Let's make fun of Trump, bash him, etc. while we can!

[Bob Butler 54]

(09-10-2016, 05:07 AM)Galen Wrote:

(09-10-2016, 04:35 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(09-10-2016, 04:31 AM)Galen Wrote:

(09-10-2016, 03:04 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(09-10-2016, 02:58 AM)Galen Wrote: The Tri-County area is infested with a bunch of politically correct people virtue signaling assholes.  Like Eric the Obtuse they don't have enough sense to leave everyone else alone.  Its ironic when you think about it, if they weren't busy stealing from me and trying to run my life I wouldn't give a shit what they did.

Pay your taxes without complaint. Be a citizen.

Citizenship these days is badly overrated.  Medieval serfs got to keep more of their earnings.

They couldn't buy much with them, though, and they didn't have a government that served them in any way except (maybe) to protect them from brigands and other lords. Nor did they have any social and economic mobility, nor much freedom or much of a life. At least some Americans still have that mobility, though much less since the conservatives took over in 1980. What you forget is that quality of life is about more than just your own personal stash of money/wealth.

True enough but that society was the product of technological limits and the high costs of projecting force.  See Davidson and Rees-Mogg for a full explanation.  My personal quality of life is very much a function of the amount of my wealth that I can keep.  Actually, wealth inequality started getting worse in 1971 which was before Reagan.  An interesting year for a number of reasons.

I'm just starting into Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty.  One chart of interest shows income inequality restarting with Reagan and supply side over stimulus.  Interestingly, the period when America was great starts not with the New Deal, but with the massive taxes on the wealthy imposed to fight World War II.

The over all thesis of the book is interesting.

Thomas Piketty Wrote:When the rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the growth rate of the economy (as it did through much of history until the nineteenth century and as is likely to be the case again in the twenty-first century), then it logically follows that inherited wealth grows faster than output and income. People with inherited wealth need save only a portion of their income from capital to see that capital grow more quickly than the economy as a whole. Under such conditions, it is almost inevitable that inherited wealth will dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime’s labor by a wide margin, and the concentration of capital will attain extremely high levels—levels potentially incompatible with the meritocratic values and principles of social justice fundamental to modern democratic societies.

It's not an easy read.  Lots of data.  I'm not sure I'm enough into the numbers to work my way through it.  At a first look though, policies like the New Deal that reduce return on capitol and favor plowing profits back into the economy can blunt the effects of ever growing income equality.  However, such policies are historically rare.  

He reviews and disparages early historical economic theories.  These include pessimistic theories like Malthus and Marx predicting impending inevitable doom, and optimistic theories such as 1950's libertarianism that suggest free market forces will fix all if governments don't mess it up.  He illuminates and reviews the historical situations that led the historical writers to propose their theories, but points out that the data doesn't support the old theories.

He also shows a justified distrust for modern theoretical mathematical economics, saying a lot of work ought to be done and has been done collecting real world information on wealth distribution from sources such as tax records.  People just have to act on it.

An interesting book that confirms the blue approach to economics.