Why America’s Struggling Middle Class Has Businesses Scared

[Padawanbater2]

The tax cuts and regulations were said to benefit Americans because the wealthy would take this money and invest it, spend it, start business ventures and the like. THEY HAVE.

Invest it... in America. That was the con. They knew all along they could get lower labor costs if they offshored production, and that's exactly what they did. Special interest groups lobbied congress to relax American trade policy and production left America exactly as planned.

As to your comment about trickle up, we've tried it. Keynsian economics was the cornerstone of FDR.

The causes of the Great Depression began during the Harding Administration through deregulation of industry and continued until the end of Hoover's term. It wasn't until the early 1930s, after the stock market crash, that expansionary economic policies began being implemented, and look what happened;

Real GDP goes up, unemployment goes down

We didn't get out of that depression until the end of WW2, thanks to the rest of the world being destroyed and American factories being largely the only ones left to rebuild the planet.

"The post–World War II economic expansion, also known as the postwar economic boom, the long boom, and the Golden Age of Capitalism, was a period of economic prosperity in the mid-20th century which occurred, following the end of World War II in 1945, and lasted until the early 1970s. It ended with the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system in 1971, the 1973 oil crisis, and the 1973–1974 stock market crash, which led to the 1970s recession. Narrowly defined, the period spanned from 1945 to 1952, with overall growth lasting well until 1971, though there are some debates on dating the period. Booms in individual countries differed, some starting as early as 1945, and overlapping the rise of the East Asian economies into the 1980s or 1990s.

During this time, there was high worldwide economic growth; Western European and East Asian countries in particular experienced unusually high and sustained growth, together with full employment. Contrary to early predictions, this high growth also included many countries that had been devastated by the war, such as Japan (Japanese post-war economic miracle), West Germany (Wirtschaftswunder), France (Trente Glorieuses), Italy (Italian economic miracle), and Greece (Greek economic miracle)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post–World_War_II_economic_expansion

But the central question here is what is better for the middle class and poor, having money in the hands of the government, or allowing the wealthy to create opportunities for those lower on the ladder to advance and earn more?

You've spent this entire thread so far arguing the wealthy haven't created opportunities for those lower on the economic ladder in America, so why should we trust them to do so when that's what was promised in the beginning and they still haven't met their end of the agreement?

As has been shown before, there is no direct correlation between tax rates and economic growth, that is a myth. Tax rates have been high and we've sustained high economic growth and likewise, tax rates have been low and we've experienced stagnation

Supply side seems to support merit based advancement. The wealthy business owner will reward his best employees.

Demand side (trickle up) seems to be just government giving money to the poor from taxing the rich. As someone else pointed out there isn't enough rich people to make that worthwhile.

If supply-side is merit based, then why have real wages in America decreased since 1968?

Right, right, American workers competing with Chinese workers... Then how can you verify this claim? You're essentially claiming "If it weren't for American workers competing against foreign workers, then it would be merit based, and American workers would have higher wages because trickle-down works."..

 

[bearkat42]

Again, the whole trickle down package sold to a naive US voter population contained policies to enrich the wealthy of the US. The wealthy in theory would then invest in ways that benefited the US working and middle classes. In the US, this policy was never about Chinese workers. We can definitely say that these policies have failed to deliver the promise to the US population. That bit about getting off a dead horse applies here.

Again, looking at the graph that bearkat posted, the middle and working classes have done worse than stagnate in their condition ever since your beloved trickle down theory was implemented in a grand experiment. The experiment failed. Compared to earlier years, we can now say that Keynesian, demand side strategies are better for the people of this country than the voodoo practiced after 1978. When an experiment shows a theory to be wrong why should we continue the experiment?

To answer your question regarding "is it better for the middle and lower classes to have more money going to the government or to the wealthy?", well, your own favorite experiment shows us that enriching the wealthy comes as a detriment to everybody else. Its time expand government funding to schools, infrastructure, jobs retraining, healthcare and so forth. Oh and cut defense spending and raise taxes on the wealthy to balance these extra expenditures. You want to call that demand side spending? I call it smart.

