No, you don’t want to see it governed well; you want to see it governed according to liberal ideology. There’s a big difference.
Yeah, nothing’s unaffordable when it comes to the American taxpayer, is it? This is part of the trouble with having people like you in charge of governing the country. To you, the U.S. is a huge golden goose with an inexhaustible supply of golden eggs. Heath care? Keeping the free world free? No prob! We’ll just make the rich pay for it!
Not yet you don’t. That would come only after you’ve completely decimated the military so as to finance the endless number of nanny-state social programs you’d really like to implement.
No, once again…France doesn’t need a huge military. Nor does Spain or Germany or Belgium or The Netherlands or Norway. They all sleep safe and snug in their beds at night because American military might protects them. They’d have all been goose-stepping or calling each other comrade decades ago if not for us, and it’s us who are keeping it from happening now.
Sure, I do. I was merely engaging in a little throw-back communist rhetoric to make a point. Still, do you really think there’d be no Soviet or Chinese expansionism without U.S. military might holding them in check? BrainGlutton was convinced of this also. So convinced that he started a thread about it. It did not go the way he hoped.
Earlier in this thread, I pointed to data which showed that, while the income gap has been growing between the rich and poor, the difference in wealth between the rich and poor didn’t seem to be increasing, and in fact appeared to be decreasing lately. I had no explanation, but through out a couple of possible answers.
Well, there’s a new study out from the National Bureau of Economic Research which sheds more light on this. According to the paper, while gross incomes have been increasing faster for the upper quintiles than for the lower, real wages have not increased nearly as fast.
The reason for this is that the cost of living for the rich is going up at a much faster rate than the cost of living for the poor, primarily because the college educated people who are earning the biggest salaries are also living in the cities, where the cost of living is going up faster than elsewhere:
So, it turns out that if you look at real wages, the gap between rich and poor isn’t increasing nearly as much as the gross wage numbers would indicate. In fact, the gap is only widening at 1/10 the rate previously estimated. And I would guess that since the recession hit the rich extremely hard due to asset value collapse, their gains over the poor might be completely wiped out.
If people believe the country is a meritocracy, then poor people can support the rich because they believe that one day they themselves may be rich. They’re not so much supporting the current rich people personally as they are supporting a system that allows people to become rich.
Let me ask you: Why do poor people support the lottery? There is solid evidence that lotteries disproportionately damage poor people, with the proceeds mainly going to the middle class. So why don’t poor people advocate abolishing them?
The answer is because while lotteries are a negative expectation game for poor people, they have positive utility because they give people hope and because to a poor person, the loss of a dollar for a lottery ticket isn’t as valuable as the remote possibility of being fabulously wealthy.
Your average plumber dreams of owning his own plumbing business. A poor mother wants to see her kids go to college and become rich. If you tax away the rich, all you’ve done is lock the poor into permanent poverty.
Because poor people have done the math, and have concluded that it is more likely they will win the lottery than become wealthy through talent and hard work.
Because God has damned them to Hell. If they were part of the chosen who will join Him in Heaven, he would have done more to indicate His favor here on Earth, so that we could respect them for being righteous.
