hippiewannabe wrote:And yes, I was working in the '80s. I came of age in the Carter inflation and malaise days, and in my first full year of working as an entry level engineer, faced a marginal tax rate of over 50%. Reagan fixed that. And then the economy grew 36% between 1983 and 1990. There has been an increasingly desperate attempt to rewrite that history.
Desperate on your part. Try this out:
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3220
edit: I'm adding a brief explanation, so it's clear what I'm pointing at. A quick image search of google using the keywords "growing gap between the rich and poor in the us" will return a dozen variants of this chart. One version is the chart named figure 1 in the link. No one, on either side of the debate is arguing:
1. The fact of the change
2. Its origins in Reagan's tax cuts
The only discussion is whether it's OK or not. A very small group of highly conservative economists, who represent a tiny fraction of professional economists worldwide, think this graph is acceptable, and believe it doesn't signify a long term destructive development which has its origins in the "tax reform" that Reagan implemented and which Hippie seems to be championing in his comment.
Everyone else ~ Hippie would be wise to consider that the vast majority of economists, all of whom are substantially better educated on the economics of the tax system than he is, and most of whom don't live in America, so don't subscribe to his blind jingoism ~ pretty much agrees that what is shown in the graph is a bad sign, and that Reagan's tax cuts accelerated the growth in income difference, a growth
which continues to this day.
Hippie, I don't care what you believe. Your inability to recognize that only a tiny fraction of the economic professionals on this planet would even bother to defend your point, and that those few are, like the examples you offer, crackpots who live outside of the mainstream, publishing books to great acclaim among the group you represent ~ myopic white people who believe that the government is evil, taxes are evil, the wealthy are deserving, etc., is a problem for you, not for me. I'm not wrong. Many much smarter people than I have made this argument
ad infinitum but struggle to achieve the necessary changes because people like you support the wealthy, who are in NO WAY helping you. Yeah, you made a few more bucks. 15% more of whatever you were making? That's nothing. 15% when your gross income is 8+ figures? That's something. You look at the baker and thank him for throwing you a few crusts of bread while he uses your hard work to make the bread itself.
Take a look at the people on the board of directors for the group I linked to ~ they have their beliefs to be sure, but a simple fact: There's more credibility and expertise on that list than you'd be able to summon had you the infinite powers of a wizard. Even Buffet thinks your argument is wrong.
Board of Directors
David de Ferranti, Board Chair
President, Results for Development Institute
Henry J. Aaron, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Kenneth Apfel, Professor of the Practice, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland
Jano Cabrera, Managing Director, Burson-Marsteller
Henry A. Coleman, Rutgers University, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy
James O. Gibson, Senior Fellow, Center for the Study of Social Policy
Antonia Hernández, President, California Community Foundation
Wayne Jordan, CEO, Jordan Real Estate Investments, LLC
Frank Mankiewicz, Vice Chairman, Hill and Knowlton
Lynn McNair, Senior Director of Business Development and Resource Mobilization, Internet Society
Marion Pines, Senior Fellow, Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies
Robert D. Reischauer, President Emeritus, Urban Institute
Paul Rudd, Adaptive Analytics, LLC
Susan Sechler, Managing Director, TransFarm Africa
Melanne Verveer, Executive Director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security
Kim Wallace, Managing Director, Head of Washington Policy, Renaissance Macro Research
William Julius Wilson, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor and Director of the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program, Harvard University
Emeritus Board Members
Beatrix Hamburg, Visiting Scholar, Cornell Medical College, Department of Psychiatry
Marian Wright Edelman, President, Children's Defense Fund