It doesn't matter what you say, or how many facts you present. They've been sold the "dream", meaning that they're convinced that the illusive "one percent" status is actually attainable. So, of course they don't want the big, bad government taking their future earnings. They're called one percenters for one reason people: 99% of us NEVER get there. Meanwhile our infrastructure crumbles, our schools are dilapidated, etc. But let's keep making rich people richer because hey, we may be rich one day as well.

 

[UncleBuck]

"analysis by the Center for American Progress"

BWAHAHAHAHA!

So, a gaggle of liberal halfwits decided they're right? Shocking!

L - freaking O - L

Next you'll be telling us how the hacks at MSNBC weigh in on the subject as further evidence. You can't possibly be this stupid.

didn't you call nate silver a liberal halfwit and then predict that romney would win by 14 points?

 

[UncleBuck]

So maybe it worked for YOU

no, thickstemz is as poor as they get, living in his parent's house in mississippi, trying to hit on chicks using POF.com

believe me, i know every single one of his personal details. he is poor and hopeless.

 

[UncleBuck]

If we're going to leave the trickle down framework in place we need to stop the trickle, if not at our borders, than with nations like ours. Canada, Europe, Australia and a few more.

"just the white ones" - neietzschekeen, aka thickstemz

 

[Fogdog]

It doesn't matter what you say, or how many facts you present. They've been sold the "dream", meaning that they're convinced that the illusive "one percent" status is actually attainable. So, of course they don't want the big, bad government taking their future earnings. They're called one percenters for one reason people: 99% of us NEVER get there. Meanwhile our infrastructure crumbles, our schools are dilapidated, etc. But let's keep making rich people richer because hey, we may be rich one day as well.

Reading watisface's posts got me thinking about the real difference between wingnuts and rational people. Its as if wingnuts are so bought into their theory that they don't even need to check to see how it turned out. You are right about social mobility in the US, we rank among the lowest in terms of this metric in the 1st world. Yet, here we are again, a wingnut is pulling right wing textbook economics right out of his ass and blowing right past facts that show its not a valid theory.

I'd be embarrassed if somebody refuted my argument as completely and as easily as you did to his and it didn't even faze the blowhard.

 

[bearkat42]

Reading watisface's posts got me thinking about the real difference between wingnuts and rational people. Its as if wingnuts are so bought into their theory that they don't even need to check to see how it turned out. You are right about social mobility in the US, we rank among the lowest in terms of this metric in the 1st world. Yet, here we are again, a wingnut is pulling right wing textbook economics right out of his ass and blowing right past facts that show its not a valid theory.

I'd be embarrassed if somebody refuted my argument as completely and as easily as you did to his and it didn't even faze the blowhard.

It's just like when their former poster boy/hero "Joe the plumber" asked the President about taking money from his business when, in reality, he didn't even have a job.

 

[Fogdog]

As to your comment about trickle up, we've tried it. Keynsian economics was the cornerstone of FDR.

The causes of the Great Depression began during the Harding Administration through deregulation of industry and continued until the end of Hoover's term. It wasn't until the early 1930s, after the stock market crash, that expansionary economic policies began being implemented, and look what happened;

Real GDP goes up, unemployment goes down

BAM! You drove that nail down. The thickstemz, I guess, doesn't need facts to draw a conclusion.

 

[ThickStemz]

Again, the whole trickle down package sold to a naive US voter population contained policies to enrich the wealthy of the US. The wealthy in theory would then invest in ways that benefited the US working and middle classes. In the US, this policy was never about Chinese workers. We can definitely say that these policies have failed to deliver the promise to the US population. That bit about getting off a dead horse applies here.

Again, looking at the graph that bearkat posted, the middle and working classes have done worse than stagnate in their condition ever since your beloved trickle down theory was implemented in a grand experiment. The experiment failed. Compared to earlier years, we can now say that Keynesian, demand side strategies are better for the people of this country than the voodoo practiced after 1978. When an experiment shows a theory to be wrong why should we continue the experiment?

