Political & Elections

soccerguy, 

You are knowledgeable enough to answer your own question, "who is getting that money?"

But to lead this on, If poor people are not invested in the stock market that leaves, Everyone Else. And  Everyone else, is/are, Who?

One should be very careful to say "the stock market doubles in 5 years."

-- Edited by longprime on Saturday 15th of September 2012 09:50:03 PM

The issue I have with designer stuff is that the Product is price high but so is the overhead. 

I just did SLV. Bought last week sold today near the peak. I don't mine short term profits because its in IRAs. Will tolerate some loss but not much, because it is an IRA.  I have to get into a commodity and an industrial to diversify. I still holding about 50% cash on expectations of big drop on elections and inflation. Who would have thunk it, PBO gaining credibility and the FRB is flooding the world with money and the markets go nuts on low volumes. 

As for the devide, I don't think that it is good for America. The difference between winning and losing in America shouldnt be predicated on inherited wealth and loopholes. 

mortgage rates will go down especially now that housing is improving, multinational companies will have increased profits because of the cheaper dollar and will hire more.  I'm the investor class and I just love Bernanke.

"He continued Bush's tax cuts, but at the same time he also expanded programs creating more debt."

and Bush and Reagan didn't?

Fed Reserve doing QE3, Sept 13. Equity markets shoot up and so does hedging metals. ???

No signs of inflation yet. Ron Paul and Paul Ryan prediction is stilll off the mark. ???

longprime,

Didn't Obama have both houses too in his 1st 2 yrs? He had the Senate for all 4 yrs.

There's no doubt that there are inequities in this country and the world that should be addressed but the way discussions about income inequality and the rich-poor gap are usually framed makes my blood boil. The typical discussion rests almost entirely on the notion that income and wealth ineqaulity are inherently "bad" in and of themselves and are therefore a "problem" that must be fixed. To accept that notion on its face is to accept as the starting point for any subsequent discussion the leftist world view of an unending struggle between the "haves" and the "have nots," which means that the only thing left to decide is how we should go about redistributing income and wealth. This is an especially specious notion since it it precisely the "solution" of redistribution which is a significant contributor to the gap through the changes in culture, attitude, and world view it fosters in exactly the population it is intended to help (see Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, by Charles Murray).

Nobody anywhere is arguing that society does not have a moral obligation to help those who legitimately cannot help themselves, or that there should be a "safety net." jeez louise if we're going to talk about supposed inequality we may as well talk about all of it.

The notion that income and wealth inequality are inherently bad things in and of themselves is a leftist falsehood which ignores too many inconvenient truths which undermine, if not destroy the it, and so the notion must be rejected as the baseline premise from which to start discussions about how to "fix" the nation's ills. If we do not do this then the odds are much greater that we'll make things far worse for ourselves and for our descendents, not better.

After a financial crisis, a deep recession, and a stalled recovery, it should be no surprise that poverty in America is on the rise. This fall, the Census Bureau reported that a record 46 million Americans — 15% of the population — were living below the poverty line. This is a troubling figure, and it should certainly move us to act to help the poor as we strive to grow the economy.

But efforts to address poverty in America are frequently derailed by misguided ideology — in particular, by the notion that poverty is best understood through the lens of inequality. Far too often, policymakers succumb to the argument that a widening gap between the richest and poorest Americans is the fundamental problem to be solved and that poverty is merely a symptom of that deeper flaw.

Such concerns about inequality are not baseless, of course. They begin from a fact of the modern American economy, which is that, in recent decades, incomes among the poor have risen less quickly than have incomes among the wealthy. And such growing inequality, some critics contend, is both practically and morally dangerous. A growing income divide can foster bitterness and animosity between classes, threaten democracy, and destabilize the economy. Above all, they argue, it violates the cherished moral principle of equality.

Implicit in much of the critique of our income divide is the assumption that inequality per se is inherently unjust, and therefore that the gap between rich and poor is as well. That perceived injustice in turn spurs support for redistributionist policies that are intended to make levels of prosperity more equal across society.

President Obama commonly uses the language of justice and equality to advance such an agenda — speaking, for instance, of "the injustice in the growing divide between Main Street and Wall Street." Other left-leaning politicians, commentators, economists, and activists say much the same. Some religious figures have even used their moral concerns about inequality to justify the imposition of specific redistributionist economic policies. For example, Jim Wallis, president of the liberal religious organization Sojourners, has said that inequality in America — "a sin of biblical proportions" — necessitates a higher minimum wage, higher taxes on the rich, and increased welfare spending.

