How America Killed Its Middle Class
 

A great article which exposes the stupidity of this "Trickle Down" economic theory of the right.

http://www.alternet.org/thom-hartman...s-middle-class



Read the entire article here.

AFAIK, it was the Progressive era reforms that allowed a prosperous middle class to rise, and their reversal that is suppressing it back downward.
No chit, and the reversal of these reforms is taking us back to Dickensian 19th Century industrial feudalism with a vast cheap and defenseless labor pool. Kochtopia awaits us there.

Tell that to the idiots I work with. We were told, yesterday, that our hours may be reduced to 36 soon. Management blamed coffee prices due to bad weather in Brazil. The good ol' boys in the maintenance department blame Obama, of course. I think they're both full of shit.

Productivity has increased. We now get the work done in less than 40 hours, so management is reducing labor costs. Which, of course, was the whole point of pushing us to bring productivity up.

But, that fact is something that management is never going to admit and too complex for the others to understand.:rolleyes:

Dave

Is "The Swamp" a 'right-to-take-it-up-the-ass-from-an-employer-without-recourse-or-defense' state ?

Aren't all states?

They are getting there, all part of the Republican/Tea-publican-led march back to 19th Century Dickensian industrial feudalism.
Next stop, Kochtopia!

An alternative view, less some of the hyperbole:

http://www.american.com/archive/2011...r/middle-class

Oh, yes. Let's look to the AEP for an objective viewpoint.

Virginia? Yes.

Dave

You're joking, right? :rolleyes: The American Enterprise Institute?

A veritble rogues gallery of neo cons. Hyperbole is their middle name, nice try Whell. :rolleyes:

Some AEI scholars are considered to be some of the leading architects of the second Bush administration's public policy.[3] More than twenty AEI scholars and fellows served either in a Bush administration policy post or on one of the government's many panels and commissions. Among the prominent former government officials now affiliated with AEI are former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, now an AEI senior fellow; former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities Lynne Cheney, a longtime AEI senior fellow; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, now an AEI senior fellow; former Dutch member of parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an AEI visiting fellow; and former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, now an AEI visiting scholar. Other prominent individuals affiliated with AEI include Kevin Hassett, Frederick W. Kagan, Leon Kass, Charles Murray, Michael Novak, Norman J. Ornstein, Richard Perle, Radek Sikorski, Christina Hoff Sommers, Peter J. Wallison, and Mark Perry.[4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ame...rise_Institute

The American Boobyprize Institute? I should have known, hardly an unbiased and unaffiliated source as a Koch funded operation.
Nevermind.:rolleyes:

True... as in the game of Monopoly, the end game of capitalism is where one person holds all the wealth. We're making good progress on that....

We can put that one right up there on the shelf in between "The Myth that Wild Bears Shit in the Woods" and "The Myth That The Pope is Catholic":rolleyes:

I think this pretty much explains it.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...hat/Book1.xlsx

Taken from Wiki, but verified in several other places.

Looks to me like the top rate has gone way down over time, yet at the same time, the top rate is being applied to lower and lower income brackets.

This is true.

In the 1950's the threshold for the top rate of 90% was $400,000 per year.

$400,000 in 1955 dollars is about 3.5 million in today's dollars.

http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

And if I had my way that's where I would put it today.

Noticing another trend, prior to Vietnam taxes always shot up for the rich to finance their wars. I believe Vietnam had the first wartime tax reduction (down to 77% from 91%). Look at the tax base of the last few middle east wars. Middle class is paying extra for those also.

Damn! Indeed it's a rogue gallery. :D

At least the AEP provided a bibliography for their information. I consider that somewhat better than an editorial piece by Thom Hartmann. I read Hartmann's article and from the onset he attributes the rise of the middle class to have paralleled the rise of progressivism. He misses, or obscures, the reality that the middle class engenderd from the rise of merchants, shopkeepers and the bourgeoisie that clearly predates progressivism of the early 1900s.

I think most everyone knows that the think tanks, whether right or left, are going to produce articles to sell their point; however, that doesn't mean that there are no standards or information that can be found in the articles. Ideally, given the assumptions and data in any given article, one ought to be able to reach similar conclusions.

