Congratulations: What 30 Years Of "Trickle Down" Policies Have Produced

[Cigar]

http://upload.democraticunderground.com/imgs/2014/140122-what-30-years-of-trickle-down-policies-have-produced.jpg

The world's wealthiest people aren't known for travelling by bus, but if they fancied a change of scene then the richest 85 people on the globe – who between them control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population put together – could squeeze onto a single double-decker.


The extent to which so much global wealth has become corralled by a virtual handful of the so-called 'global elite' is exposed in a new report from Oxfam on Monday. It warned that those richest 85 people across the globe share a combined wealth of £1tn, as much as the poorest 3.5 billion of the world's population.


How richest use their wealth to capture opportunitiesPolling for Oxfam's report found people in countries around the world - including two-thirds of those questioned in Britain - believe that the rich have too much influence over the direction their country is heading.


Byanyima explained:

"In developed and developing countries alike we are increasingly living in a world where the lowest tax rates, the best health and education and the opportunity to influence are being given not just to the rich but also to their children.


"Without a concerted effort to tackle inequality, the cascade of privilege and of disadvantage will continue down the generations. We will soon live in a world where equality of opportunity is just a dream. In too many countries economic growth already amounts to little more than a 'winner takes all' windfall for the richest."



http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Business/Pix/pictures/2014/1/20/1390211106000/Working-for-the-Few---Oxf-009.jpg

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jan/20/oxfam-85-richest-people-half-of-the-world


http://www.solidarity.com/hkcartoons/images/TrickleDown.gif
http://proactvoice.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/reaganomics-trickle-down.jpg

[Chris]

Why does Obama use trickle down then?

[Captain Obvious]

http://imgace.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/hello-yes-this-is-douchebag..png

[Cigar]

Why does Obama use trickle down then?

Did you forget to post your link or do you just have gas ... :tongue:

[Cigar]

http://imgace.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/hello-yes-this-is-douchebag..png

Hello Douchebag ... how ya doing? :laugh:

[patrickt]

Cut Cigar some slack. He can only go with what he's sent and he doesn't actually have to read it or understand it.

[killianr1]

Obamanomics has managed to accelerate the money shift to the ultra rich.

Duhh....... a snake is a snake is a snake


In an interview that aired Sunday on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," the show host cited a recent study from the University of California, Berkeley, (http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2012.pdf)that found 95% of income gains from 2009 to 2012 went to the top 1% of the earning population.



The president agreed with Stephanopoulos.
"The folks in the middle and at the bottom haven't seen wage or income growth, not just over the last three, four years, but over the last 15 years," the president said.
In fact, other data also show that America's median household income has dropped (http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/05/news/economy/middle-class-wages/index.html?iid=EL) by more than $4,000 since 2000, after adjusting for inflation.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/15/news/economy/income-inequality-obama/

[keymanjim]

And the moral of the story is: DON'T BE POOR.

[keymanjim]

Incidentally, who are those 85 people? Is there a list?

[zelmo1234]

Can anyone explain to me where the capital comes from to grow the economy from the bottom up? I need help

[Chris]

Did you forget to post your link or do you just have gas ... :tongue:

Discussion after discussion has demonstrated that the decades' long development of crony corporatism in the form of bail outs, quantitative easy and other regulatory favors have only increased under Obama's watch gutting the middle class and poor and enriching the rich.

[Chris]

Cut Cigar some slack. He can only go with what he's sent and he doesn't actually have to read it or understand it.


Yea but he should get the I'm a Partisan Union (IMAPU) to demand better material.

[Chris]

Obamanomics has managed to accelerate the money shift to the ultra rich.

Duhh....... a snake is a snake is a snake



http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/15/news/economy/income-inequality-obama/


There's your link, cigar. Thank killianr.

[Cigar]

Discussion after discussion has demonstrated that the decades' long development of crony corporatism in the form of bail outs, quantitative easy and other regulatory favors have only increased under Obama's watch gutting the middle class and poor and enriching the rich.

Ok you have Gas :tongue:

[Cigar]

Obamanomics has managed to accelerate the money shift to the ultra rich.

Duhh....... a snake is a snake is a snake



http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/15/news/economy/income-inequality-obama/



Well lets see ... Infrastructure = NO; :rollseyes:

[killianr1]

Well lets see ... Infrastructure = NO; :rollseyes:

Lets see, would that be the infrastructure that the stimulus program (sponsored by Obama and Democrats) failed to improve or add additional?

Is that the infrastructure of which you speak?

[zelmo1234]

Lets see, would that be the infrastructure that the stimulus program (sponsored by Obama and Democrats) failed to improve or add additional?

Is that the infrastructure of which you speak?

Yes the first round failed completely and what he democrats are looking for is Stimulus round two, more of the same failure!

[patrickt]

I had to study the graphic that was posted a bit and then I realize what what the elephant was producing was a Cigar.

[Newpublius]

Can anyone explain to me where the capital comes from to grow the economy from the bottom up? I need help

Of course, Zelmo, the government. The government takes the dollar from you, because after all, while you spent thousands of hours the past year to earn those dollars, you obviously won't know how to spend, save or invest those dollars that your blood, sweat and tears produced. Instead of course, the government will make a centrally determined expenditure that must obviously be more stimulative than anything you could possibly make and voila! The economy will grow and flourish like its 1985 in East Germany! How could you be so stupid?

[Newpublius]

Well lets see ... Infrastructure = NO;

Its funny because whether its military contractors or road contractors, those companies are owned by poor people, right?

For instance in NJ the Route 3 road project which was supposed to be completed by the Super Bowl by the way. Surprise surprise, its not....that's a joint effort between two contractors, one of which is Sanzari....