But though the gap between rich and poor may be widening, this obsession with inequality — and this preferred approach to mitigating it — are fundamentally counterproductive. They are born of a misconception rooted in a flawed understanding of both justice and economic fact. Even if their premises and objectives were sound, these policies would have perverse unintended consequences — fostering class resentment, destroying jobs, and reducing wages and opportunities for the poor most of all. Such policies also tend to undermine the family and create a culture of dependence on the state — unleashing harmful consequences that would, again, fall disproportionately on the poor. http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/justice-inequality-and-the-poor


False premise #1. A widening gap is not normal

The income gap between a person who makes, say $100,000 and a person who makes $40,000 is $60,000. If both people get a 5% annual raise then their new salaries will be $105,000 and $42,000, and the gap between them will widen[i/] to $63,000. “Income inequality” will increase[i/] by $3,000. This is perfectly normal. OF COURSE the gap between a person who makes a high income will "widen" in comparison to a person who makes a lower income. But so does the gap between the lower person and another who is lower still. This is what WANT. In a free market society the principle of compound interest, whether it is applied to income or to savings is a good thing. It is one of, if not the, most prevalent ways PEOPLE MOVE UP from lower incomes to higher ones, and from less wealth to more wealth. A REAL problem would exist if that DID NOT happen. To suggest otherwise is to misrepresent reality.

False premise #2. People tend to stay in their current income/wealth bracket.

And speaking of moving up, most people in the bottom bracket don’t stay there, they move up. Many of them move to the very top bracket. “Most income statistics present a snapshot picture as of a given moment – and their results are radically different from those statistics which follow the same given individual over a period of years. For example, three-quarters of those Americans whose incomes were in the bottom 20 percent in 1975 were also in the top 40 percent at some point in the next 16 years. … That makes it completely misleading to say, for example, that “people making minimum wages have waited ten long years for a raise,” because these are not the same people making the same wages for ten years, even when the minimum wage level has not been changed in a decade. Far from being an enduring class, most Americans in the bottom 10 or 20 percent of income-earners are transients in those brackets – as are people in other income brackets.” (Thomas Sowell, “Economic Facts and Fallacies,” p. 136.) “A major study at the University of Michigan has followed the same individuals – tens of thousands of them – over a period of decades. Among individuals who are actively in the labor force, only 5 percent of those who were in the bottom 20 percent in income in 1975 were still there in 1991, compared to 29 percent of those in the bottom quintile in 1975 who had risen to the top quintile by 1991.” (Sowell, p. 145.)


False premise #3. Comparisons of household income in the top and bottom brackets are apples-to-apples comparisons.

“The top 20 percent of households have four times as many workers as the bottom 20 percent, and more than five times as many full-time, year-round workers.” (Sowell, page 128.) “The poorest fifth of households contain 25 million fewer people than the fifth with the highest incomes.” (Sowell, p. 127.)
Is it any wonder then, that the top 20 percent of households make more money than the bottom 20 percent by a wide margin?

False premise #3. Education levels among rich and poor are the same.

“While nearly 60 percent of Americans in the top 20 percent graduated from college, only 6 percent of those in the bottom 20 percent did.” (Sowell, p. 128.) It is only natural that the more educated, on average, earn more.

False premise #4. All sources of income/wealth are counted in the supposed gap.

“Most statistics on income inequality are very misleading in yet another way. These statistics almost invariably leave out money received as transfers from the government in various programs for low-income people which provide benefits of substantial value for which the recipients pay nothing. Since people in the bottom 20 percent of income receive more than two-thirds of their income from transfer payments, leaving those cash payments out of the statistics greatly exaggerates their poverty – and leaving out in-kind transfers as well, such as subsidized housing, distorts their situation even more. In 2001, for example, cash and in-kind transfers together accounted for 77.8 percent of the economic resources of people in the bottom 20 percent. In other words, the alarming statistics on their incomes soften cited in the media and by politicians count only 22 percent of the actual economic resources at their disposal.” (Sowell, p. 128.)

False premise #5. "The Rich" don't ALREADY pay WAY MORE than their "Fair Share"

People who make more also PAY proportionally MUCH more in taxes. “The wealthiest 1 percent of the population earn 19 percent of the income but pay 37 percent of the income tax. The top 10 percent pay 68 percent of the tab. Meanwhile the bottom 50 percent – those below the median income level – now earn 13 percent of the income but pay just 3 percent of the taxes.” ( http://www.american.com/archive/2007/november-december-magazine-contents/guess-who-really-pays-the-taxes ) People whose earned income is in the top half of all brackets pay virtually the entire tax burden of the United States. Much of what the top half pays is redistributed to those in the bottom half but not counted as part of the bottom half’s income. The people in the lower half are essentially free riders.

False premise #6. Those who pay more into the system get more out of it.

In the calendar year 2004, the bottom 20 percent of households paid about $1,684 in taxes, but received $24,860 in federal government spending. In other words, they received more than they contributed by a factor of almost 15. The second 20 percent paid $6,644 and received $19,889. They received more than they paid by a factor of three. The third 20 percent paid $13, 028 and received $16,781, also receiving more than they paid. The fourth 20 percent received less government spending than it paid in to the system, by a margin of $22,719 to $15,502. They paid about 1.5 times what they got back. The top 40 percent pay more than they get back. Everyone else gets a return on their “investment.” The top 20 percent paid $57,512 and received $18,573. They paid over three times what they got back. (From a chart, here: http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/sr151.pdf )

So how is Obama suppose to handle this - he continued the Bush tax cuts - all of them.  The rich - poor gap has been growing for decades independent of whos been president.