Convince Me We Should Have Another 8 Years of Republican Dominance

Great Debates
41

Income <> Wealth.

I do not dispute that the income gap between the rich and poor has increased. However, the wealth gap has not.

Have a look at Table 3 in this article. It shows the percentage of wealth owned by the top 1% in America, from 1922 to 2004. Notice that it has been significantly higher in the past. And significantly lower. In fact, it fluctuates quite a bit between about 25% and about 40%, with a couple of outlier years.

Here’s another analysis, which only goes to 2000, but which uses estate tax data and comes up with the same basic numbers: Top Wealth Shares - Evidence from Tax Returns.

So the question is, how come income share is increasing at the top, but total wealth is not? One reason is because the tax system is progressive, so the after-tax income is not increasing as fast. Also, a study which I also linked to in the other thread has shown that people with high incomes are predominantly clustered in areas where the cost of living has increased much faster than in areas with predominantly poor people. So the real adjusted income gap is only about 1/10 that of the raw income gap. Add into that estate taxes and other factors, and you have a situation where wealth is relatively stable even though income at the upper end has been increasing.

42

Enough with the ad hominem crap. If you have a problem with a specific fact, quote it. You don’t get to run around making vague accusations without backing it up. I post more cites on this board than just about any other poster. Any fact I post is usually questioned, and I have to cough up the data for it, which I do. I have been wrong on occasion, but rarely. Of course, some people have a vested interest in tracking every one of those occasions and then using it to smear everything I say.

So unless you’ve got a specific complaint with the facts in this thread, button it or take it to the pit.

43

Okay, so are the top 1% better off after a Republican administration or after the Democrats?

And assuming there isn’t a shot it hell I’ll ever be in the top 1% is it even relevant?

44

Well, the years and percentages are listed there - you can figure out which ones were Republican and which ones weren’t.

I believe you’ll find the variations have more to do with the rise and fall of asset prices. For example, the percentage of wealth held by the top 1% has declined even further since 2004, but it’s not because George Bush was bad to rich people - it’s because asset prices have collapsed.

45

Your data comes from an economist called Edward N. Wolff. It turns out he’s a credible guy, professor of economics at New York University. He is the author of Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can Be Done About It, as well as many other books and articles on economic and tax policy. He is managing editor of the Review of Income and Wealth.
Here’s what he has to say about wealth inequality over the past few decades :

MM: What have been the trends of wealth inequality over the last 25 years?
Wolff: We have had a fairly sharp increase in wealth inequality dating back to 1975 or 1976.

Prior to that, there was a protracted period when wealth inequality fell in this country, going back almost to 1929. So you have this fairly continuous downward trend from 1929, which of course was the peak of the stock market before it crashed, until just about the mid-1970s. Since then, things have really turned around, and the level of wealth inequality today is almost double what it was in the mid-1970s.

Income inequality has also risen. Most people date this rise to the early 1970s, but it hasn’t gone up nearly as dramatically as wealth inequality.

Here he is again :

These are large inequalities, and they are growing: between 1983 and 1989, the top 20 percent of wealth holders received fully 99 percent of the total gain in national wealth; the wealthiest one percent enjoyed 62 percent of that increase..

Share of wealth owned by top 1%.
1983 33.7
1989 38.9
1992 42.0

From 1983 to 1989, the share of wealth held by the top one percent increased by five percentage points, from 34 to 39 percent, and the share of the top 20 percent rose by three percentage points, from 81.3 to 84.6 percent. By contrast, the share of wealth held by the bottom 80 percent fell sharply, from 19 to 15 percent. Then, between 1989 and 1992, the share of the top one percent of families increased sharply again, from 39 percent in 1989 to 42 percent in 1992.4 The increase in wealth inequality recorded over the 1983-92 period is unprecedented except for the 1920s, when rising concentration was largely attributable to the stock market boom. …

and so on

http://bostonreview.net/BR21.1/wolff.html

46

[ deleted due to easiness of the target ]

47

With another election drawing closer, I thought I’d dust off this thread and see if there are any new thoughts. There has been some time for the dust to settle, and we’ve now seen what Democrats can do controlling both the White House and Congress

Oh what a year it’s been: Since the emergence of the Tea Party, I get the distinct impression that the American voter has completely forgotten what the world was like pre-Obama.

So again I ask, looking back on 7 years of Republican dominance, why should we seek to have that again? What’s in it for me?

Will my taxes be lower? Life freer? Marriage more sanctimonious? Job more secure? Borders more controlled?

48

Although I am liberal, one of my main concerns with the GOP is that they are more ideological than practical. Communism has the same problem. Many communists faced problems in their own nation with the attitude of ‘it doesn’t matter if these solutions work, make the problem better or worse. What matters is ideological purity’. The GOP has the same attitude.

