But why would those college students want to make a million dollars? As we just heard, after taxes that’s not a lot of money!

Of course the reason Steele thinks that’s “not a lot of money” is that he spends his time around people so wealthy that a million dollars really is chump change.

“Trust me, after taxes, a million dollars is not a lot of money,” Steele said.

A million dollars after taxes would support my current lifestyle for the next FIFTEEN years.

Amusingly the Republican argument for low taxes on the rich is amazingly similar to lotto ads.

“How many of you want to make a million dollars a year?” Play Powerball! Vote Repub.

The problem lies not in giving rich people everything because you’re a wannabe, but in the fact that Americans believe they will be one of them.  In Death by a Thousand Tax Cuts, the authors published surveys showing that 30 something percent of Americans believed they would someday be a part of the two percentile, economically.

Oh, well, that’s silly, but it’s still a distinct minority.

True, however, over 20% believed they ALREADY WERE in the top two percentile.

Once you put those two numbers together you get it.  You really, really get it.  It’s why the elite have been able to get joe schmo to fight for a repeal of the estate tax.  It’s a frustrating reality, but it’s a reality, and we will never get around it without using methods the right will decry as “class warfare”, which would be no big deal, except that, you know, Democrats are big pussies.

The biggest thing that bothers me about this kind of attitude (“Trust me, after taxes, a million dollars is not a lot of money”) is that while both parties seem to cater almost exclusively to the “needs” of the richest Americans at the expense of everyone else, the policies come from the Right, but the framing of it tends to place blame on the “elitists” of the Left.  Meanwhile the pickpockets of the Right have free rein to pillage and plunder free from negative consequences. 

We hear about wealthy leftist “Hollywood” types and wealthy “liberals” like Al Gore, and how George Soros is single-handedly controlling the US, but the overwhelmingly rightwing Wall Streeters, bankers, multinational corps, military/industrial complex, etc., seem to just slip right under the radar and avoid being perceived at anything more than the level of another faceless group of “them” who control the world.

And it comes out in the weirdest ways.  “OMG, did you know that Obambi is a millionaire?”  But there’s no understanding that every president at least since 1960, and almost all of the rest were “millionaire’s” or equivalent?  Why is it cool that George Bush Jr. was very wealthy (coming in at #10 in a list of the richest presidents in this old Forbes article), but if Obama, or any other Democrat makes more than minimum wage it’s scandalous?  Moreover, how is it that this framing goes unchallenged?  What the hell is wrong with Americans?...

if Obama, or any other Democrat makes more than minimum wage it’s scandalous

Because if Democrats care sooo much about the poor, they should give their money away to help them and quit bullying High Achievers™ with their proposals for punitive, innovation-stifling taxation.  Then the HAs™ would then feel unburdened enough enough to be even more privately generous with their money, and this free and unoppressed society would finally, definitively prove that trickle-down theory would work… in the absence of any formal societal obligations whatsoever (for the wealthy, of course; lesser beings will still need the heavy boot of the state on their necks).

IOW, it’s a not-very-subtextual hypocrisy accusation—one that’s pointless and untrue, but emotionally compelling for people who like to flatter & validate themselves the way conservatives do.

You’re totally underestimating the power of the appeal to audience aspirations of achieving that million-dollar income. It’s not just the attraction of the money, it’s also attraction to the idea that you are one of the superior people who will be/has been able to lift yourself up by the sheer power of your hard work and genius. It’s the American dream. Most people not only aspire to get there, they assume they will. Ask any group of middle-class college kids what they intend to do with their lives and you’ll hear lots of talk about starting their own businesses, staying home while the kids are little—things that are just not possible for most workers, and getting less possible as the financial situation becomes more and more unstable. But no one is pointing that out, because the people in power are all financial winners, and they have no desire to try to share a rapidly shrinking national wealth with a bunch of non-superior types who don’t “deserve” it.

Oh, this is going to be a fun thread, I can tell already. 

First, the Scrooge McQuack fallacy:
““How many of you want to make a million dollars a year?” Steele quickly responded when no hands were raised.

Well, okay then. There’s the Republican argument in a nutshell—-give the goodies to rich people, because you want to be like them, though of course the vast majority of you have no chance at all.”

So what Amanda is implying is that when people get rich, their wealth gets put into a giant building with a dollar sign on it, and they swim around in it for fun, they give none of it to anyone else and nickel and dime anyone they do have to deal with. 

When people try to get rich, they generate wealth for everybody else. Small businesses, owned by upper middle class people trying to get rich, account for a large percentage of employment in the US, and the people that own these businesses pay taxes.  However, raise those taxes, and the businesses will cut costs (fire people) in order to maintain earnings.  Most importantly, raising taxes decreases the incentive for creating wealth = nobody wants to put in 80 hour weeks as an entrepreneur if the government takes their earnings away when they become successful. 

Reducing the inequality of wealth distribution decreases the amount of said wealth.  It’s a tradeoff that every advanced country deals with.  The U.S. decides to maintain a greater amount of inequality than Europe or Canada, which is why it’s so much richer than those places. 

