By means of the Economist, from Sir Angus Deaton (Nobel-prize Economics): IF THE STATE GOT OUT OF THE DISTRIBUTION BUSINESS - Without governments, would countries have more inequality, or less? - excerpt: Read on to see the "facts" ...
And oftentimes government spending can end up leading to more inequality, as the lower middle class is taxed to give to an army of well-paid bureaucratic officials (and their generous job benefits than most non-government workers don't have). And of course a lot of government funds get funneled into private contractors, giving certain company executives millions on the public dime. The "services" a lot of these private contractors provide are quite silly. Just one example of the types of things public money can go to: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/cia-torture-contractors_n_6296758.html Obviously, whether government spending leads to more inequality or less depends on how exactly it is spent! Just because 1% of taxes you pay go to hand out bread crumbs to the poor doesn't mean it's all money well spent. That's a myth many people seem to have, that tax money is mostly redistribution from rich to poor. Arguing for more taxation isn't going to change anything if you don't address where all that money is actually going.
Tiresome rhetoric heard around the world from Extreme Rightists that want "no government". Except when their house is burning down. Or they've just been robbed. Just what are you complaining about? The US has one of the lowest "government expense as a percentage of GDP". See here: OECD Government Spending as a Percent of GDP.
Why are all those OECD countries progressives like comparing the U.S. to white, English-speaking or Western European? (the only exception being Japan) What about all the other countries in the world? That seems like selective cherry-picking, and I'm not sure if there's any country as diverse as the U.S. that has it better. In fact it will be interesting to see how all those countries in Western Europe compare when they become more like the U.S. in demographics.
Look, the OECD is considered the Rich-Countries' Club. So, at the very least, if all countries are Fruit, we know that some are Oranges and others are Peanuts. As regards Income Disparity, the US is a big juicy Orange that should be pressed by higher Upper-income Taxation ...
I'm sure that's how you see things. Wherever there is wealth, you want to take it. Well guess what? Eventually that wealth is going to run out, and then there won't be anymore freebies to grab. That's what several countries experienced that were run into the ground. The really sad part of all this is that only a fraction of it will ever trickle down into the hands of the poor. (i.e. just because you throw a dime to a beggar doesn't make you Robin Hood) I'm not confident at all that more government spending (even if we increased taxes 50% !) would lead to an end to poverty. Like I said, we need to address spending.
IT'S ALL ABOUT THE ONE-PERCENTERS Simplistic nonsense. Wherever there is Unfair Income Disparity, the nation deserves higher taxation to right the wrong. Definition of Income Disparity: Visually:
Ratio of rich and poor would be the same. All that would change is the mechanism by which people get rich.
That's a provocative perspective. I wonder how much bringing in millions of poor people from other parts of the world has affected the inequality rate. Who knows? It might not be increasing at all. We might have just transferred over some of the global level of inequality into our own country's level of inequality. It's hard to say with so many people moving around like that.
It was not the immigrants who perpetrated the SubPrime Mess that caused the Great Recession, which wiped out the saving of millions upon millions of Americans. Moreover, they were likely rather more victims of the Mess. Enough of the "migrant bating". You are beating upon a dead-horse ...
What's a "tribe" for you? Being undeveloped? I'd say that today the EU is a combination of 26 "tribes", each with a different language, a different culture, and different means of economic growth. But with a common goal of "keeping Europe together" in order to avoid the warring divisions of the past. "Tribe" in the economic sense does not necessarily mean aboriginals fighting one another over a downed animal's carcass in order to feed itself. There are different historical growth rates over the centuries in the EU - most of them very different country-to-country over time. Who (arriving from another planet) would think today that Spain and Portugal were actually "empires" that colonized parts of the New World? Perhaps, not many. But, they did exactly that ...
