Perhaps not, but is there something special about the American economy so your point wouldn’t be applicable?
i think you misunderstood me. I was not questioning “SOX” - I am well aware of its cost and impact (and consider it a ridiculous over-reaction).
Rather, your cite to number of regulations and the registry alone, that’s as empty as the Left citing the number of millionaires. I’d prefer the argument be made better.
I’ll skip the accounting debate, as that is a distraction, but I think it sufficient to note that the move to mark to market at least in IAS world came as much from private investors as government. I would hesitate to call mark to market an example of regulatory failure as such.
Define for me “artificially low”
You made a contradictory observation to the “artificially low” hypothesis with respect to your observation re excess Asian savings. Massive excess liquidity seeking return push market rates down everywhere. Pinning the blame on a Central Bank strikes me as a one sided argument.
Wage can’t grow. If you balanced out everyone’s money (i.e. true socialism), the lowest income slot would be making maybe a hundred or two more a year. Quibbling about it is silly.
But more importantly than that, who gives a fuck about wage? What practical measure is that of anything if it’s not one of quality of life? Now I’m saying that the time lapse between going from the poor of today to the rich of today can be shortened. I can tell you that you can be living like Bill Gates (though admittedly in a smaller house) in five years, or you can be living like him in 50 years but with $100 more a year in wage. Which would you chose?
Social status, as you should know, is pretty zero-sum. Therefore it is a pretty weak argument to use in talking about the advancement in the well-being of the poor.
Quite right, and I think much conversation about economic well being confuses social status (a relative measure, and zero sum) with material comfort (arguably an absolute measure).
Excessive levelling in social status, as the Soviet / Communist experiment has shown, destroys wealth. I’ll admit though that not enough sharing of the pie probably can reduce potential as well.
The former. In 50 years I’ll be dead.
We’re clearly not talking about equalizing wages. We’re not talking about living like Bill Gates. We should be talking about how to ensure that no one is living in fear that their next illness will drive them into bankruptcy. We should be talking about how to keep families from homelessness because they’ve lost their house or apartment due to unemployment. I suspect most people would trade a couple of inches from their TV for that, and that is how the poor person, especially the working poor person, of today is more similar to the peasant than the lord. It is power.
I don’t think it is zero-sum at all. The top will be the top whether they are $1 billion or $500 million above the middle class. That share of money flowing down would make a bigger increase in well being of the poor than it would decrease the well being of the rich.
Simpler example. Your child, just starting out, has a job that doesn’t pay much, and you are doing very well. Her car dies and needs $500 of repairs. You’ve got it to spare. Does giving her the money increase well being, or keep it the same?
If you think there was leveling in social status in Communist countries, you don’t know much about them. Ever hear of the stores for party members only? Those on top changed, the gaps didn’t.
In any case, who cares about social status? That is not strictly a function of money anyhow.
I suspect otherwise. People, both poor and middle class would rather have a cell phone than to have that money go towards drinkable water or food for starving children in Africa.
Or to be more like your plasma TV analogy… most people would rather have an iPhone instead of a cheaper Motorola so that the difference in money could be applied to make the world a better place.
Maybe Saint Voyager would make the small sacrifices but I don’t kid myself to think the benevolence extends to the population at large. Just look around at the blatant consumerism. Or am I missing something?
If one interprets “social status” as a mathematical ranking relative to the group – it is zero sum.
If you interpret “social status” to mean wealth redistribution, (which you have described in your reply) then that’s something else.
I once lived in one, I know a thing about social status in the former Soviet Block. Yes, indeed, differentiation (re) emerged, but the whole point of the Communist system was initially vast social leveling and the system did in fact do so (ridiculous wage spreads btw labourers and Drs for instance). Of course non-wage party connected
So, you apparently don’t know much about the history.
Social status is something in any event that drives humans. Deep primitive primate social status perceptions are real drivers.
I’ve done more than “think about it”, Sage Rat. I’ve studied this very issue, both formally and informally, for more than a decade. I’ve already provided graphs and explained the issue. Despite that, you still hold to your fabricated notions.
It doesn’t appear at this point that you have any interest in learning, but you’re still making enough mistakes to confuse the thread, so it’s worth going through your fantasies one last time to correct them.
