Corporations are giving a lot of money to both major parties, in roughly equal amounts. I have already provided cites to back this up. You, to state the obvious, have not provided any cites to back up any of your claims. You seem to think that merely repeating the same things over and over again will be good enough.
You attacked Republicans for being poor. I pointed out that the poorest city in the country votes overwhelmingly Democratic.
Percentagewise, the poverty rate in Detroit is more than double that of Mississippi and Alabama. The poverty rate in New Mexico, which votes Democratic, is higher than that of Alabama. The poverty rate in the District of Columbia, which votes more Democratic than anywhere else, is higher than that of Mississippi. All of this, of course, is based on the federal poverty line. When we start looking at poverty rates adjusted for cost of living, the four places with the highest poverty rates are California, District of Columbia, Nevada, and Florida. All four are ‘blue’.
However there’s really no need to “look at a map”. There’s survey data about income and party preference. Suffice it to say that it disproves what you said about the poor voting Republican. Plainly your belief in a strong link between poverty and voting Republican is not based on any facts.
Well then why didn’t you use the correct name the first time. Regardless, you claim that Republicans “tends to get most or all of their news” from Fox News. Given that the number of people who vote Republican is many times larger than the number watching Fox News on any given evening, that has to be false. Do you have any cite to back up what you said?
Are there tax deductions we should get rid of? Of course.
But consider things like MACRS, which is basically accelerated depreciation.
Say one of the divisions of GE want to build a new factory to produce the latest new product. Smith Tool & Die will benefit from building the new production line as will Smith’s employees. Who will then spend their money in the local community.
Encouraging investment and jobs is a good thing, IMHO.
You seriously didn’t know that the Republicans call themselves ‘The Party of Lincoln’? And that ‘The Party of Reagan’ and ‘The Party of Corporations’ are analogies to what they call themselves? If you don’t understand analogies and rhetorical devices, and if you can’t look at a map to see where the red states are, then there’s no point in engaging you.
Interesting range to pick. A hundred years ago was close to a low point for the median person in some ways. Unhealthy slums, low rates of land ownership and profit participation, the domination of the economy by mass production and big capital, no minimum wages in many places. Yeah, we’re a step up from hellhole, big whoop.
If you look around at American society you’ll see the benefit. You may also notice a lot more of the world is clawing to get into the US than is leaving the tyranny of a greedy capitalist system that promotes income inequality.
And the reason is in your first two sentences quoted above: It turns out that it is not “dumb luck” which is the fundamental driver of success. It’s competence, coupled with a reward for risk and work.
That does not mean competence guarantees success, nor does it mean the wealthy deserve the good fortune that comes their way.
The trick to gaining wealth is to stop looking at how the other guy got so rich and go get rich yourself, if that’s important to you.
Over the course of history, the masses have decided on occasion to try and equalize wealth artificially–perhaps on the pollyannish notion that we should get from each according to his ability and give to each according to his need. On occasion the masses actually succeed in redistribution, via revolution or taxes that manage to distribute wealth more equitably. But in the end, the collective incompetence of the masses squanders that artificially distributed wealth, and the competent figure out how to make some more…
You mean the society where a non-insignificant slice of the population lives in Third World conditions, most people have to work two or even three separate jobs just to get by and 1% of 1% of the population owns ~20% of the capital ? That society ?
Cause you couldn’t kick me in the nuts enough to make me live there.
I am going to need cites that
[ul][li]A significant slice of the US population lives in conditions similar to that of Africa or China or some other portion of the Third World, and[*]that most people in the US work two or three separate jobs just to get by.[/ul][/li]
Regards,
Shodan
Yeah, really. Some of the stuff that gets offered as a given around here is mind-boggling. I’ve seen stats that suggest that something approaching 50% of working age Americans don’t even work at all, so there must be lots and lots of people who work 6 or 7 jobs if the average works out as Kobal2 suggests.
Making the argument about paycheck comparisons, or house sizes, or bus-v-private jet is to miss the point. Mostly, it becomes far too much like a have-not whine stemming from sheer greed.
Ownership of wealth does not contribute meaningfully to economic imbalance.
Income is only relevant in terms of what the recipient does with it.
Johnny L.A. was making it seem like it was so. Fox News is just a cable channel. Lots of other choices out there.
Many corporations also give the the Democratic party so I would be curious as to who gives more: Corporations plus unions versus corporations plus the Koch Brothers.
It’s more like they own %99. The Walton family by itself owns more wealth than the bottom 40% of the country combined.
