Are Republicans right do the Rich or the Wealthy create Jobs

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Well, at least I'm doing my part by not reproducing.

I wanted to clarify something from my last post. The Economist is not a socialist paper (if anyone had gotten that idea), far from it.

I looked for any European calling Obama a commie, but I found only pages of ranting americans. I would suspect anything I heard on talk radio, but that's only because I actually listened to it for a while and researched some of their claims.

The magic is there's a lot you can spend days looking for online - especially if its something you're dying to research that could have nothing to do with politics. In that sense it could mean something or, then again, it could mean nothing.

That is because anyone who knows what communism and socialism actually are know that if Obama is one he is a very bad one who does not represent what an actual socialist or communist would look like....if he was a socialist things like welfare would not be the first thing they wanted to make cuts to....those would be the last things to get cut.

I don't know where you've been getting your information, but Obama is a socialist/communist. Or did you not here all his "spread the wealth" and other class warfare messages.

He says one thing and does another.....Obama is far from being a socialist or communist, he's just saying what he thinks people want to hear.

Explains why he wants to tax people more so he can spread the wealth around...

All that will happen if taxes are raised, is that Government will just start spending more.

It does not explain why he wants to cut things some people actually need, while increasing taxes. it is very obvious who he and our government is protecting and it is not the best intrest of the citizens.

It's so he can give his cronies more money, fact of the matter is you all are just starting to see what Conservatives noticed about Obama in 2007.

I'm going to tell everyone that voted for Obama that's now all upset about how he seems to be doing his best to wreck this country, I told you so.

You think I am just starting to see what is going on? lol I see exactly what is going on and the fact of the matter is it more closely resembles facism than socialism.

And when government does manage to spend less, rather than pay down the national debt, conservatives decide to cut taxes for the wealthy and start new wars.

Here's something. Does anything that he's doing right now match up to his books or the 'dreams' of his father? There's a good chance he's not really doing much of anything that he wants to do aside from perhaps getting on the soapbox about the preponderance of corporate jets he perceives the US to have.

BTW, I just caught a good reminder that I can get beguiled/bedazzled as quickly as anyone else when I don't feel like researching things all the way through, haven't had enough sleep so don't want to bother, don't have the time, etc. I prefer to think its a rarity but I realize that I just let this run right past me untested and I made a mistake in going that route.

Contest article:
http://www.businessinsider.com/history- ... rates?op=1

Try plugging in 1948 for the initial date, unemployment seems more cyclical than anything:
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united- ... yment-rate

DOW appears quite positive to tax cuts, you could re-articulate it for rate of change and it still wouldn't make a huge difference:
http://stockcharts.com/freecharts/histo ... a1900.html

GDP Per Capita:
http://visualizingeconomics.com/2011/03 ... 1871-2009/

Inflation-revised map of 40, 60, and 80th percentiles:
http://visualizingeconomics.com/2006/02 ... quintiles/

The point I'm making - there's a lot here that, at a minimum, points out that there's significantly more to this than the author of the contest article tries to make a case for and at the most sheds significant doubt on the logic behind their claim that there is a strong correlation between tax rates for the top tier vs. economic health of the US.

On clearer examination all this article said was 'remember how good the 50's were?' and then said a bunch of random things about disparity during boom times (which, if there's a lot of of money to be made its not necessarily the poor getting poorer, its more people getting richer). All of the graphs just show, at their most meaningful read, correlations between the top marginal tax bracket percentage and government revenue (which, at least from 2000 to 2008 it doesn't look so bad). As far as troubles we've seen during these dip times, if memory serves, the end of the 20's with the collapse of Wallstreet was our first big experience in what its like to combine investment banking with general/consumer banking, hence the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was put into place, repealed by Gramm–Leach–Bliley of 1999. It seems like there's more correlation to be found here than there is with tax rates. Then again I could also bring up Amity Schlaes and 'The Forgotten Man', she's been one of many to suggest that FDR's spending habits actually prolonged the Great Depression from what should have been maybe four or five years at most to needing WWII and reconstruction of Europe to pull us out of it.

BTW: How great were the 50's? What measure can verify to me that this decade had a higher standard of living than say the 60's, 80's, or 90's? I know we had some post-war euphoria and the standard vanilla cliches about American life were coming around but I'd love to know - were the poor living significantly better than they did in subsequent decades? Significantly better than in the 20's? We're missing some pretty salient info, they make some great suggestions but then give you a lot of data that has nothing to do with the suggestions he makes.

My analysis at this point - he's confusing tax realities with deregulation problems. That's what Black Tuesday was, it's what Enron and Arthur were, its what Fanny and Freddy were.

The first chart dips after each tax cut, but the per capita part loses some significance when we take the second chart into consideration. The gains have been taken almost entirely by the top 20%, and that even blurs the issue. Make another bar for the top 5%, and that would flatten the 85 - 90% line and curve even more dramatically.

High taxes on the rich don't hurt the economy. They don't even hurt the rich. That's the point of the article, and the thread, although I agree with you that deregulation has actually had more of an effect on the economy than tax rates.

Here's a chart of the share of total income taken by the top 10% going back to the 20s. I think this clearly shows that we are in a new Gilded Age. Study the history of poverty in the U.S. for more. I chose to link to the blog rather than the original Times article so that you can save NYT clicks.

Considering small business owners are going to be the ones getting hosed in the tax hike that you are supporting, I would say like Obama you have no clue the ramifications that a tax hike would have.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unite ... 7-2003.svg

I hate pulling in Wiki and things like Visualizing Economics since for the later I don't know enough about who they are and for the former they're considered a pretty vapid and tertiary source but - it looks like, in an inflation indexed map, its not a situation of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, its just the rich getting a bit richer. What this lacks though, and every source I've seen, is a 1900 to 2000 or 2010 line calculating something similar.


Unless the poor and middle class are literally drifting down though I'm not sure I see a big problem. If the idea here is that anytime the rich are doing this much better that, technically, the poor could be doing a little bit better as well I think we have an issue then - if the poor are doing better via distribution from Washington - of how well Washington actually does its job at that. The question I still have though - how much better, qualitatively, were the 1950's or that period shown between 1942 and 1982 on the graph? My best intuition from what I've learned of history is that they were - on the plot of gradual improvement and innovation - no better or worse in terms of financial well being (aside from the late 70's with the gas crisis and stagflation). In that sense, I could see continuing the great compression on that chart being a big prerogative of those who specifically have their top issue being social equality, but it seems like that would have to be a top issue for it own sake - not because the poor are necessarily being blighted more by it.