To answer your question regarding "is it better for the middle and lower classes to have more money going to the government or to the wealthy?", well, your own favorite experiment shows us that enriching the wealthy comes as a detriment to everybody else. Its time expand government funding to schools, infrastructure, jobs retraining, healthcare and so forth. Oh and cut defense spending and raise taxes on the wealthy to balance these extra expenditures. You want to call that demand side spending? I call it smart.

I think we'd agree that the American people have been sold out. Republicans generally sold us on supply side.

The Democrats are largely responsible for the conditions that have lead to the trade problems.

I don't trust either side. Both have a hand in each of those two factors.

If you want to call it a failed experiment I can't argue. Note I've not said the results have been beneficial for the people. I'm simply explaining the primary reason why it's failed.

I would also add that a demand side economic approach would lead to the same problem, the primary export of America becoming her prosperity and her wealth.


If you ask me which has been worse for America, the economic experiment or the trade deficit, I think any rational person would have to come to the same conclusion. Free trade with countries who might as well use slave labor is a bad idea for a country who is supposed to value a working class

 

[ThickStemz]

BAM! You drove that nail down. The thickstemz, I guess, doesn't need facts to draw a conclusion.

If you don't think the 90% tax rates to pay for WW1 had more to do with the depression than anything than you don't know enough to discuss it. That was the first domino to fall.

FDR had policies that helped. They treated symptoms and made it better. But they extended the pain. The depression was showing no signs of really ending until ww2 began. The economy didn't fully recover until it was over and world reconstruction began. Blind luck that we were the only functional industrial base left. The world turned to our factories for material. That is what ended the economic malaise that FDR couldn't turn around.

 

[ThickStemz]

"just the white ones" - neietzschekeen, aka thickstemz

There are countries in Asia I would put on equal trade status. I just dont know enough about them to feel comfortable naming them outside of Japan, S. KOREA maybe. Maybe a couple more. Certinlty not Vietnam or China.

 

[Padawanbater2]

The Democrats are largely responsible for the conditions that have lead to the trade problems.

If you don't think the 90% tax rates to pay for WW1 had more to do with the depression than anything than you don't know enough to discuss it. That was the first domino to fall.

FDR had policies that helped. They treated symptoms and made it better. But they extended the pain. The depression was showing no signs of really ending until ww2 began. The economy didn't fully recover until it was over and world reconstruction began. Blind luck that we were the only functional industrial base left. The world turned to our factories for material. That is what ended the economic malaise that FDR couldn't turn around.

"The post–World War II economic expansion, also known as the postwar economic boom, the long boom, and the Golden Age of Capitalism, was a period of economic prosperity in the mid-20th century which occurred, following the end of World War II in 1945, and lasted until the early 1970s. It ended with the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system in 1971, the 1973 oil crisis, and the 1973–1974 stock market crash, which led to the 1970s recession. Narrowly defined, the period spanned from 1945 to 1952, with overall growth lasting well until 1971, though there are some debates on dating the period. Booms in individual countries differed, some starting as early as 1945, and overlapping the rise of the East Asian economies into the 1980s or 1990s.

During this time, there was high worldwide economic growth; Western European and East Asian countries in particular experienced unusually high and sustained growth, together with full employment. Contrary to early predictions, this high growth also included many countries that had been devastated by the war, such as Japan (Japanese post-war economic miracle), West Germany (Wirtschaftswunder), France (Trente Glorieuses), Italy (Italian economic miracle), and Greece (Greek economic miracle)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post–World_War_II_economic_expansion

 

[ttystikk]

Milton Friedman? Come on, find someone with Right Wing credibility! That's guy's a piker!

 

[UncleBuck]

The depression was showing no signs of really ending until ww2 began.

factually incorrect.

please feel free to list the unemployment rate under FDR's first term. tell me how much it went down.

then learn to stop revising history, like you do with the holocaust.