This is true only for high-end technological goods. For the prices of other commodities, which make up the bulk of people’s purchases, this is not true. It is false. For the bulk of purchases that people must spend their money on, prices have increased in line with wage increases.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which calculates the Consumer Price Index (the most commonly used measure for inflation) does in fact compensate for the introduction of new goods. That is already included in the calculations.
Is it perfect? No. But it’s still pretty damn good. As a matter of fact, estimates in the 1990s were that real median wages were actually negative or zero. As you could see by the graph I’ve already cited, that’s not considered so anymore. Real median wages actually have a positive slope now (though not a very steep one, so they’re still fairly stagnant). There were two statistical refinements that re-interpreted this graph, the first from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which switched to a chain-linked measure of GDP growth (thus changing the GDP deflator, the other major measure of inflation), and the second from a panel of economists lead by Michael Boskin, who estimated that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was overestimating the CPI by as much as 1% every year because (and pay attention now) they weren’t doing an adequate job of adjusting their figures for the introduction of new goods and the improvement of older goods.
In other words, your very criticisms were pointed out and accounted for more than ten years ago. And now, yes, it’s acknowledged that medium real income has been slowly increasing, though of course it’s still extremely languid growth, especially compared to the upper income strata.
I’m using the actual definition. The information included in “real wage” is robust thanks to years of statistical refinement. It’s not perfect, but it is extremely good.
Your issues are valid ones, of course. Where you err, repeatedly, is in thinking that you’re somehow unique in considering these problems. You’re not. These issues have been the source of statistical wrangling for a very long time, and the number crunchers do in fact compensate for them, despite your tenacious belief to the contrary.
People don’t trade the distance from their TV from that, is precisely the issue. If you walk into the house of a person who is at the bottom of the heap and they have a TV and nintendo, a drying machine, and other luxuries as well as being overweight, smoke and drink beer, but they haven’t bought insurance, that’s them opting for the present instead of the future.
I can buy health insurance for myself for $66 a month according to eHealthInsurance.com. Minimum wage in my state is $8.55 an hour. If I work a 40 hour week, I’m making $1368 a month. Subtracting taxes, let’s say that’s really about $1000 a month. I pay $500 for an apartment, $150 in food, another $100 in electricity, phone, and water bills, $72 for a monthly bus pass, and I’ve still got $178 left. If I buy insurance at $66, I’ve still got $112 left. I can add dental insurance for less than $10 a month.
What takes health insurance from people is smoking and alcohol (both very expensive), overeating, luxury items, gambling, and otherwise poor money management. Why not have the government step in and just manage everyone’s income who can’t manage it themselves? Why make me have to lower the rate at which new medicines are created, to go into purchasing two six packs of beer a week for people who should have been buying insurance?
I was referring to their own well being, not others. I didn’t just pop out of the cabbage patch. What you said is exactly why the idea of cutting taxes to give more money to people so they can give it to charity doesn’t work very well. I wonder how much charitable giving would go down without the hefty tax benefits?
It’s cheaper to eat food to make you overweight than to eat healthy food. Carbs don’t cost as much as protein.
What exactly does your health insurance cover? I just bought insurance for my daughter who is 23, in the prime of health, and in the pool associated with the university. I see from looking at esurance that most of the plans around that price range have $2500 deductibles. Ready to pay 2.5 months worth of take home pay on doctors’ bills before your insurance kicks in?
I also looked for a generic family of 4. I found one for $166 a month - but with a $5K family deductible. Neither has drug coverage. $5,000 will set your working poor wage earner back a bit, especially if the wage earner gets sick and doesn’t have a lot of sick days.
So I’m not impressed. My employer paid (partly) plan is a lot better than any of these - but I’m one of the haves. Maybe our guy isn’t buying beer with his extra money, he’s buying diapers.
None of this is going to affect the rate that new medicines are created. In fact, if we had a UHC plan where the drug companies didn’t advertise, they’d get created twice as fast, since their marketing costs are higher than their R&D costs. Not to mention that a lot of new drugs are being developed by startups which then get bought up by Big Pharma.