“Using the premise that the rest of us should gladly give up everything to the already-privileged because we want to have their privileges, you should also stop dating if you rate less than a “10” by an impartial jury. “

Interesting analogy, since about the only thing that people can do to make themselves more attractive is losing weight.  So if you’re unhappy with the fact that attractive people get a better choice of partners, should you:
a) change your lifestyle and lose weight?
b) become a ‘fat activist’ and delude yourself into thinking that thinness is attractive because it’s a social construct, and if you complain loud enough, that hunk or super-hot girl is going to be shamed into loving you for the wonderful person you are inside?  Because, after all, you wouldn’t want a fat person for a partner yourself. 

Which leads me to my response to hypatia.  If you did win Powerball, would you give all your winnings away to the poor?

Reducing the inequality of wealth distribution decreases the amount of said wealth.  It’s a tradeoff that every advanced country deals with.  The U.S. decides to maintain a greater amount of inequality than Europe or Canada, which is why it’s so much richer than those places.

PeterZeroOne, that’s a nonsense winger talking point.  Here’s an introduction to the work of economist Samuel Bowles to refute it a bit.

Glad to know you’re straight out of the “workers don’t add wealth to the economy” zone, Peter.  It’s an intriguing theory neatly disproven by how the people you believe keep the economy running—-the owners—-react when workers go on strike.  But keep on keeping on!

Interestingly, the time of greatest prosperity in the U.S.—-the mid-century—-the marginal tax rate that Peter suggests is economy-destroying varied from 88% to 94%.  So, the opposite of your claims are true, Peter.  Allowing the wealthiest people to hoard wealth doesn’t improve the general economy.  The more spread around the money is, the better the economy does. The notion that you have a trade-off between prosperity and reducing inequality sounds good to apologists for inequality, but has no relationship to reality.

Oh lord, What is it with single guys in their 20’s and 30’s that buy into the winger bullshit.  I hear the same shit Peter spewed out of the mouths of other glibertarianish youngins’ that grew up in middle class households and have deluded themselves into thinking that with a little pluck and the ability to play the stock market, they will become millionaires.  No dude, it is a closed club.  There is little economic mobility in this country for a variety of reasons, but the main reason is that the deck is stacked education wise and policy wise, against you.  The rich white dudes are not going to let you into their little club, even if you ask nicely to suck their dicks.

The other reason that taxing the crap out of the wealthy is a good idea is that when you reward getting rich quick, then you encourage the deliberate creation of bubble economies, so that the rich can make a ton and then get out without having to face an enormous tax burden.  Same thing with CEOs who can grab huge bonuses and then run.  If you have to build your wealth slowly, it encourage investment in stable industries.  More manufacturing, less dot com bubbles and housing bubbles.

Just to add the above, Bowles’ main point is that our economy is warped by the panic of the rich.  Because of gross inequality, hey’re terrified that the lower orders will rise up and grab their stuff by violence.  So 25% of the jobs in the U.S. consist of assuaging this anxiety.  Prison guards, cops, private security forces, gatekeepers at gated communities, hospital employees, on and on.  Some of these people could contribute more as inventors or small business entrepreneurs, but they’re scared in place.

Some rank-and-file Republicans, like the ones in my own family, are decent people (if not well-educated or intellectually curious) and they vote Republican because it allows them to believe a simple, positive narrative about the world - namely, that the situation someone is in is due to what they did, and not factors out of their control, which allows them to believe that *they* control their own lives to a greater degree than may actually be the case.  For example, that those who have money *obviously* have it because they earned it, so it would be awful to take that away, while the poor are *obviously* poor because they are slackers or whiners or sucking off the gov’t tit, so it would be equally awful to enable them.  This narrative makes people like my relatives feel good whether they have money or not, because it seems fair to them.  It’s a really deep-seated feeling about the way things should be, is tightly connected to certain strands of Protestant Christianity, and I don’t know if there is anything that can be done to shift the paradigm for these folks.

When I go to Europe, I notice that politicians are just as slimy over there, but people do not seem to think anything the way my Republican relatives think.  They are much more willing to see the structural forces that have led to some people being poor and some being wealthy, and thus they don’t feel ‘greedy’ for demanding their share of the pie and getting out into the street to protest when those in power inevitably start to screw them over (which is after all what always happens - those in power will always start to want more of it, and more resources - but a working class that is aware of this can at least mitigate this universal tendency).

I really don’t have a lot of hope for the U.S. because there are a lot more people following the simple, fact-free ‘personal responsibility’ narrative than there are progressives who think more like the Europeans.

Maybe it goes back to the fact that we are a nation of immigrants, and so the ancestors of most of us did have to ‘make their own way’ under harsh conditions in a fairly dramatic way.  Individuals aren’t necessarily connected with their immigrant past if they are 3rd, 4th, 7th generation in the U.S., of course, but they inherit their attitudes from their parents and such habits of thought pass down the generations basically unchallenged, especially if people do not get a liberal education requiring them to learn to think critically and dissect the logic of arguments that, after all, often go unchallenged in the media as well as the family and social environment.

“Glad to know you’re straight out of the “workers don’t add wealth to the economy” zone, Peter.  It’s an intriguing theory neatly disproven by how the people you believe keep the economy running—-the owners—-react when workers go on strike.  But keep on keeping on! “

Ah yes, the labour theory of value.  You know, I grew up in a country that believed that nonsense.I remember the power and water being out half the time.  I remember empty grocery stores.  I remember butcher shops with only chicken feet for sale.  I remember when my parents had to provide eggs to the baker so he could bake me a cake for my birthday, and they had to trade away their monthly vodka stamps for for the monthly egg stamps of alcoholics to get them. 