 

[ThickStemz]

factually incorrect.

please feel free to list the unemployment rate under FDR's first term. tell me how much it went down.

then learn to stop revising history, like you do with the holocaust.

Please tell me that you don't think employment is the sole factor in determining that? I never said things hadn't improved any, just that improvement was modest.

"We have to start by asking: What does "end the depression" mean? The technical definition of a recession is a specified period of shrinking gross domestic product (GDP). (We may think of a depression as a severe and prolonged recession). The focus on GDP seems to suggest that a recession ends when GDP stops shrinking and starts growing.

But there's a problem: There's less to GDP than meets the eye. It's a statistical aggregate that includes government spending, but in itself, it tells us nothing about what's happening with living standards.

In human terms, a depression isn't a shrinking GDP or some other changed statistical construct. It's a decline in real people's living standards. Therefore, ending a depression requires not a change in sign from minus to plus in a statistical measure, but a rise in prosperity. You can tell a depression has ended by the fact that people live better than they did previously.

When we apply this standard to life during World War II in America, it's clear that the war did not end the depression in any meaningful sense. Economic historian Robert Higgs has debunked the statistics that purport to show that the depression ended during the war. Take unemployment. Unemployment of course was historically high throughout the 1930s, and the rate plummeted once the U.S. government entered the war. But this was no sign of returning prosperity. The government drafted 10 million men into the armed forces and others enlisted to avoid conscription. Those men were not producing prosperity by making consumer goods. They were fighting a war. Moreover, statistics showing that industrial production picked up steam in the 1940s are no indication of prosperity because those plants weren't making consumer goods; they were making war materiel. In fact, those plants diverted scarce resources from the production of consumer goods. The few consumer goods that were produced were rationed. People could buy only a fixed and small quantity of foods, gasoline, and other previously taken-for-granted products. Many things weren't available at all.

Thus the aggregate statistics fail to capture essential details of life. A million dollars spent making automobiles and a million dollars spent making tanks look the same in the GDP tables. But the difference is vast in terms of consumer welfare."


http://reason.com/archives/2013/01/27/world-war-ii-spending-did-not-end-the-gr

 

[ThickStemz]

I didn't know Milton Freidman signed laws into law....

Milton was speaking in a time when exportation of our industry was just starting. He would have never thought it a good idea to ship our manufacturing base to third world countries.

Ill admit to being a little sloppy with my language. Free trade is synonymous with offshoring. But they aren't the same thing. No economist would think it a good idea for a country to scrap a lot of its best paying jobs.

Besides in the video you like Friedman argues there are many special circumstances in which free trade can be a bad idea. I'd say a country that is bleeding good jobs to third world peasants might be a special circumstance. He specifically argues that tariffs are essentially the same thing devaluation, which would greatly help us.

Did you not watch this video or are you not smart enough to understand how it indirectly supports what I'm saying?

 

[AussieWeedSmoker]

fuvk that chart is shocking

 

[ttystikk]

fuvk that chart is shocking

Imagine the level of spin and propaganda required to keep a large portion of the citizenry here from realizing just how badly they're being ripped off by their own system.

 

[NLXSK1]

It doesn't matter what you say, or how many facts you present. They've been sold the "dream", meaning that they're convinced that the illusive "one percent" status is actually attainable. So, of course they don't want the big, bad government taking their future earnings. They're called one percenters for one reason people: 99% of us NEVER get there. Meanwhile our infrastructure crumbles, our schools are dilapidated, etc. But let's keep making rich people richer because hey, we may be rich one day as well.

I am not trying to reach the 1% I am just trying to make a decent living without forking over more than half of it to the government. And you act as if that is unreasonable.

 

[UncleBuck]

I am not trying to reach the 1% I am just trying to make a decent living without forking over more than half of it to the government. And you act as if that is unreasonable.

you clearly have never actually owned a business then. i do own a business and make a fine living, and fork over nowhere near 50% you retarded assclown.