So what? We know it's a right leaning think tank. Podesta's sand box is much the same, but from the left's perspective.

You did notice that I was replying to Whell's assertion that his source was without hyperbole, right? You may choose to see some sort of equivalence in that source vis a vis the OPs but I certainly don't. So fuckin' what back atcha Brent. :rolleyes:

Hartmann is probably relying on Robert Reich's recent article. Here's an opposing viewpoint.

The bottom line is that the status of the middle class is not as dire as the left claims. Their fixation with the relative wealth of the wealthy while serially propping them up via the Federal Reserve and their cronyism says more than all their strident demagoguery.

Care to back up Whell's fairytale article BH?

Your opposing viewpoint is exactly the one Whell linked to. :confused:

No it isn't. The one I posted has different authors that are academic economists, albeit on the right.

Robert Reich and Paul Krugman are the pair that are usually carrying the water for the left. Reich's just old and was never all that great, but Krugman was good but then liked the notion of being a popular writer more than an economist IMHO.

I'll take the little guy's interpretation over the blathering of this author. ;)

Steve Conover retired recently from a 35-year career in corporate America. He has a BS in engineering, an MBA in finance, and a PhD in political economy.

Mr. Boudreaux is professor of economics at George Mason University and chair for the study of free market capitalism at the Mercatus Center. Mr. Perry is a professor of economics at the University of Michigan-Flint and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Whatever Brent. :rolleyes:

I just want to make it to retirement before some excessively ambitious a-hole decides he deserves my money more than I do. It looks like I'm losing ground and losing it fast.

Do any of you pontificating yak-a-lots have a suggestion that's not untethered and floating aimlessly in your personal ideologisphere?

Dave

As opposed to what, the same old dusty trope of the downfall of the middle class perpetuated by the left. The progressive politicians that are knowingly using a poor indicator to demonize their opposition and drum up the emotions of their base. The paper I cited describes exactly why the left's position wrt to middle class stagnation ought be taken for what it is, namely, demagoguery.

You can argue the points in their paper, but it isn't fair to dismiss them just because their politics differ from yours.


PS: Did you watch the Coachella Festival? I think we need a thread on that in Of Topic. :)

Nope. Anybody decent play there?

Funny how the Wall St. Urinal calls that op ed piece of ginned up hyperbole news...;)

Anybody know how to play "follow the money"?

Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk

I enjoyed several of the bands. Haim I really liked. They consist of three sisters from the San Fernando Valley. They're good. Arcade Fire closed the show and I thought they were good. Everyone in that band is a multi -instrumentalist and move around to different instruments throughout the show. Pharell Williams was good once he got out of rap mode and started singing. Neko Case, Elle Goulding, Lorde and Ingrid Michaelson were all very good. Seeing the Pet Shop Boys made me feel old.:D

Oh........demagoguery?

Are you telling me it's all in my head that everyone I know seems to be working for less reward than we were 20-30 years ago? That those who had a good retirement now have jack shit and struggle to live off of PBGC and SS? That I'm just believing in some left wing media perpetuated myth that my employer is cutting my hours as my reward for helping raise productivity? WTF, Brent?:confused:

My God. My countrymen are so deep up their own butts with their silly dueling ideologies.............

When are we going to snap out of this? When it takes a wheelbarrow full of twenty dollar bills to buy a can of Vienna Sausages? When three people have all the money and the rest of us have to beg their mercies?

Dave

Choose up a side and in a lot of cases it will likely lead you to the same place. :D

Okay, I'll ask again;

He's about my age actually.

Less than a year older.

Which means he's lived long enough to personally observe the deterioration of the middle class.

It's an obvious fact.

There is nothing to discuss.

The only question is why it's happening and how are we going to reverse it.

To try to argue that it's a myth is beyond ludicrous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Boudreaux Cato Institute? Phuck him and the horse he rode in on. ;)

WAAAAYYYYYYY beyond.

Dave

Yeah, but that never stops the right from believing in shit that has no basis in truth.

Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq?

Legitimate Rape?

Being Gay is a choice?

Tax cuts for the rich help the poor?

The list is endless.

They live in a very very strange world that has virtually no overlap with the real one.