My parents had advanced degrees in engineering, and they lived worse than the poor people do in the United States.  That’s what socialism does.

WOWWWW I love how PeterZeroOne manages to fat-shame in a thread that isn’t remotely about that.  What an idiot.

“.  No dude, it is a closed club.  There is little economic mobility in this country for a variety of reasons, but the main reason is that the deck is stacked education wise and policy wise, against you.  The rich white dudes are not going to let you into their little club, even if you ask nicely to suck their dicks. “

What a delusional fantasy world you live in.  The United States probably has the MOST class mobility of any country in the world. 

“Interestingly, the time of greatest prosperity in the U.S.—-the mid-century—-the marginal tax rate that Peter suggests is economy-destroying varied from 88% to 94%. So, the opposite of your claims are true, Peter.  Allowing the wealthiest people to hoard wealth doesn’t improve the general economy.  The more spread around the money is, the better the economy does. “

Up to a limit, comrade.  No wait, I don’t have to call you that, because the Western capitalist countries won the Cold War, because they were better at generating wealth.

Also mid-century was the time of the war; doesn’t apply.

“WOWWWW I love how PeterZeroOne manages to fat-shame in a thread that isn’t remotely about that.  What an idiot. “

Shame is a powerful motivator, which is why you’ll excuse me while I go hit up the gym.

Plus he thinks that helping poor people would suddenly turn the US into the USSR.

I’m so glad PeteZeroOne is here to straighten out us Junior Karl Marx’s and help us understand that Only Pure Unrestrained Randian Capitalism will save us!  After all, it worked out so well the last few times we tried it...

And I apologize for a somewhat off-topic post.  The connection to the post is that people who are highly invested in this sort of Calvinist way of thinking, that the money someone has is a sign of their deservedness, it doesn’t really matter what the dollar amounts are that you talk about.  People know that the televangelists are rich, but if they believe they really are divinely favored, it doesn’t make a difference, it doesn’t make them angry in the least to know that Pat Robertson is worth fifty bajillion dollars while they live in a double-wide.  It seems like the way the world should be, in fact. 

Try convincing someone who truly feels that our world is fair, that it isn’t.  You can’t, because they are not basing their feeling on facts or evidence, and the more facts and evidence you pile up in front of them, the less convincing it is to them.  This is why I really, really despair, because we can gasp at the ridiculousness of the GOP and the audacity and idiocy of what comes out of their mouth - but there are a LOT of people who hear what is said and will nod sagely, because after all Michael Steele wouldn’t have gotten where he is if he didn’t know what he was talking about, would he?

People who *do* use facts and evidence to try to prove a point seem *less* deserving of trust to those of this mentality than people who demagogue and say ridiculous, meaningless dogwhistly crap.  Anything that isn’t extremely simple to understand must be sophistry, chicanery, tricksterism.  If global warming is real, for example, it should be obvious, right?  We shouldn’t need ‘experts’ to explain the world to us; if something is that complicated it’s probably lies.

They have it exactly backwards but good luck trying to convince them of that.

“Shame is a powerful motivator, which is why you’ll excuse me while I go hit up the gym. “

I hate to derail, but I spose your genetic allow you to be thin.  (is a biologist)

At closing for our house, we got a really good idea of how many people believe this malarkey (I’m going to be rich someday, so lets not tax those poor put upon rich people!) and pass it on.  All of the people at the closing kept poo poohing about Obama’s proposal to not let married couples with over $250,000 in income get the full mortgage interest reduction, and how we’d better watch out.  I just laughed.  All of these people know we don’t make anywhere close to $250k as they have all of our mortgage paperwork in front of them.  “Just you wait” they said, as if, our income is likely to magically triple with no effort.  I said, “if I get an unexpected windfall of 250k a year I will be so happy, I will not care about having to pay more taxes.  In fact, if my income goes up that much, I can likely pay off my mortgage in one year”  The funny thing is, we can’t even deduct our mortgage interest because the standard deduction is larger than everything we can itemize.  So it makes no difference anyway.

It’s sad but I don’t think most people have as realistic an opinion of their future potential earnings as we do, and that makes them easy to manipulate by republicans and not realize how these proposals actually screw them over.

Actually, Peter, a Wall Street Journal article available in PDF if you Google “class mobility in U.S. vs. Europe) tells me that those on the bottom rungs of society have greater class mobility in Europe than in the U.S., and that U.S. class mobility has stalled.  That was written in 2005 and I somehow doubt the situation is better for the U.S. poor now.

U.S. class mobility (on a large scale - obviously, you can find individual anecdotes to ‘prove’ anything) is a thing of the past.

What a delusional fantasy world you live in.  The United States probably has the MOST class mobility of any country in the world.

Ahem.

By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark.

Delusional indeed.

Labor is value is an assumption of all economic theory, these days, PZO, and if it weren’t true, employers won’t need workers to do the work and get a surplus value that is more than they spend on worker salaries and employment taxes.

Marx’s solution was to distinguish between labor-time worked and labor power. A worker who is sufficiently productive can produce an output value greater than what it costs to hire him. Although his wage seems to be based on hours worked, in an economic sense this wage does not reflect the full value of what the worker produces. Effectively it is not labour which the worker sells, but his capacity to work.