Tax cuts for the rich do not decrease the deficit
Sarah Palin is not qualified to be VP
The problem with the economy is not lack of capital
You can’t substantially decrease the deficit by cutting ‘pork’
The fact that none of it matters in the real world is irrelevant, only ideological purity matters. As far as I can tell, the GOP has no real, working, valid solutions to the nation’s problems (their new pledge with america had no valid methods of reducing the deficit, as an example despite the deficit being their biggest selling point in this election cycle). Just attempts to make the real world match their ideology, solutions be damned.

49

Some general republican things in the recent past (not limited to just Bush era):

  • Got welfare reform in the 90’s. Some argue that Clinton deserves credit, but it was the Republican Congress that passed it and it wouldn’t have been done without that. They also pushed through some other Republican ideas in the same era, but mostly they were pretty unimportant for a big picture point of view.

  • Overall there’s been a general trend towards free trade over the last couple decades. This is typically a Republican view, although Clinton was rather influential in this as well.

  • Lowered taxes. Not just on the rich, but on everyone. Which has little to do with the current argument on extending those tax cuts. In the context of the times, it probably helped.

  • Speaking of the context of the times, in 2000 the economy was heading to the hell because of the dot-com bust. Then 9/11 happened shortly after that. It’s actually somewhat astounding we didn’t head into a total economic tailspin then. Granted, part of how this was avoided was the housing bubble which just delayed, and worsened, the hit (and was truly bipartisan so I can’t blame or credit either party) but still, Republicans were not nearly as economically worthless as some like to claim they were.

  • A major overhaul in US security. Things such as the Dept of Homeland Security, airport screenings, overhauling the intelligence agencies, etc. Although I believe Democrats would have done similar things if they were in power on 9/11, so it’s questionable how much Republicans deserve credit/blame there.

  • Revamped foreign policy. Bush Jr did many major changes. Mostly this was a response to 9/11, and like I said I believe Democrats would have done similar if they were in charge. Partially though, this was in response to the cold war ending a decade earlier. The US desperately should have revised it’s foreign policy after that, and we really didn’t until Bush. Democrats wouldn’t have done that, as evidenced by the fact Clinton was around for 8 years and he didn’t. If this is good or not depends on if you like our current focus on non-state actors/‘rogue’ states more than our former focus on being able to fight WWIII.

  • Cleaning up our messes from the cold war. During the cold war the US supported a lot of absolute dicks as a ‘lesser evil’ sort of thing. After the soviet union fell, the US actively attempted to get rid of those lesser evils. Papa Bush took out Noriega and tried to get rid of Saddam. Bush Jr finally took out Saddam, got involved with Afghanistan after we ignored them for a couple decades, got the US seriously involved in dealing with the mess that is Pakistan, and was heavily involved in aiding third world shitholes that were pawns in the cold war (notably Africa, hardly anyone realizes Bush did a lot of good there). Contrast that to Clinton’s doing little more than wack a mole with Saddam for eight years. So Republicans really do deserve credit/blame from this. I know that I’m in a minority view here, but I think if someone walks into your house and takes a shit on your table, the least they could do is clean up their own crap on the way out the door. Of course, we screwed the pooch pretty badly in Iraq or Afghan so I totally understand why others think this is a horrible thing overall.

Note: I’m not trying to get you to vote for Republicans. I’m just pointing out things they actually did, as opposed to the sheer amounts of bullshit political hacks of all sorts usually claim. It’s up to you to decide what, if anything, they did was good or not. But at least judge off what they actually did instead of things that were either beyond their control or that Democrats would have done also. In that spirit, let me comment on a few of your complaints.

Katrina really was not Bush’s fault. Federal emergency response just wasn’t designed to deal with Katrina like situations, state emergency response was supposed to do it. It was Louisiana’s and New Orleans that screw up. Bush deserves no more blame for Katrina than Obama does for the BP spill.

Increased government is something either party will do. So while it’s fair to blame Republicans, it’s not like it’s only them. Look at it this way, if the Republicans didn’t allow the government to increase then people would be complaining they let old folks starve by not expanding social security or poor people die by not extending drug benefits or something similar.

Massive run up in deficit spending is bad, but keep in mind that 9/11 happened. Either party would have greatly expanded the deficit spending to cover changes/response to that. Plus it could be argued the deficit spending was needed to keep the economy from going to hell after that, much the same way it’s argued deficit spending is needed now to boost the economy.

Warrantless wiretaps, and presumably other civil rights issues like the Patriot Act as well, weren’t really all that bad. I’m not supporting them, but a lot of that stuff was quite understandable given 9/11. Don’t blame Republicans for it, blame over-reaction to a significant event. A lot of it also had strong support from democrats at the time also, so it’s hardly a Republican only thing anyway. Although it is fair to blame a Republican who still defends this stuff because they can’t admit that it was an over-reaction.