic. But I'll be damned if I'll support opening immigration laws so the poor populace of Africa can move to the U.S. At least not unless they have a marketable skill, which would of course, probably relieve their inequality issues.

 

Anyone supported by Robert Reich is probably wrong.

 

A typically ignorant right wing response. Totally expected.

 

Amen to that!!

 

So yes we should continue to vote for the party that wishes to increase the size of an ever more corrupt government. The more the government tries to micromanage the economy the more corrupt it will become. And the bigger govenment is the more micromanaging it will try to do. The problem isn't corporations that will cheerfully pay whatever protection money they have to to stay in business, the problem is the politicians demanding the protection money.

 

Meh Shiller still fails to understand that the problem is capitalism itself

 

Dude, it's Robert Reich. Lying is just an everyday thing for him.

 

I hear you ... They gave President Obama the Peace Prize too didn't they?
Why don't they just say ... "Vote Progressive Liberal Democrat and we will be more likely to give you a Nobel Prize for Stupidity" ... Rehashed Liberalism that hasn't solve anything?

They gave Al Gore the Nobel Prize as well ... I mean get a clue.