Imagine a worker who is hired for an hour and paid $10. Once in the capitalist’s employ, the capitalist can have him operate a boot-making machine using which the worker produces $10 worth of work every fifteen minutes. Every hour, the capitalist receives $40 worth of work and only pays the worker $10, capturing the remaining $30 which, after deduction of costs (the leather, depreciation of the machine, etc.) leaves a residual, i.e. surplus value or profit.

The worker cannot capture this benefit directly because he has no claim to the means of production (e.g. the boot-making machine) or to its products, and his capacity to bargain over wages is restricted by laws and the supply/demand for wage labour. Hence the rise of trade unions which aim to create a more favourable bargaining position through collective action by workers.

As the Wiki article on Surplus Value states, Marx didn’t invent the idea, he merely improved upon it and used it in his analysis of labor/capital relationships.

The absolute most tax on $1,000,000 of income would be $350,000, for a net of $650,000.  No-one would actually pay that much, though.  Any competent tax strategy will net at least $700,000 (plus the benefits of living in a civil society). 

I will not lose any sleep for high-income families tonight.

Thoughtful post teabea, thanks.

Even a healthy capitalist economy is supposed to have a lower class, a middle class, and a upper class.  Instead, we have a lower class, an upper class, and an upper upper upper class. 

My family (my mom and dad) make 75,000 a year.  We still scrape to get by in this economy.  If the medium combined income is 52,000, it follows that significantly more that 50% is struggling to get by, whereas in the past they would have made it just fine.  Meanwhile the top 5 or 10 percent maybe is living it up.  That doesn’t seem right at all. 

Call me when the next french revolution style coup d’etat happens.

Gosh, those darn taxes! Look at Colorado Springs, they’re doing just fine without—oh! Nevermind! Anyway, taxes are bad!

Anyone here read The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett?  They examine levels of inequality in various industrialized nations and draw a lot of interesting (and ultimately, um…scary) conclusions about the harmful ways that inequality impacts society as a whole, rich AND poor.  And the studies they looked at on social mobility handily refute PeterOneZero’s contention that the U.S. is still socially mobile.  The Guardian has a review of it here.

“When you let Harold Ford sound like a prince next to you, you’re doing something very wrong. “

Harold Ford as an economic populist. Look out, Gillibrand!

Peter, the problem with mansplaining is that your aggressiveness doesn’t actually mean you’re less wrong.  You haven’t made a reality-based assertion in this thread!  Even your assertion that shame is a good motivator is not based in reality.  Piles upon piles of psychological research have determined that people are far better motivated by the promise of reward than fear of punishment.  If you’re using shame to motivate yourself to work out, odds are you’ll be quitting soon.  Someone who focuses on rewards is far likelier to stick it out.

about the only thing that people can do to make themselves more attractive is losing weight.

Well, there’s also becoming better at conversation, more considerate of others, less ignorant, and much less of an intellectually dishonest right wing asshole.  But I’m not holding my breath for any of that to occur to Dick-Ought-One.

become a ‘fat activist’ and delude yourself into thinking that thinness is attractive because it’s a social construct

There’s a Mr. ‘Renaissance’ on line 2 for you; something about ‘Rubenesque’ women…

because the Western capitalist countries won the Cold War, because they were better at generating wealth.

And the collapse of the USSR had nothing to do with militaristic imperialism or the suppression of civil liberties, two things which are near & dear to the hearts of modern ‘conservatives.’

You know, we can talk about the average family carrying $9k in credit card debt, how financing that debt puts money in the pockets of wealthy shareholders, or how the massive increase in worker productivity has been accompanied by a decrease in real wages, but I suspect we’d be wasting our breath.  Nothing penetrates the force field surrounding Captain Unrestrained Capitalism.

about the only thing that people can do to make themselves more attractive is losing weight.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *snerk* *wheeze*

*dies*

Exhibits A-Z in “Some Men Just Have No Motherfuckin’ Idea...”, and possibly in “Hot Damn Our Standards For Male Attractiveness Are Low.”

When people try to get rich, they generate wealth for everybody else. Small businesses, owned by upper middle class people trying to get rich, account for a large percentage of employment in the US, and the people that own these businesses pay taxes.  However, raise those taxes, and the businesses will cut costs (fire people) in order to maintain earnings. 

Do you know what taxes we are talking about? A sole proprietorship or similar small biz pays taxes on profits. If profits were 250K, that means revenues would have to be around 2.5 million, if this were retail.

You seem to be assuming some form of Say’s Law, which is basically supply side economics. If people don’t have money to buy things, no one will be willing to invest n things. Banks have money and are not investing - because there is no end demand.

Most importantly, raising taxes decreases the incentive for creating wealth = nobody wants to put in 80 hour weeks as an entrepreneur if the government takes their earnings away when they become successful.

Have you read any behaviorial psychology studies regarding incentives? You really think Steve Jobs and Bill Gates work their ass off solely to make more money?

Reducing the inequality of wealth distribution decreases the amount of said wealth.  It’s a tradeoff that every advanced country deals with.  The U.S. decides to maintain a greater amount of inequality than Europe or Canada, which is why it’s so much richer than those places. 

How is the US richer? GDP per capita is around the same, and in most cases lower. Median income is almost always higher elsewhere because the US has a very unequal distribution of wealth.

So this guy is a mansplainer? He seems like a complete dumbass who knows less than nothing about anything but thinks he is a genius. Is he more assholish because he felt the need to correct the bad thinking inherent in weak lady brains or something?

