He paid for it at least as much as Fred did. He just took better advantage of it.
The point being that Ned and Fred used up equal amounts of the resources available. The rich guy did not use up more.
One can argue that the rich should pay more taxes because they can afford it, but not because it costs more to have somebody get rich than to stay poor or middle class.
Regards,
Shodan
The excluded middle has been shrinking for years.
I’m curious what “ethical obligation” wealthy people owe that goes beyond trading their work and creativity to provide some service or product that people willingly trade for in order to obtain some benefit?
Perhaps a discussion unto itself, but one of the issues with income disparity is that the wealthy are more easily able to disengage themselves from “their society”. They can sequester themselves in gated communities with private security, private schools and private health care.
Republicans without religion? That’s called a Democrat.
I realize I’m way late to the party here, but…
There are lots of ways to be religious. There’s only one way to spell “eschew”. So really, who’s being nitpicky? And it’s such a typically conservative reaction to simply not care that they’re demonstrably wrong, rather than think to themselves “You know what, perhaps I should check the spelling of this fancy word I heard the other day and became enamored of.”
For one, all of their prosperity is dependent on the larger society and those less-than-wealthy people they despise so much. For another, to do otherwise is hypocrisy; if they expect the rest of society to respect their needs & desires and not, say, cut their throat and grab everything they own, then they in turn should treat the rest of the population as if their needs and desires matter.
People who go on about how they owe nothing to other people are parasites who rely on most other people having better standards than they do.
I love that in the first paragraph you call people hypocrites, then you use extortion and threats of violence to justify progressive taxes. And in the second you call them parasites. Classy.
I’m going to combine a few responses into this post.
Resources of the community are not tangible or able to be tallied up to be repaid. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t put a price tag of things like culture, encouragement, risk taking, compassion, mercy, or luck. You cannot simply tabulate a monetary value for your interactions in life and repay them; you create them every day. We all of us have an obligation to give back to the community; it’s part and parcel of living in one. We give back in many ways, money only being a small one. Hopefully we all give what we can afford without hurt. In the real world though, we must be taxed because many of us do not *see *that obligation. We are so sheltered, comforted, and entitled that we forget that it is only by our shared agreement that wealth even exists.
Consider that without our collectively decided laws and agreement to abide by them, nothing would matter but power. Certainly you could sit atop your pile of cash like Scrooge McDuck, armed with a rifle and taking on all comers but you have to sleep. If I want your shiny stuff, I can wait. I’ll find a way. Instead we have agreed to respect others, play by the rules, and everyone profits. Few of us live in daily fear of robbery, assault or death at the hands of roving gangs.
It is that community, that culture that has allowed us to innovate, to create, and yes to gain great wealth from our labor. No one man does this on his own. You do not raise your own food, with tools made by your own hands. You do not educate yourself from scratch and observation. Your ideas are made reality by infrastructure, made profitable by a shared culture that has created a market for you. You are free to dream, build, and profit thanks to the thousands of unseen people that jointly create our world.
Without each other we are nothing.
THAT is the obligation to give more because you can. THAT is why we should try to improve the lot of the truly poor. THAT is why we have laws to protect those who cannot do so themselves. Because we know we cannot trust each other to do so privately. Because as many of you have already stated here, you do not feel that you are obligated to help anyone. So we make laws, and force you to do what you should do without reservation, knowing that your lifestyle is is a great gift; the thing that it seems you will not do on your own. Be a decent human being.
And for possible reasons why those correlations are not causative:
The Democrats are ‘front loaded’ into the earliest years. Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson. Only one Republican, Eisenhower, presided during the period starting from the Great Depression all the way until Nixon was elected in 1968. And since then, the Democrats were outnumbered 2-1 by Republicans (not counting Obama, who isn’t included). So what we may be seeing is little more than a generational shift in the economy.
Roosevelt/Truman span the WWII years, which are a huge outlier. Roosevelt also starts after the beginning of the great depresssion, when there was really nowhere to go but up.
Obama is not included, and the changes under his watch are negative by all the metrics used in the article - and massive.
Small number of data points.
No correction for liberal/vs conservative policies. Clinton presided over welfare reform. Nixon engaged in wage and price controls. GW Bush signed the Clean Air Act and the Americans with Disabilities act. Kennedy cut marginal tax rates.
