Neither prove your point.
Also, the American middle class is much smaller than it was 50 years ago. The bell curve has flattened and widened. It hasn’t quite yet approached a “brassiere curve,” as in some nations, but that is the direction we’re moving.
Nonsense. Innovators are lucky if they get any reward at all; innovators work for the people who get the actual rewards. And people with capital don’t take on risks, they have other people take risks for them; they themselves risk nothing.
Cites, please.
You, too. Cite. And don’t give us that BS about cites being ignored. Put your Big Boy pants on if you’re going to post in GD. If not, maybe IMHO is more suitable.
Shrinking American Middle Class.
(That wasn’t even hard!)
Except for one “minor” detail. From your cite:
So, if you meant that the middle class was shrinking because an equal % were moving into both the upper and lower class, then I agree. But somehow I don’t think that is the point you were trying to make. Or was it?
Also, I’m not so convinced by data that is 2 years old considering we were still coming out of a severe recession and there has been considerable economic improvement since then, especially in the hard hit housing area. As I’m sure you know, the value of a home is a large part of the wealth of a typical middle class family.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_fertility_rate
Catholic First World countries such as Italy, Spain, and Portugal have some of the lowest fertility rates in the world, with even Ireland have a lower fertility than that of the United States. The case is the same with Latin America, with virtually all the countries there having birth rates only slightly higher at best compared to the United States and in the case of Brazil and Chile (one of the most socially conservative countries in the world) far lower.
You sound like someone who’s never invested. They definitely risk capital.
Innovators get rewarded by their salaries. I admit that the day of the garage entrepeneur is over, sad to say. I’d like to see it come back, but I can’t imagine how, since these days, most innovations require massive capital backing and countless man years of effort.
I’m skeptical of the OP’s claim. While I’m not a big Ayn Rand fan, I’ll paraphrase her with a good point why communism doesn’t work. Communism is based on allocation of assets based on need. The problem is that productivity is limited and concrete, whereas need is infinite and arbitrary.
By “concrete” I mean “real and measurable, finite”. By “arbitrary” I mean it’s defined based on people’s values and choices, and therefore not real and measurable in the sense that productivity is.
To exacerbate matters, the productivity is created by people. Incentivizing people to create increases production; reducing the incentive decreases it.
However, there’s a possibility that some day, productivity could be automated to the point where it’s essentially no longer produced by people (yes, I’m talking science fiction here). In this case, productivity would be based more on ownership than personal contribution. (although here, I’m ignoring innovation driving productivity, which is a big flaw. But we could reach a point where people say “Enough” and prefer distribution of automatically generated wealth with a fairly low level of innovation to concentration of wealth based on ownership plus a strong incentive to innovate.
That said, I’m glad that I get rewarded more when I’m more productive. Which reminds me, time to get back to work!
So, Catholics do not listen to the Church’s teaching on birth control; because I do not believe for a moment that Brazilians have stopped fucking.
Did you not know that? 25% of Americans are Catholic. And most of them are “real” Catholics, unlike most European Catholics where it’s more a cultural thing.