If you want to go smoke a bowl in your home. Knock yourself out. If you want to take someone of the same sex to a school dance. Go right ahead. You want to gamble half your mortgage on the internet. Fine. If you want to have an abortion. Who am I to judge....................



but if you want to destroy the moral fabric of our country. Keep accumulating the wealth of this country to the top 1% of earners. Keep squeezing out productivity from the working poor. People without jobs do crazy things.

Close the borders. Shut down trade with China. It's high time we start worrying about American's and American jobs.

(03-16-2010 03:54 PM)Machiavelli Wrote:  If you want to go smoke a bowl in your home. Knock yourself out. If you want to take someone of the same sex to a school dance. Go right ahead. You want to gamble half your mortgage on the internet. Fine. If you want to have an abortion. Who am I to judge....................
but if you want to destroy the moral fabric of our country. Keep accumulating the wealth of this country to the top 1% of earners. Keep squeezing out productivity from the working poor. People without jobs do crazy things.
Close the borders. Shut down trade with China. It's high time we start worrying about American's and American jobs.

Mach,

Interesting. I think your proposed solutions are worse than the problem, but I do think you've identified some worthwhile issues.

Saw an interesting analysis the other day, comparing income growth 1946-1973 to 1973-2000. What's interesting is that from '46 to '73, income growth was fairly consistent across the board for Americans, with the bottom quintile doing slightly better than any of the higher income levels. From 1973-2000, the growth is skewed toward the upper income levels. It's not exactly "the rich got richer and the poor got poorer"; actually we all got richer, so it's more like "the poor got richer but the rich got richerer."

So what caused this? Clearly it wasn't the "Bush tax cuts"; no matter how bad a president Shrub was, this predates him by decades. I think Ross Perot had it nailed in 1992, and you made mention on another thread. We've shipped our manufacturing base overseas since the 1960s, and replaced it with a "retail/service" economy--and you simply can't pay someone as much to deliver a pizza as you can pay him/her to run a steel mill.

I believe the "retail/service" economy inherently requires more concentration of income and wealth. When there are no value-added steps in the process, everybody becomes interchangeable, and the guys at the top don't have to share with the real producers--because there are no real producers. We're not going to tax things back into order. We have to bring value-added activities back to the US. How?

(03-16-2010 04:30 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-16-2010 03:54 PM)Machiavelli Wrote:  If you want to go smoke a bowl in your home. Knock yourself out. If you want to take someone of the same sex to a school dance. Go right ahead. You want to gamble half your mortgage on the internet. Fine. If you want to have an abortion. Who am I to judge....................
but if you want to destroy the moral fabric of our country. Keep accumulating the wealth of this country to the top 1% of earners. Keep squeezing out productivity from the working poor. People without jobs do crazy things.
Close the borders. Shut down trade with China. It's high time we start worrying about American's and American jobs.

Mach,

Interesting. I think your proposed solutions are worse than the problem, but I do think you've identified some worthwhile issues.
<snip>
I believe the "retail/service" economy inherently requires more concentration of income and wealth. When there are no value-added steps in the process, everybody becomes interchangeable, and the guys at the top don't have to share with the real producers--because there are no real producers. We're not going to tax things back into order. We have to bring value-added activities back to the US. How?

Mach is mistaking a symptom for the problem itself. Wealth concentration, as you point out, isn't *the problem,* it's a the by-product of a globalized economy that led to the servicizing of the US economy. (To be fair, the US is still the world's leading manufacturer, but the trend is bad and China will overtake us in just a few years.)

(03-16-2010 05:15 PM)Brookes Owl Wrote:  

(03-16-2010 04:30 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(03-16-2010 03:54 PM)Machiavelli Wrote:  If you want to go smoke a bowl in your home. Knock yourself out. If you want to take someone of the same sex to a school dance. Go right ahead. You want to gamble half your mortgage on the internet. Fine. If you want to have an abortion. Who am I to judge....................
but if you want to destroy the moral fabric of our country. Keep accumulating the wealth of this country to the top 1% of earners. Keep squeezing out productivity from the working poor. People without jobs do crazy things.
Close the borders. Shut down trade with China. It's high time we start worrying about American's and American jobs.

Mach,

Interesting. I think your proposed solutions are worse than the problem, but I do think you've identified some worthwhile issues.
<snip>
I believe the "retail/service" economy inherently requires more concentration of income and wealth. When there are no value-added steps in the process, everybody becomes interchangeable, and the guys at the top don't have to share with the real producers--because there are no real producers. We're not going to tax things back into order. We have to bring value-added activities back to the US. How?

Mach is mistaking a symptom for the problem itself. Wealth concentration, as you point out, isn't *the problem,* it's a the by-product of a globalized economy that led to the servicizing of the US economy. (To be fair, the US is still the world's leading manufacturer, but the trend is bad and China will overtake us in just a few years.)

I don't understand how we can bring manufacturing back. We've gotten to a spot where we need to have a totally new industry.

(03-16-2010 11:01 PM)nomad2u2001 Wrote:  I don't understand how we can bring manufacturing back. We've gotten to a spot where we need to have a totally new industry.

http://www.fairtax.org

That's a start.

(03-16-2010 03:54 PM)Machiavelli Wrote:  If you want to go smoke a bowl in your home. Knock yourself out. If you want to take someone of the same sex to a school dance. Go right ahead. You want to gamble half your mortgage on the internet. Fine. If you want to have an abortion. Who am I to judge....................



but if you want to destroy the moral fabric of our country.

What?

Since when are you the keeper of the "moral fabric"?

Total hypocrisy.