Yes, and he advocates raising his tax rate. He pays the legal tax rate and he thinks the tax system should be changed to make it fairer and more in line with Democratic goals. The fact that he thinks that he believes that people in his situation can pay higher taxes and still be wealthy should tell you that the Democratic position isn’t anti-wealth.
Right, the biggest single-payer expansion (Medicaid) in decades is hostile to working people in your backwards-twon. Advocating for raising the minimum wage is hostile to working people in your upside-down world. Advocating that the rich pay higher taxes is hostile to working people in your bizarro view.
Um… all the Democratic policies designed to address growing wealth inequality have been blocked by Republicans. Now, it’s true that the Blue Dogs and centrists and neo-liberals also often advocate policies that are part of this problem. But the Democratic party is far better on this problem than the Republicans. And certainly some of the Democrats you mention, such as Kerry and Warren, have repeatedly championed policies to address growing wealth inequality.
And even with all that, despite the best efforts of the Republicans, the centrists and the Blue Dogs, we still got a number of policies through which help the poor and the working-class. Spare me your fake innocence. Based on your other threads on this board, I know exactly what you are up to.
What is hypocritical about that? Do you think he must voluntarily pay a higher tax rate than required by law? By that logic, Republicans should voluntarily refuse federal spending in their district until the budget is balanced.
How does that show confusion - she’s under no obligation to humour demands for evidence from the Cherokee or anyone else. From your cite:
Some “Cherokee groups have demanded documentation”? Seriously, guys, I recognize your history of getting fucked over, but as regards these demands, fuck off.
Further, she’s only “famous” for it because of knuckleheaded efforts to smear her. So she repeated some family lore about Cherokee ancestry. It’s even more stupidly irrelevant than her personal wealth.
Disclosure - I’ve been a bit of a Warren fan ever since her appearance on Frontline’s “The Secret History of the Credit Card”, 2004. She was a Harvard Law Professor at the time.
The OP is correct, the Dems are in the pocket of big business. No secret. Them being rich is a non-sequitur though. Heck, it can arguably be harder to buy off, I mean, influence the already rich.
I think if you look over the broad sweep of history the powerful have broken down into two factions. The debate is always about what to do with everyone else. The first side wants to eat the poor and grind their bones into bread. The other side wants to keep them mostly alive so as to extract the most value possible, maybe kick 'em around when they have a bad day. I guess the OP thinks the Dems are the bread bakers? Remember to vote early and often.
If you want to point out hypocrisy (and Lord knows there is that aplenty), you need to show that Democrats advocate policies that actually make them richer-- not just saying “hey, they are rich”. For instance, most Democrats advocate for higher income taxes and those taxes would affect them. Most Republicans don’t.
Few, if any, Democrats say that being rich is inherently evil. So yeah, a bunch of them are rich. So what? I’m no advocate of increased income distribution, but we don’t have more of that because the Democrats are against it-- we don’t have more of that because Republicans are against it.
That’s an absolutely extraordinary point of view, and as Ulfreida and JesterX have already pointed out, it’s exactly backwards. Less government is exactly what the 1% want because government is the only entity that can stand up for the collective 99%, and without it the 1% dominate everything without limit. They’re doing it already – and that’s the whole point of why they spend billions to get their guys into government to basically do things like lower their taxes, scale back environmental regulation on industry, deregulate broadcasting and media ownership rules and scuttle the fairness in broadcasting laws, deregulate commerce in general, appoint right-wing nutcases to the Supreme Court to allow them to spend as much as they need to in order to buy the hearts and minds of the unwashed masses, and basically render government inoperative. Except for a few things that they like, like an immense free-spending military, and draconian laws that let entertainment conglomerates sue grandmothers and small children for downloading a song while the corresponding injustices and personal privacy invasions are completely ignored.
The actual solution to restoring some semblance of balance and sanity and concern for the actual citizenry instead of the plutocracy is to take money out of politics by imposing stringent uniform spending limits on all candidates equally, and providing public funds to all qualified candidates who have a realistic minimum level of support. Then – and only then – will you have some chance of maybe getting candidates elected on merit instead of being vetted, anointed, and installed by the wealthy plutocracy.
I’ll quote Bill Maher again, because he sums it up so well, and he’s not exactly kind to Democrats, either:
I do not need Warren Buffett or anyone else to explain to me that the Democratic Party isn’t anti-wealth. As I have already explained, I believe that the Democratic Party is pro-wealth. Extremely so.
Well yes, obviously so. Poor people, generally, are the ones who desire to sell their services for wages at the low end of the scale. “Raising the minimum wage” means banning some of those poor people from selling their services. How can banning some people from selling certain of their services not be considered hostile to those people?
