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Politics : View from the Center and Left

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To: Lane3 who wrote (59612)	4/16/2008 4:44:59 PM
From: Katelew	Read Replies (1) of 542970

Some of them truly believe that the Republican economics are in their best interests You are right. I remember a poll done during the 2000 election when there was criticism being made of Bush's tax proposals benefiting most the top brackets. The interesting part of the poll was that 10% of the people polled thought they were in the top 1% income bracket. And another 15% thought they would be there within, I think, ten years. It was funny but sad. While working as a financial consultant for so many years, I was always amazed that almost no one knew their affective tax rate and how many confused their highest marginal tax bracket with their affective tax rate. In other words how many people thought every dollar they earned was being taxed at some exorbitant rate. This made sense as I saw people get sucked into the notion that cutting taxes was the governments panacea for all the problems in the country. As for the value of unions, I believe they pretty much created what we call the middle class. And the demise of unions has paralleled the hollowing out of the middle class and the widening of the national income distribution. How it all ends is unknown. But I'm intrigued by the fact that Europe seems to be surpassing us as far as economic matters and standard of living goes. And Europe has preserved most of its unionization of the workforce. If memory serves, 7% of our workforce is unionized vs. 20% in the EU. The subsequent income distribution patterns are very different in Europe, too. I was amused recently by a commentator on CNBC talking about US economic weakness. He tossed out something to the affect of "but we should come out better than in Europe where WAGES CONTINUE TO RISE". I thought about the fact that rising wages mean consumers are able to continue shopping.....which benefits business......increases government tax collections......and so on and so on....the business cycle at its best, lol. We should be so lucky in this country to have rising wages. We've become a culture of 'cuts'. Cut wages, cut taxes, cut benefits....it's a race to the bottom to some extent.

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