But no, I’m sure you think that everyone who has gone bankrupt due to big medical bills are just drunks with big TVs, who’d be doing fine if they just worked a bit harder. Ah, the milk of human kindness flows so strongly in the veins of the conservative.
Was the social status gap smaller in the '90s along with the smaller wage gap? I don’t think so. I wouldn’t expect it to. I’ll happily accept a social status gap if those on the lower end of it get health insurance. Deal? Hell, I’ve seen big status gaps in graduate departments where all students make exactly the same amount of money. And my status as a PhD student in Louisiana made me a lot closer in status to some rich oil guys than my pitiful stipend could account for. So I still don’t understand what social status has to do with this issue.
Conveniently, choosing even decades happens to help the numbers significantly. Bush’s numbers go from 2000 to 2007. If you look at the numbers from 1990 to 1997, you see almost the same increase. If you go from 1980 to 1987, you see a significantly smaller increase. Much depends on where in the various business cycles you choose to pick your start and end dates.
But in any event, you simply can’t wave away spending as if it’s irrelevant to the discussion, because spending was clearly much more responsible for Bush’s deficits than was lack of revenue.
Using your same time spans, let’s look at government spending.
Total outlays:
1980: 590.94 billion
1990: 1.032 trillion.
2000: 1.789 trillion.
2008: 2.524 trillion.
Spending increase between 1980 and 1990: 441 billion
Spending increase between 1990 and 2000: 757 billion
Spending increase in 8 years of Bush administration: 1.193 trillion
Or looked at by yearly average:
Average annual increase between 1980 and 1990: 44.1 billion dollars
Average annual increase between 1990 and 2000: 75.7 billion dollars
Average annual increase between 2000 and 2008: 149 billion dollars
Spending increases under the Bush administration were more than 3 times greater than in the 1980’s, and about twice as great as in the 1990’s. And that doesn’t include TARP.
The deficit is not a revenue problem. Spending is out of control in the U.S. And of course, under the current administration it’s absolutely exploding. In Canada, revenue went up by a similar ratio as it did in the United States between 2000 and 2007 (59% vs 55%). The difference is that we held spending increases to slightly lower than our GDP growth. The result is that we run budget surpluses and have been paying down our debt.
Yeah, I see that picture made the rounds of the lefty blogosphere. But exactly which mortgage regulations were watered down? Do you have a bill number so I can look it up? Because I can’t find it. Before we assign blame, we have to look at the details of the bill and actually analyze why it might have done damage. But I can’t find any details.
I DID find this from the same year:
Oh, come on. The Bush administration was raising the alarm on this stuff from almost day one. The major opposition came from Democrats. Barney Frank was willing to ‘roll the dice’ in the interests of selling as many homes as possible to poor people. The Democrats championed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pressured bankers into lowering lending standards.
Look, I’m not trying to claim that private industry was blameless, and I will acknowledge that the U.S.'s regulatory standards may not have been up to snuff. But this wasn’t a ‘Bush Administration’ problem. The U.S. government has been on a mission to push as many people into home ownership as it could, dating from the time the mortgage interest deduction was introduced. Democrats were the ones leading the charge in the 1990’s and 2000’s, as they discovered that the GSE’s could be used as an instrument of social policy to move more people into home ownership. It was the Democrats who turned a blind eye to the need for financial regulation in the 2000’s - not the Bush administration. The administration repeatedly sent people to the hill to plead for reform of the GSE’s and to help rein in out-of-control mortgage lending. It was the Democrats who resisted.
Unfortunately, your beloved 1990s was a period of increasing income inequality.
I believe Stone that the factual part of the claim was with respect, if I recall this correctly, to blocked regulation of mortgage brokers. That might be a correct claim or Lefty dreaming, but I believe this would be the item.
You keep doing this, and it’s borderline dishonest if not lying. Every bit of data I have seen on US lending, the majority of lending that was a problem was via entities not even subject to this community lending act. I believe that community lending act has been in place in the us for 30-40 years. It’s a dishonest argument in my book to point to it as the driver for lowered lending standards.
I’m skipping the rest but to my outside eye your argument looks every bit as partisan and skewed as the Lefties. Saddens me to see such.