Quote Originally Posted by Lyle View Post
So you're saying we need some kind of wealth redistribustion? Some sort of Communist solution to our problem That's shocking Kirkland, I never would have guessed something like that would come from you

They have this thing called The Lottery...that gives poor people the chance to be rich and blow millions of dollars.

The problem with you is you compare last year's numbers to this year and even then you would have admitted the numbers were blown up due to what was going on with subprime loans and the housing market.
Yes, we definitely need a little bit of wealth distribution. And I want to make sure you really understand why so that, in ten or twenty years when you look back on the 2000s with the benefit of hindsight, you realise that you were wrong again and I was right again. In fact I'd like you to print this post out and keep it in a safe place just so I know for certain that in the future you'll be reminded at least once of my Infallibility.

US economic policy is insane. For 30 years now huge tax cuts for the top 1% have created huge national debt and ongoing deficits that are a drag on the economy. Huge tax increases on low/middle income earners over the same period haven't brought in enough revenue to cver the debt, but have stripped 90% of Americans of most of their excess cash. So for a decade Americans have borrowed against the rising value of their homes to maintain their standard of living -- a trillion dollars a year, or as the total worth of the US is about fifty trillion, effectively a State a year is currently being sold off to foreign creditors to maintain current standards of living. Now that people can't borrow so easily, there's going to be an eventual drop in spending and this will affect economic growth, as 71% of US GDP is consumr spending.

Median wages that are barely higher than they were in 1970, adjusted for inflation. Male wages today are in lower than they were then -- the income of a young man in his 30s is now 12 per cent below that of a man his age three decades ago. So if low/middle income people are all tapped out and their wages aren't going up any, where is the spending/economic growth coming from? The only way to do it is to distribute more of the wealth to the bottom 99% of the population, so that the money is spent in the economy and pinballs around from person to person, business to business, enriching everybody. The good old Keynesian multiplier. Probably the besy way to do this is taxation. The top half or one percent really wouldn't noticea 10 or 20% increase in their taxes, they own half of the country's wealth, they already spend all they want and due to the explosion of wealth to the top that the Bush tax cuts/policies have created most aree earning 5-10 times what they were making even in 2000. And that money is being exported as fast as possible to be invested in emerging economys like China where it makes more money than in the US because of the f'd up economic situation there. It's difficult to be a capitalist country with no capital.

So somehow more of the wealth that the top earners are creaming off has to be spread through the economy for conomic growth to continue to be robust. Whether it's empowering unions again or just tax manipulation it needs to happen.