No correction for political change over time. The country and most politicians were far more conservative before the Johnson era.
No correction for composition of Congress. Congress controls the purse strings. Reagan had a Democratic congress, Clinton had a Republican congress.
No correction for the slowing of growth over time. You could argue that there was a lot more ‘low hanging fruit’ in the economy in the post-WWII era, which was heavily loaded with Democrat administrations, than there is today when Republicans have dominated.
Cause and Effect is reversed. Maybe when the economy is roaring and people feel confident, they tend to elect Democrats. When the economy is slowing down and people begin to be worried about debt, they elect Republicans. By the same logic, you could say that interior decorators are better at housecleaning than housecleaners are, because interior decorators tend to be hired when the house is clean, and cleaners tend to be hired when the house is dirty. I’m not saying that this is the case, but it’s something a rigorous analysis would have to consider.
Missing metrics. These are all the ones cherry picked to make Democrats look better, perhaps. But for example, inflation is missing. Reagan inherited massive inflation, and the tight money policy required to bring it under control threw the country into a recession - which counts against him. Likewise, metrics like worker productivity, capital investment rates, investor and consumer confidence, quality of life metrics, and other potential measures might show a different picture, but they aren’t included.
External events are not considered. 9/11 cost the economy at least a trillion dollars. That counts against Bush but has nothing to do with him. Clinton benefited from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ‘peace dividend’, while Reagan increased military spending on the cold war, driving up his deficit numbers.
The business cycle is not included. This whole thing could simply be a reflection of which regimes were in power at different points in the business cycle.
No correction for budgetary overlap. The first year of a new administration operates on the previous administration’s budget. The administration axis of the graph should probably be shifted by a year.
Lag time. Laws get passed, but they often take years to really have an effect on the economy. Tax rate increases may result in immediate gains in revenue, followed by declining gains as investment activity drops off or tax avoidance grows. Tax cuts may result in initial revenue losses, but the revenue may recover from economic growth caused by the cuts - which the next administration gets to take credit for.
The existence of these kinds of potential factors means that ‘analysis’ like this should really be seen as little more than partisan preening. Both sides do it, btw. I’ve seen Republicans attempt the same thing, only using different metrics like who was in power in Congress. For example, they say that Clinton’s fortunes turned around after the Republicans cleaned out the congress and forced him to engage in reasonable and conservative policy.
Oh, please, I did nothing of the kind. I was pointing out that the people who make speeches about how they don’t owe other people any consideration expect such rules to only apply to themselves. They don’t expect other people to take the same dog-eat-dog attitude and use their superior numbers or brute force to take what they have. They expect to be able to treat other people like cattle or worse, and to be treated with respect and generosity in return.
They are parasites because they depend on other people being better than they are to function. They depend on other people working harder to make society function and showing more consideration to them than they show towards other people. They want to be able to take and take and never give back, while everyone else takes up the slack.
Just 14? Seems like a good time to implement the peer-review standard.
Holey-moley Sam, I’m a little overwhelmed. Let me start by grouping your complaints.
#1-4 are variants of small sample sizes, which can be addressed by standard statistical significance tests. That may have been done, IIRC – by I may not recollect correctly.
#5-8 are calls for a multivariate regression. That may be possible to do – but then the small sample size starts to matter.
#9 calls for a Granger test, I suppose. Yeah, you do want to worry about cause and effect here.
#10 Missing metrics. Give me a break: we have changes in the budget deficit and we could adjust that for the state of the economy. The stunning part of this analysis is how many metrics point in the same direction.
#11-12 are calls for a multivariate regression.
#13 is a robustness check.
#14 is an application of the concept, “How could this relationship possibly hold?” Oddly, I find this the strongest one, and I’m surprised you haven’t emphasized it more. Republicans don’t have time to demolish the economy, as they apparently do. It’s not like they’ve shown any reluctance to engage in Keynesian business cycle manipulation. More generally, you can only establish an hypothesis if it has a) evidence and b) internal coherence and consistency. Notwithstanding #1-13, we do have evidence and I wouldn’t call it weak as it involves multiple metrics.[1] (More investigation would be useful of course.) But until you posit an economically defensible mechanism, you have a puzzle, but not a valid hypothesis.
Yeah, but there’s a world of difference between an assertion and a statement backed by the data - as presented explicitly in a non-bogus table or chart. Sorry, this isn’t preening and taking pot shots at these empirical observations doesn’t make the puzzle go away.
