Posted on 03/06/2011 4:48:19 AM PST by mmanager
ST. LOUIS • It was late morning at the coffee shop, and the professor wanted to talk about rich people.
Mark Rank usually focuses his attention on the low end of the income charts, on poverty. As a professor of social welfare at Washington University, he's considered a top academic expert on that topic and social justice.
But he was moved to join a reporter here, at a back table of Kayak's Coffee across the street from his school, to talk about income inequality because of an interview in last Sunday's Post-Dispatch with Thomas A. Garrett, a St. Louis Federal Reserve vice president and economist. Garrett wrote a paper titled, "U.S. Income Inequality: It's Not So Bad," which argues that the rich's getting richer doesn't make the poor any poorer.
It doesn't matter, Garrett argues, that the distance between the rich and everyone else, from the middle class on down, stands at its widest point since the 1920s Gilded Age. "My point is, the social ills that are the result of having a low income are not because other people have more," he says. "It's because those at the bottom don't have enough income. The resource pie is not fixed. If I make more than you, it's not that I've taken it from you."
(Excerpt) Read more at stltoday.com ...
All I Can Say Over The Past 60 years we have Had Politicians who have Changed the Immigration System,1965 the Immigation Reform Act Championed By None Other than the Massachussets Wonder Ted Kennedy that changed the Quota system to Take More Immigrants from Africa ,Asia and Latin America,You Know all those Bastions Of Freedom And Democracy. Now you can Read Kennedys speeches at the Time where he Said that by Passing that act IT WOULD NOT CHANGE THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF THE UNITED STATES. Look around and see how Profound that statement was. Import all the Poor and Illiterate from third world areas with no Understanding of Democracy,Freedom,Liberty,Provide all kinds of Government Programs,Educate them to Victim Status which Creates a Burgeoning State Bureauracy with High Paid Government EXPERTS who along with a Bleeding Heart Communist Education establishment that Indoctrinates More Of the same and then Complain about How Capitalism has caused this Mess that is a Threat to Democracy.
When you have a Democracy, Which we are Not, we are a Republic,I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States Of America,And to the REPUBLIC,for which it Stands... ,Then you end up with Half of the People who dont pay ANY income Taxes,then turn around and Vote to Raise Taxes on everyone else to pay for their Largess.
I can tell you this you dont end up with The United States Of America,you end up with Union Thugs dictating to your so called Duly elected Reresentatives to Run into other States,Then Importing the Rabble Rousing Left wing Loons who Flout the Rule of Law and Encourage the Circus we Now see Playing out in Wisconsin soon to be playing out all across the Country.
I hope a Leader soon emerges to Inject some sanity back into our System or our Children wont have to worry about how much taxes they will be Paying,they will be just be looking to where their next meal will be coming from
So do some don’t.
There are two major mistakes that people make. The first is that the rich (both people and corporations) are all evil, the second is that they are all good.
Though with the fallen nature of human kind, betting on the evil side is probably wiser.
That is because when one gets to that level, you can not truly fail.
Which is why public corporations are so oddly run in this country. It isn’t that way in many others.
By Reverend William J.H. Boetcker (1916)
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot help small people by tearing down big people.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away peoples initiative and independence.
You cannot help people permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
That's a leftist talking point. It's remarkable how much of a company's success really does depend on the CEO. Look at Apple and Steve Jobs. When Jobs kicks the bucket, Apple will implode. Look what's happened to Microsoft, Wal-mart, GM, HP, on and on, now that their founders are no longer in charge.
The other problem you touch on is how public corporations and their stock option incentives encourage short term thinking rather than long. The Koch brothers on average grow their business 18% year after year because they have a huge advantage: they are a private company and are free to think long term. The stock options given to managers of public companies are defective incentives. There has got to be a better way.
Executives giving themselves bonuses after laying off a significant portion of their work force is unconscionable. Giving failed CEO’s golden or even platinum parachutes is unspeakable.
I’ll bet the whole compensation package for the professor is over 6 figures. He should share the wealth.
Social justice; a euphemism.
And part of human nature. Few enterprises, large or small, survive past the third generation.
Has he created a new, successful, business? This was the traditional American yardstick of success. He hasn't.
Has he come up through the ranks to run an established business? This was the second traditional American yardstick of success. He hasn't.
These first two yardsticks are uniquely American and were well established in our traditional ethos.
