Economic inequality is holding back economy

Sorry, don't have much time right now to get into your post or give it the thoughtful response it deserves. Let me say this however - I think you will find that the amount of inequality of incomes is greatest when the economy is booming, and it is the least when it's in recession or slowing down. When the stock market crashes, it is the rich guys that take the biggest hits.

So, the assertion that income inequality holds down economic growth is actually backwards - slow or non-existent economc growth holds down the inequality, to the detriment of all. Frankly, in a free market open economy it might be nearly impossible to have good economic growth without the corresponding inequalities of income.
 
Economic inequality is holding back economy

Mental retardation is holding back rdean.

Everyone except Republicans understand that.

Funny then that you are utterly incapable of intelligently enunciating the logic that your rulers used to make this determination.



Bullshit.

You have no grasp of economics, which is a big part of the reason that you're a leftist..

Supply and demand are two sides of all transactions. You stumble and vomit forth "demand" as if it were some magic ingredient that the nation lacks, based on your failed grasp of idiocy that blares forth from comedy central, from whence you gain your news, and the fetid hate sites that determine your opinions.

Lord Keynes advocated an economic model that attempted to circumvent the business cycle by applying deficit backs stimulus during recessionary periods in the belief that this would generate demand and move the economy forward.

Ignorant morons such as you, ingesting a steady diet of diarrhea from charlatans like Krugman, foolishly declare this to be "demand side' economics, a claim Keynes would laugh at, as it is nothing of the sort.

NOW you have magnified your utter and completely stupefying ignorance by dishonestly extrapolating your misconception to hiring practices of fictitious corporations.

If no one has any money, there is no demand. It really is that simple.

You truly are an ignorant baboon.

{A new report released Sunday suggests that $30.9 billion has been spent in online shopping so far this holiday season, or a 15 percent increase compared to last year.}

$30.9B in online holiday sales so far - Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal

Virtually nothing you post is accurate or relevant.

The Republican "plan" is to give rich people even more and maybe, just maybe, they will take pity on us and create jobs. Because they do things like that. They are almost like "Gawds".

Rdean, you are a marvel of stupidity. You are the epitome of an Obama supporter. Uneducated, misinformed, ignorant, and downright stupid.

It's difficult to get past the name calling in your post. Seems you think "demand" is good, or not. Hard to tell.

Not only have the vast majority of economists said the stimulus kept us out of a depression, but even the well over 100 Republicans who voted against the stimulus took hundreds of millions and created thousands of jobs THE TOOK CREDIT FOR. It's easy to look up who took the money and what it was spent on.

When someone screams and rants they way you did, many times it's because the truth is simply too much to bear.
 
...the vast majority of economists said the stimulus kept us out of a depression...
If that were true then out of roughly 15,000 practicing US economists, you should be able to provide some 8K links to that statement. OK, we both know you can't becuase it's not true. Even if it were, the consensus still wouldn't prove what happened given the fact that we're so much worse off after all them friggin' stimuli than before.
 
It's difficult to get past the name calling in your post. Seems you think "demand" is good, or not. Hard to tell.

It's only "hard to tell" because you have utterly no grasp of even the most rudimentary concepts of economics.

In economics, Say’s Law or Say’s Law of Markets is a principle attributed to French businessman and economist Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) stating that there can be no demand without supply. A central element of Say's Law is that recession does not occur because of failure in demand or lack of money.

Say’s law

We could argue the counter-point of Keynesian theory, except you clearly have zero grasp of that, either.

What the hell, the main fallacy put forth by Keynesian charlatans like Krugman is that Say's law only covers barter economies, as if 18th century France was a barter economy. Of course this is absurd, Say said {
It is not the abundance of money but the abundance of other products in general that facilitates sales... Money performs no more than the role of a conduit in this double exchange. When the exchanges have been completed, it will be found that one has paid for products with products.}

Not only have the vast majority of economists said the stimulus kept us out of a depression, but even the well over 100 Republicans who voted against the stimulus took hundreds of millions and created thousands of jobs THE TOOK CREDIT FOR. It's easy to look up who took the money and what it was spent on.

I understand that your only ability, as a mindless sycophant, is to vomit forth the talking points from the hate sites that poison your mind.

However, your repetition of slogans merely underscores the lack of grasp you have on the subject at hand. You have no clue what you are rambling on about, you don't grasp the concept of multipliers. If the state engages in deficit spending of $100 and that generates $100 in economic activity, then the economy has been damaged by the act, even though a simpleton like you will crow of the wonderful $100 of activity that your glorious party created. Why? Because the combination of interest and inflation will spawn indebtedness of well beyond the $100. This is a concept in economics that we call "the time value of money." A dollar today is worth more than it will be in a year, or five years.

John Maynard Keynes was an intellectual, that is to say, he certainly was no idiot. Keynes would never postulate a system where the NPV was not favorable. Keynes postulated that turns of the capital created a multiplier effect thus generating economic activity many times in excess of the capital employed. This is where we see the Obama stimulus fail. That the stimulus generated activity commensurate with the capital expenditures is complete failure, though you don't grasp this. The return on capital employed would need to represent 3.5 times the original capital in order for Keynesian theory to be upheld.