Didn’t Paul Krugman just have an op-ed saying that Canada avoided the financial collapse?

Of course the ideology that says the wealthy should not have any restrictions of any kind because they are indispensable Masters of the Universe has no connection to the ideology that says we should not tax the wealthy too heavily because they are indispensable Masters of the Universe.

”because the Western capitalist countries won the Cold War, because they were better at generating wealth.”

With a 90% top tax rate and 50% union membership! That’s unpossible!

”Also mid-century was the time of the war; doesn’t apply.”
Korea?  You do realize that WW2 was over by the 50’s don’t you?

“Have you read any behaviorial psychology studies regarding incentives? You really think Steve Jobs and Bill Gates work their ass off solely to make more money? “

They DID work their asses off to make money.  Now Gates has had enough and is moving on to other things. 

“Peter, the problem with mansplaining is that your aggressiveness doesn’t actually mean you’re less wrong.  You haven’t made a reality-based assertion in this thread.”

Really?  You’re asserting that the more spread out the wealth is in a country, the richer it is overall.  I’d say my example of the Eastern block neatly disproved that assertion. 

I stand by my assertion that redistributing wealth decreases the incentives for creating it.  Now, what I’m NOT saying is that wealth should be concentrated, only that there’s a trade-off to it.  I’m hardly an unrestrained capitalist - countries are free to make a choice about which way to go.  But it IS a choice. 

“How is the US richer? GDP per capita is around the same, and in most cases lower. Median income is almost always higher elsewhere because the US has a very unequal distribution of wealth.”

The U.S. 2008 GDP per capita (PPP) is 4th according to the World Bank, 6th according to the IMF, exceeded by countries like Quatar, Luxembourg, Norway, Bruinei and Singapore. One is a tax shelter for rich Europeans, the others are oil-rich. 

“Actually, Peter, a Wall Street Journal article available in PDF if you Google “class mobility in U.S. vs. Europe) tells me that those on the bottom rungs of society have greater class mobility in Europe than in the U.S., and that U.S. class mobility has stalled.  That was written in 2005 and I somehow doubt the situation is better for the U.S. poor now.

U.S. class mobility (on a large scale - obviously, you can find individual anecdotes to ‘prove’ anything) is a thing of the past. “

Really? I didn’t know that, I’ll have to take a look at it. 

“And the collapse of the USSR had nothing to do with militaristic imperialism or the suppression of civil liberties, two things which are near & dear to the hearts of modern ‘conservatives.’ “

So, the U.S. wasn’t militaristic or imperialist during the Cold War?  News to me.  If not though then I guess then the only difference would be civil liberties, among which I would count the freedom to create your own destiny.

I think Steele’s line of thinking reveals the essential narcissistic appeal of the Republican position.  Just as opposition to abortion is reduced to “OMG! What if my mommy had aborted me?!?”, opposition to increasing taxes on millionaires is framed as “I’m so special that I’ll definitely be making a million dollars a year! I’d better vote Republican.”  Of course, as life goes on, and the system grinds up and spits out our formerly idealistic young Republican, this line of thinking changes to “the reason I’m not a millionaire is the fault of the minorities/immigrants/liberals!  I’d better keep voting Republican.”  Rinse and repeat.

You’ve go to hand it to the Republicans; they’ve developed a very effective electoral strategy.  It’s hard to go wrong when capitalizing on narcissism and a sense of thwarted entitlement.  The fact that the system also screws their most dedicated supporters is just the icing on the cake.

Sshhh, you’re feeding our claimed russian conservative troll.  His tails of childhood poverty seem pulled straight out of a half-dozen soviet-era biographies of scientists and political leaders.  In all honesty, if you were in a soviet controlled country you would have a better grasp of what the soviets did to drive themselves into the ground and how the western states kept them out of export markets so what goods they did produce were forced into already flooded markets.  By the way, thinness is a social construct, it dates back to around the turn of the 20th century and it has become obnoxiously extreme in the last decade or so.

To focus on topic, Michael Steele is probably the most honest republican out there.  He isn’t playing the fear politics of the teabaggers, he’s just flat out admitting he plays for the 2% at the top and doesn’t care about anything or anybody else.

I’d say my example of the Eastern block neatly disproved that assertion. 

Well, in doing so you also claimed bread grew on trees, so you’re not an authority on much.  After all, you outright said labor had no relationship to the wealth that gets bread into a store.  The harvesting of wheat, baking of bread, selling it—-all useless acts that do nothing to generate the bread wealth.  Only the guy who owns the land had anything to do with it.

Don’t try to mansplain something you know nothing about.

”You’re asserting that the more spread out the wealth is in a country, the richer it is overall.  I’d say my example of the Eastern block neatly disproved that assertion”

So, can you demonstrate that in eastern Europe wealth was spread out more then in western Europe/North America? 

”I stand by my assertion that redistributing wealth decreases the incentives for creating it”

That explains why Guatemala led the world in car production in the 50’s while Detroit was known for exporting agricultural goods

If you compare the USSR to Czarist Russia (where wealth was hardly “spread out”) the Soviets had a higher standard of living.

Of course nobody is advocating complete central planning and abolition of private property, only a return to the kind of policies we had in this country from 1945 to 1980.

And don’t trot out the line of the rest of the world being in rubble responsible—the fact our largest foreign markets were in that condition is a DISADVANTAGE.

