Discussion:Land of opportunity
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| 25 January 2014 | |
| despite all the rhetoric, this is what I thought to be the case based on my own obeservations. | |
| 26 January 2014 | |
| Real incomes in America have not risen significantly since the 1970s, and keep in mind, we measure this income as household income, so the wife working has not even kept things even.
In 2010, the great liberal, President Obama, signed into law a 698 million tax cut (over 10 years) when our country was flat broke. Now, since the failure of Capitalism in 2007, we are missing about 1 trillion dollars a year in consumption in the U.S. economy. Monetary policy though the Fed., and the above tax cut, have done nothing to improve this consumption deficit. However, some increase in household income would help to improve consumption. Ahem. After all, there is no credit now to act as a bandaid to make people feel like thier standard of living is improving when it's not. To the extent that credit does come back to give average Joe an illusion of increased spending power (even though his real income remains stagnant), and when Joe again cares more about his credit score than he does his savings account balance, he and others like him will put themselves on a debt treadmill for life, and nothing makes the Wall Street crowd happier than this scenario. In the 2010 tax cut legislation, my understanding is that the unified credit now shelters 5 million...which I could go along with to help keep smaller businesses from being broken up to pay taxes, however, the legislation also lowered the top rate for those who have to pay estate tax down from 55% to some new number that you folks would know. I am strongly opposed to this lowering of the top rate and other tinkering with the estate tax, as are Warren Buffet and Bill Gates' father, as this would only skew the distribution of wealth toward the rich even further toward them than it stands now (which is a national scandal). Now keep in mind, this tax cut was signed into law by the "liberal" Obama; so both parties are intent on screwing the middle and lower classes (and in the long run, this is a huge mistake); and as economist Richard Wolff has remarked, it's not the left that's broken, or the right that's broken, it's the system that's broken. We'll see how it turns out. As I have said, the American people are stupid (very stupid)...but they only stay stupid for so long, and I can already sense a "TURN". | |
