Mommy, why are poor people poor?Follow

They're still homeless, but they have Obamaphones in case someone calls them with a job offer?

Just for fun.

For the record I think the 1950's is really not a very good decade to compare to just in general. The biggest reason is that it's right in the middle of a historic post-war world-wide economic expansion. With the U.S. being the only major industrial power that didn't have to rebuild their country we were in a perfect position to benefit from it and leverage the new technologies that the war had brought (think things like cheaper cars, housing, really anything manufactured, etc.).

It's a little disingenuous to think we could easily get back to those economic conditions; without blowing up half the world again, of course.

Edited, Nov 5th 2013 9:36am by someproteinguy

Lol, I want my mtv on a flat HD screen.

I've not yet afforded myself one of them flat screeners. My middle class status is in question.

Ideally a middle class is the biggest chunk of the population. Thats clearly not the case in the US. Most of our population lives well below 'middle-class' standards at, or just above poverty. They probably have tvs.

Our incarceration rates have skyrocketed since the 80's, our life expectancy is plateauing for the first time ever, premature births rates up since the 80's. Public education has completely crapped out - classroom sizes are once again on the increase, arts, music, shop classes - gone from many schools. These are all indicators of a larger pool of people with fewer resources.

Income inequality is not simply one guy has a gazillion dollars and the other only has a million, therefore they're both financially comfortable. It's distribution of wealth, distribution of resources - resources like health and education. But also, and probably what's most detrimental to the country is that the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few allows those few to buy legislation that serves the interest of those few, versus the interests of the many - duh.

I know, I just find the whole "The 50's were great, so vote for me!" thing to be humorous, you just happened to be the last poster. You lucky guy, you.

I know, right? Flat screens aren't even as good as CRTs for competitive video gaming due to display latency!

That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean Call of Duty: Ghosts....

Singular. I'm specifically excluding larger scale macro economic effects here (hence, my statement that "nothing else changes"). The point is to show that just because one person's earnings increase more than another person's over a given period of time does not mean that the second person is "worse off" as a result. I'm disproving Smash's assumption by presenting a simple case where his assumption fails. That's it.



It's not. And that wasn't remotely the point I was making. The argument that a gap between rich and poor all by itself is "bad" rests on the assumption that if person A's wealth/income increases faster than person B, that this is bad for person B. My case was designed to specifically show that this assumption is false, therefore the assumption that a growing gap between rich and poor over a period of time is bad is also false.

Pretty basic logic, right?



The bureaucracy became unmanageable *because* the government was in charge of making economic decisions. Which is what will inevitably occur when you have the government make those decisions rather than the free market. It's not about where the "focus" is, but the very attempt to use the government to control market outcomes.



You're completely missing my point. I'm simply saying that there is a cost for social benefits and we should not lie to ourselves about it.



Ok. But then you have to make the argument that there are macroeconomic factors involved beyond "The gap between rich and poor has increased". Like actually arguing why you think this is a bad thing. What's amusing is that I've directly asked people to provide such an explanation several times in this thread, and so far not a single person has actually done it. Folks have tap danced around the issue, but none have directly addressed it.

"On the whole Smash is right, but if you ignore the big picture and look right at this specifically isolated portion of the data it shows nothing changes and disprooves Smash."

I like where this thread is going.

I've seen those graphics before. Was that guy playing Everquest?

Hey! I did.

It concentrates political power, undermining the democratic process. As much as those Republican types leverage arguments about the Democrats buying off the poor people with promises of free health care and such I figured it'd be a fairly straight-forward argument to make.

Actually, that video has that verse cut. Because censorship.

No, the focus was not on wealth creation, at least insofar as the consumer markets, the focus was on creating control, and generating certain ideological outcomes.

China uses same sort of command apparatus to create enormous wealth, because, shockingly, it's one of their objectives.

The US used strategies of a command economy to create wealth during one of it's largest booms.

There are certain aspects of wealth generation that the private sector services better due to various structural efficiencies, and are positively affected by vulnerabilities that the publicly funded pursuits can wall themselves off from. eg. cummulative morass effects.



And there is an opportunity cost to not do so. If economic conditions were such that it was not a good bargain this could be a very different discussion. We could manage to agree on things then but you'd still not know why.

Since you're fond of analogies, would you purchase gold if it's price was going to grow exponentially (in the positive direction) assuming it's fungible and liquid?