Posted on 12/10/2012 10:48:27 AM PST by ksen
What? It’s basic free market economics - where demand exceeds supply for a scarce good, such as housing stock in nice neighborhoods or enrollment slots at top schools, people will compete for that good on price. The more money the richest have, the more they can spend getting those goods.
The answer is to broaden access to those goods in market- friendly ways. Like for education, the scarcity isn’t in education in the broadest sense, the scarcity is for an access to a _good_ education.
IMO anyway, the answer is probably in having fewer, better universities.
In CA, thanks in part to guaranteed federal student loans, so many people are admitted to some crappy CSU or private school who are either not prepared for school, not smart enough for school, or are really talented in a way that needs some other form of education - e.g. art, manual trades, entrepeneurship. Rather than subsidize everyone going to school, reduce and focus subsidies on a more limited set of schools and impose better quality controls and tougher entrance requirements as a requirement for federal funding.
It’s obviously better to not have federal $ in education, but that’s unlikely to happen, so better to channel it in the way it does the least damage.
I did make a generalization and thought about it after hitting "post" and since there's no edit button I determined to let that go unless someone called me on it.
But the data has borne out that the bottom 90% of income earners have seen a large slowing down of the growth of their share of the national income and wealth.
Pre-addressed in #1:
"We are the polity of individual success. We want each person to be able to be the successful wealthy person, so that we create as many golden geese as possible. The poor who aspire to The American Dream can listen and respond well to our arguments about success and growth."
I'm a lovable little scamp, that's how.
Which is what I pointed out in Post #1:
"All data I’ve seen is that the rich get richer fast, and the poor get richer slower....(Proved by my graph above)
Leftists find the disparity in the speed with which people become better off to be a problem.....
Conservatives find the disparity in the speed with which people become better off to be normal....."
So, which are you? Conservative or Leftist?
I said what I was in the OP.
Heaven forfend we get a direct response.
I’ll take that as “I’m a Red Diaper Communist.”
Maybe, or maybe because we've seen the return of the Robber Barons during our lifetime. :shrug:
Lets clear it up right now.
lets say you have 2 people, one makes $50,000 a year, the other makes $100,000 a year.
They both decide to buy a $100,000 house.
The ‘rich’ guy can pay it off in one year, the ‘poor’ guy takes 2 years.
so .... 20 years go by
At a regular normal healthy inflation rate of around 3%. the cost of living about doubles...
Now the guy who USED TO make $50,000 still has the same job but makes $100,000. The guy who used to make $100,000 has the same job but he now makes $200,000.
The $100,000 house now costs $200,000.
The ‘poor’ guy still needs 2 years to buy it, the ‘rich’ guy still only needs one. The situation is exactly the same. Their buying power is still what it was.
But, the ‘poor’ guys income only went up $50,000 while the rich guys income went up $100,000 in that same time.
Is the rich guy any richer? no, but the democraps will say “but he made TWICE AS MUCH of an increase - the rich always get richer faster”
Yes, that is why there are LIES, DAMNED LIES, and STATISTICS.
I've directly said I'm a liberal/progressive in this thread at least once and I'm pretty sure in more than one thread you've been involved in since I started posting again.
Normally my answer is followed by a request for AdminMod to zot me.
:waits patiently:
Now the guy who USED TO make $50,000 still has the same job but makes $100,000. The guy who used to make $100,000 has the same job but he now makes $200,000.
This is where your analogy breaks down because currently while yes, the $100,000 guy has seen his income at least double the $50,000 guy has seen his income go to maybe $55,000.
Am I right to say that most of the conservatives in this thread feel there is no issue here?
Not an economist by any means. But ALL technology has always been a revolution and the better sustained have always been able to make better use of it.
Take the invention of fire or the wheel. Hugely revolutionary at the time. People living in a bad spot might have had trouble with those inventions. As well as people who were at great risk of constant animal attack or a group who has an illness.
“There will always be the poor.” Once you measure and compare, you cannot NOT have poor. Someone always has more and someone has less.
It is a false part of your argument that current / future technology creates greater disproportion. It will always remain the same disproportion but your emotions are more tied in to today’s new inventions because you FEEL how new they are.
The greatest change in economic progress was the freedom of the American Constitution. Not having a ruling class created the ability for anyone to come up with a way to make money. This created both a self made merchant class as well as a comfortable middle class. Both slip away under “progressive” (really, control from an anointed class) politics.
We need not fear technology. We must reapply our moral principles to it, but this blue planet was for us to discover new ways to help ourselves. If only we could return to less control from government, more people who are poor now could use tech to make good money.
“The Distributional Issue” is an excellent and accurate title to the article.
It presumes that some agency (small “a”) is in charge of The Distribution.
The title presumes that there SHOULD be someone, some group, some governmental Agency (capital “A”) or Stalinist Utopian Fairness Governance Board which DECIDES Distribution of income, wealth or some other thing.
I reject the idea that any one person or group of people acting as the beneficent “agent” should have that power over me or anyone else.
The purely destructive power of that agent to arbitrarily and generally allocate assets or income has been proved every time it is tried. See Friederich Hayek, “Road to Serfdom”.
Leftists may not like the outcomes of the free market. But the un-free market underperforms the free market in absolute terms, tends towards totalitarianism, and in several key examples in history, has led to the murder of a hundred million people in pursuit of “fairness.”
0bama pursues “fairness” just like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. Equality of outcome is a regular feature of leftist economics: Equally poor, miserable, un-free, starving and dead.
There is a political issue, because leftists effectively leverage an evil: envy.
Conservatives have to battle that evil you leftists raised. It’s a fact of life, and difficult to do for us. You have a great issue. It’s evil and wrong, but devastatingly effective. Kinda like Mustard Gas.
Technology isn't making most of our workers superfluous.
Individuals make choices and take actions (or refuse to take actions). Their choices and actions determine those individuals' relevance in the ever-changing marketplace for skills. The refusal of Democrat slugs to grow and change is harming our whole economy.
Unions pressure individuals to prevent positive growth in individual knowledge and skills; and they pressure businesses to prevent modernizing their processes. When foreign entities can produce the same or similar products with more efficient processes, our competitive edge disappears.
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