Again, specifically, what would you like me to prove?
If you don’t know that top earners in the US have seen their earnings increase faster than lower wage earners, then you shouldn’t be in this discussion. It’s been shown in gov’t stats for a number of years.
Well, of course incomes for the top quintile have gone up faster than lower wage earners. They derive more of their income from capital gains. If you could prove that the bottom two, three or four quintiles have not been experiencing real growth in their incomes you'd do it. Obviously you cannot.
Not much to do with free trade.
Because you say so? Is that why the more protectionist countries always have lower per-capita GDP's?
This discussion is about free trade, not about total economic growth.
You're the one who's challenging your opponent's understanding of economics and trade. Maybe if you answered as many questions as you ask this discussion would be more productive.
And, class warfare can be waged from the top or bottom of income earners. The top wants to influence government policies to benefit them (and they have), and the lower earners want to influence policies to benefit them.
Sounds like a good argument for keeping government out of the equation as much as possible, which is exactly what my argument has been throughout this thread.
What crap. Japan and Korea are doing very well and China's GDP is growing near 10% each year
You are the most ignorant kind of free trade ideologue. You just can't let go of what some college prof stuffed into your young skull full of mush. Or maybe you picked it up elsewhere
“Again, specifically, what would you like me to prove?”
Prove that free trade has made a major contribution to the increase of economic wealth in the past thirty years or so years, or since the 1950s. Not sure what your first time period was.
“* The new economy has not distributed prosperity equally, in contrast to previous periods of economic growth, so inequality in lifetime wage growth has risen rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s. The gap between the high and low achievers has widened by some 20 percent not because those at the top are doing better, but because so many of these men are now doing worse.”
If you don’t know this, I wonder where you’ve been living the past twenty or so years. I’ve found some very long articles and nothing that gives good summaries. Here’s the link the above comes from:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-02/uow-npo022002.php
Maybe I’ll find something more in summary form later.