[1] ETA: Is it insufficiently strong though? Sure.
I showed the univariate relationships in my previous citation. The charts are easy to read, but as Sam noted, there was no attempt to control for confounding factors. Scientists would consider such evidence to be suggestive, but not the basis for drawing a final conclusion.
A leading scholar on this topic is Larry M. Bartels, the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Charts and regressions on the subject make up chapter 2 of Unequal Democracy, (2010) published by Princeton University Press. A much abbreviated version of chapter 2 was published in the American Economic Review (2003), at least according to the forward of the book: "Economic Behavior in Political Context ". Economic Behavior in Political Context on JSTOR
Sam Stone’s list is fraught with problems and lightly sprinkled with falsehoods and nonsense as well.
Item 1 contains the concept of a “generational shift in the economy.” A what now? Are you saying that the economy has worsened over time and that there have happened to be more Republicans recently, unfairly tarnishing their performance? Shouldn’t Clinton’s record be among the worst, then?
#2 is flat wrong - most of the people who have put together the data I’ve presented have, for some sets of data, excluded WWII years. One set includes only FDR’s worst period of performance. It doesn’t change the overall outcome.
#2 and #3 are explicitly contradictory. If FDR had nowhere to go but up, the same is true for Obama. Don’t forget that Obama followed Bush (and your very favoritist Bush economic agenda, which nearly ran the country into the second Great Depression). #3 is just wrong, as well. Obama’s performance has not been as god as it could have been economically, but he’s created more jobs than Bush ever did, the stock market is up under Obama, GDP growth has been better than Bush and Reagan (http://www.politicalforum.com/political-opinions-beliefs/154977-comparing-first-6-quarters-gdp-under-obama-vs-reagan.html, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/nov05election/detail?entry_id=81709)…
#5 and #7 are flat wrong. Additionally, the top tax rate did not change during JFK’s term in office; it changed subsequent to his death.
#14 is false as well. See the link to eRiposte’s data.
The charge of cherry-picking favorable indicators is plain stupid. I could go back and pick any one of Sam Stone’s Bush-cheerleading posts from the W. era, and the same indicators he was pointing to there would be found in these data sets here. GDP, jobs, stock performance, personal income - these are not the types of indicators that result from cherry picking only the favorable ones.
Most of Sam’s list is just spitballing vague criticisms and hand-waving. I invite him, rather that waving an empty folder around and suggesting that it contains names, to actually present some evidence.
Sam, using available data from the past century, please show us which economic outcomes have been better for Republican presidents, Republican congresses, Republican anything!
From what I can tell GDP rose 3.2% per year for Carter, but 3.5% for Reagan.
Coolidge had some pretty crazy growth, but I guess you could offset that with Hoover.
Had the mortgage meltdown held off for a few more months, and/or the dot com bust happened a few months earlier, Bush 43 probably would have looked pretty good. George Dubya fucked up everything he touched, but is it actually fair to blame him for the recession following the dot com era?
More importantly, what happens to this thesis at the end of Obama’s first (last?) term? He’s on track to have the worst economic performance since Hoover according to
http://www.presimetrics.com/blog/?p=34
Its true Obama’s dog won’t hunt. Bush killed it, is why.
So what you’re saying is that Democratic presidents are better for the economy than Republican, except when they aren’t. But that’s okay because it’s the Republican’s fault?
Reagan still outperformed Carter, thus disproving the original thesis. Unless you want to twist Reagan’s success to make the Dems responsible.
No I think he’s saying that if you take a crap in a blender, you don’t have any choice but to break it down and clean it. That sort of thing tends to slow down the frozen drink productions.
The Republicans would just merrily carry on making shit smoothies.
The worms we’d have in our poop after Republicans get rid of meat inspections would be a good source of protein.
Does it only work from Republican presidency to Democratic presidency? In other words, am I allowed to hand wave away any of the slow growth during Republican presidencies that were the result of Democrats (ie the dot com bust right before Bush 43)?
If we can blame Obama’s failures on Bush 43, can we also blame Bush 41’s failures on Reagan? What about Ford following Nixon?
And then there is Ike following Truman, who as a Democrat is the worst on the list.
Seems like what the data implies is that it’s either really good or really bad to have liberal presidents since they are at both ends of the spectrum.