Ben D. @ 45,

One of Naomi Klein’s main points in The Shock Doctrine is that free market/Chicago school types reserve their greatest contempt not for Soviet-style state socialism (which had the good grace to implode, forever serving as a go to counter-example for the Peters of the world) but for efforts to forge a “third way” between absolute state control and unrestricted free markets.  The biggest enemy of the Friedmanites was always the New Deal, not the Great Leap Forward. 

Peter is merely invoking the free-marketeers favorite rhetorical device:  the assertion that anything short of unrestricted free markets is tantamount to Soviet socialism, and we all know how that turned out (his later backpedaling notwithstanding).  In the world of the Chicago school, Western European social democracies either don’t exist, are living on borrowed time, or are somehow “poorer” in some vague way that discounts the benefits of the economic security and increased well-being that these societies provide for their people. 

Frankly, the idea of having richer rich people is not a terribly compelling argument for unrestricted free markets.  It sure won’t pay for my wife’s $1300/month MS medicine—which would be free for us if we lived in Western Europe or Canada.  Here, we do without, as the disease slowly eats her brain.  But we’re so much richer than they are, so I guess that makes up for it.  Or something.

it is a closed club.  There is little economic mobility in this country for a variety of reasons, but the main reason is that the deck is stacked education wise and policy wise, against you.  The rich white dudes are not going to let you into their little club, even if you ask nicely to suck their dicks.

This is actually not correct and not even the problem at hand. If we had listened to our grandmothers and become orthodondists, we’d be making plenty of money by now. Certain career paths are designed to make lots of money (finance, specialized medicine, corporate and patent law), and some don’t. If you pick those selected career paths when you’re in your 20s, you’ll always be able to make plenty of money, if that’s what you want to do with your life.

The problem is that under normal circumstances, having lots of money should be useful to buy things like designer clothes, powerful luxury cars, large houses, and vacation homes in exclusive areas: things that ultimately have little to no intrinsic value beyond what your social ambition demands from you. Instead, we’re in a situation where access to basic public goods (livable, vibrant neighborhoods, good quality schools, dependable public services, health coverage that won’t bankrupt you) is only accessible if you make a lot of money. These should be things that anyone should be able to have, even if you are unable or unwilling to focus only on making lots of money. But that means that we need to have tax money invested in these public goods rather than leaving everyone else to scrounge for scraps. Instead, we act as though these public amenities of modern society aren’t basic infrastructure.

Well I don’t even buy that we have a higher per capita GDP because of right wing economic policies relative to Europe’s.

It’s mostly because the United States sits on one of the best pieces of real estate on the entire planet, has a large enough population to be an economic powerhouse but small enough not to be an overcrowded hellhole, and no wars on our soil since 1865. And even that war was only in one half of the country.

And the fact that Republicans STILL fucked up badly enough to end our entire economy despite these advantages just shows how terrible their policies are!

Wait a sec, people only work 80hrs/wk if they make tons of money off of it? Holy cow! Scientists and nurses and grad students and teachers and entrepreneurs and single mothers and the working poor must be making bank.

A lot of conservative rhetoric, financial and otherwise, is based on the promise of a shot at an extremely unlikely reward, with a tiny handful of success stories held up as proof that the gamble can pay off.  It appeals to the same logical fallacy that makes people play the lottery week after week.  Liberals get tarred as pie-in-the-sky dreamers, but it’s Republicans who build national policy on ideas like, “Maybe everyone in the country will suddenly become a millionaire next year!  Then you’ll all feel pretty silly for supporting that higher marginal tax rate, won’t you?”

what are you talking about Tyro?  Even if I had listened to my grandmother and became a doctor or an orthodontist (actually my brother and sister both became research scientists), My parents didn’t have the means to pay for my college education.  I had to take out student loans.  During the Bush administration.  When several student loans were outsourced to private lenders.  Everyone in my family makes a decent living, but the amount we have to pay in student loans pretty much insures that we will all being playing catch up for several years.
Furthermore, several people I know majored in computer science in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, thinking that they would have awesome jobs.  Guess what? they are either out of work, or making a lot less then what they were advisors claimed they would make.
And this isn’t even touching on people that are born poor.  Even just being born poor, with our not so awesome health system, puts people at an inherent disadvantage.  That’s right, the weathliest americans, fighting against health care that would help poor expectant mothers, guarentees that these children will never be able to compete with their own children.

Of course, what’s funny is the presumption that any acknowledgment of the problems of severe inequality or the need to value labor is automatic Communist bloc-style communism.  Instead of, you know, standard issue liberal politics from the mid-20th century that presumed that some inequality isn’t a big deal and can be mildly motivating, having people starving in the streets is bad, and the government should take responsibility for a smoothly running economy.

Or, what Captain Bathrobe said @47.

A lot of conservative rhetoric, financial and otherwise, is based on the promise of a shot at an extremely unlikely reward, with a tiny handful of success stories held up as proof that the gamble can pay off.

Such as, “It’s okay if 95% of women with certain serious pregnancy problems die or become disabled, because one of them produced a Heisman winner!”

kitten parade, the point is that being “rich” in the most vulgar of senses (eg, making lots of money in an annual salary) is available to most everyone with the mental means to do so (and that’s a huge number of people in the USA). There’s no conspiracy holding you back. It’s simply that it’s unrealistic that all of us are going to want to chase after the same limited set of professions. There was no conspiracy that prevented your siblings from becoming orthodopedic surgeons instead of research scientists; they simply preferred (as I do) to pursue their chosen profession and expected that their decent incomes would be sufficient to cover their needs. The problem isn’t that there are people stopping members of the middle class from making lots of money if that’s what they want to focus on, it’s that the mediocre amenities of everyday life that one expects from a modern society are not available to the middle classes, and rather our previous expectations of what we should have are only available to those who decide to focus on making lots of money.