Did he inherit a business and run it successfully? This is a worldwide traditional yardstick of success. He hasn't.
So, the only yardstick of success left is the modern one - a whole bunch of academic degrees and letters behind his name and a minimal bank account. When did this modern yardstick become our only measurement of success? IMHO in the early 1970s when the student radicals of the proceeding decade discovered that their actions left then only the academic world to live in. Since then the professional student, no sustained full time job since summer jobs, has become our yardstick of success as this article demonstrates.
I am an expert on social justice too.
If you want to be poor, do what poor people do.
If you want to be rich, do what rich people do.
Simple.
The left continues to feed to people the lie that somehow, Americans pay very little in tax compared to the rest of the world, and that somehow, "if taxes were higher, just like they are in Europe," things would be better.
The surest path to reducing taxes in this country is to abolish the practice of withholding. Force everyone to cut quarterly tax checks to all the various governments which impose tax.
YES!!!!
I've been saying this for years. If this happened, we would have revolution almost overnight.
Of course, we also need to add in what taxes really cost us. How much, for example, do taxes add to that gallon of gas before we buy it?
Here in Texas, we don't pay sales tax on groceries. People don't think that taxes add to their food costs. They forget that taxes do contribute to the cost of that gallon of milk, loaf of bread, bag of potatoes, or can of beans.
Most don't realize that when the government imposes more taxes on those "evil, greedy" corporations, that cost tends to get passed down to the consumers.
I really do believe that if most people had a clue what taxes actually cost them, and then had to sit down and write out a check or go buy a money order to send in to the government, the Tea Party rallies would look like tea parties in comparison.
A look at his charitable contributions might also be instructive. It's possible that he puts his money where his mouth is, but it's not likely.
Our society does a lousy job of selecting people for leadership/management positions. Past performance is the best predictor of future performance. Over and over again, I’ve seen people selected for leadership positions based on what they say in an interview. “Yeah, I ran that last outfit into the ground, but choose me for this job and I’ll make all your wildest wishes come true!” Three years later...nothing but failure. Nepotism, company politics, Democrat/Republican politics, looks, impossible promises, the Halo Effect, the hidden agenda, and the outright stupidity/naivety of selecting committees are all way more prevalent than competence, experience, training and past performance in selecting people. So long as this goes on, we can only hope that foreign companies are worse. And hope is a poor strategy.
The phrase “social justice” is always a giveaway. Anyone who spouts those destructive words is by definition a far-leftist.
Is he averaging all CEO's and comparing to all workers? Or is he taking the highest paid CEO's and comparing them to the lowest paid workers? What is the ratio of the highest paid CEO's to the lowest paid worker IN THE SAME COMPANY?
Was CEO pay calculated the same in 1980 and today? Or is there a big disclaimer in the tables that says that data cannot be compared on either side of the 1987 tax reform because it counts different sources as "income" or not?
Read Income and Wealth by Alan Reynolds. 90% of liberal causes are based on playing games with statistics.
Bottom line, in a truly free market with only those minimal regulations required to protect people from fraud and to secure their property rights, everyone will make what the product of their work is worth.
So let companies make bad business decisions and suffer the consequences when they do. Perhaps buying out a CEO that is doing a poor job is a better business decision than keeping him on through his contract. I don't know and neither do you because we are not the ones with the information required, or the skin in the game, to make such decisions.
Narcissists gravitate to certain professions. A common one is teacher, especially college professor, others being politics, acting, journalism (since Watergate anyway), and other look-at-me self-important puff work. With vanity always comes painful feelings of envy, hence narcissists are usually leftists. Narcissism is a contagious, self-replicating, incurable mind virus. Being the center of attention is the last place we should let these sick people lodge themselves. They are extremely damaging people.
You answer is in your first paragraph...
The 2008 financial meltdown is a prime example where very few of the Wall Street bank chiefs lost their jobs even though they had to go running to the government for a bailout to save their companies.
Let them fail. The problem is not too much free market, it's too little.
Problem is, those types always end up strongly supporting anti-business legislation that crushes the small businessman and entrepreneur and does little to affect large company management structures - because those large companies have bought enough legislators to ensure such laws are written the way they want them to be written. Any attempt made to redistribute income away from the bosses at Goldman Sachs will always end up wiping out Main Street first.
And have election day on April 16.
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