Now I said that Keynes was no idiot, far from it. Keynes was a pampered aristocrat, educated at the finest schools who never did a days labor in his life. Keynes was an intellectual, who built theories and models in a vacuum. Keynes was as impressed by the complexity of his equations as with the accuracy of his models, his motivation was the equation, not solving a problem. This is the flaw of aristocratic intellectuals.

When someone screams and rants they way you did, many times it's because the truth is simply too much to bear.

You are an ignorant baboon, this is a fact. IF you had the base intellect to actually read what I wrote, you might actually learn something.
 
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Sorry, don't have much time right now to get into your post or give it the thoughtful response it deserves. Let me say this however - I think you will find that the amount of inequality of incomes is greatest when the economy is booming, and it is the least when it's in recession or slowing down. When the stock market crashes, it is the rich guys that take the biggest hits.

That's true within any given set of economic rules as set by government policy; however, what I'm talking about is outside of the business cycle and involves comparing the performance between rule sets through both booms and busts. Comparing the period from 1940 to 1980 to the period since 1980, what we find is that in the earlier period, yes, income inequality did decrease very slightly during recessions and increase very slightly during good times; however it was less in both types of economy than it has become over the last 30 years. AND, in addition, the booms were boomier and the recessions milder and shorter. The worst recessions our economy has suffered since the Great Depression all occurred after 1980. That's not a coincidence.
 
Equality refers to position before the law.

A nation can have economic equality or it can have prosperity.

Not both.
That would be true if you infer the literal meaning of equality.

A better word to use in this context is equitable, which would apply in describing America's most prosperous era, that which occurred between the 40s and the 80s and resulted from FDR's New Deal. That prosperity came about largely by a 91% progressive tax rate and growth of the union movement. It marked the rise of the middle class which came about through the equitable (not equal) distribution of the Nation's wealth resources.

Just read this last night, Mikey, and it contains quite a bit of info that would support your thesis...
....it's long, but if you get chance...
LUIGI ZINGALES
Who Killed Horatio Alger?
The decline of the meritocratic ideal
Who Killed Horatio Alger? by Luigi Zingales, City Journal Autumn 2011

1. Yet in a recent survey of 27 developed countries by the Pew Charitable Trusts, only one-third of Americans agreed that it was the government’s responsibility to reduce income inequality;...they do want the government to provide a level playing field: over 70 percent of Americans said that the role of government was “to ensure everyone has a fair chance of improving their economic standing.”

2. When the fairness of the rules grows questionable and when the benefits of the system are distributed too unequally, the consensus for free-market meritocracy can collapse. Returning to a meritocratic consensus is next to impossible once you reach that point. And America is approaching it.

3. Recall that to survive in a democratic country, a meritocracy must enjoy a welcoming culture and offer large, widespread benefits to citizens. In the United States, both of these factors are being challenged: the first by a spreading belief that markets are a bad method of rewarding the meritorious; the second by a reduction of the benefits that most people derive from those markets.

4. They objected, rather, to the specifics of what the government was doing. One reason they objected was their perception that lobbying interests had influenced the intervention: 50 percent of respondents, for instance, thought that Paulson had acted in the interest of Goldman Sachs, not the United States.

5. empirical evidence suggests that this mobility is becoming less common. Start with “intragenerational mobility,” the likelihood that a person will move from one segment of the income distribution to another....a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago reports that intergenerational mobility, while increasing between the 1950s and the 1980s, started dropping in the 1990s and dropped even more in the following decade.

6. Between 1989 and 2009, the real per-capita income of the poorest 20 percent of the population, as determined by the census, declined by 1 percent. The median national income increased by only 3 percent over the same period. It seems very much as though the benefits conferred by meritocratic capitalism are neither as great nor as widespread as they once were, and this change seems likely to weaken political support for the market system.

7....weakening in Americans’ dwindling support for a pillar of capitalism: free trade.
Who Killed Horatio Alger? by Luigi Zingales, City Journal Autumn 2011

Zingales has alot of ammo for you, Mikey....give it a look.
 
Sorry, don't have much time right now to get into your post or give it the thoughtful response it deserves. Let me say this however - I think you will find that the amount of inequality of incomes is greatest when the economy is booming, and it is the least when it's in recession or slowing down. When the stock market crashes, it is the rich guys that take the biggest hits.

That's true within any given set of economic rules as set by government policy; however, what I'm talking about is outside of the business cycle and involves comparing the performance between rule sets through both booms and busts. Comparing the period from 1940 to 1980 to the period since 1980, what we find is that in the earlier period, yes, income inequality did decrease very slightly during recessions and increase very slightly during good times; however it was less in both types of economy than it has become over the last 30 years. AND, in addition, the booms were boomier and the recessions milder and shorter. The worst recessions our economy has suffered since the Great Depression all occurred after 1980. That's not a coincidence.


What I'm saying is that the higher highs and lower lows over the past 30 years CAUSES the greater or lesser degrees of income inequality, rather than being caused by them. You could argue that if you raise taxes today then the future highs will not be as high and the lower lows won't be that bad, but then the question becomes what are you left with. Would we be in for a lost decade or two similar to Japan, with slow or no economic growth?

I would suggest that the answer in part depends on how high you raise taxes here, compared to other markets. And of course there are other major factors, right? But it seems foolish to me to do anything that is counter productive, at least not until the economy gets stronger and can absorb it.
 

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