Paul Ryan's outrageous use of the word "envy"

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By redistributing wealth to the top .02%?

I'd argue that you'll just be less conscious of it when it comes from a side that you agree more with.

If we robbed them blind it would not cover the National Debt.

ruveyn

They're already robbing the rest of us blind.

Then stop the robbing. But taxing the rich into penury will not undid us from a hole that was started back in the FDR New Deal in the 1930s. Nearly a hundred years of fiscal irresponsibility will not be undone by taking revenge on the business men and productive technical people. All it will do is equalize the misery. Is that your idea of cure to our ills?

ruveyn

Penury? They have the most money of any group of people ever! No one has had their income and wealth grow as quickly as has this class of plutocrats in the history of the world, and people seriously speak of taxing them into "penury"? You can grab half of what they have and they will still be ahead of what they had in 1980 by a factor of several times.

All this talk of "unsustainable" New Deal policies is madness. There were no more panics or depressions or what have you after the New Deal. Any serious economic troubles were caused by outside factors such as the oil shocks. People lived better than ever because of New Deal policies. The debt to GDP ratio was always perfectly manageable. Productivity increases were incredible. Economist Michael Hudson likes to talk about how had the people in the '40s been told about the technology of today that they'd assume we'd be living lives of leisure. They would never believe that people work harder than ever, longer hours than since the labour reforms. What's unsustainable is the growth of the financial sector. Futurists actually believed that wealthy people would decide at one point that they have everything they want - they didn't think they'd grab more and more and more and have the resources of a Bond supervillain and buy up governments and own them completely which is what's going on now.

Last edited by xenon13 on 15 Apr 2011, 11:12 am, edited 1 time in total.

They did fine in the 50s and 60s with 90% tax rates. I love how conservatives seem to forget this part whenever they go on their nostalgia trips.

It's "revenge" to not let a small group of people take everything and own the government? If these people are so evil as to demand the right to own everything and own the government, then this shows a massive failure in the culture and society to allow such reprehensible beliefs to take root amongst such people. Such people surely should be locked up for the good of society.

Stop blaming other people because they actually manage to be successful, the overwhelming majority of the rich got their by working hard and were very fiscally disciplined. I'm getting seriously annoyed with Liberals claiming that Grandma and Grandpa are rich because they saved up while they worked and happen to now be rich.

You want to see which side really hates the elderly, its the Left, not the Right.

UPDATE:
xenon13 has officially lost all credibility, he has admitted he is actively rooting for the destruction of the United States...
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp3554452.html#3554452

So it's the whole "The gods sacrificed for us, we must sacrifice to them" argument. As the Rich all suffered so grievously to become what they are, like the Gods of yore, we must give up our blood for them and accept their authority, sing their praises, and not offend them, right? This is primitivity. This is also false. Most of these people didn't suffer horribly to become Masters of the Universe.

I said that if not wanting the USA to lose 20% of its GDP is rooting for its destruction... then it needs more enemies to save it from itself. Meaning, the people rooting for its destruction are those who don't want its economy to implode as Ireland's has and that those people are better for the USA than its so-called friends are.

If all the money was confiscated and redistributed equally how long would it take for us to be back in the same situation with a small percentage of people controlling the wealth?

I'm thinking it would take less than 20 years.

Not without some scam like what happened in Yeltsin's Russia as if the wealth is more spread out the result is a lack of the sort of concentrated power that can change the rules to accelerate the amount of wealth ending up in their hands. If the wealth and the power is dispersed this makes this more difficult. I suppose however that there are always people who make certain decisions, run the media, run enterprises and so on who are in a position to try to parlay that power into more wealth that increases their power and they end up controlling the media and end up grabbing more and more. It's possible. However, the more equal the forces and the distribution of wealth, the weaker are the people who would try to take more. Right now the concentration of power is accelerating and this is very bad news for everyone, really.

Pfffft... Most people aren't going to get super wealthy through the good ole' Protestant work ethic. Capitalism doesn't reward "hard work" so much as it rewards buying up financial assets so you can make money off of other people's "hard work". If "hard work" was rewarded Mexico would be far wealthier than the US as the average Mexican works 10 hours a day rather than 8.

LOL, I wonder how many investment bankers "worked hard"... so hard they deserved bonuses in the tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars?

I'm sure they worked much harder than Grandma and Grandpa did...

Not only do Liberals apparently hate babies, but they hate old people too... suuuuuuuuuure

My Dad had worked his ass off his whole life as a manual laborer, and never got rich. My parents were able to live very comfortably after retirement on social security and a company pension won by the union fighting the company - a pension which most Republicans would argue my parents didn't really deserve, might I add. I don't begrudge the wealthy their money - if they had gained it without stepping on working and poor people. But it's completely outrageous that this little prick Ryan thinks we envy the rich just because we aren't happy to go off and die when afflicted by old age, sickness, or injury.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Define "stepping on".

ruveyn