Tyro, there isn’t room at the top of our society for “everyone with the mental means to do so,” to become rich.  Having a head start on wealth, such as being born to rich parents, is the easiest way to become rich in the USA.  Being born poor, or being a member of a minority, means having to overcome all sorts of obstacles that those born rich don’t have to overcome.  With the middle class shrinking, and unemployment high, with our manufacturing base all but destroyed and larger percentages of wealth moving to the top of the pyramid, even being able to become middle class isn’t easy if you start out in poverty.

There may be no conspiracy to keep the rich rich and the poor poor, but the effect is the same as if there were.  The rich tend to give favor to those of their own social and economic class.

I never said there was any sort of “conspiracy” tyro, I simply said, albiet crudely, what G Porgey put more eloquently.  There is no conpiracy, but there are many cultural factors that work against someone from the middle class, except for a select few, from becoming rich.  I would say that for 10 intelligent people from the middle class that have the intelligence and drive to become rich, only one is acutally going to become rich while the others may stay in the middle class due to unforseen factors.  The rich take care of their own.  Their children go to the ivy league schools and have contacts and mentors from their own peer group that will enable them to get good jobs, without having to take out student loans.  And guess what, my brother is a scientific researcher for “Big Pharma” (Argh, I shouldn’t have admitted that, people will immediately ignore any post I make about vaccines again )  He makes a lot of dough, but he went to an ivy league school and still has to pay an enormous amount in student loans, and he is just barely living a middle class lifestyle, and he does not have any expensive toys or whatnot.  His pals from the ivy league that came from cash have plumb jobs and assloads of cash because their parents had money.  Will he ever be rich?  Maybe, but I am thinking the way washington is going the economy is going to collapse and we will all have to live like peasants

I can usually spell,actually, but its the combination of bong hits and the puppy bowl that are conspiring against me

about the only thing that people can do to make themselves more attractive is losing weight.

(hint) Actually, there are a lot of things you can do to make yourself more attractive.  Not being a patronizing, mansplaining Randian is one of them. (/hint)

Tyro, there isn’t room at the top of our society for “everyone with the mental means to do so,” to become rich.

That’s correct. Instead, we depend on the fact that most people have better things to do than pursue the limited set of professions that lend themselves to paying people lots and lots of money and the people who actually wanted to do that filled those “slots.” Judging from the number of graduate degrees and other academic accomplishments people tout in their comments on pandagon, it seems like plenty of us could have pursued those professions, but we didn’t. It’s not a “closed club” in that I really don’t think the “malefactors of great wealth” care whether or not middle class people enter high-paying professions. The point is that making lots of money should carry with it the same advantages as being named “employee of the month”: something that’s nice but doesn’t really give you anything important (access to good schools, public infrastructure, vibrant neighborhoods) in a modern society that anyone else doesn’t have.

there are many cultural factors that work against someone from the middle class, except for a select few, from becoming rich.

Those cultural factors are that, well, some of us prefer to get Ph.D.s or go into teaching rather than investment banking or plastic surgery. The door wasn’t “closed” to us by the rich. We just had other priorities.

I think the dynamic is not so much that people “think” they’re going to get rich but are invested in the idea that they would be rich were it not for taxes and regulation “getting in the way.” The Republican sales manager and chemical engineer aren’t making hundreds of thousands of dollars because those jobs just don’t pay that much, but they’re convinced that the government just has to “get out of the way” to pave the way for their success rather than admitting to themselves that they cashed in on jobs that seemed like they made a lot of money when they were a lot younger.

There are as many or more opportunities to get rich now than there were in the past. The problem, as I keep saying, is that the middle class is worse off than they were in the past.

Higher taxes actually mean more economic growth. (So do democratic presidents. So do presidents who raise taxes. None of these correlations imply causation, of course, but none of them is even close, and none of them require any qualification.)

So, when Steele asked the “want to” question, Ford should come back with “How many would accept higher taxes once you got to earn a million bucks, if it meant a greater chance of getting there?”

Guatemala in the 50s had a center-left regime for 4 years, before the CIA-sponsored coup, so that was a bad example of a tax haven. Try Honduras.

I would say that the business owner who works an 80 hour week, and suddenly decides the hours aren’t worth it because of the taxes on millionaires, will NOT scrap his business suddenly, but hire an office manager/assistant manager/admin assistant—whatever is appropriate for his type of business. And that person will, for 38K-52K a year, work for 40 hours, do 50 hours worth of the owner’s productivity, leaving him free to work HUMAN hours and get in a golf game while expanding his business.

Delegation would be his friend.

Comment #8: PeterZeroOne on 02/07 at 12:29 PM

When people try to get rich, they generate wealth for everybody else.