Of far greater significance, though, is simply the fact that your list of what the Democrats have done consists of only three things, and leaves out a vast number of other things. When hundreds of billions of dollars are given to bail out the country’s largest banks and insurance companies, who benefits more, the rich or the working class? When we’re all required to pay for corn ethanol in our gasoline, who benefits, agribusiness CEOs or the middle class? When middle class people are forced to buy health insurance policies that they don’t want, who benefits, insurance company CEOs or the middle class? When various mandates and regulations drive the price of those same insurance policies through the roof, who benefits, insurance company CEOs or the middle class? When tariffs keep the cost of sugar and other commodities high, who benefits, wealthy farmers or the middle class?
Nope, and the fact that you don’t understand basic macro-economics doesn’t mean that the Democrats are hostile to working people. Nobody is being barred from selling their services, and there is no evidence that the minimum wage affects unemployment rates. What is being barred is employers from exploiting workers. Again, you live an in upside-down world.
I’m no fan of this. It’s the progressive wing of the Democratic party which has proposed regulating banks to prevent the types of crashes that make these bailouts necessary. It is the Republicans and Blue Dogs/Centrists who fight tooth and nail against those regulations. Where is your scorn for the Republicans?
I’ll also point out your basic lack of knowledge of economics here. When the crash happened in 2008, the credit markets shut down. Grain and oil would have started piling up on the docks shortly and people wouldn’t have been getting their paychecks. If the government hadn’t bailed out the banks when it did, the poor and working class would have been royally shafted. I wish the bailouts had happened in a different manner, and I wish the government had temporarily nationalized the banks and I wish banks were better regulated. But if the government hadn’t moved to do something, the poor and middle class would have been completely devastated.
Why are you singling out Democrats on this issue?
Oh, please, you know full well why the ACA is structured the way it is, and you keep repeating the same tired arguments. You don’t know anything about regulatory economics or healthcare economics.
This is an outright falsehood. The ACA is designed to bend the cost curve on health insurance spending, and cost curve has bent. This is typical right-wing welfare queen nonsense. I’m happy to pay for people’s health insurance, but I’ll be damned if some right-wing welfare queen is going to tell me I have to pay for it in the most expensive way possible.
Well, then, vote for progressive Democrats if you are actually concerned about this.
Here is a list from Daily Kos of Obama’s 50 greatest progressive accomplishments.
There’s plenty in this list that benefits the poor and middle class.
Note: There’s also stuff which didn’t really go anywhere or which really has nothing to do with economics, but the point here is that there’s a lot more than 3.
ITR Champion, forget about the Democrats. It is clear that you do not actually care about the poor and middle class. You want them to be exploited by their employers. You want them to have shitty health care and go bankrupt when they have a medical emergency. You aren’t in any position to criticize Democrats. You are much worse on these issues then they are.
Earlier this year, the CBO released a report entitled "Effects of of a Minimum-Wage Increase on Employment and Family Income. It examined different options for minimum wage increases and concluded that all of them would, at a minimum, throw hundreds of thousands of poor people into unemployment. This is in agreement with scores of studies from many sources over the years. For instance, you could look at the paper “Minimum Wage and Employment: A Review of Evidence from the New Minimum Wage Research”, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in November of 2006. The authors’ conclusion: “among the papers we view as providing the most credible evidence, almost all point to negative employment effects”.
Then again, since I live in an upside-down world and you’re so much smarter than me, I’m sure you’ll soon appear to explain how this fits with your claim that “there is no evidence that the minimum wage affects unemployment rates”.
That doesn’t make very much sense, given that progressive Democrats are generally the ones who want the highest tariffs, which would drive prices higher for the poor and middle class while increasing profits for wealth growers and manufacturers. For instance, I recall that in the CNN/YouTube debate in the 2008 Democratic primaries, Dennis Kucinich reminded viewers that he was the most left-wing candidate, and also assured them that he supported higher tariffs and other anti-trade policies. Tariffs are and always have been a favorite of people like him. It’s generally conservatives and libertarians who want to lower tariffs and thus let us buy stuff at lower prices.
Why do we have to pretend? I know it’s not true, but Democrats do a fine job of portraying themselves as hostile to wealth, which is more than a tad hypocritical given you can’t win without being well-off.
Check out some of the current ads against Scott Brown and see if you think portraying him as a rich guy, which **is a bad thing **(they even say that the “real” Scott Brown isn’t the one ordinary business attire, it’s the one in a tux,) is a one-off or something you see in dozens of campaign ads every cycle. They sure as hell are trying to paint a distinction between the well-off republicans and…they themselves who are also well-off. In fact, Scott’s opponent is much wealthier than he is!