J. Fletcher Creamer & Son Inc. and Joseph M. Sanzari Inc. - real poor guys, I'm sure.

[Newpublius]

Yes the first round failed completely and what he democrats are looking for is Stimulus round two, more of the same failure!

The government can't get it through its head that it doesn't create demand, at best it can only transfer demand (after it goes through government's bureacracy wastes significant percentages of it).

Somehow a calamity will befall our nation unless we continue to borrow like drunken sailors, right? FALSE. The Democrats want you to believe that the sine qua non of American prosperity is the government and that unless the government borrows money and spends it, on the multitude of topics that the government wants to spend money on, that the country’s economy will be stricken and will otherwise suffer a death blow. In introductory economics classes, many of you may have heard about the old example of “guns versus butter” a simple two dimensional analysis to express the concept that societies face choices and that choosing one thing will preclude choosing the other. Well, aside from guns and butter, that two dimensional analysis can be applied to virtually anything and in this context between “government and ‘anything else’” You see, this is quite pertinent here because it will illustrate exactly what our society will do if the government decreases spending, it will quickly allocate from the government to “anything else” and the reason is really quite simple. While the Democrats are focused on their left hand and what the government is spending money on, everyone pays attention to the left hand and completely forgets what the right hand isn’t doing. Of course if we were to glance at the right hand, we’d note that those people were kind enough to buy our government’s bonds (or supply tax dollars through direct taxation) at currently ridiculously low interest rates.



Of course, once those bonds are bought and the bondholder spends his money on the bond, the bondholder no longer has cash to spend on ‘anything else’ (and neither does the taxpayer)




And now of course the salient fact should become quite evident. Once we stop selling bonds, the bondholders (taxpayers) will spend their money elsewhere – on “anything else” and our society will begin its reallocation of resources from the public sector to the private sector.

It really is that simple and is actually part of the logic behind the Federal Reserve’s repeated efforts to stimulate the economy through quantitative easing. In the case of quantitative easing, the Federal Reserve creates money, ex nihilo, and buys assets with them on the premise that the person, now armed with cash in hand will spend that money. Of course, the government itself will feel a recession, but the rest of the economy will begin to recover from the hangover of excessive government spending that now consumes, at all levels, in excess of 40% of our national income as the funds that were formerly spent on government bonds filter their way into the veins and arteries of the private sector around the entire country. -

[nic34]

An Economic Cancer: The Top 1% Earns More Than the Bottom 50%

Recently, Senator Bernie Sanders published the following data set on his website:

"In America today, the top 1 percent owns 38 percent of our country's financial wealth. The bottom 60 percent owns 2.3 percent. The increasing wealth inequality in the United States has become the great moral issue of our time"......

-----
Indeed, given the data above, one can come to the conclusion that from the capitalists' perspective, this is indeed the Golden Age of American Capitalism. The one and only goal of the capitalist system is for the capitalists to make money, to make profit from whatever piece of the economic system they have control of at the time: exploitation of natural resources, manufacturing, trade, trading in financial paper, banking, insurance, the military- and prison-industrial complexes, and so on and so forth. Nothing else matters. And profits and top corporate executive salaries go ever-higher. If in earlier times in this country there was some sort of "social safety net" (VERY modest compared to that found in all of other capitalist countries), it was there not because the capitalists set it up out of the goodness of their hearts, but because organised labor and certain other social movements forced it out of them.

Since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and the concomitant national "anti-communism," which enabled then, and still does, from time-to-time, the attachment of the negative word (except when applied to the states that vote GOP) "red" to any proposal for social legislation designed to make life easier for the working and middle classes, organized labor and its allies have been under constant assault. The War on the Trade Unions has been successful. The public employee unions, the last bastion of true trade unionism in the US, is under ever-increasing attack (see Wisconsin). Manufacturing has been exported, and indeed one of the most important weapons of any capitalist class, Marx and Engels' "reserve army of labor" or "permanent army of the unemployed" is in the process of being created. This is the magical way to keep both trade union activity low and willingness to stay at work, regardless of the level of wages and benefits (see Wal-Mart, for example), high.

Although technological advancement has been an important feature of industrial capitalism since it started, computerization/robotization has made manual labor in manufacturing increasingly obsolete, at an increasingly rapid rate. And among other things, machines and robots don't join trade unions.

Thus, given the data from Senator Sanders, above, indeed this time must be regarded as the Golden Age of US Capitalism. This is especially true because the current leader of the system, Finance Capital (see Lenin), has the government at its back, so that when it errs and loses even vast sums of money, it is "bailed out," at the expense of everyone, with no payback required. As Paul Krugman asks "But what if the world we've been living in for the past five years is the new normal? What if depression-like conditions are on track to persist, not for another year or two, but for decades?"

What if, indeed? Indeed, if things continue as they are, if the reality as described by Senator Sanders stays with us, but continues to produce those record profits and incomes despite the "depression-like conditions" that Professor Krugman describes, one could indeed say that the U.S. is in its Golden Age of Capitalism. And the capitalists will never give it up, without a fight, and I mean a real fight. And why should they, especially if they think that morality is on their side? Would you?

http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/18329-economic-cancer-top-1-bottom-50

[Chris]

"An Economic Cancer: The Top 1% Earns More Than the Bottom 50%"

And yet, nic, you do, don't you, like cigar, support Obama who more than anyone preceding supports gutting the middle and poor classes to enrich the rich.

[Mainecoons]

This time most certainly isn't the golden age of capitalism. This time is the triumph of big government and corporatism over capitalism. But keep telling yourselves that your Messiah really gives a crap about you as he continues on with his stellar job of enriching the one percenters. At this point, it is the shining accomplishment of his reign.