Except when they get richer while everybody else gets poorer:

“The earnings of the typical full-time worker, adjusted for inflation, have actually fallen since Bush took office. Pay for CEOs, meanwhile, has soared — from 185 times that of average workers in 2003 to 279 times in 2005.”

let’s deal with PeterZero the Ayn Rand wannabe one step at a time:

Reducing the inequality of wealth distribution decreases the amount of said wealth.  It’s a tradeoff that every advanced country deals with.  The U.S. decides to maintain a greater amount of inequality than Europe or Canada, which is why it’s so much richer than those places.

it also has the worst social health (mental and physical health, prevalence of violence, quality of education, child-wellbeing, teen pregnancy rates, etc.) among western nations. and it’s not a statistical fluke, either. economic equality and social wellbeing are very strongly correlated, statistically speaking.

The United States probably has the MOST class mobility of any country in the world.

you’re wrong.

I stand by my assertion that redistributing wealth decreases the incentives for creating it.

which explains why the most equal OECD country is also the world’s 2nd largest economy, followed closely by the 7th and 10th most equal (the U.S. was 22nd, with only Singapore being more unequal)

oh, wait, no it doesn’t.
—————
and lastly, I should note that more equality doesn’t lead to “communism”. Europe’s nations are all social democracies, not stalinist dictatorships.

”Guatemala in the 50s had a center-left regime for 4 years, before the CIA-sponsored coup, so that was a bad example of a tax haven. Try Honduras.”

OK Honduras, but my point wasn’t “tax haven” it was social inequality
Even under the leftist regimes of today like Lula or Chavez they have made some strides in reducing it but still have vastly more inequality then Europe or North America

All 3rd world countries do

Hmmm… maybe massive inequality dosent create wealth but keeps you in 3rd world status … nah that’s un possible, say’s so in atlas shrugged

So what Amanda is implying is that when people get rich, their wealth gets put into a giant building with a dollar sign on it, and they swim around in it for fun, they give none of it to anyone else and nickel and dime anyone they do have to deal with.

DouchePeter, I grew up among the very, very wealthy. I was from the poor side of the tracks, so my family was merely quite wealthy. And what you’re claiming Amanda implies is exactly what they do. The Bill Gates who dedicates his vast fortune to making the world a better place is the exception that proves the rule: everyone I grew up with, to a person, was a cheap, awful bastard/bitch who treated everyone around them as if they were peasants or servants and wouldn’t have given ten bucks to the Haitian relief fund if you held a gun to their head. Great wealth breeds entitlement, the sort that drips off every word of bullshit you speak, and nothing embodies entitlement better than seeing others as lazy or subhuman or insects.

Oh, and as others here have most excellently demonstrated, the rest of your argument is demonstrably untrue, as well.

Which leads me to my response to hypatia.  If you did win Powerball, would you give all your winnings away to the poor?

1. I wouldn’t play the American lotto because the tax rate is atrocious compared to my capitalist haven of Canada and their policy of 0% tax for windfalls.

2. My partner and I are probably those poor people who are “unattractive” to wealth because of disability/getting another diploma to increase my job opportunities. (Will going to the gym help?)

3. And most importantly: Way to miss the point!  Which was described in much better detail later on but I’ll recap.  The likelihood of those students becoming millionaires because America keeps with the “Bush Era” income tax rates (or go even lower still) is about the same as if they were to become millionaires by going out and purchasing some lotto tickets.

Actually probably worse, but they work on the same principle; throw some dollar signs out there to keep them starry eyed while you rake in the dough.

everyone I grew up with, to a person, was a cheap, awful bastard/bitch who treated everyone around them as if they were peasants or servants and wouldn’t have given ten bucks to the Haitian relief fund if you held a gun to their head.

That describes my great-grandfather to a T, and in my family it was offset by the fact that a Catholic layperson of wealth was expected to do something in the way of helping the Mother Church back during the first third of the 20th Century.

Ask any service-type worker where their best tips come from- here’s a hint, it’s not likely to be from the table ordering $50 bottles of wine.

Tyro:

The problem with your model is that jobs like orthopedic surgeon and financier are high-paying in significant part because there is a limited supply. For everybody who wanted to become a doctor to become one and make piles of money, we’d need 10 times as many medical schools, 10 times as many residency spots at hospitals, blah blah blah. And then guess what: with an oversupply like that being a doctor wouldn’t be a passport to wealth. Same thing with financiers: to have lots more of them, you need lots more people with capital willing to risk it under the financier’s management. (And we’ve seen what happens when you have only a middling expansion in the size of the financial industry.)

And unless you’re lucky, whatever you choose at the beginning of your career will be useless by the end. Engineering used to be on a par with medicine and law for personal income.

Didn’t Paul Krugman just have an op-ed saying that Canada avoided the financial collapse?

Don’t worry, Mr. Harper is making his damnest effort to make sure we don’t get left out.

(What a lot of free marketers won’t tell you is that we missed to worst of it because of *government regulations* that disallowed some of the financial products based on high risk mortgages that tanked in the USA.)

From a purely utilitarian point of view, if you could just distribute a billion dollars of annual income—in a vacuum—it would probably yield the most beneficial outcomes if you split it evenly among maybe 20,000 families at $50,000/yr each.

It’s the concept of marginal utility. An extra buck is really valuable when you have only $20K/yr. It’s hardly anything when you have $1MM/yr. Somewhere around $50K/yr somewhat works for a small family to be solidly in the working-class income range or somewhat near the lower-middle-class range depending on where they live.

A high mean income isn’t a good measure of how well-off a society is, simply because someone pulling in $1MM/yr isn’t twenty times as happy as someone making one twentieth of that.