It’s closer to 40%. Here is an article that actually explains those numbers. The right wing narrative is that 40% of the country has dropped out of the workforce because of Obama’s failed economic policies (and because they are lazy immigrants and no-account colored people). This analysis would suggest that a greater factor is due to the ageing population with some increase in discouraged workers from the 2008 financial crisis (which is slowly getting back to normal).
That doesn’t change that a lot of working class people need to work multiple jobs to make ends meet.
That’s the crux of the problem. An increasing number of Americans feel like they are already working their asses off, but are not getting ahead. They can barely cover their cost of living, let alone increasing health care and education costs. And more and more, the perception is that instead of being the recipient of the fruits of their labor, it is being syphoned off to a semi-permanent class of executives, lawyers and bankers while the jobs themselves are becoming increasingly competitive, tenuous and even being eliminated altogether due to disruptive technology and offshoring.
In fact, according to some stats I’ve seen, economic mobility in the US is actually worse than most advanced countries, not better.
But keep on watching Fox News and believing in the myth of “American Exceptionalism”. The actual stats don’t seem to bear that out.
“It’s worse in some places” is not a defence against “things could be better here”, and never has been.
Wealth disparity is one indicator of a healthy society, but more importantly in the context of the US, it’s an indictment of the concept of the American Dream where anyone can make it as long as they work hard and keep their heads down. When all of the wealth is tightly in the grip of a handful who keep accruing even more, then the prospects of “making it big” dwindle.
It’s also damaging in the sense that you’ve got a handful of overprivileged elite cruising on inherited wealth while a whole LOT of people go from born broke to dead broke, which some would argue is not an ideal state of affairs. I’m no commie, but I do think a society where most everybody owns about the same amount of Stuff (plus or minus X%, or a Bell curve distribution if you prefer) is preferable to a society where a handful have it all (i.e. an exponential curve)- and not just because I would have a better shot at owning or learning Stuff that way. I know the canned Fox News answer to calls for more social equality and wealth distribution is “y’all are just jealous !”, but they’re completely missing the point. A more equal society means that every brain has the means to outpour its creativity to some extent, while a society where half the people scrabble hard from can to can’t just to put food in their bellies (and in the US, ostensibly the most prosperous nation on god’s green Earth, ~20% of the people can’t even reliably do *that *!) represents an awful lot of novels never written, inventions never tinkered with, science not broken through and so forth. It’s quantifiably better for everybody, including the fat cats.
But that’s just the thing ! America today is a society where, in many different contexts, people work their asses off and don’t get ahead any more. Their CEO gets waaaay the fuck ahead though. Oh yes.
Threads like this are why I scoff when people mention how lib this place is.
I’d generally agree that America is immune to revolution, either violent or political. The populace is politically atomized, discouraged, distracted, and generally just keeping their head down to make ends meet. Modern political movements were stillborn. The Tea Party was co-opted immediately; Occupy was broken up and the target of widespread and fierce media denouncement.
It’s interesting to speculate where the seething anger will go if/when conditions worsen. This is the sort of stuff that leads to increasingly right wing paranoia and fascist ideologies taking hold. People like to laugh at the “right wing crazies,” but they feed off the quite legitimate rage of the working class whites and the failure of what they perceive as liberal politicians to address any of their concerns. That’s one of the dangers of championing someone like Obama or Clinton as liberals instead of recognizing them as bought and sold corporate representatives. It’s a toxic brew altogether.
I don’t think much will come of it though. The increasing security state over the last several years will prove quite useful if things get too out of hand. It’s not like America is shy about jailing people.
You are actually making our point for us. Corporate America claims that if they were just given more cheap credit, and more tax breaks then they would be able to invest that money which in turn will allow them to hire more workers and trickle down the benefits to the rest of society. That is the ideal of supply side economics which has been the bible of Republican economic thought since Reagan.
However as it stands, a very small population has the vast majority of the capital. The masses can’t afford to buy that much, and as for the wealthy, money isn’t about buying things, after all there are only so many yachts one needs, its really just a score keeping mechanism between them and their peers. So by and large there isn’t much in the way of demand for products. Without demand as you say, there is no point in investing in more factories or hiring more workers, so all the extra money they are given just more or less sits in their bank accounts or the wealthy or in T-bills sold by the government to pay for tax cuts and loopholes for the wealthy, and on social programs to support those workers whose companies refuse to give them a living wage.
Which brings us back to the need to find a way to reduce the economic inequality, so as to put capital in the hands of the masses who will actually put it to work in the economy rather than hold onto it as a score card. If we reach the point where companies are struggling to find the capital to keep up with demand, then we can dust off supply side economics, but now is not the time.