Well, I get my information from sources such as academic papers and journals, books by credentialed experts, and reputable mainstream publications. I don’t based my beliefs on what Bill Maher says; that may explain why you and I disagree on so many things.
We do agree that the current government, with the Democrats holding the White House and the Senate, is “vetted, anointed and installed by the wealthy plutocracy”, more or less. That was the point of my original post.
You say that the 1% want less government. Well, if the 1% want less government and they control the government, then we would expect to get less government. Instead we’re getting more government. Non-military government spending has been far higher in the Obama era than in any previous era, has it not? Tax burdens are higher than ever, are they not? Regulations place an enormous burden on American businesses, do they not? It would seem that this plutocracy which anoints and installs our leaders actually must be pushing for more government, not less.
Did you even read the report? It did not conclude that “at a minimum” hundreds of thousands of poor people would be thrown out of work. This is a clearly false statement about the report, so, yeah, it shows pretty clearly you don’t know what you are talking about. The report included a slight increase in employment in one of its ranges and a very small decrease in employment in another of its ranges.
But, if you did actually know what you were talking about, you would already be aware of the actual criticisms of the actual report, and you would know better than to come to me without addressing those criticisms. Here’s one.
There is no historical evidence. We’ve raised the minimum wage in the past many times without seeing corresponding movement in the unemployment rate. Now, if you were actually interested in learning about this issue, we could examine it in more detail. But since it’s pretty clear to me that you aren’t, I don’t know if that would be a waste of time.
Since you misrepresented the CBO report, I suspect you may be misrepresenting Kucinich here as well. I remember Kucinich wanted to re-negotiate the trade agreements to make them fairer and include things like environmental and labor protection, but I don’t recall him advocating for tariffs just for tariff’s sake. So, pony up a cite.
I’m not sure I’m looking at the same one you are. Is it the one where CBO concludes that even given job losses, an increase in the minimum wage would raise real income for those under the poverty line by $5 billion, and take 900,000 people out of poverty? I’m just not sure we’re reading the same report.
Awaiting your reply if this the the gloomy report indicating that there would be nearly a million fewer poor Americans. Because that’s just awful.
I liked this argument better when it was called “Algore cannot advocate for measures to address climate change until he lives in a yurt and rides a bike attached to an electricity generator to every speaking engagement.”
This argument is not only risible but is contradicted by the stances of the 2 major parties on nearly every single domestic policy issue of the last 3 decades.
After this, it’s clear how ridiculous ITR Champion is, so I’m not going to play whack-a-mole with all the misreprensentations and fallacies any longer. He’s not actually interested in anything factual.
Here, he has linked to a chart of per-capita tax burden, which of course, doesn’t tell us much with regards to the overall tax burden in the economy. You’d want to look at tax burden as a percentage of GDP or tax burden relative to different income percentiles if you were really interested in this issue.
But the kicker is that this is a chart of per-capita tax burden in real values. If you were actually doing historical comparisons, you’d want to look at nominal values, since you have to take inflation into account for any such comparison to be meaningful. The fact that he would link to a chart of real values instead of nominal ones shows that he is just spouting nonsense.
I referenced two studies about the minimum wage, one from the CBO and one from NBER. You totally ignored the second one.
As for the first one from the CBO, the middle estimates it gives for both of the minimum wage increases analyzed are that hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost. And there are criticisms of that report, yes. There are criticisms, that’s true. Should we ignore every single piece of research when there are criticisms of it? If so, that gives us a nice excuse to ignore all research. It doesn’t help those who lose their jobs, though.
Debating whether minimum wage drives employment downwards or upwards is like debating whether heavy objects fall downwards or upwards. If the government increases the cost of cigarettes, people will buy fewer cigarettes. If the government increases the cost of gasoline, people will buy less gasoline. If the government increases the cost of labor, employers will buy less labor, and that means that poor people will lose their jobs.
Well, since you’ve treated me with such politeness and respect throughout this thread, I’ll give you a cite. Here’s Kucinich responding to the removal of tariffs on steel in 2003:
But as I recall, you were the one who first implied that I should “vote for progressive Democrats” if I wanted tariffs eliminated. Well, what’s your cite for your claim that “progressive Democrats” are in favor of ending tariffs?
Are you calling my post a criticism of the CBO report? Because I wasn’t criticizing it; I was reading it to you. You clearly picked out one negative aspect of that report and failed to put it in any context. The main problem is that the report itself provides the context, and you totally ignore it.