Well that's a question, isn't it? How much did the Subprime mess cause the Recession and how much might have been other factors. In fact there are a lot of factors at play floating around here. For example, it wasn't all fraud and bad financial practices that caused the Subprime mess, there were outer economic factors too. And "the Recession" likely wasn't the only thing that wiped out the savings of Americans. To say bank fraud caused the Subprime mess, which caused the Recession, which wiped out the savings of Americans, is giving far too simple of a picture I believe. For one thing that picture is completely linear, and seems to track all the blame of America's economic suffering back to unethical banking mortgage practices. I'm not sure if this is making sense to you. What I'm trying to say is there were very likely larger structural factors going on behind the scenes, leading to the problems, and contributing to the mess at each stage of the linear series of effects we just discussed. I'm not saying bank fraud didn't cause huge problems in the economy and help lead to the Recession, I'm saying that it's being used as a scapegoat to blame ALL the problems in the economy on. You understand? It's like a big distract from the primary causes. You can't understand how much A leads to B without taking a close look and understanding all the machinery in between. Even if there hadn't been any bank fraud at all, there still would have been a subprime problem (albeit much less), there still would have been a Recession. And even if there hadn't necessarily been a Recession, the living standards of America would have still gone down!!! You see, you can't blame all the unemployment and lowering of wages on "the Recession". Recessions come and go, but there are longer term trends in the economy underlying things. It's easy to get them all confused together. And then you try to get "inequality" confused into all of this. That's absurd. You might as well try to say bank executives stole money so that alone is the reason inequality is higher. You see how ridiculous that is? I don't subscribe to your understanding of causes. Just because there is some link between each of the factors you identify does not end up establishing a strong link between the original cause and the final result in your long series of links.
fact is the libcommie war on our schools families and religions rendered many Americans unfit to work. And, libcommie taxes unions regulations and budget deficits that shipped our jobs offshore made it impossible for many Americans to be equal.
The stats don't show that at all. They make their way through life just like the rest of Americans. I am, myself, the son of migrants. You're just hashing myopic personal opinion. Some do better than the native-born Americans:
Bollocks. Tired, simplistic and sarcastic. Keep it to yourself, there's no room for sarcasm in a debate forum ...
WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO US????? So be it. Right now, getting rich is dead easy for a select group of people who are high-income earners and low-tax payers. Let's try it and see what happens if Tax Levels are put back to where they were before JFK/LBJ first changed them. At the time, they were at 90% for upper-incomes. (See here.) And if they had remained there, we'd likely have had no SubPrime Mess. Why? Because the banksters were motivated by the profit obtained from the colossal sub-prime fraud perpetrated upon American house-buyers. Of course, the banksters have all since retired to the links in Florida with their ill-gained riches, whilst those who lost their houses due to the Great Recession (which the sub-prime fraud triggered) are wondering "what the hell happened to us?" One thing is "for sure". Were upper-income taxation put back to near confiscatory levels, there'd be less bankster fraud, and far less funding into Replicant coffers for electing their Cohorts In Crime. And we could employ the money to provide our kids a decent post-secondary education that was free, gratis and for nothing. Low upper-income taxation is a bane upon the nation, and will always be so for as long as it exists. It simply takes Income, shifts it up into Wealth (which minus debt becomes Net Worth). Massive Net Worth upon death is then shifted OVER to those who did nothing whatsoever to deserve it (except being born) and thus perpetuates itself ala Donald Dork Junior ...
GOTCHA! It is difficult to find a Progressive Tax Policy. I've looked and one simple graphic just does not exist. (It aint easy, I must admit.) But there is one document that explains why the challenge is great, and it's from the Economist here: Tax policy - In an ideal world. Excerpt: Taxing the super-rich is only one side of the Tax-Fairness Issue. The other side is taxing the Middle-class where the amounts of taxation are the most. So, any well thought-out remake of taxation should not only double-down on Upper-income Taxation (which is a must), but it will involve higher taxation for the Middle-class as well. (And nothing fills that bill better than a Value-Added-Tax (VAT) - which is a major tax-burden in Europe (at around 20%.) And what will they get in return. Well, how about free post-secondary education at a state-school for their kids? Now that is a GOTCHA!
It's up to parents to decide what to do with their money not a Nazi government. If a Nazi government is empowered to steal money from you when you die then It can steal from you when you're alive to why would they want to wait after all they know better where your money should be spent even though you earned it
Yes. The general government should get out of the distribution business. Taking one person's money to give to another is not the way to go.
especially since its a free county and thus people are free to redistribute their money to whomever they want
