NYT's piece on study "Income Inequality and Financial CrisesFollow

Yeah, like hell I'm doing that again either. I'm barely keeping afloat making just under $14/hour; I'd be too broke to even afford to file for bankruptcy if I had to work for minimum wage again.

Personally, I'm not even rigidly opposed to allowing someone the potential to earn even 1000x the average. What I'm in favor of is a system by which a rising tide lifts all boats rather than scuttles them. IE a working progressive tax, not the **** show we have now.

Actually what exists in America is more like the truly wealthy "earning" 10,000 times the poor people. With an underclass of desperate people even under those poor.

I'm not against disparity per se, and I'm totally enthusiastic about investment income earned from assets instead of personal labour. What I despise is a national system that allows people to die early - even as children - out of lack of basic needs, or be forced into criminality, when others can siphon all their money through tax havens and company deductions, so they can order $25,000 desserts with dinner.. Again, nothing against a $25,000 dessert per se, except when other people are starving to death*, not getting a decent education, or the mental healthcare they need to keep them functional enough to stay housed.

No liberal is for the idea of handing out tax money to healthy adults to live a life of middle class comfort for nothing. I just want out of work healthy people to have a basic subsistence life funded so they have the time and resources to find a job or get more educated. Like in Australia, that help can be conditional on checkable proof of jobhunting activities.


*A diet composed entirely of cheap high processed carbs, proteins and fats IS a slow starvation to death.

Edited, Aug 27th 2010 9:26am by Aripyanfar

But deductions let me pay at a .6% tax rate :(

I wonder why.

Quoted, as they say, for truth.

Yeah, no. if you eliminate deductions/credits it wouldn't be close at all.

(Not that I'm saying this is necessarily a bad idea.)

Canada is not the US. It's not just about regulation, but what kind of regulation.



How is that blamed on the Republicans? We weren't the ones who pushed for the regulation which created the crisis. It was the Democrats who used regulation improperly. They decided it was more important to buy votes by providing housing assistance to people who couldn't afford the payments than making sure the financial sector didn't collapse from the weight of said program.

I agree that proper regulation can do good things. But what the Dems want to do isn't proper regulation. They regulate with an eye towards social policy instead of fiscal policy. And that's a recipe for disaster...

Edited, Aug 27th 2010 12:55pm by gbaji

So long as you guys stand for removing regulation and not correcting regulation, you're as much at fault. Now, the GOP could be for correcting regulation, but every time you or any other Republican bring sit up, you always say removing/reducing regulation.

Oh no, I blame both sides equally in the US. I was only commenting on the part of your post I disagreed with.

For some reason I was under the impression that you made around $60k/year, which is where the figures in question come from.

I'm not entirely sure why.

I don't agree that they are "as much to blame" though.

I'll say again that I don't understand why people attempt to create some kind of moral equivalence between someone who actively chooses to do something which causes you harm and someone who fails to prevent that person from causing you harm. Those are *not* equivalent.

The Democrats pushed pretty much every single thing which caused the financial crisis. They wanted CRA requirements in the 1999 financial reform act. They wanted mark to market rules to reign in banks and lenders. And they opposed investigations into Fannie and Freddie when it might have actually prevented the crisis from reaching epic proportions. Obviously, politics does not happen in a vacuum, and the GOP allowed those things to happen, but if we're looking to assign blame, and perhaps more importantly trying to figure out who might better lead us out of this mess, it's pretty relevant to pay attention to who's fiscal policies caused the disaster in the first place.


You can certainly blame the cops for not catching/stopping the guy who robbed you. But you should kinda blame the guy who robbed you more, right?

Again, that's just a label. What else are you supposed to call removing bad regulation? Can we please acknowledge that the CRA requirements were bad regulation? And the mark to market rules were bad regulation? And, in an odd twist, the refusal to hold Fannie and Freddie accountable was *also* bad regulation. But in one of those cases, the GOP wants to simple eliminate the regulation, in another they want to change it to include special rules for non-active markets, and in the third they actually want to *increase* regulation on GSEs.


Yet the whole position gets labeled "deregulation". Um... whatever.



Equally to blame for the existing financial problems? How? The proposed changes by the GOP haven't happened yet. Effect can't precede cause. You're free to speculate that too much deregulation might result in some future problems, and if they happen, you can certainly "blame" the GOP for those problem. But I'm not sure how you blame the GOP for actions they haven't taken yet causing something that already happened.


That's kinda bizarre, isn't it? Shouldn't we at least wait and see what happens if the GOP makes the changes they want to make before blaming them for something?



It's not that I don't understand the words you're writing down. It's that they don't make any sense. We have an event that occurred in the past. One party's actions very clearly lead to that event occurring. Yet for some reason, you refuse to place greater blame on that party. And when pressed, you say that the other party wants to do some other things which you don't like, so they get blame too?

How the hell does that make sense?



But the Dems mistake has demonstrably caused harm. You're only speculating that the GOPs actions will. Surely, you don't think those are equivalent? Has it occurred to you that you just might be wrong?